The Fifth Church

Aside from locking my car keys in the car at the gas station in downtown Minneapolis yesterday and "tapping" another fender in the parking lot today, I'm starting the year off by finally solidifying a piece on a new ecclesiology that I've been mulling over and over for ten years. I call it "The Fifth Church." I'm presenting the first of a number of white papers on this on Thursday, and will put snippets of it online here over the next few months. It starts with the premise that the heart is a church. Here an excerpt of chapter 1. See what you think:

The Heart as a Church

The First Church that must be fed in the post-modern world is the individual heart. Committees don’t have vision. People do. Committees don’t die. Committees were never alive. People die — physically, emotional, spiritually — when they are not fed. The heart of the church is the church of the heart.

The first job of the Fifth Church is to feed the peoples’ hearts. You can anesthetize most of the human brain and the heart keeps on pumping. Anesthetize the heart, however, and the brain quickly dies.

Whatever we do as the Fifth Church, we’ve got to become heart specialists. Our pulpits had better speakto the heart. Our classrooms had better nurture and strengthen the heart. Our entire system of delivering the Good News must shift from efforts of the head to efforts of the heart. The head is a modern emphasis. The heart is a pre-modern and postmodern thing. We don’t live in a modern world.

Nothing happens in any “church” until it happens fi rst in a single heart. The heart is the First Church. If the Fifth church cares to share a single byte in the iPhones of the future, it had better reengineer all of its efforts to become an intensive care unit for broken and bruised hearts. The church that doesn’t head to the heart might as well head to the realtor.

Comments

[Matt Musteric]

Just read the first chapter of Meletios Webber's book Bread & Water, Wine & Oil, and he explains the separation of the head and heart from an Orthodox Christian perspective: this fragmentation is in fact one of the central results of original/ancestral sin.

http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Water-Wine-Oil-Experience/dp/1888212918