What we call ?church? is too often a gathering of strangers who see the church as yet another ?helping institution? to gratify further their individual desires. One of the reasons some church members are so mean-spirited with their pastor, particularly when the pastor urges them to look at God, is that they feel deceived by such pastoral invitations to look beyond themselves. They have come to church for ?strokes,? to have their personal needs met. What we call church is often a conspiracy of cordiality. Pastors learn to pacify rather than preach to their Ananiases and Sapphiras. We say we do it out of ?love.? Usually, we do it as a means of keeping everyone as distant from everyone else as possible. You don?t get into my life and I will not get into yours. Stanley Hauerwas I am seeing some truth to what Hauerwas is relaying. I pastor at a place where we are trying to point to Jesus in everything we do. We currently are at a point where we are having a vote of confidence for our lead pastor this Sunday, because there is a faction of confusers in this church, who want nothing more but church the way they want it. (oh yea, we are in Alabama, where they only want to be married & buried, with some good ole' preachin') I think McManus's bucket analogy is so wrapped up in laity, in our context. Another way to look at the situation here at the Sixth Avenue Service Station, is the Parable of Dirt. What we are essentially trying to do at this place is to see if the seeds that we are throwing, are landing on good soil, where we can see growth, or if they are landing on concrete, where they will just die.

I am not in the mood to append a previous post on here, where i was stating how difficult a month Shannon and I were having. I thought I would just open this up, and start typing. This may sound out of sorts, but having a week away to focus on my Dad's health and mentally disconnect from Alabama, has done wonders for me. Granted, I would take back my dad's heart attack in a second, so he wouldn't have had to go through so much. But even my dad would tell you that the knowledge he has of what is going on in his heart, will only add years to his life. As for me, not being weighed down mentally by the stress of this church, for a matter of a week, has opened my eyes in a lot of ways. I don't want to talk percentages or the what if's, when it comes to my future in Alabama, because that is really not my decision. I do know that my view of what the church means to Andy, is so different from what it used to be, and I hope I never forget this time in my life. Lets be more concise . . . . The church I am currently at, is not a church. It is a service station. I recently shared with a few friends, that church in our culture was a lot like the grocery store visit(Pagitt thought, not mine), you go there like once or twice a week, you get what you need, the relationships are like"hi, how are things? Good, see ya later!" and thats it. But you could go as far as what its like to get your car worked on, because we don't even go there with a mechanic, we just want our mode of transportation to be fixed, so we can go where want to go. We just want our souls to be tuned up enough so that we can turn the key and go when its time. That is where I work. The Sixth Avenue Service Station, where people want nothing more but to be serviced. This makes my heart cry out . . . When I was in NC, with my mom&dad, and dad was in CCU, for a whole week, we were bombarded by my parents bible fellowship friends. My parents were so looked after and cared for, it made me so jealous of my parents. These were people who were sacrificing their lives for my parents. This one lady Pam, she had like 3 other major medical things going on in her family, at the same time, and she sat with us in the Cath lab waiting room for like 3 hours. She even went and got Shannon's prescription, while we were in CCU. Don't get me wrong, I KNOW this is what church really is. But I have been on another planet for 3.5 years. What goes on at our house on thursday nights is church too, we even have kid that calls it church. It's a place where a group of 16-20 somethings feel open to share their lives and listen to each other's stories. It's not perfect, it's not structured, it's just there, and God is working in some hearts. I had nothing to do with it, and that is what I am intoxicated by the most, that God used a random act of people gathering, to work. This is why people are calling for my job, because they want those same kids to sit in 3 services a week, to be preached at, to be serviced. Pagitt used the term "post-protestant" in trying to illustrate what his church was creatively doing. The early church reformers realized that the way people operated in faith, wasn't working, and that the gospel was not reaching the hearts of men. I cannot sit quietly when it comes to some of the church I see today, especially in my current environment, and not proclaim that THIS ISN'T WORKING!!! I pray that God continues to reveal himself, as He always has, but I also pray that we never stop being creative, no matter who tries to stifle it. More later . . .

From Doug Pagitt's book, (which I am in the thick of) Reimagining Spiritual Formation: A Week in the Life of an Experimental Church "Will we do the hard and costly work of hand-crafting faith in our day, or will we be content living off the antiques of previous generations and fill in with cheap imitations of our own to "freshen up" the old stuff? Are we willing to become artisans of new expressions of faith so that our grandchildren will see as their legacy the quality that came before them, so they will be stirred thereby to craft newer, more beautiful, more meaningful expressions in their own day?"