Tom Sine bringing back old memories

It's been a while since I first stumbled across Tom Sine in the bargain bin of the local Xn bookshop.

Whilst doing some tidying up recently I cam across this quote which I used to read out to churches whilst working 3 days a week as a youth ministry coordinator for 6 churches and 2 schools. With some of the churches being up to 30 minutes away from each other it was as difficult a job as it sounds. None the less it was a great learning experience and it gave me a respect for a mainline denomination that I had not had before.

As I suspect is the same with many churches, part of the problem for a lot of the churches I worked with was a desire for youth ministry to happen but not a great desire from people in the church to do it. I routinely visited the churches of a Sunday morning and would be asked to speak. On one round I thre this great quote from Tom Sine's Mustard Seed vs McWorld book in to the talk.

What we have done, I am convinced, is to succumb inadvertently to a dualistic model of discipleship. In spite of all the talk about Christ’s 'Lordship', everyone knows that the expectations of modern culture come first. Everyone knows getting ahead in the job comes first. Getting ahead in the suburbs comes first. Getting the children off to their activities comes first. And we tend to make decisions in these areas pretty much like everyone else does - based on our income, our professions and our social status.

Essentially most western Christians unquestioningly allow modern culture to arrange most of the furniture of our lives - forty to eighty hour work weeks, single family detached housing, congested timetables for our lives and children. Over the last fifteen years I've seen Christians becoming busier and busier which means that they have less time left over for prayer, church, ministry or even family.

We're racing into a future in which McWorld wants an even larger chunk of our time and money, which means even less left over for the things of faith.

On the other side of this dualism, following Christ is too often trivialised to little more than a devotional lubricant to keep us from stripping our gears as we charge up the mountain trying to get ahead in our careers, the suburbs, and our children's activities. Following Christ is for too many of us reduced to a little more than fifteen minutes in the morning and two hours on Sunday and we wind up with a highly privatised and spiritualised piety that is often largely disconnected from the rest of our lives.

We permit modern culture as part of the deal to define our notions of the good life and better future. As a consequence our lives are too often driven by the same manic aspirations that propel McWorld. No wonder we are exhausted. Modernity calls the tune and we dance.

It was a lot of fun reading this quote. There was a kind of safety in reading something someone else had said rather than saying something myself. I could see a few parishioners squirming with discomfort and priests smiling with joy. The memory of that alone compelled me to share it again.