Monday, March 17, 2008

 

How Will They Know Series

Proverbs 29:18 “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  

 

I’d Rather Drive a Truck

 

I am mindful that the church is changing, not just the local church, but the understanding that faith is in transition.   I think that people are searching for authentic, real faith, a place where they can be transformed with people who are transparent with messages and missions that are engaging.  

 

The church of the past had a strict order of how things were done, decorum, if you will.   In many ways the church of the past was a worship of religion.  It had its procedures, its laws, and its regulations.   People were doggedly tied to denomination and rules of conduct.  

 

People today don’t want religion, they want faith.   Maybe it is a good thing.   I mourn at letting go of the patterns of the past.   I love the old ways but I know that people have changed and the desire is much more for a faith of the heart.   They want something they can understand and that speaks to their everyday life.   It seems in a world where people have lost their meaning and purpose there is a search for something more.   Many no longer find purpose and meaning in the ways of the past and they are challenged by a new quest of faith. 

 

In a western I just finished reading the cowboys are talking about the end of an era in the western lands of America in the 1870s.   It was the end of the open range and the law of the powerful and the beginning of private lands and legal justice by trial rather than by power.   One cowboy who is speaking of this change said, “A man has to go with the times.  No man can put a rope on the past and hold to the old ways.   The best thing is to ride the new trails.”  

 

In this point of my life as a leader it would be easy to try to keep the past ways of religion.  However, in these years I’m called to be a leader and a leader moves into the future.  I believe in the ways of faith.  We must keep the ways of God and practice the heart of faith with loving insight to the understandings of people as they are now.   The challenge of the future is very exciting. 

 

I remember Ricky Nelson played at Madison Square Garden.  It was many years after his initial popularity as a teenager on Ozzie and Harriet.   He played his new songs and the crowd protested by desiring his past hits.  He wrote a song entitled “Garden Party” in which he said, “I went to a garden party, they all knew my name.  No one recognized me.  I didn’t look the same.”    In the song he reminisced about the tunes he used to sing and then closed with this line, “If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lot of luck, but if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.” 

 

We all have to seek the future, the new trails.  If I’m only called to preach the old ways, I’d rather drive a truck. 

 

Prayer:

Dear God, help me to find the new paths to tell the people I love of your love in these days.  Amen.