Road toll
Rest homes for old people and car parks for churches are similarly abominable.
UPDATE: I don’t say cars are similarly abominable. I say of all places/times, surely a church service should be a small picture of ‘how things ought to be’, God’s will done on earth according to the pattern of heaven. Presumably the gathering of God’s people on Sundays is the symbolic high point of the week – we have a chance to slow down, plan it ahead of time, think about how this time will direct coordinate focus the rest of our lives.
Thank you all very much for your contributions to this post and all the others too, I appreciate you all, and I’m not just having a laugh.
54 responses to “Road toll”
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John, also: both the baptism and tongues issues (and even the ‘agreement’ issue) are tiny, in comparison to the overall character and life of the church. Part of the problem is that we have forgotten that a church is a new body, an example of new humanity at work in all of life. The language used to describe it by the apostles makes the church a new type of city-state: a complete challenge to the way of life in Greek/Roman cities.
But we have made ‘church’ mean the corporate gathering on Sunday for a ritual service. Listen for how people use the word, and you’ll see I’m right. But that usage is very impoverished, and ripe for all sorts of contentions – because all significance and meaning is poured into the single event it refers to.
If we recovered the full sense of what a ‘church’ should be, we would immediately see that issues of liturgical procedure (baptism, tongues) are very, very unimportant compared to actually being those who love one another.
Kate, thank you for your commitment and desire to serve God, I hope that your contempories and fellow confessing members of the Reformed Church of Wellington will welcome you, support you and fellowship with you as befitting those who love you in Christ. Whatever recovering the true church really means, it must include that level of practical nurture and care.
Matt, perhaps you should have allowed your deep respect for what David’s family did in looking after their Pop temper your somewhat superficial condemnation of aged care facilities before launching. “Rest homes are abominable” is just so unhelpful. How does this statement contribute to those struggling with loved ones with advanced dementia? As for the young folk with no experience of the harsh realities of senescence and decay, your condemnatory slogan just makes it all seem so easy; “Rest home bad, loving home good”, while true, is another false dichotomy.
Hans – I didn’t say they were abominable, I said they were *as* abominable as churches with carparks. To me this is obvious hyperbole. And I made that comment *after* David’s family’s actions were brought to my attention. I didn’t attempt to capture the entirety of carefully nuanced truth about care for the aged in one thirteen-word sentence. Recent visits to a rest home on my part shocked me out of complacency on this particular issue.
Cheers, good that you were shocked out of complacency, still do not see a comment on the abominableness of rest homes as being a useful result of that shock. If merely hyperbolic, what was the point? Exaggeration can be useful if points are to be made, exaggeration can obscure any point by polarising and annoying. That was the point I was trying to convey.
Vrede