But there is some great stuff here to chew on.

Some of the more provoking quotes here for your pondering:

• The church is especially notorious for doing this. We have kid’s ministries and youth ministries and young adults and older adults — all separated from each other because of age, thereby negating any positive and necessary influence the different ages might have on each other.

   

• Whatever. I’m not looking for a program or ministry geared for me and my situation. I’m just looking for people to connect with and be church with. I’d like marrieds and singles and old and young in that group. I’m not looking for easy homogenization.

   

• Such people, like myself, sound impossible to reach or include in the system of church as we know it today, which is my point. They way we do church today isn’t necessarily being church. There needs to be something else for those of us who can’t stand the way services are arranged, the way emotions are herded into a set time frame (which today involved — what was impossible for me — going from the whole congregation doing “the wave” as instigated by the children’s pastor into, about ten minutes later, “surrendering to Jesus” with soft piano music and hushed tones), how discussion is nil and being preached at in silence is the accepted method of learning…

   

• The building isn’t huge or fancy. The church doesn’t have programs and any other accessories to attract sub groups, like teens or kids events or anything that smacks of entertainment; there’s no program there to attract me to stay, but instead, it is the real relationships that have done the trick. We greet people not as a job or because we’re the assigned greeter, but because we see they’re new and we want to get to know them.

   

• Because isn’t that what the church is, meeting together with other believers and being accountable and real with each other in our walk?