Definitely coming down with something

Yep, I'm definitely coming down with something. Kara, too, seems to have picked something up, from school probably. She was coughing enough last night to warrant some medicine. Never adept at waking up quickly, she cried for at least 15 minutes until coming to enough to gulp down a dose.

The weekend looks pretty good. Despite rain scheduled for Saturday, Lynn-nore has invited Sir W. Raleigh & QE over this evening. I'm picking up the pen tomorrow morning and knocking 3,000 words out. Shouldn't take more than a few hours.

I noticed this morning that the New York Times magazine has an interesting article about the mega-church movement. It is very plain, having done a good bit of reading in the adjustments in public attitudes toward religious faith in the last 200 years, that the state of the modern church in the west is largely reactive and still reeling from deep-seated cultural and intellectual attacks leveled against it over this entire period. The symptoms of the "blighted church" are easy to spot, and are rampant and suffocating in every community I've ever been a part of. Simply put, this sickness manifests itself in the question, "What is our purpose?" And are only mistreated by church growth initiatives.

The problem with the western church is so deep-seated, so rooted in the makeup of our very life-assumptions, that it would really be impossible to fix them without accepting radical change. As John G. said the other night, community, as the human species has always understood and known it, is no more. We simply do not know what we are saying any longer, and cannot accept, by stint of our own cultural desires and the constructions of identity and personhood that have been built into the west since the Enlightenment, a re-discovery.

Some will say that the growing emergent church movement (cf. Anna Aven on this movement which is an outpost to the larger web conversation) proves me wrong on this. Some of these churches represent semi-radical attempts to strike out in bold new directions, that is true. But they are not addressing the problem on a definitional level, and, in my opinion, are more a manifestation of discontent than a well-informed solution. The Jesus movement of the 1970's, an outgrowth of the secular hippie movement, was "emergent" (and far more radical) long before these largely 20-something churches. That move us gave us Christian industries, and a more powerful political voice, but it has not helped the churches. The definitions of religious community, language and expression are still nostaligic, and largely culturally isolated, throwbacks.

btw. Anna defines the Emerging Church as:

The Emerging Church (EC) is a movement throughout the English-speaking world that is in part a response to postmodernity and in part a reaction to church as we know it, which is also called the institutional church. There are some unifying factors to the movement as near as I can tell, namely some concept of “ancient-future” worship, a deconstruction of liturgy, and a return to a less hierarchical structure of church leadership in order to have more people more involved as in the days of the early church.