djByron [Dan Byron]husband, father, christian, musician & technophile ( but not a dj )

My thoughts based on the opening pages of Pop Goes the Church by Tim Stevens.

In my Christan walk I’ve been a part of many different churches. I grew up in church, attended a Christian college, attended a few more churches (in a few different states) and ended up back here in New York where I started. Of all the churches I’ve attended, the believers I currently associate with are by far the most “connected”. We’re not what you would consider a huge church (thought we’re not small either), we’re in a small town on the other side of a mountain it’s an awesome place to be. I love it because I know that we’re heading in the right direction. Moving away from “religion” and moving into societal relevance. We’ve managed to establish a good reputation within our community and are becoming more and more relevant. We started on this journey in 2001 when God brought us through a series of new “revelations” within the Word and it’s been an exciting time or us. Though we’ve never been overly “religious”, God has corrected our course numerous times over the past seven years to bring us more in like with His vision. Here are a couple of paragraphs within these first few pages that jumped out at me.



From the Foreword:

“We do not worship the church: we worship God. The local church is the vehicle Christ left us to communicate and share our love for God. When the traditions of the church become supreme, God will seem very irrelevant to people, both inside and outside the walls of the church. As I’ve often said, the tendency of any church is to always look inward and become navel gazers. And when we bend over into our holy huddle, guess what the rest of the world sees. You got it! If we do not look outward intentionally and strategically to engage and become change agents in our culture, we will become self-obsessed and wrapped up in meaningless tradition. That is neither attractive nor helpful for a world looking or real answers to the real problems it faces in this new millennium.” - Ed Young (Foreword, Pop Goes the Church)

From the Introduction:

“I love the way John 1:14 is written in The Message. It says Christ “became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” He came to us - met us where we were. In Jesus’ case, the neighborhood was a rural, agricultural society in first century Palestine. He immersed himself in that culture. He wore the clothes, used the language, and illustrated his stories with the signs and symbols of the day to communicate the Gospel of an upside down king om here on earth.



He didn’t wear God-clothes, speak God-words, and expect the culture to connect. he didn’t spend years learning big words so he could impress but not communicate. he didn’t look for music that was unfamiliar to the culture and expect people to learn to like it.



Jesus spent his time with real people such as Peter, James and John, the blue-collar workers; Martha, the over-extended homemaker; Matthew, the IRS agent; and Simon, the political activist. He watched the popular culture of his day and wove it into his teaching. Jesus identified the needs of the people around him and started there as he taught” - Tim Stevens (Introduction, Pop Goes The Church)

And one very interesting question was posed:

“Would your community be any different if your church disappeared tomorrow? Have you ever asked yourself this question? If your church suddenly disappeared, could the community even recover? Or would they go on as though nothing at all had changed?” - Tim Stevens (Introduction, Pop Goes The Church)

My answer to this question? I know that there are people that would definitely take notice if we closed our doors but there’s still work to be done!

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