I'm afraid I'm complaining again, but why is the six letter word above seen as such a swear word in churches? Rather than moving out of a comfort zone, why do we look so suspiciously at fresh ideas, new thinking and improvement. I won't go into details here but this is something that I am struggling with at the moment. I long for a church (in the wider sense of the word) that embraces new thinking in the same way as the rest of culture. I long to see a day when the cultural boundaries between the churched and nonchurched communities come down.
Jesus himself was not in ministry long and he realized that in order to get his message accross in the best possible way, he would need not only to be culturally relevant but also inclusive and accomodating too. In ministry we need to be strong and if God has shown us the things that aren't working, he expects us to do something about it. We as the church for too long have been expecting people to knock on our door on our terms speaking our language and behaving in a way that we find acceptable. I begin to see people realising that in order for the Kingdom to come again we the Church need to be relevantly teaching the Gospel through word and action. Without this major change in our thinking the Kingdom can't come again. Not because it doesn't want too but because we having been given the job of proclaiming the Good News in order that people can make their own mind up haven't done our job well enough. We have spent so much time worrying about what we stand for that the world is not paying attention anymore. We need to reaffirm what we do in the light of the basics of Jesus ministry and seek God's guidance as to how to proceed.
The world will continue to change, do we the Church have the guts to change with it?
