Church today
So in church today the guest preacher was talking about how much the church as shifted from being a family centered institution to an industrialist center. By that he meant that we are very focused on building new buildings and setting up programs that are supposed to fill up the spiritual pitcher of what people need. These programs such as ladies groups, men's groups.kids clubs, things that are supposed to reach out to the community and fulfill there spiritual needs aren't working anymore! They are things that are put in the community to get these places back in touch with the creator but are not touching the fact that there is no creator in the home of most of the people in the community. He said that the main problem with most of what the church is doing today is that they are trying to put out these programs and not place faith back in the home and back as part of the family life but still kind of try and make it fit into a very industrialized, investment/money based world. He quoted some statistics which said that for young people who keep their faith after highschool the main reason that that happens is because their main spiritual influence was their mother. The next main influence was their father and then their pastor. What does that say about churches that do not try to bring a good solid faith into the families in the church but try to push their programs out into the community without that family value system? I don't know, if this makes any sense. But I was thinking about it this afternoon and was wondering what your opinion was on this.
posted by Kelly at
8:08 PM
1 Comments:
The stat you're quoting is from research done by an Alberta sociologist called Bibby, who found that most young adults (about 75%) officially follow the same faith as their mother, whatever that may be.
I've heard many theories on why current church structure/programs don't work for connecting the community to the church. I suspect they're all partially right. One that goes w/ yours is that currently church is set up to meet the needs of our grandparents and parents, but the needs of some of our parents and ourselves has changed and not been met. For example, some of our parents and many of our grandparents had/have a deep need for stability and formal organization b/c they were impacted by such major life crises as WWI, WWII, and the Great Depression. Our parents' generation and our own are more removed from those events and are more impacted by rapidly developing communication, transportation, and entertainment technologies. I think our grandparents needed church to function primarily as an information outlet b/c school was not very extensive (my grandparents had "extended" school when they went all the way to grade 8) and they had the relational ties they needed in their own large families and small town communities. Now we have information coming out of our ying yang but no relationships to learn practically the love of God in b/c we move constantly, have smaller families and bigger communities we can get lost in. But church is still trying to teach people about God academically rather than relationally. That's my theory anyway...
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