I Think We're Out of Our Minds

Church these days is replete with people (leaders and thinkers) who are looking at church culture and saying, "Ditch it. This doesn't look anything like Jesus ministry and I can't see what the point is when we get together every week for these same-old same-old activities -- sing songs, listen to teaching, have communion, etc." But I think we're out of our minds. First of all, just to clear this up because I think it appears in this blog, I've used the "doesn't look like Jesus ministry" argument myself in regard to the Roman Catholics, but I use it to question the RC claim of authority over the rest of us, not to question its validity in itself. Secondly, those who attempt to ditch a culture are really attempting to replace one culture with another. I hope they're doing it out of a genuine vision of something new. But I doubt it. The blogs on this topic don't give me any hope of it anyway. The practicalities of doing church at all over some 2000 years have brought us to this point and the result is before us. Hey, I've seen culture changes before. I go to a Vineyard, one of the biggest agents for culture change in the larger evangelical church of recent times. God was mightily with the Vineyard back when I first came, and I thought one of the reasons for his presence was the brand new culture. But now I'm convinced I was wrong. It was more like God was mightily with the Vineyard and that, as a by-product, powered the culture change. Because of God's presence we embraced the new models. But we really left our old churches because they had a missing ingredient. The evident and mighty activity of the Holy Spirit. This is the same missing ingredient in the churches of today, even in the Vineyard I am part of. That's why we're all questioning church culture -- when we should be crying out for revival...