Sadly, this is ridiculously true. As a church, we think that things our different for us, that we can keep doing things the way we’ve done them for the past century. We need to think progressively, think outside the box. So your church did a Bethlehem walk-through last year? This year, prepare a day in which you will serve food to anyone and everyone. It requires more work yes, but what makes you think that doing the same thing year after year will bring in more people? Look at theme parks: they’re constantly designing, creating, and building new rides and attractions. The church should see itself as a theme park, constantly reestablishing it’s presence and relevance to the society. You don’t need to make the Bible relevant to the culture, it already is, but church, since run by us humans, must be constantly changing and adapting to the culture we find ourselves in.

Throughout the recently concluded Peasant Princess sermon series based on the Song of Songs, I included a few discussion questions in the sermon each week. Some people have asked for a compiled list of these questions, and the following includes as many as I wrote down or can remember. Some of the questions, though, were made up during the sermons and therefore might not be on this list if they escaped my memory.

There comes a time when all things must be laid to rest no matter how important or vibrant they once were. Imagine if you saw your neighbors watering their tomato plants in the middle of December with six inches of snow on the ground. What if your crazy neighbor has a taxidermy pet that he still talks to and tries to play fetch with. We laugh at these images; however, often in the church we are not far off from this.

When the church was finally accepting that it was ministering to baby boomers and baby busters, it was already well into dealing with a clearly postmodern generation. And now that decent books about postmodernism in the church are finally being written, and we are finally accepting and getting a handle on it, I can’t help but wonder if once again we have missed the death of one paradigm and birth of another. Are we running in at the last moment with the much-needed transplant just as the patient is coding on the table? Are we watering the tomatoes in December?

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