Living as the church, not at the church

For one of my classes we got to choose from a list which book we wanted to review for our midterm. I chose Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture. I didn't agree with everything the author (Michael Frost) said but, wonder of wonders, it did make me think. I could rewrite most of my review for you, but I don't think you really need all of it to think about what I want to talk about.

I've been hearing for a couple of years now about needing to rethink the way that we do church. I guess I've been hearing about it for a long time in terms of adding praise and worship bands or screens and projectors or any of the other things so many churches are trying out to make themselves more progressive. But I mean a serious rethinking of how we do church. I've heard several people say that we should go back to the early New Testament way of doing things, with house churches and all that. Or that, rather than a song-sermon-song paradigm we need to include all different kinds of sensory worship experiences. But that's always what we mean when we talk about rethinking church. Changing the service, maybe the building.

One thing that Frost talked about that I found really interesting was our persistent identification of church  with worship and of worship with singing. He talked about how a big part of that mindset is a carryover from the Middle Ages, when everyone was a Christian because everyone was baptized at birth. This removed the evangelistic function of the church, and besides doing some support work in their communities, all the churches had to offer was worship services. We forgot all the things that church can mean. Variegated worship services and forming small group churches start to address that.

But I think that the bigger issue with our obsession with the way we do church right now is another that he addresses: we live at church, not in our communities. Or, differently put, our churches are our communities. And they're often our only communities because we devote all of our time to them. Personally I think this is another hold-over, this time from when the church (read: church building) was seen as a literal refuge from all of the darkness in the world. I think a lot of people still think of church that way. And that's not to say that the church isn't a refuge; I just don't think it should be our home away from home.

Why not? Many churches today ofter after school programs and camps during the summer. That's great! They offer Bible studies for almost every possible self-identification. Awesome, you can meet people like you! And then, of course, there's the service projects and the meetings and the potlucks and the retreats and the picnics and church choir... on, and on, and on. Again, I'm not saying that these are bad things in and of themselves, or that church communities are not legitimate communities. Lots of programs that the church offers are really good (especially the after school programs and summer camps, I can say after many years of camp counseling).

I'm just saying think about this:
You spend approximately 1/3 of your time sleeping.
You spend approximately 1/3 of your time at work.
And if you're even moderately involved in a church, I'd be willing to bet that a good chunk of that last 1/3 is spent at church or doing something with your church community.

So how much time is spent out, talking to people? Getting to know the people in the community where you live? Being involved in life outside of the church? Offering hospitality to your neighbors? Living in the world?

Jesus didn't spend all of his time in the temple. He didn't do most of his ministry there. He spent his time and did his work out among people, living where they lived. Frost talks about the idea of third places. Third places are the places outside of work and sleep where most of the life in people's lives is lived. Places like coffee shops, book clubs, and bars. This is where real interaction happens, where you really get to know a person and see just a piece of their life. So if the church is our third place, if it's where we spend all of our time and have all of our relationships, who are we meeting? Not many people.

Hiding ourselves away is not what Christianity is about. We can't be the church out in the world if we're always in the church and out of the world.

Don't Feed the Ponies

Wow, I'm so behind. I have at least 4 entries (including this one) that I've meant to write for a couple of weeks now. First the internet was down, then I was out of town, then I had family issues and finally I was catching up on schoolwork that got put off because of those family issues. Oh, and this weekend is both Halloween and the Rally to Restore Sanity, so there's likely to be another post or two over that. So the next week might be an entry every day or every other day kind of week. Enjoy!

The out of town that I just mentioned was actually a fabulous camping trip with Jeff and three of our new awesome friends here at Wesley. See, Wesley does this awesome thing called Fall Break (UT, take note!) where basically we just get a week off to catch up. It's actually called Reading Week, but I'm going to go ahead and posit that not a whole lot of reading ever gets done by anyone. It's Fall Break. So the five of us decided to take a couple of days at the beginning of the week and go to Assateague Island-- yes, like Misty of Chincoteague, for all of you little girls (and little girls at heart) who are screaming with jealousy right now. And yes, there were ponies.

Awwww! But no, we did not ride or pet the ponies. Sorry to disillusion any of you, but ponies BITE. Also, they want your food. They want it in a stick-their-head-in-your-trunk-and-steal-it, take-it-right-off-your-table-while-you-eat, lay-seige-to-your-campsite kind of way.

          (I love this picture. Andy and the pony are just staring each other down over the trunk of our car.)


They do this because silly mothers say, "Look, kiddies! A real, live pony! Go give it this apple!" And then the child gives the pony the apple and the the pony says, "Hmm, is that a carrot with that apple?" And the pony bites the child's finger. If it doesn't, it's still learned that people = food. Thus, you have ponies wandering up to your table while you eat.

In any case, they're still pretty and the little ones are adorable and it really is pretty cool that they're just wandering all over the place, wild. Just remember that wild is the key adjective here. Not pretty, not cute.  Wild.

But enough about the ponies. The other wildlife that needs to be discussed is the MOSQUITOES. Good Lord. I'm from the Gulf Coast, so I'm used to humidity and therefore puddles and therefore ridiculous amounts of mosquitoes, but never in my life have I been chased down and mauled by mosquitoes like we were that weekend. They literally swarmed us. Andy in particular. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and say that Andy was the beacon that called them and then they realized that there were actually FIVE tasty humans there. So we all came home looking like we had the pox.

There were also lots of tiny crabs everywhere. Like, TINY.

Also less tiny crabs, and horseshoe crabs and a jellyfish and bioluminescent plankton. The plankton were by far the coolest things we found on the beach, but I'm not a good enough photographer to take a picture of tiny, faintly glowing green things.

Speaking of glowing things, I'm also not very good at taking pictures of fire (apparently), but that turned out alright because we weren't very good at building fires. Somehow we managed to utterly fail both nights we were there, despite both Mike and Andy's heroic Eagle Scout attempts and despite Jeff, Heather (yes, another one) and me standing around encouraging the fire to freaking light already. We did get a good enough fire to toast marshmallows for s'mores, though, so it really worked out in the end.

Oh, and by far the coolest thing that I couldn't take a picture of was the Milky Way. Yeah, I said it. The Milky Way. This may not be so big of a shock for all of you who are from places small enough that there's no light pollution, but I'm a city girl. AND I COULD SEE OUR GALAXY. One arm of it, anyway. It was incredibly awesome, and I mean that in the literal awe-inspiring sense of the word. I got to go to a presentation by my friend's dad a while back on how small we are in the universe, but man, this brought it home like nothing else. It was amazing. I really wish I could have taken a picture.

I also wish I'd taken a picture of our friend with dreads who gave us fire and a frisbee and a science lesson the first night, or of when Matt joined us and we went to Ocean City, or of making lunch (two separate pots of pasta and a third of sauce) on the one tiny little burner that Andy brought.

But I did, at least, get a pretty picture of the ocean.

And here's a pretty picture of my friends, super excited to go home and shower.

I love my new friends :) That is all.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't feed the ponies.