Friday Quote: Open Source Church for Changing Communities
The Church’s Never-ending Pursuit of the Past
What if you come to the church with an open source view of the world?
What if your entire life was one in which you experienced a collaboration of gifts, skills, and knowledge?
What if, almost every day, you experienced the coming together of seemingly disparate voices and ideas that resulted in beautiful and tremendously effective and meaningful events and solutions?
What if this was your world, and you then walked through the door of almost any church, where it quickly became apparent that your job was to sit down and shut up—that your job was to listen and be spoon-fed what you needed to think and believe?—Landon Whitsitt
This is not a big “what if.” It is actually our experience!
Part of the problem churches have in relating to their neighborhoods today is that collaboration and diversity are intrinsic to modern life. Its absence makes us feel a little lost, less than whole. Much of church life still revolves around similarity and control. Both have left the building.
Rather than find ways to engage new communities, church leaders throw up their hands, sigh, and mutter the handy excuse —“demographics.” Everyone nods in agreement, the thought that they might change with the neighborhood is never seriously considered beyond rhetoric. The Christian message is apparently for just one demographic—and then the property rights become a tug-a-war.
Even in a city of more than a million people (like ours), church leaders oversee the closing of one church after another and say with a straight and appropriately solemn face, “There is no population to support a church.”
If they are looking for people of northern European descent who were in the prime of life in 1960—they are right!
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