Updates from November, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Mark 11:42 pm on November 8, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Time for Freedom 

    We live in the “church district.”  Meaning right downtown, and all the huge downtown church buildings that loom all around.  There are lots of nice people that show up on Sundays and throughout the week, but every fifteen minutes – ALL week long – I hear the bells of the two largest churches giving me the correct time.  Only the churches are about 20 seconds off sync.  Which is the correct time?  Do I have to be a Methodist to set my watch by one time, and Baptist if by the other?  Every day at 5pm, these churches begin playing hymns…but because they play through each other, you can’t understand anything, and the tune sounds awful.

    Are they competing?  What’s the deal?

    I like to set my watch to another resounding vibration echoing through the downtown Abilene streets.

    Near our apartment is a half-way house that really takes up a whole city block.   Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at 3:45pm the recovering addicts rally together and with one voice they scream at the top of their lungs, “FREEDOM!….FREEDOM!”

    Let me tell you – there is little that can do more for a heart like mine that is so bent on seeing personal transformation in others than hearing this cry for freedom throughout the week.  I am certain that the chanting will change my life, just like it is changing theirs.

    Today I caught myself quietly chanting along and finding deep peace in my heart.

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    • rob horton 7:03 pm on November 9, 2007 Permalink

      AWESOME!!!!

    • Agent B 12:30 am on November 10, 2007 Permalink

      American composer Charles Ives wrote a symphonic piece with a section that is supposed to sound like two marching bands playing different songs while marching past each other. The purpose is to create the annoyance he heard at some parade once. And to annoy the audience.

      Those colliding hymns…and that half-way house chant…

      There’s got to be a serious prophetic message in there somewhere.

    • Agent wife 8:59 pm on November 10, 2007 Permalink

      Wow, what a cry, what a testimony. Yeah, we all need that.

    • priest 10:25 pm on November 16, 2007 Permalink

      that rocks.

  • Mark 9:45 am on November 2, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Pub or Billboard Church 

    Two kinds of “attractional style” churches that have very different methods for doing so:





    I’d love feedback on each of these – which appeals to you more? Is one wrong? Are they both necessary?

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    • miller 4:18 pm on November 2, 2007 Permalink

      they’re the same thing…

      hype generated to draw contributors

      JMO

      peace

    • Agent B 5:00 pm on November 2, 2007 Permalink

      Yeah…just more gimmicks. Both of them.

      But I’d go to the beer church before I’d go to the sign church.

    • Billy 10:20 pm on November 2, 2007 Permalink

      I think the beer church is more appealing atleast they are going to the people. It does bother me a little how they integrate beer and worship a little too much though. It is one thing to have it a bar, but to promote something during worship that some might seriously have struggles with bothers me.

    • Chadd 10:31 am on November 3, 2007 Permalink

      I’m not too impressed with either approach either. Gimmicks. Perhaps neither is wrong…just wrong headed.

      Both approaches show awareness of the specific groups’ culture and target group I suppose.

      Wouldn’t it be great to express our faith in a completely different way…on purpose? ;-)

    • miller 9:35 am on November 5, 2007 Permalink

      well, we got the conversation started…

      where’s the author???

      what does he think???

    • Mark 11:16 am on November 5, 2007 Permalink

      Thanks Miller. :)

      The media has a great way of twisting really bad ideas into good ones, and really good ideas into bad ones. Getting to know the people at both congregations would be necessary to really tell. I put this post up as sort of a indirect follow up to the Hybels post. Both of these churches seem to be “seeker sensitive” (just reaching out to a different audience). I wanted to display the folly of just adding new gimmicks to an old paradigm (ie billboards, beer, ad nauseum).

      Can’t we be proud of who we are in God’s family, without having to DO something to show others how cool we are? I’m just as bothered by beer as I am by billboards as ways to put up a front for others. Although, with the bar-church, I’m a little more miffed. Why not go to bars that non-Christians will likely be hanging out at? The billboard church is just shamless self-promotion. I wonder if its really Satan that hates the hubris of a church that posts a huge spectacle displaying their holiness.

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