Welcome: Entering The Information Age

Who says the church is behind the times? Irrelevant?  Techno-phobic?

See.  We've got a blog.

Oh sure...blogs have been "a thing" since Al Gore invented the internet.  But look! We've totally jumped on that bandwagon.  Ten years later. 

Who are we kidding?  Twenty years later. *sigh*

The thing is, the church is slow to move.  It's slow to embrace every folly and every whim that society comes up with...mostly because within the concrete walls of the church (talkin' building, here) you've got a three year old, sitting next to a 93 year old...and that gap can be hard to bridge at times.  Because though the three year old is navigating his iPad mini with ease, the 93 year old doesn't always understand what the draw is...

And so the church moves slow.

The church moves slow, because we're diversified.  Sure, we could do better (afterall, it's common knowledge that the most segregated time each week, is Sunday morning).  But for the most part, the church functions because a long, long time ago, a group of men and women who fell in love with the message and mission of Jesus Christ, decided that it was worth it...to teach men the stories...to ordain women into ministry...to value the opinion of their elders...and to welcome the question of the child.  A long time ago these men and women who loved Jesus and dreamed big dreams about a world that looked like the Kingdom of God, decided that it was worth it...to welcome the faithless...to embrace the foreigner...to gather the broken...and to share bread with the unwanted.

In the intervening time, we've screwed this up, now and again.  We've misinterpreted the Bible and told women they are sinners and excluded our elders from our hand-waving songs of praise and silenced our children when we didn't know how to answer their questions.  We've shut our door to those who sin differently than us...and frowned upon those who sound different than us...and excluded those who love differently than us...and shuddered at the idea of sharing table with those who know brokenness differently than us.

But for the most part, the church hasn't changed much.  And so we still hope.

We still hope that the elderly life-partners have something to teach the newlyweds, who sit two pews ahead.  We still hope that the 93 year old, might watch the 3 year old, and rejoice with the child, when another level of Candy Crush is conquered.  We still hope that shouts of praise, no matter what language they are shouted in, are heard by God and rejoiced in.  We still hope that justice might rain down like water...that the poor might know respite, that the hungry might know satiation, and that the disenfranchised might know a safe place as they search for the bits of their heart.

And so...yes. We're twenty years late to the information-age. 

But in a lot of ways, that's because we're looking to our right and our left and trying to figure out how to be both relevant and respectful.  Hope-filled and awe-struck.  New and old.  And that's not always easy.

So bear with us.  And know that you have a place in church.  Even if it doesn't look like the rest of the world. 

Or maybe BECAUSE it doesn't look like the rest of the world.

Thanks be God.....

rt