And the future of the Church is where?

A few blogs ago I mentioned a conversation with a person from a newly constructed church building and the kind of ‘attractional’ and ‘consumerist’ mentality this person had with respect to the future of the congregation that is there, and is hoped to come there.

Again I came into contact with the same person who now spoke to me of the ministry they were hoping to develop for ‘young people’ and the kind of enticements, things and persons, that are envisaged being used to bring about the attendance of that particular constituency. Now I’m not against attracting young people! I try all kinds of things to make worship & the life of the congregation where I serve address the yearnings, spiritual and otherwise, of young people. (We use Hillsong material and have a data projector to show slides, movies, etc.!) However when this persons spoke to me the language was peppered with “iPod”, band, singing group, movies, internet, coffee and so on. I found myself bombarded once again by that ubiquitous cultural mix of ideas, sounds, words, images that is a streaming torrent of all the advertising for that which is subsumed under the rubric of “emerging church”. The growing culture of narcissism that we are growing for our young in the church. It made me go back to George Orwell and his novel 1984. At one point near the end of novel the protagonist, Winston, is being tortured and Big Brother is reminding Winston that he’s old, part of the past and holding back the future that the young are open to with its myriad of the ‘new’. As hope flees from him Winston also sees fleeing his belief that the future lay in the young. Traditionally they have been seen as the symbol of hope. But Winston notes that they have already been indoctrinated and have sold out to a phenomenon that has been called Cultural Attention Deficit Disorder: the need to be constantly entertained, visually, mentally, aurally and orally. There is no future with the young who live in a muddied environment where distinctions between fact, fiction and advertising are not known.

So, if it is argued by others that we need to stop and realize that our needs are simple, materially and spiritually, then we might uncover, as Winston sought to do, that love and companionship is where we need to be.

Rather than this mad rush to ‘live for the now’, maybe the ‘now’ is what we really need, where, as I’ve said in my message on http://glenelg.unitingchurch.org.au that giving and receiving expressions of pure love, old and young, make us who we are as children of a loving God.