I am a pastor. I am a worship leader. I am, who cares what I am. What matters is that I am seeking God, listening to Him. Today, we talked about how to be more real as pastors. Perhaps we don't do Resonate vision in 2005 right off the bat. Instead, we are talking about the need to unravel our young adult's modernity.
Also, we are concluding, finally, that Resonate (our young adult service) is not postmodern. Dah, some sould say! In other words, it's not, as McLaren talks about, World=Church=Self. But instead, it's the modern model, Self=Church=World.
For the most part, our young people compartmentalize their faith. Church is church, friendships with the unchurched is a different thing. We are realizing that many of our young adults, young marrieds are pretty content in the modern system. They don't necessarily want to be honest, or have their pastors share their stuff. They want us to be strong, good, visionary leaders that create good experiences for them and their children some day.
And college students, for the most part, can also fall into consumerism. Of course, this is what our modern churches, including us, have created, a consumer mentality. Better services, better messages, better music, better children's programs. And my duty? Show up, give, serve if I really have to.
So we conclude that the Spirit has to do a work, we as pastors have to get honest about our own journey and hunger for honesty. People have to choose if they want this kind of faith, to become this new kind of Christian.
Perhaps, our church will have two systems running simultaneously for a while - modern and whatever we do.
I'm not sure our church wants to/can/should go towards more emergent thinking. Resonate could. There are still many modern hands around the Resonate throat. That sounds harsh, but there's truth there. Our leaders just have to be concerened with the modern stuff - numbers, reaching out, a good service, good worship leading, good teaching, relevant series and the like.
That's important. I like that too, the modern in me. Remember, I'm both. I'm transitional, not native.
But it's not working for everyone. And most of all it's not reaching unchurched people, and worse, it's not calling people out of their consumerist lives.
Tomorrow morning, we meet again, to talk some more.
