That in turn leads me to the question of how could a new kind
of church today look like?
My issue is that I can't find the term accountability anywhere in Scripture, yet it has become a mantra in
most churches today.
Many
christian churches today have had to turn their buildings into tourist spots to keep up with the mounting cost of being holy than thou!
Let's say you
leave church today, and as you go out the door, you see a friend of yours quickly tuck a beer can inside his coat.
Such a book is desperately needed because the
average church today is seeing a massive drop - out rate among men.
Perhaps I am useful to such diverse communities because the disputes of the past are simply not all that relevant to the challenge to
remain church today.
I drove by one
mega church today that must have had 50 - 40 acres in land, and a good 20 of it was nothing but grass.
Most people serving
in churches today with any history, struggle with some level of bitterness.
I do think they are crucial, but the biblical meaning is not what is often meant (or done) in
most churches today.
This attitude, so prevalent in the
Christian church today, is not to be attacked or condemned; rather, it desperately needs to be understood.
Most popular notions of the future of the
local church today are technical concepts that work by formula, not history.
There are a lot of misunderstandings in
churches today about what the Holy Spirit does and who He is, but when we truly consider the whole council of God, we discover that He always prefers to remain out of the way and behind the scenes, gently and quietly point people to Jesus Christ.
You don't get to be a Christian by yourself, I'm learning, and I don't know if I was crying in
church today because of the burdens we are all carrying, or if I was crying because someone was there to share the load.
Most
churches today seem to operate under the conviction that new Christians (and even non-Christians) know best what they need.
Much of the resistance to change in
Protestant churches today comes from people who fail to realize that a Christian way of life is far more radical than it would appear when looked at uncritically through the lens of a family ideal that has roots in the American Dream of the nineteenth century.
While many
Orthodox churches today celebrate Christmas in January, December 25 became fixed in western tradition from the fourth century on.
They look at
churches today where people know a lot of the Bible, or where a lot of evangelism is getting done, or where the pastors have built a large following, get the sermons aired on the radio or published in books, and decide that these pastors must have figured something out about preaching.
It is the
only church today that is administered by verifiable priesthood authority with most churches not even bothering with authority at all!
The question of God, along with the question of the Bible, is, it seems to me, the central theological question in the
Western church today.
One of the greatest needs of
oldline churches today is for faithful movements of the Spirit that can breathe new life into the dry bones of the denominational establishments.
The confessional
Lutheran church today may be poor and weak, but it stands as the true heir of the Reformation.