I recently visited a family-friendly
church where children played on the floor with dump trucks, elementary age
girls danced in aisle, and people walked back and forth with food and drinks
while visiting one another. Teens huddled together in conversation, young
parents swayed with babies in their arms and bounced them on a knee. All this while
the praise team lead the congregation in the worshipful praise song, “Here in
Your Presence.” Needless to say, the lyrics were apropos, “Here in Your presence,
we are undone; Here in Your presence, heaven and earth become one.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----God made man to have three parts: body, mind, and spirit. Our being is like a continuum having the purely physical on one end and the purely spiritual on the other, with our mind somewhere between the two progressing toward one end or the other. It is indeed worthy of all thanks that God has given the believer’s spirit new life. But death is yet in the body. The spirit has new life through its intertwinement with the Holy Spirit. The body yet has death through its intertwinement with the dying (2nd law of thermodynamics) physical universe. Which playground should we tend our minds toward? Surely we must mentally engage the physical world, but the essence of that engagement best comes from the spiritual side of our makeup. “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” (Rom 8:5)
-----It seems that the supreme interest of today’s trendy church is to attract a crowd. Maybe there are small groups hidden in the back rooms at other times which serve the Spirit well. But seeing how they’re dealing with physical space is quite revealing to the ever mounting trend of trouble this way coming. Jesus told us disciples to move outward into the world as spiritually adept beings, that is: go make disciples. Such movement of a spiritual people throughout physical space expresses Holy Spirit essence into that space through His people's expressions. America enjoyed a couple centuries of spiritually enlivened dead space. But today’s trendy churches are trying to draw the death culture of the world’s dead space into the space of the believers’ meetings in hopes that dead people will follow it in to be made alive. The intention is good. The effect is bad.
-----The Good Book calls thusly effecting churches Laodecean. They no longer beam and spread spirituality, but worldliness. They hide and bogart spirituality in their backroom meetings, almost like underground conspirators. Of course physical space is just physical space and the physical things happening there are just physical things. But when the physical things happening during a gathering of supposedly spiritual beings are of the physical nature rather than of the spiritual nature, then what is there to express the spiritual reality of new life into the minds of those gathered? Music that’s also shaped by the dead space’s beat? Probably not. Self-help sermons of some Bible shy preacher? More than likely not.
-----It just seems to me that if the goal is winning people’s souls to life in the Lord and building up the spiritual strength of spiritually alive people, then the space in which we strive to effect this goal might better serve if it is more adorned in spiritual activity and expressions than worldly. For the converse of the old adage “out of sight, out of mind” is just as true: "in sight, in mind". Then, if we are going to adorn our worship space with only the activities and expressions of the ordinary world, we should expect no more of the attending minds than worldly thought. That’s like feeding a living spirit rotten burgers, moldy cheese, and spoiled milk. Yuk! “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” (Rom 8:7-8)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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