Pleasing people the wrong way

To give the whole store away to match what this year's market says the unchurched want, is to have the people who know least about the Christian faith determine most about its expression.

This writer fears that we are on the verge of seeing happen what happened in the 1950s to mainstream Protestant churches: they retooled for people who were casually attracted and liked big parking lots, spectacle, and low demands; and people left as easily as they came. You can see that I lean toward the search for the dynamisms in the longer-pull worship traditions and against the emerging market orientation. But I am never cocksure abut this and try to listen.

Martin E Marty, quoted in Dawn Reaching Out... p258

Dawn: Memory

Research studies show that the earliest memories are retained longest in people's minds. How important it is, then, to fill children's memories with hymns, songs, prayers, Scripture verses, and creeds!

I want to emphasise this point doubly because of my own experiences with chronic illness and life-threatening crises. Last year a retinal haemorrhage in my good eye made reading barely possible only for very short periods with a double set of magnifiers. During seven months of near blindness, I thanked God constantly for my 8 years at a Lutheran elementary/junior high school, during which I memorised hundreds of hymn verses and passages of the Bible. This background enables me to participate almost fully in worship even when I cannot see the words. In times when I have been near to death, those songs and texts have flooded my brain and brought enormous comfort and strength.

In crises, old age, blindness, or other infirmities, our faith and hope continue to be nurtured by what we have stored in our memories.

Dawn, p.120.