The ooze.com is an online magazine of things heretical and Christian. It' a nice combination. get's you thinking ut the box. The leader article this time round is about the chruch and it's demise as an institution still doing stuff the way they did stuff half a millenia ago. I've quoted a wee piece of the aarticle below. If you what the whole thing then go here. It's worth thinking about and paralleling it with our community arts p;roject but challenging in a whole lot of other ways about how we are doing and will need to do church in the future. I'm interested in your thoughts...
A quick survey of the church’s resources would suggest that we focus on one product to the exclusion of all others. Most often, it’s teaching. Almost everything we do centers around a 60-90 minute event held on a Sunday, at a particular time, at a particular physical address. It’s basically the same product we’ve been selling since the Renaissance. People sit in a room and listen to someone talk.
But here’s the thing: in the Renaissance, it made sense for people to travel miles to hear someone talk about God. After all, people were mostly illiterate, Bibles were expensive and people were frequently isolated from their friends and neighbors. A Sunday morning service was often the one time each week when people could get together and expand their horizons. Teaching was a rare commodity.
But that’s no longer the case today. Teaching is available everywhere these days—on television, on the radio, and even online. The local church no longer has the corner on the market.
The situation reminds of the banking industry. At one time, if you wanted to deposit or withdraw money, you had to go to the bank and stand in line. You had to fill out a slip and wait for someone to serve you. Today, there are independent ATMs capable of instantly dispensing cash all over the place—from grocery stores and restaurants, to sports stadiums and bars. I don’t know about you but I can’t remember the last time I actually “went to the bank.” It’s not that I’ve stopped needing money; it’s just that I choose to get it in other ways.
But the church seems largely oblivious to this trend toward flexible, on-demand service in our culture. When it comes to spirituality, we still expect people to come to us. We insist they arrive at our buildings to do transactions with God or make deposits in their spiritual account. When congregants complain about pastors and churches having banking hours, the church cries foul in the form of “consumer!” They don’t think to ask whether their product is really what the market needs. Instead, they ramp up the rhetoric, overhaul the marketing materials or renovate the branch.
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