-Chris Burton on the changing scene of church in America
Exactly. It's not only non-Christians who feel that the invitation is hollow...
Our breadth of incarnation has been insufficient. Meeting with God happens no more on Sunday morning than on Friday night. Everything is sacramental, every moment "charged with the grandeur of God." And yet, Sunday morning or Saturday night, or whenever the church gathers for worship, is special, or should be special. It is not so much the place to come meet with God as it is the place to come and celebrate having been met by God and to find the context for and learn the shape of what it means to be God's image out there in the world.
This morning in church we danced. Not the palm leaves, people with banners in the aisles, and tambourines kind of dancing (not that there's anything wrong with tambourines per se), but the all we needed was a strobe light and some turntables kind of dancing. And it was beautiful. Not because people were so holy and so spiritual that they had ascended to the heights of "holy dancing" or "holy laughter" or any other imaginary spiritual watermark, but because we are material beings who live in bodies that engage in life with God and life with others through the bodies God has given us by seeing and eating, singing and dancing. Much of Christian subculture has been stiff and split down the middle by a dualistic gnosticism that says "this material world is bad, the spiritual world is good. Only what is 'supernatural' is good. Whatever is 'natural' is bad." Tim Keller talks about how Jesus is the happy ending to every community's cultural narrative. Today I saw how Jesus breathes life into his design for us to worship Him with rhythm. And besides, it was all still pretty tame compared to the church in Africa...
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