:: Cir-convict-vo-lo-cation ::

:: Reflexions about the necessity of being part of a local church ::

My wife and I have wanted to move to this here town since we left Manitoba. This past June, we finally got a house rental... In the meantime, the churches we so wanted to be part of, and who sooooo wanted us to be part of, have demonstrated a solid stucture of denominational leadership and function. I am talking about churches who could be seen as surfing the crest of the wave of the renewal/prophetic.

Even with all the best intentions and professed desire to walk into "the new things of God," as some need to define "growing onward into deeper maturity," they find they cannot function out of the paradigm of the greater circuit of churches who follow the evolving contemporary movement of apostolic/prophetic.

We have become friends with many of the people, getting to know them through attending church, or outside of the bounds of church life, as we both work with believers who attend there. But still, evey time we would go to a Sunday meeting, something just doesn't feel right. Worship times are basically when we really connect corporately with the Lord and coffee times, with other people.

I would benefit from more of these, but loike someone said, some of the rituals just drive me nuts. And hanging out with them would just bring me to a place of questioning the way things are, and I'd put my foot in my mouth far too many times in search of proper words to define my quest, and why I just can't sit in church anymore and really feel it is the Lord and our Family I am communing with in an unrehearsed way.

So we are here, finding renewed hope in a community like Resonate that there exist life beyond the dummy Church we've created to try and represent the passionate pursuit of God that was sleeping amongst so many, and that the Renewal re-awakened.

I must say I do deeply miss the corporate worship and fellowship times, however, I can't shake the feeling that there is a collective agenda of self-preservation that confuses things. And that's what I'm staying clear of. For now. It helps trying to perceive the actual true bonds of brother/sisterhood that makes a "natural intentional church" a faithful articulation of God's kingdom as a social unit as well as a spiritual one.

What qualifies a church as being a church? In my opinion, it is a local community of believers who gather together to worship God, take communion, and learn to love each other according to the Lord's command. That many groups around the country would affiliate themselves to increase their ability to serve the poor and missions seems to be a natural extension of such a clustering.

But then, they need to come up with a shared and common creed to preserve the homogeneity of the membership, and what happens when protecting the integrity of that creed takes precedence over the founding reasons of these affiliations?

Is there really a way to reinvent ourselves within each generations to follow God's leading?

Andre