Only drink milk from a Christian cow

For those of you who read my occasional brain barfs here on this Blog, you know that in the past year or so I have really been rethinking what Church is, and should be, and what community really means.

I meet every Monday night at a pub on Belmont in Portland called the Horse Brass (try the Fish and chips!) with some guys. Last Monday I was there till about 11pm talking with two friends, Charlie and Aaron, about this whole idea of community. Particularly, we were talking about when a community turns into a closed bubble that isolates us from the rest of the world. All of us had experienced such communities in our lives.

I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the church’s ability to become a meeting of individuals who don’t particularly care for one another beyond the superficial “passing of the peace” and occasional potluck supper. The middle sized church’s I have served in my career have often felt like anonymous places of worship.

I am amazed that in the 11 years I have been an ordained minister, I have met on an average three nights a week committees on top of weekly worship services and classes and retreats...and...and...and... Yet the largest numerical growth I have witnessed in a congregation I’ve served is 10% (we used to call it death plus 10% since the average age of most Methodist churches is usually more conducive to funerals rather than weddings and baptism... That's a thought for another blog)

I don’t want to get hung up on numbers and fall into a trap of saying a church of 500 or 1000 is better than a church of 100 or 200 (because I don’t believe that to be true) What is frustrating, is that after 11 years (in my case) of meeting 3 or 4 times a week we still don’t see the communities we live in changed much by our presence there.

So when did we get to the place where we spend 4 nights a week to work out what the church is, yet become so closed that we have little or no contact with anyone who doesn’t go to our church?

Maybe I’m just struggling with the fact that I feel like I need to spend more time with “sinners” (That was a loaded phrase wasn’t it?) So how do we kick the bureaucracy that keeps us gathered in basements, passing motions like the Judean Liberation Front (Or was it the Liberation Front of Judea??) in the movie “Life of Brian” that never did anything, but voted on statements of support... “let it be known that we support Brian’s martyrdom...”

I guess I have been feeling God’s call to foster a christian community that genuinely loves and cares and supports one another by sharing their lives together. A community that would be a touch stone and body that sends us out to coach little league, and volunteer at hospitals, and what ever else way we can interact with the world. I am tired of being such a closed community that we think we can only drink milk from a Christian cow (That is my most favorite song lyric ever written, “Guilty by Association” thank you Steve Taylor!) So what would it be like to be a community of faith that God uses to transform our world??