Only Grief Permits Newness.

We continue to look at "Signs of Emergence"...

...the first stage of the waiting process is grief.

There is a spectacular lack of grief in our churches today. The texts of so many Christian magazines, sermons and songs are all woven into an enormous blanket of denial that we wrap warmly around us, smothering the honest doubts with an ever-optimistic hue of "everything is good and God is with us." Hands are raised , but never to ask questions, only in surrender to programs of services, outreaches, prayer meetings, and worship. Eyes are shut, less blinded by glory as blind to the facts that numbers are falling, churches are closing, the "revival" didn't come, society is losing interest, and our circle of influence is decreasing.

This is a moment of repentance. We have allowed our culture and the Church to drift apart. We ought to find truth each Sunday: instead we go for doses of fiction, enough to cloud our perception for the week ahead that everything is OK.

We must do it, we must stop all the programs, stop the meetings, stop the denials, dismantle the structures, face our fears and disappointments, and weep for the absence, weep for the emptiness, weep for the pretense, weep for the fiction. Weep until we can see our barrenness clearly, for only then will we have made room for newness.