The Beginning of the End
Well, today just kind of generally sucked. My Bama boys decided that playing big time basketball means turning the ball over to the other team every chance you get. The first major upset in the tournament...what an honor. (There's always football season...) And if that weren't enough, I got to spend my St. Patrick's Day evening doing nothing better than serving food to Indiana's finest until midnight. So, no green beer for me tonight. (There's always next year...)
On a different note, it seems that we might have reached the end of the rope with the Bonhoeffer/church discussion. To be honest, I don't know what it would take for me to be satisfied with it. But to continue that honesty, I will also say that in many ways the discussion has confirmed my suspicions/concerns about the widespread apathy in the church. I'm not convinced that enough people really care to do anything about the problem. I really think that things will continue along that line until the few people who do care start something. Until then, well, it'll just be another version of same shit, different day. Cynical assessment? More or less. Realistic portrayal? Well, time (or you) will tell.
I'm going to post something new over the next couple of days to get a different discussion going. I don't like to post something completely new on Fridays b/c most of you do your blogging during the week. And this weekend you should be watching basketball anyway. I should have some ample time over the next couple days to put up something new. So, let this weekend be a last call of sorts for the earlier discussion. Keep the comments coming and I'll talk to you. Well, I've got to clean up the place. Those Irish people get a little rowdy sometimes...
posted by thewalrus at 2:17 AM
3 Comments:
You are right. Blogging is a commitment that your readers do not appear to have confidently made.
1:20 PM, March 18, 2005
I don't really follow sports, but sorry about your team.
I'm leaving for the weekend, well actually coming home, so if you post something a little later, I'll check it out on Monday.
2:11 PM, March 18, 2005
Last call?
Okay. Maybe I read the paper because I was a slightly-different version of thewalrus twenty-some years back: career on-track in advertising, young married guy. Then I came home to an empty house one evening.
I went through the churchless period. There were no church "programs" to "deal with" divorced people at that time, and it seemed like that was all churches cared about doing: having a program to fix broken people.
After a year of on-again, off-again visiting around, I was very blessed to find a church home where none of that mattered. But I mattered, because Christ mattered there.
I can't argue with many of the charges laid against the-church-in-general; I'm not sure that very much has changed in the intervening years between churchless me and thewalrus.
I still see a great gap between where the church is now and where it was just after the first Pentecost.
I still don't see us eager to gather every day at the "temple." We don't gladly sell what we have to support each other. And - surprise! - we don't enjoy the favor of all the people.
So where do we go from here?
Is the answer in some kind of emerging/emergent church? Or in emerging Christians who have recaptured the divine spark of Pentecost; the craving of the Kingdom? Or in the resuscitation of creeds? Or even in the extraordinary theology of a Christian who embraced Jews and was willing to conspire to assassinate Hitler?
I have a concern that a new church movement might only generate - in the words of thewalrus - new "catch phrases" that baffle and draw lines and alienate those outside the secret Gnostic circle.
Do we really need more abstruse "e-words" like "emergent" to add to the historic list of evangelical, ecumenical, eschatological, ecclesiastical, epistemological, expiational, et cetera?
Sorry. I got no answers for you.
Just more questions.
1:26 PM, March 19, 2005
Post a Comment
<< Home