What is a guest blogger post? It is when a blog host lets someone else post on their blog. Today I am letting Russel Rathbun – a founding minister with Debbie Blue of House of Mercy, an emergent church in St. Paul, Minnesota, post on my blog.
He has just released a book called nuChristian:Finding Faith in a New Generation and I thought that I would have this post on church because I wanted to show an openness to ideas and push-back about church, being that I don’t attend and don’t plan on attending church in my lifetime. Anyway, I would never say never and I appreciate Russell’s thoughts. What do you think?
There is an old truism in Christian culture that the church isn’t the building; it’s the people. This is meant, I think, to emphasize the spiritual over the physical, or people over things. Or perhaps like the companion truism, a house is not a home, it means that the church is not where we are, but who we are and how we live our lives in relationship with one another. The idea is that the place doesn’t matter.
But the fact is that we are not purely spiritual beings. We are decidedly material. We have bodies that move through the physical world, that touch one another and hold things, that sit and lie down on things. We admire things and are moved and inspired by things. We need some place to go and be.
I was at a meeting recently of historic urban congregations (and I use “historic” here to mean the churches were established a really long time ago). All were concerned with trying to grow their congregations (“grow” being used here to mean, replace their aging, dying members with younger people), and to increase the diversity of their ministry (“increase diversity” used here to mean, what do we do about the fact that not many white people are left in the neighborhoods around our church). As we talked it came out that every one of those churches had meeting in its church building at least one ethnic congregation (meaning, a group of nonwhite Christians) or emerging ministry (meaning a gathering of younger people). Most of churches hosted more than one such group.
So, on any given weekend in a particular church there where hundreds and hundreds of people worshiping from all different cultural and generational backgrounds. The historic congregation’s Sunday morning worship service might have been only 50–75 older white, middle-class people, but at various times the building was bustling with African American Pentecostals, Hmong Lutherans, 20-something hipsters, or Somali Congregationalists. That sure seemed like a growing, diverse church to me.
What if the church building were seen as important sacred space and if it were cared for and preserved for Christian worship and ministry in a particular neighborhood? What if it were seen as the Neighborhood Worship Center, instead of First Baptist Church or Immanuel Lutheran Church? What if the building, the physical space, were changed a little by each different expression of the Body of Christ that worshiped there?
The metaphor of the Great Melting Pot doesn’t work any more. Assimilation is no longer considered desirable. There is a recognition that groups of people from different world cultures and from various American subcultures have unique languages, practices, and experiences, all of which are valuable and contribute to our understanding of God and our neighbor. I think a church (here I use the term to mean the building—a sacred space) is a good place for all of us to be. Not so we can all come together to worship or live in the same way, but so our physical bodies can bump into each other coming in and out of our worship services, sort of rub off on each other a little, get to know each other, maybe even come to love each other.
Tags: emergent, house of mercy, judson press, nuchristian, russel rathbun
