Summary of Session 1

Thank you all for the good discussion last night. We've got a good group of people, and I look forward to the next two weeks and to Diana Butler Bass' visit in May.

As we review Christianity for the Rest of Us over the coming weeks, I think there are three key things to keep in mind:

1. Expand our notions of liberal and conservative. I encourage everyone to go beyond politics with these terms. For example, it's possible to have a person who is quite liberal regarding his or her interpretation of the scripture and ideology, but this same person might be conservative in terms of the worship service. By conservative I'm thinking of someone who values the formal elements of worship that have been part of the service for decades.
   
2. How vital is change for a congregation? What might be barriers to change/
3. Finally, consider that people expect to have choices now. As a society we seem to have more options than ever before, and churches are a part of this marketplace. Gone are the days when most people would be content with the denomination that they inherited from their parents and grandparents.
   

These liberal, conservative, change and choice issues led us into a discussion of the diversity of beliefs and backgrounds that come with church members now. It seems to me that it would have been far easier to have been a minister 50 years ago when most of the people in the church simply inherited their faith.

Nomads, exiles, immigrants, converts, returnees, and villagers... we discussed where we as a group fit in. Most of our group considers themselves to be villagers, but the congregation of Second Presbyterian probably has many exiles and converts as well. We also discussed how some people might move through more than one of these categories over a period of years. For example, my disenchantment with the fundamentalist Baptist denomination and my turn to the Presbyterian church makes me an exile, but I've been attending Presbyterian churches exclusively for 12 or 13 years, so have I become a villager now? During college, as I gradually left the fundamentalist movement and started attending a church in the American Baptist denomination off and on, I probably would have been classified as a spiritual nomad, someone without a firm church home.

We wrapped up our discussion by emphasizing that Christianity for the Rest of Us is not so much about how to "grow" a church in terms of membership, but rather to make a church more vital in peoples lives, and the trinity of vitality that is discussed in chapter 3 is key to understanding this.

Next week we tackle the "signposts of renewal." Some of the "signposts" that we want to pay particular attention to are hospitality (chapter 5), discernment (chapter 6), and beauty (chapter 14).