I ran across an excellent article by Tom Sine, entitled “Church Re-Imagined,” in a Christian magazine* this past week. Sine is co-author of a book, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, where he and Shane Claiborne discuss the future of the Christian church in light of what they describe as “the greying and declining of many of our congregations.” Sine asks the following penetrating (perhaps even perplexing) questions in the magazine article:

“Does the future have a church?”

“What will a post-Christendom, post-institutional, post-Western, post-congregational future for the Church look like?”

“Is it possible we have got what it means to be church wrong?”

“Is it possible that many of us unwittingly accept this popular cultural notion of church as a place we go for two hours each week to have our needs met?”

Basically, our brother and fellow pilgrim points us to the New Testament, using the radical language of family to describe what we have become when we take that first step of faith in Jesus Christ. What matters is not our genetic code, but our shared spiritual DNA that recreates all of us into family members—rich, poor, young, old, multi-colored, slave, free, male, and female. He describes our new family like Continue reading →