Detox

So it’s just turned noon and I’m back home from our last Sunday service of 2008. We call it “Simple Church” and on the last Sunday of the year for the past four years we’ve closed down our stage, sound, lights, food booth, resource booth, welcome teams, ushers, trolley driver, musicians, vocalists, camera guy and children’s ministry – rested our tremendously valued volunteers (we need 76 to make Sundays happen – we rest all 76 of them) and we sit in a circle around the communion table. For 60 minutes we quietly pray, hear the Word read and eat communion.

Simple Church ….pulling everything back, take it to the bare bones, a bit like detoxing!

Which is what I am about to do – literally. Thanks to a wonderful procedure I’m due to enjoy on Monday – today I've to swallow a special potion and boom ….my overeating Christmas binge body will be detoxed!!
[You know they had to take the stuff I’ve to swallow off of the shelf because people would literally try using it every month to detox themselves. Hey guys – this privileged potion is the exclusive right of us colonoscopy victims!]

But talking about detoxing.
I’m sitting in Simple Church and I’m thinking – in 2009 could we try a detoxing of the church. Not just strip bare a service from time to time – what would a total detoxing of everything we are about look like.

There’s some stuff out there written on this already. Simple Church @ Rainer; The Big Idea @ Ferguson; or even the old classic The Purpose Driven Church @ Warren.
Strip the church down to the bare essentials and focus on them.

Yet most of the above books aren’t performing detoxing – they’re more doing the slimming thing. Slimming cuts back consumption – number of ministries, number of things you teach.
Detoxing is more radical, deeper.
Detoxing asks questions of the why, not just the what.

Book like Organic Church @ Dale; The Forgotten Ways @ Hirsch or Total Church @ Chester. What’s helpful about these books is the theological exploration they bring to the search. Worth reading.

But come back to the detoxing question.
At its root definition, detoxing is to “get clean of a severe addiction.”
Take this thought into 2009.
I’ve read all the books mentioned – helpful insightful – but I think still blind to some of the insipid addictions evangelicalism has in the West.
In 2009 can we rid ourselves of our ecclesiological addictions?
Here’s a few addictions we have going on:

Addiction to time.
Addiction to copying what someone else is doing.
Addiction to ‘money still talks’.
Addiction to civic/patriotic Christianity.
Addiction to bumper sticker theology.

Simple Church slimming does not remove these addictions.
These addictions are deep within our church cultures.
For decades churches have allowed these habits to permeate our ecclesiology.

To detox.
To get clean of severe addictions.

May our staff and leadership, your staff and leadership drink the potion of God’s Word and Spirit and detox in this coming year.