Sacramental Living

This is the fifthPart of an ongoing post. Part 4 is here. Part 3 is here.  Part 2 is here. Part 1 is here.

In Part 4 of this post I considered the US American Church and its exilic condition.  Today, I’ll look at the second and third arenas of exile I’m considering: the Wesleyan-Holiness movement and the local church.

The Wesleyan-Holiness movement as a segment of the US American church also finds itself in exile today. The paradox of extremes–life by law and life by grace–continue to grow further from each other. Consequently, there exists a confused and muddled array of choices for responding to exile. From isolating the Christian community, to rubber-stamping every individual’s idea of spirituality as personal truth, the responses work against the acceptance of exile and only serve a further detriment to the faith community.

The local church is not exempt from exile. For a church (building and people) to be wanted in its particular neighborhood today is an exception and not the norm. Church members have dispersed to the suburbs and neighboring communities. They only find themselves assembled a couple of times a week, while the rest of their time is spent assimilating into the empire. In my tribe, there is no cogent form of worship, community, spiritual experience, ministry, or discipleship nationally. One can travel the country visiting one Nazarene church in each of the forty-eight continental states and find forty-eight widely varied church experiences that appear to have no common thread. So we see that the local church can even be in exile from its own doctrinal movement.

SO TELL ME SOMETHING:
How do you experience exile in your local faith community?

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Brian Niece
www.brianniece.com
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Related Posts:

• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Part 4
• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Conclusion
• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile 1
• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Part 2
• A Lenten Exercise: Analyzing Exile – Part 3