I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new Hirsch book, The Forgotten Ways.
There are tastes at his new blog here and today speaks of churches seeking equilibrium and so kicking Jesus out.

We want equilibrium:

But Jesus disturbs our equilbrium. He won’t be controlled. He won’t be handled only by priests and professional religionists. He won’t be domesticated. He is Lord! Yes, Jesus is our disequalibrium. And the way back to an authentic Christianity is simply to put Jesus back into the equation. Christianity plus Jesus equals World Transformation. (Hirsch)

I think this kind of sums up how I feel about church and stuff at the moment. Church seems to have forgotten Jesus. The emphasis seems to be on service delivery, rotas, finance, where people are, what we believe, who has upset who, building programmes and so on.

Now I KNOW this is me generalising and I will get it in the neck for doing so, but I am sking ‘where has our focus on Jesus gone?’ Hirsch suggests we need to reboot back to Jesus.

Rebooting is an idea I like, it suggests turning everything off, holding down ‘ctrl alt del’ and starting afresh. It’s something I do now again when the laptop stops working properly, or slows to an unbelievable snail pace due to too many programs open and leaving their residue bits in the temp files folder.

Remnants of past programs, bits of old software. Remains of ideas and visions. Used plans, unused thoughts. Could all these be clogging the church and forcing Jesus to stand outside the door and knock, and wait to come into his church?

Maybe we need a reboot. A pause. A moment to realign ourselves back to Jesus, to remind ourelves of the founders characteristics, before we step out again.