A specific version of the Christian message brings people to church in economic downturn

An article I read (found here) speaks of Evangelical churches growing in attendance numbers in Sunday worship during times of economic downturns while mainline churches attendance continues to fall (albeit a bit slower than in "normal" times).

The study was done by a professor at Texas University and tracks some of the historical trends of economic downturns and church attendance.

Of the many questions I have one that I continue to come back to is:

Is there anything the mainline church can do to stop the dramatic decline of members?

If Starbucks maketed like the Church...

I will confess I got this from my friend Kyle (the post-modern pilgrim blog in my list). But I wanted to add it to my personal reflection.

What does the fellas apron mean? I identified this as a caricature on many of the stereotypes of what I see in the non-denoms. What do you think about this in relation to the UMC in the CTC? In what ways are we like this? How are we different? Could we make a video 'parable' about the CTCUMC? Any thoughts on this idea for something like annual conference?

Parable of attending morning prayer

This story was told in the book Singing the Lord's Song in a New Land. The book uses this story as a way of talking about the importance of going to morning prayer as a Korean American Christian. I think it is good to think about for when we wake up on Sunday mornings...

A man decides that he will get up early in the morning to go up the mountain to pray. The first morning, he gets up and goes up to the top of the mountain and prays. On his way back down to his house, he says to himself, "Why should God only be on the top of the mountain? God must be in the middle of the mountain." So the next morning he gets up and goes halfway up the mountain and prays. On his way back down to his house, he says to himself, "Why should God only be in the middle of the mountain, God must also be at the foot of the mountain." The next morning, he gets up and goes to the foot of the mountain and prays. On his way back down to his house, he says to himself, "Why should God only be at the foot of the mountain? God must also be in my bed." The next morning he wakes up to pray in his bed, but cannot keep his eyes open. So he falls asleep.

9 Needed Fundamental Shifts of Christian Living

Presented by Gary at the Young Adult Summit

We need to shift from:

1. Being Church focused to Kingdom focused
2. Maintenance leadership to Missional leadership
3. Fear of failure to embrace failure (fail often to succeed sooner)
4. Codependency (people have needs, we need people to keep the institution alive) to worship (aka: giving) and service
5. Talking at people to Talking with people
6. Counting money and people to counting relationships and missions
7. Dualistic worldview (there is sacred time and there is secular time) to sacred worldview (all time is sacred)
8. Judge and savior to Cultivator
9. Attractional (church growth model) to Missional (ministry with people)