"Church" = 6 Hands, 45 Minutes and 35 Gallon Trash Bags? - Jeff Wiersma

Eliot (left) and Oliver (right)

There's nothing unique or ground-breaking that I can add to the volumes already written about what "church" means in the 21st century.

This is not to demean or diminish the importance of the ongoing dialogues and discussions over the past decade about making "church" a more authentic, holistic and "earthly-good" experience.

I have taken part in many of them. It is a subject near and dear to my heart; part of a seismic cultural shift from Modernism to Postmodernism that resembles the time of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

So instead of attempting to reinvent the wheel, I simply want to share one way I thought of to do "church" beyond the prescriptive routine of going to a certain building, on a certain day, at a certain time.

Since I have my sons Eliot (7) and Oliver (4) with me every other Sunday, sometimes we make it to church and sometimes we don't. On the alternating Sundays, you can find me at one of those aforementioned churches leading music and liturgy.

On this Earth Day Sunday, our "church" consisted of filling an entire 35 gallon garbage bag with foam coffee cups, plastic shopping bags, candy bar wrappers, bottled water containers and fast-food receipts in only 45 minutes.

Here are the two key points from this week's "sermon":

• "We are taking good care of the earth, aren't we?" -- Oliver
  
• "People should care more about the earth than about being so lazy and throwing their trash into nature!" -- Eliot

AMEN and AMEN!!

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church: An Interview With Diana Butler Bass - Candace Chellew-Hodge

We are at a crossroads in history.

This year's seemingly crazy, religion-infused GOP primary race is actually part and parcel of an awakening that will transform how all of us structure and experience religion—as well as society—going forward.

We are at a crossroads in history—we can choose to move forward into new emerging spiritualities, or we can heed the siren sound of the traditionalists calling us back to a romanticized, rigid, past. 

We are in a period of intense cultural reorientation or revitalization, and that during an awakening, politics, worldviews, religion, education—the whole way a society approaches being community, and connecting with one another, and understanding their God or their gods—it all changes.

What we’re in the moment of right now in American culture is that our old institutions, our way of being church—our way of understanding any kind of religious tradition, —all of those older patterns are dying. 

I look at that whole arc of people who are leaving church because of the failure of the institution, and I don’t see that as threatening. I see that as a really exciting and hopeful possibility—if religious institutions will listen to the message those people are sending them.

When you have this kind of institutional collapse and large groups of people who are demanding a different kind of faith and moving out, taking risks toward an unknown future, that’s actually going to terrify a large number of people who are happy with the way things have been.

On one hand, you get movement toward the future, with people taking risks; you get people who are willing to engage new ideas about God and community and spirit. On the other hand, you get a counter-awakening movement; you get people who are very afraid and are trying to reinstate what they knew in the past.

I hope we get there quickly, because I don’t like it when people get hurt. That’s what happens with these backlash movements. They can express themselves in violence. And that kind of violence also does harm to the people who are in the mode of the fearful—it’s a devastating cultural moment.

The full article is available here