Barneyisfat

Church should be fun.

Church should be a good time to reconnect with friends and to celebrate the resurrection in our lives. I've had the honor and privilege of seeing more than a dozen adults become members of United Methodist congregations in the last few weekends. I went home to see Kane First UMC add 11 new members, 8 by profession of faith. This last weekend my grandparents and I visited a UMC here in Pompano Beach, FL. Two young men were baptised as new believers.

It's an exciting experience to see people leave behind their former lives and follow Jesus. Church should be a weekly excersize in celebrating this. Our worship should celebrate the good news of Jesus Christ. It should connect with the people we wish to reach - with those who do not yet have a saving faith.

Un churched people have two primary points of connection with traditional worhsip. Weddings and funerals. Our traditional worship experiences should remind the unchurched of weddings they have attended in the past. Our church services should be a time of celebration. Music should rarely be categorized as a dirge. The unitiated should never feel overwhelmed because of our lack of explanation - our churches do weird things and we should explain why every week.

People should leave church with a sense of joy and peace. People should leave church having encountered the risen Christ. We as leaders in the church need to stop bemoaning the lack of excitement in worship and begin to reinstate it. Church should never be a contractual obligation - and we should mourn the fact that it became that in the 1940s and 50s not refer to that time as our "hayday."

It is infinetly better to have a small group of people genuinely worshipping than to have a large congregation dreading Sunday morning.