The New Church Nomenclature

The new church nomenclature. - By Jesse Noyes - Slate Magazine


The corporate world has gone granola. Business executives prefer the term community to customer base, and companies extol their "holistic" products. In the current commercial zeitgeist, where millions of consumers are flocking to Facebook and paying higher

Erik Crown writes- Insightful article about current trends in evangelical churches. The differentation presented between fundamentalist, emergent, and megachurch movements showed the author really did his homework.

" But there's nothing wrong with these young bodies of believers tapping cultural fads and lingo as they return to such an ancient idea of Christianity, so long as they earn it with fruitful action." This is where we as the church can fall short with this tapping in. As I think about, any monkey can know about YouTube. It takes wisdom not simply point to a social object but rather engage it, use it. The church has done that with Christmas. Yes pagan roots, but guess what - JESUS HAS WON. God is God and he reigns, therefore the common grace that was present in pagan longings for eternal life and to not be depressed during the winter find fulfillment in Jesus. It is such a part of our culture we forget and often don't think about how powerfully the church engage both the pagan Solictice Rituals!

There was a book given to me called "American Jesus". And it traced the different snapshots of Jesus that have been emphasized through the history of our country; Rasta/Happy Jesus, Manly Jesus, Womanly Jesus, Pick you own adventure Jesus (Thomas Jefferson's contribution). Over and over again you had the author talk about these movenment and how they went off the deep end, then he would keep coming back to except for the Calvinist/Reformed type the just kept reading the Bible. I am very grateful for the grounding that our tradition gives us when it comes to cultural movements. The word can powerfully engage YouTube, facebook, I know what you did last summer X . When we are grounding in it the Places we will go are limitless. I would like to see someone write a cultural movement book on the American Church.

One last note, we don't only short change engaging culture with tapping into fads. I know as a pastor I have and I see others use stories from their lives in this way. Stories about our experience or families can be life changing and powerful, or they can simply make us look cool as the one's won told them. I guess what I am saying is there are idols all over the place, in the church and out the church and we all fall prey to them.