New Church

We went to a new Church today. We had been going to a
heavily ex-pat influenced church which is where the Garrisons go. Unfortunately we felt the
church was not particularly alive in some ways. It seems to be a
church that was trying very hard to be like an American evangelical
church but not doing it particularly well. Today as we visited this
new church with a Norwegian couple we are getting to know, I realized
what bothers me about that. I feel like churches should be trying to
emulate God's church, not the American or European or South Korean or
Myanmar or any other church type here. It just seems like with any
system of copying each subsequent copy will be worse unless you go
back to the original. So in the case of Myanmar, there are churches
that are copies of American churches which are copies of European
Churches which are copies of the Early church. I don't doubt that
there has been some going back to the original at different times
(perhaps the reformation, rise of evangelicalism, etc.) but on a whole
it seems there is a lot of copying of people, methods and styles and
not a lot of looking to God for direction within the church.

Anyway, this new church was a little more alive it seemed from today.
It had problems, but it seemed like people were excited about their
faith and doing something about it, even in the face of oppression.
They've been meeting in their youth center since the local authorities
closed down their 200+ person english class/sunday service that used
to meet at a hotel. The church has broken down into cell groups of
about 10 people and there are about 20 groups. I talked to one of the
leaders of a cell group to day and the only thing he wanted of his
group was that less new people would come and there would be a bit
more continuity to the group.

Now I think we're going to go swimming and eat american food.