Two vignettes:
Sunday morning, I preached at a large church in downtown St. Catharines that will be amalgamating with two other large downtown churches. It's becoming a familiar pattern. There were about 120 people in attendance, most of them seniors, and many of them very, very sad. The service was a celebration of this congregation that has been in existence for over 180 years and the marking of a new stage in their life. But the emotions were very, very mixed. There is a sense that the church that once was, the church that most of us once knew, is passing away.
Sunday morning, I preached at a large church in downtown St. Catharines that will be amalgamating with two other large downtown churches. It's becoming a familiar pattern. There were about 120 people in attendance, most of them seniors, and many of them very, very sad. The service was a celebration of this congregation that has been in existence for over 180 years and the marking of a new stage in their life. But the emotions were very, very mixed. There is a sense that the church that once was, the church that most of us once knew, is passing away.
On M
onday night, I went with my 28 year old son and my wife to Toronto to hear Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw and the "Jesus for President" tour. Claiborne and Haw are young and very cool evangelicals who are also radical social activists. They read the biblical narrative as an powerful, anti-imperial proclamation of God's freedom and justice. I was really impressed by the sophistication of their analysis, and their idealism. The Church of the Redeemer was packed with a crowd that was mostly under 30. They were unabashedly evangelical, unabashedly Christ-centred, but very counter-cultural and politcally radical.
onday night, I went with my 28 year old son and my wife to Toronto to hear Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw and the "Jesus for President" tour. Claiborne and Haw are young and very cool evangelicals who are also radical social activists. They read the biblical narrative as an powerful, anti-imperial proclamation of God's freedom and justice. I was really impressed by the sophistication of their analysis, and their idealism. The Church of the Redeemer was packed with a crowd that was mostly under 30. They were unabashedly evangelical, unabashedly Christ-centred, but very counter-cultural and politcally radical. What I'm realizing is that the living reality of Christianity is so complex that there's just no way to pin it down to one trend or phenomenon. CNN.com had this really interesting story about how these young evangelicals may change US politics. In previous elections they were solidly Republican, but disaffection with Bush and especially the Iraq war is changing that.
One of the things I found in my survey of affiliates is that you really can't pigeon-hole people. And this was confirmed for me. Most of us have such a narrow experience of "church" and "Christianity" that we assume that everyone looks at things the way we do.
And the biblical story says pretty clearly that God's hand is mysteriously at work in the midst of all this diversity. Which gives me a lot of hope. As traditional mainline Protestantism does seem to be sliding towards oblivion, we need to be reminded that the Holy Spirit isn't contained within those vessels. There's stuff happening that we can't even imagine.
