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11 Responses to “Happiest About the New Year”

1. Chris Harness Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 4:55 am

   Nice Piece, Mike. In support of your point about Christianity in historical context, I am currently enjoying Eusebius’s History of Christianity. I was able to get it free through my Kindle as well as many of the other Church founder’s work.

   I would invite everyone to read their viewpoint of our religion. It is a part of our tradition.

2. Khori Smith Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 6:19 am

   Great writing Mike. Your writing a real gift. Thank you for graciously sharing it with us so often in such a fresh, relevant way. You bless me.

3. George Hepburn Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 10:47 am

   Happy new year Mike,

   I believe the Sunday worship service became irrelevant to some who tired of feeling like a number in a lottery. The Big Box churches of yesteryear lost touch with the individual forcing people to get connected with smaller groups. Some churches have done good work by encouraging church plants that have 20-50 people where each person feels a little more connected to Faith and their church goers. With the huge churches of the past, people searched for ways to feel related to their Faith and that may have forced some to go it alone, at home on Sundays watching TV evangelists and studying solely alone.
   While some big box chuches are still thriving, the key is to have people connected in smaller settings without discarding worship on Sundays.

4. marble Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 1:02 pm

   Heh!

   I never published the article I wrote some years back – (I guess it was the last time Christmas feel on a Sunday) – expressing my amazement (and critique) that “church” would be “closed” for Christmas.

   You have highlighted a point I was missing: that of services that are all about the congregants. Instead of about God. Because a service that is about God will go on whether or not there are congregant-spectators. That means that churches “closing” on Christmas is a critique not only of the church leadership, but also of those of us who do [or do not] attend. We continue to live down-side-up. . . .

   Thanks for your musings and confessions. I, too, have struggled with the organized church/faith community equation. As you know.

   I have recently started experimentally attending a small local church of a traditional denomination. Evangelicals might question their salvation because they don’t express themselves in the evangelically-accepted manner: but they were “open” both Christmas and New Year’s. . . . It’s a bit of a paradigm-shift.

   I enjoyed the story of Amy Welborn. It’s a point we tend to miss, isn’t it, when we try to appeal to the congregation as our “audience” instead of a transcendent audience of One. In addition, when we turn our worship service back onto ourselves in this way, we limit ourselves to ourselves. The transcendent and the mysterious (not to mention the supernatural/metaphysical) are shut out – or intrude only by accident. It’s that feeling of awe-filled hush that I experience when I walk into the ruined remains of a cathedral or monastery that reminds me that the true worship of God goes on whether a “congregation” is there or not. That is the worship that we most wish to join, I think.

   Meanwhile, we live in a fallen world and have to do the best we can as we go from one [mistaken] extreme to another. . . .

   Thank God for His mercy to us all!

   Best wishes for God’s blessings to you this New Year.

5. Byron Borger Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 1:26 pm

   Great, great piece, Mike.

   In a book called “After Darkness Light” (essays in honor of R.C. Sproul) Keith Mathison has a great chapter on various shifts in church history about the role of the Bible, and makes a big deal out of what you noted about an unfortunate idea that reading the Bible alone and devoid of creedal tradition was proper. He calls it the shift from sola scriptura, to solo scriptura. It’s a line so clever that you could have come up with.

   Some nearly emergent guys, Tim Conder & Daniel Rhodes, wrote a book a few years ago about how they work at reading the Bible as community. It is provocatively called “Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community.” Pretty fascinating. I guess this is somewhat what Christian Smith tried to raise in his less than conclusive “The Bible Made Impossible.”

   Anyway, linking weak discipleship and public witness to “thin” church life, based on individualism (and how that individualism may in part have been caused by oddities in our use of “sola scriptura”) is an important way to start the new year.

   Thanks for bringing big, insightful questions to us in well written essays. Keep our doggie’s heads tilting in 2012!

6. Brody Bond Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 2:19 pm

   Your point about the application/meaning of “Sola Scriptura” is a great example of how meaning is found in the frame, not the term itself.

   But doesn’t this seem like an example of how one can separate of words and their reality?

   The importance of frames is clear to me. It’s why the statement “to break the meaningful connection between words and reality” is so confusing. Is the frame the connection?

   Thanks,
   brody

7. Mike Metzger Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 3:30 pm

   Brody:

   If I understand your question correctly, the answer is to put the emphasis on “meaningful.” In other words, I can say anything (such as “I am Hispanic”) but those words have no meaningful connection with reality. This is particularly difficult for Christians to see themselves doing, since they tend to assume everything they say about their faith is faithful to scripture or church history. But in fact, the way we describe “fellowship,” or “spiritual growth,” or “evangelism” might indeed be fairly distant from how God actually defines it. Hence, we – perhaps inadvertently – break the meaningful connection between words and reality. Throughout history, God’s solution was prophets who performed the role of crap detectors. But as Jesus pointed out, prophets are routinely given short shrift in established religious communities because they point out these disconnections – not to wound religious leaders but to redeem our words.

8. Bob Moffitt Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 3:41 pm

   somehow I am not getting your blog. Please add me again to your list. Bob Moffitt

9. Mike Metzger Says:
   January 2nd, 2012 at 3:48 pm

   Bob:

   Look at upper right hand corner: “Subscribe Now.”

10. What is a Church? « Thoughts and Christianity Says:
    January 10th, 2012 at 8:52 pm

    [...] [...]

11. Emily Terrell Says:
    January 10th, 2012 at 8:58 pm

    Posted a question on my blog (http://thoughtsandchristianity.wordpress.com/) in response to your article – would love some thoughts! Here’s the question: what must a “small group of believing friends” have to become a “faith community” in the proper sense? (Just FYI – I’m an active member at my non-denominational church – I just want to understand the issue better). Thanks!

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