No hope no harm, just another false alarm

We were in Big church yesterday. The theme for the month is ‘hope’. This is to coincide with the Hope 08 intiative.

I don’t have anything against things like Hope 08, I don’t really have very much against big church, whatever floats your boat and all that. The problem I have is with the complacency that can sometimes accompany them both.

I was discussing yesterday’s worship with my good lady at home yesterday and I pointed out where I thought the major difference between BCLC and BC was. At one point in the service the issue of people getting into debt around Christmas came up. This is a real issue for a lot of families at this time of year, people get carried away with the festivities and before they know where they are they have a massive credit card debt to pay off in January. It happens to us. Now if we had brought that up on a normal Sunday we would have had something of a discussion about it and looked closely at how we behaved and whether that measured up with our ideals. It’s easier to ignore those awkward questions when, to be frank, you don’t actually have to answer them.

I hope that ‘Hope 08′ will allow people to engage with the issues they are trying to tackle in a way that, perhaps, previous ‘programmes’ have failed to do.

This is not my expectation though.

My expectation is that churches that are already active on their communities will become more so. The churches that currently struggle to to ‘find their mission’ will continue to do so.

There is a tendency in churches to hope that the ‘next big thing’ will trigger some sort of revival of their fortunes and return us all to some cosy bygone time where the churches were full and kids kept their hoods off so the local bobby could clip their ear for them.

This isn’t going to happen. People need to develop their faith and allow that to inform their actions, this in turn will bring about some changes in the way members of our society conduct themselves towards one another.

The ancient out-dated model of church that we continue to hang on to will not deliver that, it allows us to remove ourselves sufficiently from the hard truths that we must confront if we are goine to effect any real change both in ourselves and in those around us.

Tags: hope 2008