If you were omnicompetent, understood everything and held the expanse of time like a lump of clay in your hand – how would you handle creating everything?
Or scale it down to something as simple as a trip to your ancestral home. Would an unexpected pregnancy, room booking failure, and the univited arrival of a crowd of sheepherders look like a failure or something planned?
John Drane uses the phrase “McDonaldization” to question our expectations of being Church. To what extent have the modern cultural values of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control influenced our expectations of what Church should look like?
To put it another way, to what extent have our expectations in turning up to a service affected our experience of the quality of the moment. Do we expect to turn up regularly to a well ordered quality experience of familiar words and actions in a gathering that doesn’t make the building look messy or too empty. If these expectations are not met how does that affect our experience of sensing a special quality of gathering as Church?
Do we think of the messy, unpolished, entry of Jesus into the world where he only escapes death at the hands of Herod due to angelic intervention and a relaxed policy on refugees by Egypt as a near disaster – or something planned by God in the same breath as Eden? (Please read Romans chapter 18 ) How has the tendency towards McDonalization in culture influenced the ways in which we do Church.
This post doesn’t offer answers, but hopefully it will encourage questions.
What quality can events like washing dishes with a friend, a session with guitar on a beach, a discussion in a cafe, a mega church display in las Vegas or a trad. service in a victorian building all share, and how do we learn to sense it?
