What dangerous ideas are we talking about here? I've commented previously on issues about places like Lindisfarne which have a facade of Christianity but are now distanced from the actual Christian faith (Holy Island Cream Liqueur anyone?).
How about we actually use our church buildings in communicating the Christian faith? I'm wearing my art history hat here (which I majored in for my original degree at Monash University) - during the medieval period the churches painted Bible stories on the church walls for the peons to look at during the Mass - given that the service and the Bible reading were in Latin. This idea of the 'gospel for the illiterate' assumed that people would learn the Bible's metanarrative and individual stories through these pictures.
What I'm suggesting is this - person X rocks up at a Cathedral/picturesque stone church for a look around. Instead of trying to flog novelty tea-towels and histories of the parish, maybe we could use the previous opportunity to explain the person the stain glass windows are depicting; how things like the pulpit, the baptism font, or the communion table relate to what we actually believe. Jesus.
If we have a bookshop, maybe we could stop selling Jesus-junk and actually have Bibles, and good books on the Christian faith. Dare I say it - like St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral, Sydney? Yes - a Melbourne boy is saying something nice about Sydney... They have free CD's with a simple gospel message; run Bible studies for people throughout the week. They don't talk much about how the physical contents of the Church relate to the gospel message, but you can't have everything.
The basic question is how do we make our buildings work for us (well, for the gospel) rather than against it, but sucking up all our time/resources/emotions? Doing this isn't a universal panacea for the Church's ills, but it would be a positive step towards making the church's buildings more missional rather than the goal themselves.
Stay dangerous.
G.
Instead of trying to flog novelty tea-towels and histories of the parish, maybe we could use the previous opportunity to explain the person the stain glass windows are depicting; how things like the pulpit, the baptism font, or the communion table relate to what we actually believe. Jesus.
ReplyDeleteYou have some crazy ideas, you want a church to talk about Jesus... I'm not sure that is going to fly.... :)