Recently at a church service, someone from the platform hit a sour note during praise and worship.\u00c2\u00a0 My wife elbowed me and made a sour face, and without thinking I said “Its not a talent show!”\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t intend to be rude to my wife, I was thinking the same thing that she was regarding the malformed melody.\u00c2\u00a0 Blurting out as I did,\u00c2\u00a0it seems my\u00c2\u00a0comment was directed as much\u00c2\u00a0at me as it was to Stephanie.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I have\u00c2\u00a0often\u00c2\u00a0been caught up in the audience \/ performer mentality.\u00c2\u00a0 I believe we are in an entertainment seeking culture with television, movies, the Internet, and the\u00c2\u00a0many other\u00c2\u00a0non-interactive media forms we have heaped upon\u00c2\u00a0us in the last several decades.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve often found myself deciding on whither a preacher was ‘good’ or not based on how entertaining he was.\u00c2\u00a0 I have had conversations where I commented that “if they can’t sing, they shouldn’t be on the platform”.\u00c2\u00a0 The problem is, church as I see it was not designed to be an entertainment outlet – and I repent for treating as such.<\/p>\n
A friend of mine recently started a house church, due in part to the condition of the traditional church model as an entertainment venue.\u00c2\u00a0 He has ‘meetings’ instead of\u00c2\u00a0‘services’, and in a recent post on his blog he pointed out the difference.\u00c2\u00a0 As I understood him, services are based on an entertainment model with a platform of performers and an audience of spectators but meetings are expected to be participatory (http:\/\/www.blog.godfidence.org\/2007\/10\/15\/house-church-clarification\/<\/a>).\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sure how well the ‘meeting’ model would work in the traditional church service with a few hundred people in the same room, but that’s his point (as I understand it).<\/p>\n Is the traditional church model effective?\u00c2\u00a0 How does the traditional church\u00c2\u00a0affect the world around it?\u00c2\u00a0 I believe the local church building does have importance in our world today.\u00c2\u00a0 It can be an anchor in a community in a way that I do not believe a home based church can.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, the need to connect on a personal level is very real and a home based church makes a greater demand for that connection\u00c2\u00a0on its members.\u00c2\u00a0 By reducing the size of the congregation, the entertainer\/entertainee dynamic is almost completely removed.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n The problem I see is our ability to affect change on a large scale is reduced when we reduce our mass (pun intended).\u00c2\u00a0 Ten people in a house church are easily ignored by a politician deciding how to vote on an abortion bill, and while the outreach would be significant to those that did receive it from a small house church, the impact that can be made in the community by a larger congregation is obvious.\u00c2\u00a0 In either case – we need more churches, traditional, non-traditional, large and small, in homes or in buildings – we need more churches.\u00c2\u00a0 To quote an entertaining preacher that I once knew, Hell is real and eternality is long – so I again repent for treating the church as another entertainment source.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not a talent show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently at a church service, someone from the platform hit a sour note during praise and worship.\u00c2\u00a0 My wife elbowed me and made a sour face, and without thinking I said “Its not a talent show!”\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t intend to be rude to my wife, I was thinking the same thing that she was regarding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2807,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/2807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}