Being the Church Today...

Here is another Organization/publication I have come to enjoy.  There are a wide variety of authors who speak to a wide variety of church 'issues'...

This one speaks about being the church today.  Here are a few sentences to give you a taste:
"As mainline Protestants, we are still working through our fixation with numerical decline. We used to be the popular kid in class, but now—not so much. One response to this changing circumstance has been the creation of an unrealis­tic mental picture: once we were a great and glorious church, but now we are doomed to the dustbin of history. This fanci­ful delusion keeps us from seeing the ministry right in front of us. This Camelot-like dream diverts us from both the joys and the challenges of being the church today. We have roman­ticized our triumphs. We have confused our former popular­ity and status in the culture with being the church of Jesus Christ. We pine for the glories of our misremembered past."

The author, Steve Willis, speaks about the small congregation but I think what he says applies to churches of any size.  The church in any century needs to be careful about what we use to measure 'success'.  

More from Steve: 
"The small-church lament is that things are not as they should be. And that lament has a long, important tradition in the life of covenant people. Angry protestations about declining mem­bership rolls and budgets do not offer a prophetic word to the church. But paying closer attention to people and places and speaking out about who people are and what they are created for carry the potential for genuine transformation."
  
Hopefully that is the lament of all churches.  And "paying closer attention to people" often gets us to what Wheat Ridge wants to help congregations do: engage their community with health and human care ministries in the name of Jesus. Check out how we can help and what others are doing.