I’ve been thinking about our church.  The Well.

Now, I like our church very much, but lately, things have been a bit, I don’t know, slow maybe.  I know every church goes through seasons and cycles but when things aren’t right, it’s my job to think about them, pray about them and maybe, just maybe, come up with the answer we need.  Well, in my current thinking about the church I may have discovered a problem.

When we started The Well, we were resplendent with buzz-words and labels, mostly from others but also from ourselves.  Words like emergent or emerging, post-modern, alternative, relevant et cetera, rolled off of our tongues and pens.  We had many great ideas and they are still great ideas but here’s a fact.  At The Well we are simple people, there’s not a lot of posturing or dissimilation that goes on; and we’re really, really laid back.  In fact, I think if we could have church lying around we would, but the floors are hardwood at the Carpenter’s Hall where we meet.  We start at some semblance of a certain time because we have to publish a start time so visitor’s aren’t completely lost.  I think maybe we are trying to0 hard to be our ideas and not trying to just, well, be.

You see, I realized pretty early on that starting a new effective church was going to require more than just a change in methodology, it required a change in theology.  Now I am Southern Baptist in background and, for the most part, have had very few problems with that belief system except for this observation.  For the past few decades,  Southern Baptists have wandered away from their actual theology and let tradition and fear drive them into becoming a Religion, or an Institution, run by a Bureaucracy. (Can you hear the capital letters?)   It’s this return to a real theology, undiluted by Religious Law, that we need.

Now as I said, we’re a pretty simple group, down to earth, open, straightforward.  We require, as does God, a simple theology so that we can just be.  We require a simple church where we can just serve the Risen Christ.  The whole of our formula for expanding our church and it’s influence comes down to these few things.

Jesus. People. Church. Simple.

There is no orthodoxy, there is no liturgy, there is no emerging, there is no post-modern, there is only

Christ and Him crucified.

Love God. Love People.

God loves you and so do I.