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to Home Page If I , who have early in life made a commitment to the vision of what the Church is, can feel so tired and often cynical of the prospects of this institution being as much as a shell of what it is called to be, what hope is there of "evangelism" taking place? I must say, first, that it will still happen in spite of my low esteem for the church-as-is.
This is true becuase there still rings loud a call to move beyond stale structures, proclaim truths that long for fresh re-interpretation (not a "recasting of meaning, but a reaffirming of the realities of the Kingdom of God in the new wineskins for today, or for the community we seek to redeem, and in formats which vibrate with the resonance of modern mythologies; which strike the common chord and help us to realize that a loving Center of the Universe has created us from his/her/the Image.
I have, particularly in the last 5 years since the Gulf War, felt very alienated from much of what I see in the typical suburban church of today. In 1991, I watched what seemed to be a total subversion of the message of the church in the hype and hysteria of popular acceptance of the call to "Support the Troops", without any asking of the what to me seemed obvious questions such as "are there any victims of this?"; and it seemed that this consideration was lost in the allegiance to patriotism.
Things were never again the same for me after that. After we moved to our first house in 1992, we stopped going to the church where we had been since 1988, and began looking around for another place. We began going to a church in the area, and my wife has joined, but I have not felt much community there. I tried the Sunday School, hoping that there could be some opportunity to get to know people there, but I did not see much interest in dialogue there. It seems that the idea of this community is our reason for being has long since been lost (and so today, the idea never even occurs to the people in the church; there are simply too many other things going on. People do not even discuss issues around church DURING the "mingling times". It's as if people consider this a time to "speak of other things they consider more sociable and acceptable.")
Actually, this was but a dose of reality for me; a glaring sample of the way that the church of the middle class, in which I grew up, has forgotten its home and its heritage; its spiritual roots.
