I have, for the last litte while, been wrestling with a frustrating thought concerning the Church.  The thought has arisen around a number of requests over the last few years for me to "make friends" for the people in our community.  It stems around the idea that if the church does not program relationships for people then they seem to not know how to form relationships for themselves.

I see this in acouple of different ways.  The first way is that we, the Church, has done such a good job of removing people from the world that they do not remember how to make friends for themselves, whether in the Church or in the world.  While in my past I have felt that I did not know how to make friends in the world, I never felt as if I could not make friends in the community of faith that I was a part of.

The second way that this issue manifests itself is in people who have no problem making friends in the world, but once they walk in the doors of a church they lose that ability and seem to develop paralisis of the friend making portion of their being.  While I can understand the first scenario, this one makes me scratch my head.  

Yesterday I was at a seminar on changing consumers into missionaries.  I was struck through this time that we, as the Church, have created such a sense of comsumerism amongst our communities that we have rendered them unable, or at least unwilling, to even make connections with others of the same faith without receiving friendship as a cosumer good that is downloaded program.

This frustration has manifest itself in me struggling to know how to, or wanting to connect people in community groups.  I don't mind promoting healthier and more missional/incarnational community, it is the need to have programs to create community that I am struggling with.

While expressing this frustration to a friend, his response was, "We do not need to create friendship and connection for people, we are connected by our love for and identity in Christ."  Well in a perfect world we could live by this thought for now we struggle in the tension.  

It was a great pleasure to spend an evening eating food at a resteraunt in Kansas City and hear a number of the great minds and voices of the Missional/Incarnational conversation share their thoughts  I was invited by virtue of who I know, not what I know.  These voices included Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch, Mike Breen, Hugh Halter, Kim Hammond and Canada's own Cam Roxburgh.  It was a thrill to hear the discussion and to try and evaluarte  the validity of each thought through the lens of our Leduc context.  This was easier to do with some than with others.  

I was doing some follow up reading of some of these great thinkers and was intrigued by the following thought from Alan Hirsch:

The language in our best theology is that a church exists as a “sign, symbol, and foretaste, of the Kingdom of God."  It’s a scratch-and-smell experience for the people around. When people rub up against the church, a Kingdom aroma should waft from it; they should catch a glimpse of life as God intended it to be lived in the first place. And just so we don’t forget, the reach of the Kingdom of God is not just local; it is regional, universal, in fact it is cosmic in scope. It’s a big purpose and thinking about it in this way changes the game.

I love the picture of the scratch and smell experience for the people around us.  I would love to know what the general thought is for people who have rubbed up against some of our LFC community.  I guess that would be determined by who they rub up against.  I am very excited by the growth that I see in many of our community, and yet I have to scratch my head sometimes when I run up against some who hold a deeply engrained "old-Church" model of how they think people in our community need to be addressed and dealt with.  

I pray that those who are starting to taste the beauty of God's plan for incarnational life will rub off on the rest.  I know that this is something that I, personally, think I am just starting to scratch the surface of.  But the aroma is attractive and adictive.