The kingdom or the church?

You may have gathered from my blogs that I have a passion for the church to be engaged in mission in a local context. Recently my thoughts on this subject have been more focused through personal experience, books and conversations on the subject. I have never and will never see the church as a means to keep Christians happy until heaven but as a agent of heaven on earth. As Dave Tomlinson puts it "The mission of God was not to invent Christianity but to spread life" (Re-enchanting Christianity, Tomlinson, 2008:132). This should be at the heart of every church.

I am beginning to uncover the sticking point to this thought. I have long known and acknowledge that we should be a people of the Kingdom but never fully grasped and convinced myself about as to how and why. What is beginning to emerge for me is a picture of what the church would be like without the Kingdom as its focus. One dimensional, inward looking, a place on maintenance, safe and comfortable. The kingdom is none of these things that I have listed. The kingdom is a scarily unsafe place to live out faith, it is a place where anything is possible and anyone can be involved. It is about always being aware of your surroundings and seeing the creator in them and how God is calling us to engage with them. Often the church has taken the priority over the kingdom. Surely, God has ordained the church as a tool to represent the values and image of the Kingdom.

Our mission, if we chose to except it, is to be people of the Kingdom rather than members of churches.

Matt

Church is for girls!

From time to time I get an extract of a news paper sent to me from our regional headquarters. This week I got a copy of an article that claimed that "real men find church too girly. Here is the first paragraph.

Real men don't like going to church because they don't want to "sing love songs to a man", because the "vicar wears a dress", because they feel like "mongrels on parade at Crufts" and because they want to be waited on by women rather than queue for coffee after the service.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7004861.ece

On first reading I thought how helpful this might be as I lead worship in our church but the more I thought about it the more stupid it all sounded. Apparently men would come to church if there were less flowers and more swords, more manly words and less wishy washy words in the songs that are sung. For what ever reason, women become part of a church a lot easier than men, women find it less embarrassing singing and praying and being sensitive to God. This article would suggest that men don't come to church because it isn't cool enough or that men feel stupid about saying they go to a girly church.

On reading through this again I found it strange that the church needs to be more man friendly. I would suggest it is the examples that males see that puts them off church. As I look back over my life I can tell you that it is the example of other people that has drawn me to faith and encouraged me to be a part of a church. There are a significant number of blokes that have shown me what faith looks like and it its to those that I acknowledge as the reason I find myself as an SA officer.

I don't think men want swords, HD TV's, sports related sermons and a vicar who drives a sports car. I think men need to see christian men living out faith in a normal everyday fashion before they even contemplate being part of a church. Maybe it is men who have the issue not the church?

Matt