You Won't Regret It

I've been reading a blog series called "The Counter-Intuitive Church" at Ernest Goodman's page. Yes, it's a pseudonym. He's a former missionary who spent some time in Europe and has moved back to the U.S. and has some observations about our churches.

A few quotes to whet the appetite from the series:

From installment #7:

"What if a church deliberately decides not to rent a bigger space? What if they refuse to go into debt? What if they wait to raise up leadership from within? What if they intentionally do the counterintuitive, impractical thing every step of the way?
The Impractical Church doesn’t build a building. Ever. Instead, it meets wherever its people live- in their homes, hangouts, restaurants, parks, pubs, libraries, break rooms, basements, parking garages, and empty church buildings of dying congregations."

From installment #5:

"If your church’s myopic focus on Biblical knowledge makes it more lecture hall than place of worship, you’re likely going to get a bunch of armchair Reformation theologians and wanna-be ancient Greek scholars who are more concerned with being right than anything else.
If your church sits in grandstands with the lights dimmed, staring at a jumbo-tron, don’t be surprised if they act like spectators."

From installment #2:

"Churches are obsessed with the gaps. We want to know what we’re not doing, and then do that. No program for recovering cross-dressers? We feel like we need one. No church for the tattooed-and-pierced crowd? Light some candles and call it good. It just makes sense to start with need and then come up with a solution to meet that need.
But that’s not how God did things in the scriptures. I’m not convinced it’s the way He does things today, either."

From the initial installment:

"We consider efficiency and volume to be stewardship issues. From video-venue churches to mass marketing campaigns to building programs, churches are constantly searching for ways to make the biggest impact, to reach the greatest number of people, and to get the most bang for the buck. I believe that these are human values, not Kingdom ones. What if doing what seems to “work” in the short run is hurting us in the long run?"

At first, it was hard for me to navigate the site since clicking on the link above will take you to the current installment (#8) and the archives page only displays five articles at a time. The easiest way to get to #1 for me was to click on the "previously" link before each one and then start at #1 and move forward.

Each one will only take you 3 or 4 minutes to read...and it's certainly a thought-provoker.

Enjoy, patrons.

*sips on coffee and hopes folks join in the conversation*