Volunteering and traveling in Argentina to proclaim God's great love, and hopefully not getting sick along the way.

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Monday, March 14, 2011

Gathering or community

I was challenged by a thought today while doing some exercises and listening to Mosaic's podcast. I'm a little behind for the year with all my sermon listening from the States, but sometimes I wonder if God's timing has something to do with it.

It was the idea that the church of the US these days is less of a community and more of a gathering place. That is, sometimes it's just a building where people go for a day out of the week. Reasons for going include and are not limited to: to alleviate the conscience full of sin, to see that cute guy, to hear some teaching for the week and let that soak in for the other seven days, etc. etc. The church becomes less and less an organism, a group that is called out, and more and more a coffee shop where you get your fix and set out for your life for the rest of the day/week.

"Yeah, I'll take my usual, grande sermon, and a dash of prayer. You put in a little too much last week, and I've got a game to watch this afternoon."

The community we seek in a church has to meet outside of the doors of that building. We get examples in the book of Acts how people met in each others' homes to break bread. But I would imagine it's also possible to you know, just hang out. Softball teams, going to concerts, to the gym, watching movies, playing video games.. endless possibilities really. Because these are the things we do with "normal" people, what makes "church" people any different?

Tonight at church was pretty cool. If I haven't mentioned before, church here meets in my house. I like this in that I can take my late afternoon nap, wake up, chug a glass of water, and open a door on the other side of the kitchen to see my neighbors getting ready to sing. We normally begin with a couple songs, pray, more songs, pray, offering, maybe a couple more songs, then message, announcements and ya está. Every now and then, we'll have a special event ranging from baby showers to psuedo asados to dramas in the neighborhood.

Tonight we had a special event. I'm still not sure what it was about except perhaps to welcome in the new school year. We played games, the people enjoyed about 10 dozen empanadas, and just in general we talked to one another about life outside of church.

Granted, this culture is naturally hospitable, and everyone knows each other well here. But over the past few weeks in gearing up to start a youth group, I realized that at least I haven't seen very many people outside of Sunday. On top of that, I haven't seen much growth either. It's the same faces; meeting in the same size building.

I'm not saying that we should be bursting at the seams to prove we're a good group of believers. I am saying that Christ in our lives can be pretty infectious in an already welcoming culture. So why haven't we seen something different?

Personally, I challenged myself to make the effort to meet outside of the home. I'm grateful that I have a place and motivation to start (ahem.. with the teenagers). At the same time, I realized that in the future if I'm not working with them, I'll have to jumpstart community and stop relying on the gathering place mentality. How about you?

Chau.

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