Bitterness

Bitterness is like taking poison yourself and hoping it will kill the person who hurt you. --Joyce Meyer

Who hurt you?

Lewis Smedes has said, "The person who hurt us should not be
the person who decides whether or when we should recover from the
pain he brought us. A wounded person should not put her future
happiness in the hands of the person who made her miserable."

He also points out that forgiving is something good we do for
ourselves; we should not have to wait for permission from the person
who did something bad to us.

He makes these points in a chapter he wrote entitled, appropriately
enough, "Forgiving people who do not say they are sorry." His book is
entitled, "The Art of Forgiving".

More on Club-Church

I found some interesting stuff in doing research on these issues,
thought I'd share and see how you all respond? again?

:)

The Billy Graham School of Evangelism at Southern Baptist Seminary
did this stuff:

The goal of the following questions was to determine what percentage
of these groups of people are "born again":

builders (those born before 1946): 65%
boomers (born 1946-1964): 35%
busters (born 1965-1976): 15%
bridges (1976-1994, interviewed those at least 17 years old): 4%

They also found that a number of people are leaving the "club
church" for a different reason than in previous decades. They are
not leaving because they have lost faith, they re leaving to
PRESERVE their faith!

These people are being called, "Post-congregational" Christians.
What is the major issue? They don't want to "Powerless God of the
modern church" and they have found that "church activity and
services are a poor substitute for genuine spiritual vitality".

Many feel they have been sold a bill of Goods. They were promised
that if they would be a god church member, if they would discover
their gifts, or join a small group, learn to clap or dance in
worship, or attend this or that, they would experience a full and
meaningful life. Trouble is, there's no evidence to support the
assumption that al this church activity produced more mature
followers of messiah. It just produced many tired, burned-out
members who found their lives mimicking the lives and dilemmas of
people in the culture who don't pay all the church rent.

Many congregations and church leaders, faced with the collapse of
church North American church culture, have responded by adopting a
refuge mentality. They are waiting for the "storm to blow over" and
for things in the world to "get back to normal", or for the culture
to wake up and come to its senses, so the "church" can resume its
previous place in the culture. Essentially, this is the perspective
from which comes the frequent lament about the loss of cultural
support for "church" or "Christian" values, which creates an "us-
them" view of the outside world (the world outside the "club-church"
walls). The response has led many (if not close to most all) North
American churches to live inside the bubble in a Christian
subculture complete with its own entertainment industry. In this
worldview, evangelism is about churching the unchurched, not
connecting people to Messiah. It focuses on cleaning people up,
changing their behavior so Christians (translation: church people)
can be more comfortable around them. Refuge churches think they are
a potent force for God.

The reality is that people outside the church (or dare we say,
messianic congregation) think the church if for church people, not
for them.

Church leaders in North America confuse the downward statistics on
church participation with a loss of spiritual interest in the
culture, because these leaders can't think of Christianity outside
of institutional terms. The truth is, although intrigue with
institutional religion is down, interest in spirituality is up. A
2003 Gallup poll indicates that a vast majority of Americans say
religion has an impact on every area of their life.

The point is, according to the research, this country has the best
churches "man can build" with the best programs for people and
for "church growth" with more Sunday school classrooms than can ever
be filled. The sad fact is that while Evangelicalism has (and there
are positive aspects of that movement) been focusing on issues
making themselves the "moral monitors of society", and doctrinal
issues, and Biblical Hermeneutics and proper exegesis, "Church" has
become less spiritual than the culture around it.

The North American church culture is not spiritual enough to reach
our culture.

Modernists emphasize the ways in which humans were part of and
responsible to nature. They argue for multiple ways of looking at
the world. They challenged the idea that God plays an active role in
the world, which led them to challenge the Victorian assumption that
there was meaning and purpose behind world events. Instead,
Modernists argue that no thing or person was born for a specific
use; instead, they found or made their own meaning in the world.
Modernists view themselves as champions of freedom and self-
realization. Looking back on Victorian views of the world, those
that the Victorians had dismissed (and subjugated) as "savages" the
Modernists saw as being the truly civilized--responsible users of
their environments, unselfish and family-oriented, generous,
creative, mystical and full of wonder, and egalitarian.

The North American "church" is a product of the "modern world" with
its focus on facts and ordered reasoning based on observation (for
example, in church culture these show up in the focus on Biblical
observation...hermeneutics, exegesis).

Both Modernism and Post-Modernism are the culture of certain groups
of people within the culture. There are in fact Two cultures in
existence at this moment: Modern and Post-Modern. Post-Modern is the
culture of those born after 1962, although in the church-world, many
post-moderns have been indoctrinated with the Modernistic values
of "club-church" and its institutions.

There are various definitions of Post-Modernism:
A movement that evolved in the mid-1960s as a critical response to
the dominance, and perceived sterility of Modernism. Embracing art,
architecture and the applied arts, it reestablished interest in
ornament, symbolism and visual wit. Unconstrained by dogma. It is
cultural and intellectual, characterized by emphasis on the ideas of
the decenteredness of meaning, the value and autonomy of the local
and the particular, the infinite possibilities of the human
existence, and the coexistence, in a kind of collage or pastiche, of
different cultures, perspectives, time periods, and ways of
thinking. Postmodernism claims to address the sense of despair and
fragmentation (and sterile focus on facts, figures, methods and
programs) of modernism through its efforts at reconfiguring the
broken pieces of the modern world into a multiplicity of new social,
political, and cultural arrangements.