I've Been Thinking About This…

Finished Emerging Worship last night. Excellent book, with some great links, references, ideas and points. Lots to follow up on there.

I started Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways this morning. So far it reads as an even more compelling book than Emerging Worship; a lot of early church history summarized in the beginning: as of 100AD there were about 25,000 Christians; by 300AD there were 20,000,000 … what happened? And why did the growth stop? Christendom. That Constantine.

It seems clear that ‘church’ is changing, driven by a post-Christian society and needs…not just because the books say so, but because of the vacuum building in our churches. Entire generations are now missing in our churches in general – in the one I attend in particular. What happened?

When you’re isolated in New England, you tend to see a problem like that but assume it’s localized, as so many problems are. We read of the mega-churches and wish we could either have them available to us or have a charismatic in-tune-with-God leader build them. But the bleeding-edge thinking going on in these books is that they, too, are part of the downward spiral, and I can see how that could be. I remember a lecture when I was at Nasdaq that spoke about the impact of change: as an old product gets stable, improvements to it slow down (because there was no reason to improve what everybody was buying). Then a new competing product or methodology or technology gets invented; as it rolls out into the marketplace and acceptance for it grows, the old one suddenly gains new life as improvements that could have been made are suddenly applied in a desperate effort to hold onto market share. Eventually, the new product takes over a significant portion of the first product’s market. (Think canal technology as rail developed; rail technology as truck and air developed; record technology as CDs developed.)

Buzz words abound in today’s Christian literature: mega-churches; missional churches; the emerging church; contemporary worship (vs. traditional worship); alternative worship. On the other end of the scale from the mega-churches comes the house church; the church cluster; tribalization; the organic church.

I need to pull this into a presentation – I will when I get home. For the last 2 to 3 months I’ve felt an urgency about it; a certain excitement; a concern. That’s why I’ve been reading the books, of course, and that’s why I’m trying to visit an alternative church and a contemporary worship service while I’m over here in the UK.

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Still working on Church on the Other Side, but early this morning I’ve finished The Heart of the Dales, which (I suspect) will be his last. He ended with another Christmas Pageant – more excellent fodder for my reading at the Christian Counseling Connection! And I began It’s not About the Coffee, an entirely predictable book about how being a nice guy built a big Starbucks empire. Very much along the lines of the feel-good management bios from Apple The Apple Way, IBM The IBM Way, Microsoft The Microsoft Way, Nordstrom (yep, The Nordstrom Way), SouthWest Airlines and so many others. Got ‘em all … read ‘em all … not much between them.

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