For those keeping score at home, this refers to the self serve gas pump. Introduced as a way to save money, the gas station has been transformed. Once they were a kind of community center for car owners, now some unfortunate soul is locked in a tiny box selling gum and cigarettes, while people leap out of their cars and fill them full as quickly as possible so as to avoid the horrid possibility that you would come near another human being without being inside your protective automobubble.

Sometimes what we want, and what makes our lives more convenient, is not what makes our life better.

How does this apply to faith?

The parallels to communities of faith seem obvious to me. If we view a church as a place which dispenses the fuel for a spiritual life, we doom it to an inevitable degradation into a something like a self-serve worship station. The inevitable exercise of human streamlining will build an church which is extremely efficient at dispensing this fuel.

The problem is, the faith, the way of Christ, wasn't meant to be dispensed efficiently. No matter how God-breathed a nation might be, the economies of the Kingdom are still "other". Jesus walked around spending his time with people and places which constantly baffled his followers.

One day later: On the thinking chair I remembered Solomon's Porch, where Doug is fanatical about calling their community worship times "gatherings" instead of "services".
9:23:20 PM    comment []