By Sven jungholm (fsaof.blogspot.com)
"We do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world”.
G.K. Chesterton.
Yoga replaces the mid-day confession and prayer Service
'A few years ago I passed Oscar's Church, (in Stockholm) one of the city's most beautiful houses of worship. It was noon, and bells rang. I assumed that they were inviting me to worship at the lunch hour and I was guided up the steps and through the heavy church doors. In the front pews were women of different ages with hands stretched upward. Hands raised in praise, maybe, although I heard no music.
A janitor, a man in his 30s, came towards me and greeted me welcome. He wanted to have 30 crowns ($4.00) for a program sheet. I was surprised. When I asked why he replied; "it costs money to have a Chi Gong instructor.”
I have a very special and personal connection with Oscar's Church, and it was an experience of and participation in a Christian communion I longed for that moment. I thought that the church bells had called me to it.
The janitor seemed to sense my disappointment and leaned over and in a whisper said, "they have stopped talking about Jesus here, now we have Chi Gong. Chi Gong in the church, nail carpet at home and warm moist yoga is the latest trend on the spiritual scale. Modern seekers, who not only want to have a trained body, begins to look more and more spiritual and internal harmony outside the churches.' Siewert Öholm
(In its simplest form, the Chinese character for qi, in qigong, means "life force". Gong means work, so qigong is therefore the practice of "working" with one's "life force". )
The culling and poaching of Christians through secularization, pluralization and privatization is a common battle facing all Swedish churches.
Sweden had long enjoyed a status the rest of the globe envied; the highest standard of living in the modern world, and the rest of Scandinavia too shared closely in this enviable status. But to earn the world’s greatest economic standard was costly! The impact of globalization on local cultures converged to impact significantly on a shared culture and historical construct. The individualistic cultures put great emphasis on freedom, including the formation of human values; personal autonomy, freedom of choice, orientation toward individual goals, competition, and success.
The church had traditionally translated and defined specific cultural values, those shared by society as a whole. However, the relationship between modernization and economic development moved Scandinavian societies in a common direction, having profound impact on values, regardless of their cultural heritage. The wide spread impact of accelerated globalization combined with a perceived and oft quoted well being, in all things, (cradle to grave security) inevitably challenged the genesis of traditional cultural values which emphasized a religious duty built on and maintained in the family’s faith.
The Report of the Consultation on World Evangelization, Mini-Consultation on Reaching Secularists held in Pattaya, Thailand, 1980 defined the loss of traditional religious values as Secularization, Pluralization and Privatization.
Secularization is the process "by which religious ideas and institutions are losing their social significance, the ideas becoming less meaningful and the institutions more marginal." Western society has been subjected to a process of de-Christianization.
This process of secularization is accompanied by that of pluralization, by which modern societies are confronted with a selection of competing world views or pre-suppositional frameworks. The pluralistic setting is not a new phenomenon, for the early church grew and flourished in such a setting. It was, however, not a part of the status quo; whereas, in terms of western culture, Christianity has played a major part in defining the nature and practice of the status quo.
The threat now to Christianity from a pluralistic setting is the challenge to the sense of the givenness of Christianity and the emphasis on personal choice. The scale and context of the demand to choose and take responsibility for one's choice is frightening when the scope of such choice is realized as a result of mass communication, travel, geographic, economic, and social mobility, education and the development of knowledge. In a pluralistic setting everything is open to question, especially those areas of life which traditionally have been accepted in an uncritical way—e.g., the family, marriage, life-style and faith.
At a SA congress we’d attended in July, 1990, in London, England, a small delicatessen near the main congress venue had erected a crudely lettered sign which warned all patrons; WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE DISTURBANCE, THE SALVATION ARMY IS IN TOWN!
Can we still be accused of disturbing societal values, people’s conscience, faith, and life-style today and be convincing? Is our presence even noticed, our voice heard?
The church, like the world, was being secularized. The spread of secularization in Christianized western Europe must be viewed as a judgment not on the validity of the gospel but upon the inadequate and ineffective witness of the Christian church,
The Rev. John Stott said in a conference I attended; “The greatest indictment that can be levied against a Christian is to say that we are no different than the world”. By definition, if the indictment extends to a fellowship of believers it speaks directly to the ineffective witness of the Christian church; we don’t differ sufficiently enough. It’s time to judge and evaluate our practices, our witness against an ever-evolving culture? Let's become a disturbance to the status quo; let people know that THE SALVATION ARMY IS IN TOWN!
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