What the church may look like?

It seems that I have created a series of blogs. It was asked of my last post basically what would this look like according to worship, community, architecture, administration, staffing, volunteer, service; and then there is the values that would need to be addressed. I will attempt my best at addressing these yet it should remain in the fore-front that this is a very large range of topics for discussion; therefore I will not be exhaustive.


The first issue is that this new imagination of church begins within the two aspects of worship and community. It is a community that worships, primarily speaking. What this is not then is a community that can gather and never have a real effect on each other. In American life today, a person can have such a fragmented life and generally the common church does nothing nor has realized the resource of overcoming this fragmentation. The fragmentation can be seen in how we can classify our friends; these are my bowling friends; these are my softball friends; these are my fishing buddies; and my church friends. This means that the church needs to become a more primary aspect of the Christian lives. There is also this aspect of volunteerism that needs to be countered. I am not going to unpack that term but what I am trying to say is that there needs to be some real honest, committed people to each other to go through the thick and the thin.


As for the architecture, I am torn and am not done trying to figure this aspect out. I went and listened to an Armenian Apostolic church father speak about his church’s liturgy. We were in the sanctuary of his church and it was one of the most theologically beautiful things that I have seen. Everything had its place and symbolic meaning; meaning that the space was holy. Likewise, I seen churches function the space out of a functionality mode where most everything was changeable and movable, to allow multiple uses for the space.


The staffing structure would have to become different as well, I think. The CEO-type of leadership just does not fit and makes us Christians unconsciously think that we are a non-profit organization which means hence a business. The church is not a business. Likewise the idea of volunteers has to change. When I clean my own house or do something to further my family along the path of life, I am not volunteering my time. This goes for the church as well. If we are a business then, yes, volunteers are necessary for the non-profit to function. If we are going to think of ourselves differently then we need to describe what we do differently. It’s sort of like being at home with my children when my wife leaves. I am not babysitting though a babysitter would do essentially the same thing. It is just different. What we do as Christians in church is different than volunteering my time with a secular community program.


Service becomes a way of life. We tend to think of our lives in compartments and service/good deeds become another compartment. We should be gathered in such a way that provides us to live a life of service. We should have a way of life in the church that provides safety to a person who may lose a job because he or she went above and beyond the traditional modes of service and hospitality. I have seen only glimpses of this in my life, yet the church has the resources to achieve this way of life.


Finally, there may not be one way that this church will look like, because all people are different and all places are different, therefore the churches will be gathering under different circumstances. It is like saying that if we were in Russia right now talking about this, my whole article would be different because there are different ideals and ways of life that we would be different from.


Though I do not have tangible community for this, I would say that I hear that congregations in places are trying to become something like this. I would say that some sort of contemporary monastic-type of look will take place, and that I intend to bring my future congregation or life to witness to this.