Foresight

General Conference, I have it on good authority, will not happen in May. It was scheduled for May 5-15 in Minneapolis, and I was to be there, blogging away. Nope. Canceling reservations even today.

I have my doubts about Annual Conference in June. I have it on that same good authority that bishops and cabinets are making plans to ordain folk only among family members and without the gathered many attending.

I hope to goodness the Doobies don't cancel. I was going to drive back from Junaluska on Friday of Conference week, anyway, to see them: their 50th anniversary tour, just elected to RRHoF. Please don't cancel, Doobs!

(Reba did cancel, but I wasn't going to see her anyway--though I think she might really like me if she ever met me. Of course, I think the same thing about Alison Krauss. I am very like Honey Thacker, in Notting Hill, who has long known that she and Anna Scott would be the best of friends, if only they might meet. Almost identically, like Honey, I can hear Reba, or Alison, when I explain all of this to them saying, "Lucky me.")

ENOUGH with the sidebars.

I am just thinking: for a long time I have heard what might be called ecclesiologial "futurists" talk about the eventual demise of the large, gathered congregation in favor of small groups, dinner churches--the kind of  house churches that were the locus of early Christianity, and the vehicle for many reform movements, not least the churches inspired by John Wesley. I have wondered whether, if they are right and have real foresight, the demise might result from gradual decline, attrition and such (we have in fact seem many church closures in the last decades), or if there would be a tipping point, something that triggered the move in more or less momentary fashion.

I am wondering if this is it? Or this starts it and another crisis finishes it?

Groups of 10? Sounds like a small group.

No more than 50? What's a megachurch to do?

But, if Christians gather around a table as God instructed the Hebrew slaves--a family, or if a family is too small, join with another family--and we read the stories and pray and have a Love Feast (a lay Eucharist), and maybe once a quarter gather in slightly larger numbers for Eucharist or a Baptism, people might decide they really like the feel and spiritual intimacy, without the buildings, bills, maintenance and upkeep, without the financial drain of staff and salaries and such. I may soon be a member of an endangered species--maybe I already am and don't quite know it. It may well be that the gospel of Jesus Christ works better away from the spotlights and megawatt smiles, and at the dinner table, the living room, where people can speak the truth in love, support and hold one another accountable, and focus on faithfulness, not on the many distractions that come with "church" as we have known it.