Musings on the subject of church - Part II

They say that by attending Regent College you will acquire a taste for Anglicanism and beer.  although the second is true I want to talk about the first: Anglicanism.
It's not necessarily true that you will become an Anglican but many do fall in love with liturgy and the more mainline church service.
I arrived at Regent College in all my anti-establishment fire and was placed in a class called CTC: Christian Thought and Culture. I was given a book called "Descent of the Dove" by Charles Williams and "The History of Christian Thought" by Jonathan Hill and then hundreds of pages of reading written by the likes of Augustine, St.Basil, Bernard of Clairvaux, Origen, Tertullian, John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola, St.Francis, St.Benedict,  Schmemann, Aquinas, Donne,  and so on and so forth.
We read and read and re-read the thoughts of old, the musings on Christianity from the beginning of Christianity until the present day. The desert fathers, the rise of Christendom, Charlemagne, the monks, the celtic christians, and the reformation.   We read of strange ideas about God from the 2nd century ,we read of architecture and music and baptism and philosophy, science, and post-modernism.

And I sat in these lectures I realized that perhaps all the people between Acts 2 and the 20th century hadn't been so wrong.  I didn't know about this great tradition of people thinking and wondering and moving in the Christian faith.  I didn't know about the thought that had been put into how we do church and why we do church the way we do.  I hadn't ever thought about the fact that God deeply loves the church and has throughout history.

I had also never realized that the Holy Spirit has been present in the church since the beginning. He has not abandoned the church but has indeed been guiding it.  Now - I don't think that just because the Church has done something it means that the Holy Spirit agrees.  But I also can't deny that the Holy Spirit is in charge.

And so - through much struggling in my soul - I started to realize that I could not so hastily throw out the church tradition that bridged the last 2000 years. That there might in fact be merit to learning and reading about the way these people saw Christianity and recognize that the church has progressed and learned and moved beyond the Acts 2 church.
I'm not sure where I ever got the idea that what happened in the first group of Christians was normative and then everything after had been a disaster. In fact, I think that attitude disregards the Holy Spirit's presence in the church. The changes and movements in the church have been brought about by Jesus-loving, Spirit guided people.

Now, the church has been deeply broken and participated in absolutely terrible things over the past and I don't want to trivialize that. But in those lectures I realized that I couldn't just throw everything out believing that we had gotten on the wrong track after Jesus died because I don't think we did.

By the time I had finished at Regent I had a new appreciation for the tradition of the church. I realized that I cannot  either choose to be apart of the church or not be a part of the church  depending on it's faults. I can't just leave and start my own house-church apart from "the church" and say, "Well I'm doing real church here and you guys over there are just deceiving yourselves."
So, full of thoughts about how meaningful and rich life in the church could be I headed back to Edmonton to see how it all would play out.

Musings on the subject of Church - Part I

I have been thinking a lot about church over the past few years and I have wanted to post about this. Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments as I move through these different posts.

In 2004 I read Velvet Elvis - as perhaps many people did. And like many, I was inspired by what Rob Bell had to say about how to understand and live out the Christian faith.  Rob wrote about a different type of a church, about a different way of seeing the world, and about a different view of God.  I became convinced that the only option for church was now house churches. This was the only way to capture the true essence of community and to provide a chance to care about people.  Programs were out and house churches were in. 

I started reading more books like Rob's book - "This Beautiful Mess", "Irresistable Revolution", "Blue Like Jazz", and others. These books only fed my "anti-establishment" tendencies.   I grew cynical about having to leave my home community to go to a church building and I was sure that we were wasting too much time in programs that didn't do anything.  I felt like all I was doing was putting people through programs that took all my time and were burning me out. 


The problem for me was that the church didn't look anything like the church in Acts 2.  I assumed we were supposed to, that the first record of the church was the perfect, pristine and correct or atleast normative. But after about 100 B.C everything fell apart and we had been on the wrong track ever since.

The type of church I was involved with didn't leave any time to be friends with people who didn't know God. It seems as though it got in the way of the main mission of the church which was getting out and telling people about Jesus, building the kingdom and living life. I grew further and further apart from my friends from high school because i was so busy with church life. 

For me - it seemed as though the church was problematic, we had strayed too far for too long from the original mission and the church I knew now was definitely not what God could have intended.  No more buildings, no more programs, no more instititutions.  I was looking for something new and better. 

So with this attitude in mind I headed for Regent College expecting for them to tell me more of what I already knew. I went to learn biblical languages and textual interpretation so that I could better understand these texts fully believing that if we got right down to the Greek and Hebrew there would be clarity about how we should live, how we should do church and what the Christian world was all about.