A reader writes: Putting faith in a new language … vs. “stuck in bygone days”
July 5, 2019
|In Uncategorized
A reader writes:
How do you live out the faith as inspired by Jesus, in community, when the local churches seem stuck in bygone days that either encourage hypocrisy by requiring people to say things they clearly neither understand or believe (when they have their children baptized) or seem content that their congregations are all drawing pensions, and lose people with passion for the cutting edge gospel because they don’t trust new ways of reaching out eg social media.I live in a tiny village and run a Day Nursery that I believe is a new kind of church. I give out five days a week and have for the last few years not gone to church on Sunday for various reasons.
My faith continues to inspire me to live a counter cultural lifestyle based on love. At times I feel lonely and isolated but with God you are never alone and I have Richard Rohr meditations and nature to feed my soul too.You were the first voice to speak into my wilderness some years ago now and I see love in my responses at times that is not normal and I take as evidence of the Spirit living within me.I have had more opportunities to share my faith since I stopped attending church than I did before.
How though, do we put the faith into a language that people will understand? The only answer that appears to work for me is to live it out through the care and love we shower upon the children and families of the Nursery but as soon as you enter any of the local churches you come face to face with another language that I find a barrier.Maybe I need courage to continue to listen to the still small voice that I believe whispers to me all the time.Yours in the search for the Jesus way of living life for all to be blessed,
Thanks for this note. I’m sure many will resonate. You capture the gap between a church speaking to itself, mainly about its past, and a world desperately in need of guidance for the future. As you suggest, the way of Jesus is ever-relevant, but just as new wine needs new wineskins, so the ever-new gospel needs ever-new language. The hard choice I think church leaders face: it is becoming decreasingly possible to massage the legacy church people with the language they find comforting and simultaneously make sense to people who have never lived in that subculture.
The good news is that people like you are making new spaces, whether in a preschool program or coffee shop, a summer camp or festival, an experimental “church for the unchurched” or an informal group of “two or three” friends. I trust that your words will inspire others to join in this important creative work … and to stop wasting efforts on backward-looking groups that really don’t want to be bothered.
