I want to talk a bit about the subject of this morning’s cartoon. Some people think, because of the nature of my blog, some of the ideas I have and things I write about, that I am one who is totally into innovation. People assume I harbor radical ideas about where we should hold our services, whether or not we should even have them, and if we do, how we should conduct these services. I don’t. The truth is I don’t care how we do these things.

The obsessive concern over songs (how the are sung, how many, instrumentation, music or not, old or new, etc.); messages (length, style, powerpoint, dialogue, conversational, etc.); order (low or high, relaxed or structured, predictable or not, traditional or modern, emergent or submergent, etc.); buildings (owned or rented, house or building, coffee shop or pub, or no meeting at all, etc.)… I could go on… these things I consider stage props. The real action is what is going on between us as a community. The play is the deal, not the staging. To me, rearranging the style is like rearranging the furniture. It’s fine to do but it isn’t going to save the world.

Of course, I think that it is totally appropriate for a community to be self-governing and self-determining. It is healthy for a community to have grassroots, indigenous expressions of its identity, even if it is along with the traditional, universal expressions. Every community has the right to express it’s own style. And every person has the right to decide what he or she prefers. All the recent hype about style is just sizzle. For me, the steak is the relationship between us and the Absolute, and our relationships that spawn from that. Once we have that focus, style is secondary.

Check out my tees HERE and my art HERE.