Deconstructing

One thing I've seen in the deconstruction of faith-based institutes is that the identity/nature of God is/has been closely weaved into the fabric of the church itself. Deconstruction of these things often leads to a change in view of God, usually from a place of hurt, rejection and abandonment. Also, it could be that that people perceive that there is a Holy quintet -- God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy spirit, the bible and the church, and challenging the view of one means that all have to come down with it. (2023 me - Its usually the latter two and involves the breaking of Dogma/fundamental interpretation )

Disclaimer before any more progress -- There have been two excellent books which haven't shaped my thinking but have confirmed and provided a more rigorous defence of my ideas. (2023 me - I have no clue what these books are!) I probably use the language in both books as it is easier than reinventing the wheel.

During the lockdown in 2020, I've been thinking about what does it means to do church, why do we do church the way we do and is this whole culture, community sustainable and healthy? For many considering church, sermons and musical worship are the two cornerstones of modern christian worship. There have been many ways of revamping church but these two anchors are always the non-negotiable. These are the foundations upon which we construct the modern church. The issue is that if one or both are removed, then the whole building come tumbling down, including the leadership structure, vision, goals and direction.

The question is "Is that a bad thing?" Does breaking up the way churches traditionally work cause problems? Well, yes! Firstly, you can't have one person/small team look after a disproportional number of people! Also, large churches aren't possible. If church is a time without a directed worship/teaching and everyone brings a psalm, word, encouragement, then time commitments become a real issue. 30 people sharing for 2 minutes is an hour of time! (like when do people keep to time limits) likewise 300 people sharing is only 10 hours!

The parallel for the scientist in me is Einstein pondering travelling at the speed of light. His interpretation of the behaviour of light required him either to believe maxwell's recent electromagnetic laws or the very established laws of motion. He choose the first and subsequently discovered special/general relativity which challenged many concepts (standard time, distance) and is the reason behind car batteries being able to work, mercury being a liquid and gold being yellow!

Stepping sideways for a second, I've been going to church for 40+ years and must have heard a message on average 48 times a year. The grand talk time is roughly 1920 hours (0.5% of my life) but i can only remember points from about 5 sermons (0.26% of sermons). This fails to take into account the numbers of sermons I've slept in, not paid attention to and/or been somewhere else in mind/spirit. So, sermons seem to be a highly infective communication/training and equipping method but why are they medium of choice?

In one swoop, Covid19 has made the in-person attendance of these events impossible. The challenge is to use this pandemic as a learning experience. Rather than retreating to streaming versions of the same, my local church used this as a time

2023 Response

How has our local church addressed these challenges? Overall, I think we've made some big changes, taking us back to the roots of what it means to be church. Every sunday we have a community discussion time. This is a time for reflection/engagement on the theme of the sunday but a space to pray and connect as a community. We've also had more of a prayer focus We also have regular meals in and as the part of our service as it makes communion/fellowship/discussion so natural. People are now coming forward to serve!

Unfortunately, the technical limitations has forced our online church to be view-only. The pandemic friend google-hangouts has been resided making long two meetings impossible This isn't ideal but better than nothing.