the church submergent

I wasn’t sure what to label the iceberg because there are so many things challenging the church today. So I decided to leave it blank and let you fill it in.

What I see are lots of attempts at tweaking the church to make it either more cool or more biblical. That is, there are two extremes. One is to try to keep up with what’s cool and contemporize or relevantize the church without losing touch with its history. The other is to forget the future and try to get back to what’s biblical, which takes on a fundamentalist flavor. On the one hand restoration and the other hand emergent, but on all hands submergent.

I suggest that all these attempts are like rearranging the furniture on a sinking ship. Things look different, refreshing and it seems that attempts are being made to make the church more useful, relevant and true. But the hull has been breached and water’s already coming in and this is all going to be deep under eventually.

I’m not sure what can be done about it. But I do think the first step is to finally admit, like they had to on the Titanic, that it is indeed sinking.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. However, I believe we need to prepare for a massive, transformative change that we can’t even foresee.