A Voice In The Wilderness

Today is one of those days that you wait decades for. This morning, I attended a workshop with a friend, given by a gentleman named Reggie McNeal. Reggie wrote the book The Present Future about the cultural shift happening in the church in response to post-modernism. His thesis was that we must move out of doing church and be the church. There is a growing body of work that lends credibility to idea of the movement, or shift, depending on who you talk to.

To really understand the moment you have to understand that the feelings espoused in the missional church are not new in general. But, they have been brewing and stirring in my heart for as long as I have been following Jesus. Something has always been just a little bit plastic about the church and too well packaged. A thin veneer has covered it, just thin enough that I could not quite get my hands around it. When you're in it, it feels like going to sleep in you bed after sweating real hard. You know something is there but its not bad enough to take care of it.

Reggie spent time really addressing some of the underlying themes that have plagued the church and destroyed its credibility. The suburban/historical church has essentially become a club that you sign up for a pay dues for. I smiled realizing that I could enjoy the fact that he said it and not me.

As I sat there in my seat my body grew numb. Not from a rejection of the content. Quite the opposite. It was a radical response to someone else saying what I had been feeling forever and doing something about it. That was important but not what really struck me and left me in a deep state of wonder. As I looked around during the workshop I began to notice that the average age of the group was probably fifty. This was radical to me because these were the people within the traditional structures of power, and they were engaged.

Which lead me to really believe we were on to something. You see, the principal message of the missional church is to connect people to loving their neighbor. This is cool, but is goes deeper than that. I validates a deeper truth that I have been exploring. When you connect people to the truth, which is that we are designed to love, you connect them to hope, to purpose, and to what ignites something within them intrinsically. Some won't get it, but for those who do watch out.

Reggie is like a voice in the wilderness to me, but what I am realizing is that he is not the only voice in the wilderness out there. There are many, and as he said, they are bubbling up from the ground, with a message people are ready to hear.