An Interesting Life....

“When I married my husband I knew life would be interesting, I just didn't know how interesting!”

I’m sure this comment that I heard a few weeks ago is one that many of us can related to. That project we undertook to fill in a little spare time, ended taking over  both our lives and our homes. Pursuing our interest in gardening finds us outside from dawn to dusk most days. Our new dream job keeps us at the office for longer and longer hours. Now we are able to travel as we once dreamed, we are home less and less of the time.

The alternative to the above scenarios we might also have experienced: divorce or estrangement, a half-finished project in a closet, a garden full of weeds by the time July arrives, overtime grudgingly spent at the office, suitcases never out of storage. So just what is the difference?

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the thing that makes the difference is commitment. Once we become committed to another person, a cause, or activity, we want to spend the necessary time to make whatever it is work to its best ability. ’The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.’ ~Martina Navratilova

We all have heard the reports I’m sure of the latest polls showing that church attendance is continuing to drop in the mainline churches the U.S. and Canada and to a lesser extent in the fundamentalist churches. ‘We’re friendly’ the congregations say. ‘Try this new programme’ the church leadership says. ‘Where are the children’ they all ask.  I think one of the main reasons for the decline a lack of commitment in those churches.

As Charles Stanley said, ”Too many Christians have a commitment of convenience. They'll stay faithful as long as it's safe and doesn't involve risk, rejection, or criticism. Instead of standing alone in the face of challenge or temptation, they check to see which way their friends are going.”  I was actually encourage this past week, to hear that a local church had to have police protection for a funeral they were doing because of threats they had received. ‘Isn’t that wonderful’, I said to a friend. ‘The church is actually doing something that is counter-cultural!’

And because of that lack of commitment there is an accompanying lack of passion and excitement. When is the last time as an avid gardener, you talked to someone about your garden, or as a quilter, you talked to someone about the designs and colours of your latest quilt? Compare that to the last time you found yourself talking excitedly about what happened at a Sunday church service and you'll see what I mean.

Obviously what  the mainline churches are doing isn't producing that excitement. And yet they keep trying to reinvent another way of doing the same things, that might have been exciting at some time in the past but need to change to speak to a new generation.

“Instead of leaven, we are like chameleons for Christ, absorbed into the very dominant culture we are called to critique and resist.”  (Robin Meyers)