Everything is Church especially during the summer months!

From Jason Clark's blog here are his thought on an issue I was processing this morning:

I was having a conversation with Fredrik, when I was in Sweden, about the growing popularity, of making 'private god spaces', of being post church, and making church something about not being church.

In this expression, we see a reaction to the idea that the church has so often seen sundays as the only valid space for God to be. In this paradigm, sundays are church, and the kingdom, only the sunday service is church.

So now we regale the congregation, and sundays, and see church as when I play golf, go shopping, play football. In this paradigm everything is church, and I don't need church anymore, I'm post church.

But in the old model where nothing is church, surely it's so restrictive that we have to say no! and find God elsewhere? And in the second model, where everything is church, then ultimately nothing is church, a kind of pantheistic ecclessiology.

A church that does not naturally lead to people connecting to God, in the places they work, and play, and live, isn't church at all. Conversely when church becomes just the place where I chose to connect with people who do just what I want, like football, I have stopped being church, just as completely.

In the reaction to church being so disconnected from the world, we think we are being radical by moving church outside of church, but we can end up not being church at all.

So where do I see church? What about the football guy, who finds God in his football sundays, and the water-skiing woman, who finds her time with God there. When they get together and ask, how are we going to talk about our faith, how are we going to celebrate christianity together - I hate football and you can't water ski - how are we going to connect together outside of our own exclusive narrow spheres of interest...then they get to start being church.

If sundays was all about me, jesus as my girlfriend worship, my blessing, my needs, lets not be fooled and think that church on my terms, on my interests, with fewer people is anything better, or different, it's just the modern church on steroids, hyper modern church.

Here are my thoughts I posted in a comment on his site. (I planned to blog about this today and his post was a great springboard for me!)

Thanks Jason for these much needed thoughts! I have been thinking about this today as my churchs' attendance is horrible in the summer. When I run into members in town they tell me of how busy there are and the many trips they have been on, the many personal projects there are pursuing. One woman today expressed surprise when I recognized her because it had been so long since she had been to church.

Her comment portrayed the bigger issue for me. Church attendance isn't the issue. Gather together in community, with others, with people who are different from us is the issue. How can we love our neighbor as our self (remember how Jesus defined neighbor) if we aren't around long enough to connect?