Musings

I am reading a book called Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the churches that reach them. I am also working on my sermon, "Filling the W/hole." At the moment those are parallel activities, but I think that by Sunday they will be intertwined.

I am always struggling with how to let my passion for Jesus come through (I LOVE JESUS!!) and thus being authentic in my preaching, without being too overwhelming (and "preachy").

I am also struggling, as a result of reading this book, with thinking about why younger persons seem to find church unnecessary to being Christian. Not because I don't understand intellectually, but because my experience of the church has always been so crucial to my following Jesus. Now I will admit that the formal structures of the organized church haven't always been helpful, but, for me, the church is the people that I journey with as a community of faith. And that community of faith is facilitated by those formal structures, even though I don't always like them or agree with them.

We just had Annual Conference this week, one of those formal structures. The meetings weren't all that fun, and the sitting for hours is difficult for me, but the sense of being together with a large group of people who are trying hard and faithfully to reach the same goal is just a rush. It was particularly strong at the service of ordination and commissioning where the crowd at Custer Road UMC read the prayers, recited the liturgy, and sang the hymns with this huge community voice. I get chills.

I have discovered that what is needed is double vision: the ability to see clearly that this is a very human organization with all the problems that entails, but that somehow it is also the body of Christ and a work of the kingdom of God.

We talked in small (well, relatively small) groups about the need to reach younger people and be authentic (so here I am back to the topic this post began with and that word 'authentic.') I hope that the younger generations can see that we are authentically trying, even though we sometimes fail at being Christlike.

So back to thinking about the sermon. (Yes, this really is a post of "musings") I am thinking about all the things we fill our lives with instead of God. If you have any thoughts on that, let me know.