Prayer

I hate it when all you can do is pray. I don’t understand prayer very well, and around here it often feels like a waste of time. I know that’s wrong, or at least wrong to say, so you don’t have to write back to me about it. Better that you should pray for me, eh?
Bart Campolo
http://thewalnuthillsfellowship.org/?page_id=16

Next time you pray or you are in a room with people praying, do yourself a favour and listen to what is being said, especially about God and then ask yourself, what we are saying, praying, what does that reveal about what we believe about God. As an example, 'God I just ask that you would touch hearts and minds here tonight'. Now what does that say about God? Does he not automatically touch hearts and minds? Does he not act unless we ask him (he is not sovereign)? He needs our wisdom as what to do? That we desire for people to know Him more than He does that is why we need to ask?

As far as I know and experience, the only reason I know God and desire for others to know Him, is because He has taken the initiative in encountering me. If anything I need His help to make me more aware of where and when He is touching hearts and minds so I can cooperate with Him.

CS Lewis in the movie Shadowlands says to a colleague who is angry with him for quitting his lecture post in remorse for his lost wife to take time to pray, accusing CS Lewis that prayer will not change her death and bring her back to life, Lewis says, 'I pray not because it changes God, but because it changes me'.

How I long for a more God-centered Theology and less a man-centered humanism.

Verse

'i thought i had to change the world for you to notice me'
evanesence

Conclusion

Of those who cannot or will not isolate themselves, some will leave the church as it is and return later to the same church as they are. But I consider it highly likely that a large number of people who grow up in our modern churches - evangelical or liberal, Protestant or Catholic - will leave and never return - at least, not to our churches as they are.
McClaren, Stories of Emergence

David is asked by his brothers, 'why are you here? Have you come to watch us die?' Brothers who question the motive of a younger brother, left out of the ranks, anointed in front of them as the next choice! How many David's are being left on the side-lines because they don't look like they know what they doing, like they won't know what they doing? How many emerging leaders will remain just that, emerging!?

Even the King doubts his ability and questions whether he can succeed at the task. The church in the West is in a crisis. Decline has been the constant diet for two decades now but where are the David's? The Kings of denominations don't believe the David's of this generation can and have the ability to make a significant change.

The King finally agrees but gives David the blue print of how he will do it. We will employ a post-modern generation to make the changes we think should be made. Oh they can do the job, but with our resources and methods.

Tick-tock the time is running out.

Tinkering and window dressing aint gonna make the thing work. It is broken and it aint gonna get fixed. 'We need new forms of evangelism', but maybe its just that ethos that got ya in this mess in the first place! 'We need new forms of church that will appeal to a new generation', so that they too can just re-gergetate the same indigestion consumer orientated fast food dead religious crap?

Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless

Like the generation who heard their own pain in the larynx-ripping squall of his grunge sound, Kurt Cobain seemed to be someone who could empathize with them in their purposelessness, weakness, confusion, worthlessness and shame. That is exactly what Jesus came to do, to sympathize with us in our weakness. Exactly a year after his death, four fans from Toronto drove all the way to Seattle to hang themselves as a tribute to their hero. That Friday one year later just happened to be Good Friday.

(Steve Stockman, The Rock Cries Out)