March 07, 2007
Niche Appeal
Standing in front of a magazine display at a bookstore it seems there are fewer magazines for the general audience than there are for the niche audience. Although I could probably learn something from reading magazines on body building, motorcycles and romance, I’m more likely to read something that pertains to a general audience. It’s my sense that many of today’s leaders are attempting to carve out a niche market on the religious landscape. In developing a narrow focus and vision they may be serving a bountiful buffet to one group, when all the while they are offering scraps and leftovers to others. The Gospel is meant for the general audience and it seems to me that religious institutions would benefit by broadening their focus.
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----Let me very respectfully object to one idea you stated, which I think would then stand out as a key to this crude disease in the Lord’s body. You stated that religious institutions would benefit by broadening their focus to that of a general audience. God’s Word does not instruct us toward the benefit of religious institutions. This is an idea that has grown from uncounted centuries of scholastic passage of religious meaning from one generation to the next. We finally have lost all impression that the Word of God does not call forth benefits from the child to be stacked upon the institution. In fact, picking the Word up afresh, and reconstructing from it all impression regarding the child of God and the institution of the Church we find overwhelming volumes regarding the benefit to the former, and scant little regarding benefits to the latter. For the relationship to which we have been called is first between the individual soul and the Lord, then second, between the various individuals.
-----I believe it is that way because in the Word the religious institution is merely a bunch of God’s children being together. Then service, care for one another, and watching one another’s backside (overseeing, ie authority of eldership) moves among all together. Indeed, the religious institution, as presented in the Word, gets its life from each of the children who comprise it’s community.
-----However. The religious institution we worship in today gets it’s life through the definitions to which the religious leaders have subjected it. I am sure it is an innocent affair. A religious leader, like any other human, only knows what he knows, nothing more. And by human carelessness that leader unwittingly responds to his knowledge is if it were all there is to know, yet admits with his lips that the more he learns the more he does not know. If he were to direct the institution of the church like he directs his lips, the church would not be an institution. It would be a gathering of loving people serving the Lord by serving one another. The institution of the church would vanish into the background while the spontaneity of folks meeting each other with needs and supplies would stand in the foreground where the Holy Spirit would nuance the church with sincerity and benefits.
Gail;
-----Let me very respectfully object to one idea you stated, which I think would then stand out as a key to this crude disease in the Lord’s body. You stated that religious institutions would benefit by broadening their focus to that of a general audience. God’s Word does not instruct us toward the benefit of religious institutions. This is an idea that has grown from uncounted centuries of scholastic passage of religious meaning from one generation to the next. We finally have lost all impression that the Word of God does not call forth benefits from the child to be stacked upon the institution. In fact, picking the Word up afresh, and reconstructing from it all impression regarding the child of God and the institution of the Church we find overwhelming volumes regarding the benefit to the former, and scant little regarding benefits to the latter. For the relationship to which we have been called is first between the individual soul and the Lord, then second, between the various individuals.
-----I believe it is that way because in the Word the religious institution is merely a bunch of God’s children being together. Then service, care for one another, and watching one another’s backside (overseeing, ie authority of eldership) moves among all together. Indeed, the religious institution, as presented in the Word, gets its life from each of the children who comprise it’s community.
-----However. The religious institution we worship in today gets it’s life through the definitions to which the religious leaders have subjected it. I am sure it is an innocent affair. A religious leader, like any other human, only knows what he knows, nothing more. And by human carelessness that leader unwittingly responds to his knowledge is if it were all there is to know, yet admits with his lips that the more he learns the more he does not know. If he were to direct the institution of the church like he directs his lips, the church would not be an institution. It would be a gathering of loving people serving the Lord by serving one another. The institution of the church would vanish into the background while the spontaneity of folks meeting each other with needs and supplies would stand in the foreground where the Holy Spirit would nuance the church with sincerity and benefits.
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