Renaissance Innovation

I don’t know what happened last time, but it was a good post, so good I can’t remember what I wrote and thus I can’t repeat it.

I have really been thinking about many things lately.  For those of you who don’t know I am a recovering sinner, but also a recovering church pastor.  I have been working for myself the last 2 years and my business is doing well.  What has struck me the last 2 years is how isolated I was from the world working for the church, even though the church I worked for was seen as a leading missional church in South Africa.

 We had world renowned speakers visit us anually which included Bill Hybels, Rob Bell, Leonard Sweet, Brian Mclaren and this year Erwin Mcmanus made a visit.  What surprised me was that all these leaders always made great comments about the church, about how cutting edge the church is and that it is a world leading congregation.  Man, if we were on the cutting edge, the church world wide is in deep du-du!!

What I have realised is how we just kept a bunch of consumers happy, for their ten percent!!!  Then because we threw one hell or heaven of a show we robbed all the smaller churches from their consumers, because we had the better product!  We were a smooth sailing business.  Our leaders got more money, moved into estates and bought sports cars.  Meanwhile some of our African pastors that we supported had to find extra jobs to stay alive, cause the white affluent church did not pay them enough to live.  If you think apartheid is something of the past, it’s very real in the church over here.

Just thinking about all this, I realise that we are in trouble.  If this is the leading church in South Africa, we are going down.  I pray that we as Christians in SA would become what God intended.  I pray that we become authentic and honest again.  May God save us from our capitalistic, business perspective of church.

Everyday I meet people in the corporate world seeking.  People with pain, people with need, people who need Jesus.  I would never have met them, if I stayed a pastor.

Take care,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.