|
A PLACE APART |
|
a teaching community where all types of people can come for a time to break from the world and rediscover the new way of living introduced by Jesus Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit. |
|
A Place Apart is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization based in Putney, Vermont. © 2008 A Place Apart, Inc. |
|
An open letter to the Church of the Brethren from A Place Apart PREFACE AND CALL As we observe our 300th year, we look back and rightly celebrate what has been. Throughout those 300 years a great deal of change has occurred in the world, affecting the character and to a larger extent than we often care to recognize, the nature of the church. With this anniversary we are uniquely confronted by the pivotal time in which we find ourselves as a church, the structure of which has been is rapidly falling away. We cannot see what is coming but in a relatively short period of time tremendous changes will take place. Throughout the more immediate future years the decline within the Church of the Brethren will appear to be very rapid. Denominational and District structures and staffs will be decimated. The centers that Brethren have looked to related to our identity will be gone. The local church with building, pastoral program, and religious education is passing away. This loss is not anyone's fault. The loss is not about failure. It is not due to a failure of the Church or District or Denominational hierarchy or structure. It is not the fault of church boards or district boards or general boards, nor the fault of pastors, district or denominational leaders. The Church as it now is can no longer continue for the sake of the Church. Rather, the Church must now come forth for the sake of a world which is crying to be spiritually reconstructed. THE CONDITION This crying has its basis in the recognition that something crucial is missing from life, that something fundamental to joy, to meaning, to hope has been lost is now beginning to be shared across generational, religious, political and socio-economic lines. A universal hunger, a longing for something more is emerging. At the same time a universal exhaustion has also emerged. A numbing tiredness combines now with an often subtle but nearly constant fear that makes moving ahead, experimenting with new forms of possibility seem too exhausting to consider. Most of us, even as we are hungering for something more aren't quite ready to release our hold on what is. Things aren't quite bad enough yet, not quite desperate enough. Maybe things will just get better on their own. "Maybe I won't have to change". Increasingly mired in debt, racing through life trying just to keep up with things, living as we've always lived, consuming as we've always consumed, burning up natural resources and our own lives as if there is no end, clinging to gods we no longer believe in, we remain stuck in lives we no longer believe in. |
