The Connecting Church, pt. 1

After deciding on our church name I started noticing the word "connections" everywhere, including a lot of books. One called "The Connecting Church" got some great reviews. I don't know why it took me so long to actually read this book, but I finally did. It basically has three parts, each essential to making meaningful connections with people- a Common Purpose, a Common Place, and Common Possessions.

The author, Randy Frazee, echos numerous thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams I've had for our church. He begins with a portrait of modern life through a fictional couple bearing remarkable similarity to the portrait of life I painted once in training session for church leaders. It's a few years old, and long, but I think still rings true...

The normal person you meet at work or in your neighborhood lives believing that the goal of his life is to achieve his fulfillment, by his efforts and through cultural definitions of success. He is under enormous pressure to reach this fulfillment and steadily finds it eluding him.

He has little information about God, mainly vague hopes that God must match our cultural imperatives of tolerance, benign interest, encouragement and non-interference. The fear of imposing religious beliefs keeps him isolated in his ignorance.

If he does have a conception of the God of Christianity, he probably feels that God is against him, is angry at him for not being good enough, and wants him to be better than he desires to be: in short, he believes the Father of Jesus Christ is a contract God who must be conditioned into being gracious. Nothing in the media portrayal of Christianity will disabuse him of this view.

He lives his life wondering anxiously over questions he can barely express: Am I OK? Am I loveable? Am I going to be all right?

He trembles under the naked open spaces of no moral restraints in the culture, watching helplessly as the tide of the culture sweeps through him:

He lives in a world where families fall apart; sacred vows no longer bind behavior or consciences. His children sleep with other children; they risk their lives in search of stimulation amidst the increasing boredom of our vacuous prosperity; they toy with violence and substance abuse.

In his world, lying is normal; revenge is noble and indeed necessary; and the competition is fierce, indifferent and unforgiving.

He is lonely, in debt, under pressure and unsatisfied by a God of his own making. He has unresolved issues in his marriage, if indeed he is still married and no basis for moving towards forgiveness, reconciliation, honesty and depth of communion.

He is distracted by business, overwhelmed with things to take care of, yet never seems to have enough money.

He is watching or has watched his parents die and has formulated some vague hopes about their well being but fear and ignorance keeps him from looking deeper.

He is tired, overworked, stressed out. In short, he is hungry to hear the good news that there is a God, that this God can be known for he has in fact made himself known. In Jesus Christ we see God revealed as unconditional, all-giving, all embracing love.

We do not see this side of people during casual conversations unless we look very carefully. We all play “Happy Face.” Too often, we choose to believe the façade presented to us.

Will we dare to risk looking beneath the façade, probing under the surface to see the misery that will move our hearts to compassionate involvement?

Perhaps this overstates the case for your life (or maybe it understates it), but each day I seem to meet more people who are longing for connections, community, a sense of belonging. I meet them in the church and on the streets. The crushing weight of isolation seems ready to overtake them, they are ready to make a change. They are ready to connect. They just don't know how.

Randy puts it in as simple of terms as I've read- common purpose, common place, common possessions. Without them we will not experience the true depths of community and connection that we were made for. It's that simple, and it that difficult- for it takes a radical restructuring of our lives and priorities.