July 20, 2011

Trying to define Church is like trying to define Christianity; both words have had their meanings lost in translation. They do not even come close to describing what they truly are. Words like church & Christianity are almost gone to us, leaving many on the doorstep of apathy, this being a state of total indifference. Interesting note is the opposite of apathy is ‘flow’. Flow is the mental state of which a person is in an activity is fully involved; immersed in a feeling of energized focus!
The Body of Christ is suffering from information overload. Trying to define what is church is close to impossible. We have so much information nowadays. So much that we are unable to process, let alone try coming to a sensible conclusion.
We have outsmarted ourselves. Our definitions have become watered down, compromised, user friendly. They contain factual errors and are filled with inconsistencies.
This has become a virus to the Body of Christ, data overload.
We must spend more time on things we do know; Jesus is Lord, He heals & saves, less time on the how’s & whys, the yes & no. In other words focus on quality information, not quantity. We think because we know more, we will have more. Information is not truth.
At the bottom of this lays on the fact that your ordinary, average joe lacks training on how to effectively discern truth of what is and what isn’t.
We are over run by information; signs, billboards, TV, the World Wide Web, tweets, all filled with meaningless drivel. We binge on the web, over doing it, and just like when we over eat and feel sluggish & dull, so it is when we get over loaded with all this information we put on our plate, we become dull & sluggish.
We are data addicted. We are addicted to the Internet & to our i phones.
I heard it put this way; “paralysis by analysis”. We have become frozen information zombies. All that conflicting information leaves us confused & glazed over. We have become desensitized. Some of us are immobilized by fear & indecision. We end up doing nothing, believing nothing & just settle for a comfortable quite environment.
I Cor, 14.8 “If a trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle”
There is no clear method for improving our way of defining things, so when we actual do put out the Truth, no body is equipped or ready to hear us. Gives a new meaning to the saying ‘those who have an ear to hear’, doesn’t it.
For so long we as the Church have made such an uncertain sound that we no longer have sway with people. So instead we have switched gears and turned onto the information highway. Information is not Truth. We seek information & rarely do we actually seek truth. The more information we receive the more difficult it is to decipher what is true& credible & useful; the harder it is to have faith. Faith in God is simple, but we have added so much more that it has become lost. We are drowning in a deluge of data. We have on the shelves at our ‘Christian bookstores’ hundreds of styles of bibles, along with thousands of teachers with their thousands of truths; jockeying for the ultimate Truth. Even on my computer, it auto corrects the word Christian with a capital c, why is that?
Do we communicate, or just throw at each other information, and facts. The body of Christ consumes & continues to adopt any & all latest revelation. We can not answer with dignity the question what is church? We can tell you how to grow what we think might be church, but what is it? Look at the word ‘Christianity’, what does that tell you? We are a ‘Christian nation’, what does that mean? That we are republicans, & tea partiers? How about being Jesusicans?
These two words in particular have lost its true meaning, if they even had true meanings. They have been over defined & twisted. I dare say I am a Pastor of a church, I don’t tell anybody that I am Christian anymore because of the stigmas’ that are so rudely attach to their meaning. They have become dirty words, probably rightly & sadly so. There is a great many of ‘Christians’ who do not go to church anymore, with as many reasons as there are definitions of church & Christianity. Most say that they are burned out on the whole church thing, the Sunday morning church in a box experience. Maybe so, but I think they should all shuffle their little behinds back to the ‘church’. They need to rise out of the ashes of their burned out lives and right the wrong. Church should be a place where Truth lives. Jesus said that He is the Head of the Church, well, where is this church?
So much junk to sort through, at the same time a deeper problem is that there is so much good stuff to sort through. Information does not equal truth. You have heard it said quite famously “You can’t handle the truth”, well; we can’t handle or even know how to handle all the info that has become so available to us either.