ShelfLife

Two quotes stick in my mind as I finished up the book this week:

1. Dallas Willard’s quote from The Divine Conspiracy that says, “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.”

 

1. A quote from a lecture on leadership given by Andy Stanley where he said, “To reach people no one else is reaching, we must do things no one else is doing.”

 

I think these quotes sum up the message Moreland has been trying to communicate throughout all 10 chapters of this book.  Our church “system” in America is yielding a result and the result is marginal, at best.  As with many things in life, admitting there is a problem is often the first step towards transformation.  That is why I think these quotes are relevant.  If we want to yield a different result, then we are going to have to change the system and do things that no one else is doing.  To me, this reality is very challenging, to say the least.

 

When faced with challenges like this, my mental pendulum swings dramatically before finally settling somewhere in the middle.  At this moment, my pendulum is pretty far to the side of, “I’m not sure the American mega-church is the best environment to accomplish the goals Moreland presented in this book.”  It seems like the greater the number of people, the more divided the interests and the more moderate everything has to be.  I am thankful that Watermark does try, as was evidenced this past weekend with the guest William Lane Craig (and trying something like this blog!), however, for some reason I feel like we are too big to make any quick and far reaching changes.

 

On the flip side, the size of our church brings many great opportunities to try to raise the value of intellectualism.  More people usually means more resources and the ability to conduct little experiments like this blog, guest speakers and other one-time equipping classes.  With so many season-of-life specific ministries offered at Watermark, I find it refreshing that we can start something new and know up front that each new endeavor is not intended to reach everyone.  We have the freedom to try a lot of stuff and see what sticks.

 

So, what is next for ShelfLife and how can it help to foster some change?  To be honest, we are not sure.  Week #1 of this book started off with a bang from a dialogue perspective and was really fun.  Then, as you all can tell, the dialogue stopped.  We’re not sure why that happened, but our suspicion is that although the content of the book was excellent, it didn’t lend itself easily to good dialogue beyond the first two chapters.  Despite the fast start and slow finish, we believe there is a need in our church body to provide a forum for more mature believers to converse about topics that are not regularly discussed on Sunday morning, in our community groups or in most equipping classes.  Our hope is that ShelfLife can help to meet that need.

 

In the meantime, as the ShelfLife team talks through a few ideas for “what’s next”, we’d love to hear from those of you who followed along the past four weeks:

• Did you enjoy the book?
• Why do you believe the dialogue stopped after chapter 2?
• Do you believe electronic communication (i.e. a blog) is a good forum to discuss books like the one we just read?
• What would have made this test run better?
• Besides simply reading a book and talking about it on-line, what are some other things ShelfLife can do to help meet the needs discussed above?
• Would you participate again?
• What other general or specific suggestions do you have to help make this a better tool for the body?

 

If you’d rather not post your answers as a response, please feel free to email me directly at adtarnow@yahoo.com .

 

~Adam Tarnow