I do hereby solemnly and earnestly vow to update the blog this summer

So I'm going to be interning at a church this summer--a church that is vastly different from the church I'm used to, in a lot of ways. And that's a good thing, if not a great thing. Not that I don't love the church from which I come, but we cannot grow or move forward without change, and I'm hoping that this experience gives me an even greater idea of what the church can and should be.

With that being said, orientation and such over the last week has gotten me thinking a lot about what direction the church is taking, and what direction would be true to the mission of the church. Some of those thoughts...the church has gradually been taken in by the same corporate attitude that pervades much of our society. It seems to me that church (and by proxy, the gospel) has become something to be packaged, marketed, and sold. We're so concerned with how church is presented and how that will appear to those who we are hoping to attract that we tend to lose sight of what it is we really are. We only leave our walls to serve because we think we owe it to the community to justify our existence, not because it is what we're called to be. It's a subtle difference in attitude, but it's one that makes a great deal of difference in mission--we do it because we want to appear "good," not because it's part of who we are. We have a good thing. The gospel, and the Christian spirit, do not need to be repackaged to be relevant to the world today. They simply need to be lived--not just talked about (this kind of "evangelism" inevitably comes across as hypocritical and condescending, at least in my view), not just used, but truly lived. And to be lived, for the church, it means getting out of our four walls, dismissing the old idea that we are some kind of bastion of goodness in a fallen world and realizing that we are a part of the world, just looking to change it. It means recognizing that the world we live in is God's creation, that we should not profane that which God has called good (to borrow words from Peter's vision), and that our work is to find the goodness in creation, to find God in creation and bring that goodness to fruition. The potential is there for all of us, and all of creation to be Quality, and our job as the church is to help bring that potential out and reconcile the intention with the actuality.

Call this my first draft--I hope to refine, rethink, and rewrite (literally and figuratively) this as I move through the summer and beyond.