Brother Maynard, a servant to the people formerly known as the congregation. To the inherited church at large, but most particularly as expressed in the Western World. Gratia vobis et pax.
Please. Stop chasing the “baby boom” generation with your inherited attractional megachurch ministry models of consumer-driven church. This generation rejected your forms of church in the 1960s as meaningless and outmoded. Get over it.
Please. Stop chasing the “Baby Busters” or “Generation-Y” or the Millennials (or whatever you’re calling them this week) with your modern-minded inherited attractional megachurch ministry models of consumer-driven church. Their postmodern worldview does not jive with yours — and besides, their parents’ example taught them to reject your forms of church as lifeless hypocrisy. Get over it.
Please. Stop fighting the battles you’ve already lost… the only thing left on the battlefield is to bury the dead. Everyone else went home: follow them, and let the dead bury their own dead. If you still genuinely want to help bury the dead, you can start by apologizing to everyone you meet for having killed them in the first place.
Please. If you truly want to reach people of any generation born since 1950, dump the forms of church they’ve rejected and fit your essence into an entirely new one, something less packaged.
Please. Stop packaging the gospel. To package something is to force it into a box and seal it up tight. You love to talk about thinking “outside the box” but if you want to be there, why put the gospel inside the box? Just stop it.
Please. Stop spending money in God’s name, and give something that actually costs to others: your time. Dale Carnegie said, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.” Take his advice, for the sake of the world which God loves.
Please. “Live your faith. Share your life.”
Amen.
Brother Maynard, I have a question. It isn’t meant to be argumentative- it’s a genuine question. (I agree with the spirit in which the post was written, to be sure.)
Who are you hoping will benefit from this post? Are you venting, or do you have a target audience in mind here? Do you have many readers who don’t already agree with you?
Well… to be sure, Cindy — you get the loudest “amen’s” when you preach to the choir ;^)
I don’t actually get a lot of dissenting views stated around here. Some, mostly small adjustments which are quite helpful. Just the audience I attract, I guess. This piece was a bit of venting and a bit of seed-ideas that I’m tossing around with myself about changes in culture. The church has been in decline since the 1960s, while postmodernism has been on the incline. For the first 40 years of this shift, the church responded with the “church growth movement” which is about to fizzle (if it hasn’t already). We’ve gone from ministering to people to ministering to programs, and we need to hit reverse. There are a few people who stop by that are on the fence about these kinds of missional themes, and I hope they’re not put off by my venting but are able to see dots connected or things stated in a way that leads them to a realization — hopefully the Holy Spirit gets in there with his highlighter for each person who reads. I do have more readers than I can keep track of… I’m sure that many don’t agree with me all of the time, but for the most part those folks don’t comment much.
A lot of these thoughts are ones I’m piecing together and hoping to be able to compose something that’s rather more thought-out and systematic as to how it’s laid out, but for now I’m probably just putting down some of the early-stage ideas. The format is part of another idea I just wanted to try creatively — don’t know if the two ideas mesh well or not ;^)
Thanks for asking. To be clear though, a lot of what I write on my blog is about working through my own ideas, which was one of my original objectives… other people seem to like that and benefit from it (somehow!), but I don’t always write to the audience, as it were. Meaning I guess I’ll sometimes write things that are useless to anyone else. I hope that even around here, people can eat the meat and spit out the bones ;^)
Thanks for the clarification. Certainly none of us is required or necessarily expected to write for anyone but ourselves (I’ve mastered writing for the good of nobody in partcilar, by the way). I guess you’ve just done such a great job of teaching and leading through your words I’ve come to assume that’s always your intent. I guess it’s tough being so insightful and wise all the time, with those resulting high expectations, and all! ;-)
Auugh! I can’t take the pressure! (Just kidding!) Thanks for the encouragement though Cindy. I normally don’t think of myself as teaching or leading via this blog… just writing. People might follow, but sometimes you can get overwhelmed thinking about that and end up saying nothing ;^)