Every one of us is a product of our environment. 
Whether we like it or not, this means our lives, ideals, and routines are shaped by the world around us.  In a sense we have been trained by our culture and society to think a certain way, value certain traits and relate to other people under the pretense of certain guidelines.  Naturally, our own accepted societal norms will be much different from those of another culture or another time. 

One simple example of this: in certain Asian cultures when you first meet someone it is quite routine to ask them to ask how much money they make in their job.  It is a normal part of conversation.  But for us that seems very strange.  Even with some of my best friends I have no idea what their salary is because we just don’t ask that question.  It is something considered private.

There are many other ways we have been shaped by the standards of our society.  The problem is, sometimes those things can run contrary to our Christian beliefs and Biblical worldview.  In our own American culture we have been trained to work very hard, and appreciate success, but we also value being served.  It is understood that at a restaurant or department store we should have “good service.”  We get annoyed (and I am no exception) when our drink does not come fast enough, our food is not prepared perfectly or our needs are not met.  In fact, our marketplace and economy are all based on this idea; if you do not serve people well enough, they will go somewhere else.

While this may not be intrinsically bad (or maybe it is) we have to be careful because what we will see this week in Ephesians chapter 3 is that the Bible is not at all about being served.  Jesus was not sent to be waited on.  The disciples were not trained to be put on a pedestal above all the rest.  Instead, Paul writes that because of God’s incredible love for him he falls down before the Lord on bended knee.  He is humbled by God’s love.  The result of this is that he then seeks to love others, serve them, and he even suffers for the sake of the church of Ephesus.  Next time we complain about service, perhaps we need to remember the great “service” Jesus gave for us.

This post is part of an original post titled "This Changing World" which discusses trends and shifts in today's culture and some points on how the Church should be ready to respond to these changes.  To read the original article click here.

"We need to deliver timeless truths of an unchanging God through new media, new music and new venues."

There is a lot in the above statement.  If you were to look through history or read through the New Testament though, you would see that this statement is not at all original.  Wherever the church has successfully gone in the past there has been an element of adaptation to the target culture.  For example, when Paul traveled to Athens and addressed the people at the Aereopagus he spoke in words and ideas that they could understand (Acts 17).  He addressed them as Athenians, well aware of their own culture, baggage, gifts and downfalls.  Later, when he travels back to Jerusalem his message to the Jews from the Temple was much different (Acts 21).  Paul used the personal setting and values of the Jews to appeal to them differently.  However, the God and Truth Paul spoke of to the Athenians, the Jews and every other group he visited was exactly the same.

This is how the Church still spreads the message of Jesus effectively today.  We need to be able to identify with our target audience to some extent.  We need to speak in a way that the message is received well even among the idiosyncracies of a different type of culture.  And we need to be able to allow worship and fellowship to happen in a way that resonates well in different places for different people, but the end result of all of this must still be a people who believe in the exact same God and narrative as the Church always has.

So how does this translate into our present American Culture? 

Well first, the Church needs to remain able to communicate well with the target audience.  In a society with high value placed on new media such as Facebook, Twitter, texting, e-mail, podcasts and web-sites the Church should be willing to communicate in ways that reach people and allows them to stay connected.  This does not mean that face to face relationships should be sacrificed however.  One of the marks of the church has always been fellowship and communion, not just with God, but with the body of the Church as well.  So, a Church must communicate in various ways, but also successfully create intimate, meaningful relationships and gathering opportunities for its its members.

Second, the Church needs to continue to allow people to worship in ways that are personally expressive.  From psalms with a harp, to dancing before the lord, to chanting, to hymns and liturgy, to guitar and progressive rock, there have been many forms of worship expression in the past and we can expect there will be many more in the future.  Yes, the Bible does dictate several limitations on worship (it needs to be reverent in some fashion, it needs to retain the prime focus on Christ Jesus, it needs not be a detriment to other believers) but beyond these things, worship style is open to creative application.  I would suggest further that creativity and artistic talent is very much a gift and perhaps even a spiritual gift given by God.  When the Church allows and enables its members to be creative in worship, a more meaningful and experiential worship will take place.

Finally the Church needs to continue to look to new venues and flexible gathering options.  Yes, God's people do need to gather, but this certainly does not have to be in a building with stained glass, in close proximity to an Altar, or even indoors.  Christian's have gathered in many places throughout history, sometimes being forced to gather in private places, sometimes filling stadiums.  What we need to consider for the future is that the gathering space of the church might look more like a gymnasium, a store front, a movie theater, or even a business than like the cathedrals of antiquity.  The more the church breaks through the "walls" of routine place, the more opportunities others will have to come in contact with the gathered faithful.

With these things in mind I believe we can begin to see what is necessary and what it not, what things are flexible and those that must be rigid.

That's all for now.  Check back for further posts on "This Changing World." 

How will the church react?  This was the topic Wednesday in our Faith in Actions series.  While we have brushed over this topic in the past, this week we spent a lot of time just talking about the facts and statistics of the changing world around us.  While studying this it is important to understand that these things are simply facts.  We tend to be quick to judge whether they are good or bad, healthy or not, but the simple truth is, these are indications of changes in the world, things that none of us individually can errase or reverse.  So our focus should be, not trying to keep the world stuck in a bygone era, but instead seeing what we can do to pass on the Truth we possess to those around us, even in a world that is so rapidly shifting.

I broke down the changes around us into 4 categories. 
They are: societal shifts, technology movements, local to global to glocal and finally religious landscapes. 
Here are some examples from each.

SOCIETAL SHIFTS
•Today 20% of women of child bearing years choose to have no children (10% in 1970).
•A record 14.6% of all new marriages in the U.S in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another.
•A record four-in-ten births (41%) were to unmarried women in 2008.
•Only about six-in-ten Millenials (18-29) were raised by both parents (40% one or neither).
•45% of the population has lived in 2 or more states (15% four or more) only 37 percent today stay home.

TECHNOLOGY MOVEMENTS

•150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook , half of them are using Facebook every day.
•83% of Millenials report placing their cell phone by the bed at night, only 35% of boomers.
•75% of Millenials have created a profile on a social networking site
•American’s have access to: 1,000,000,000,000 web pages;  65,000 iphone aps;  10,500 radio stations;  5,500 magazines;   and 200+ cable channels.
•America has 240,000,000 TVs in use.  2,000,000 are in bathrooms.
•More video was added to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC, CBS, NBC had been airing original content 24/7/365 since 1948.
•The average American teen sends 2,248 Text Messages each month.

LOCAL TO GLOBAL TO GLOCAL
(This category essentially describes the way the world has shifted from a purely local culture 500 and more years ago, to more recently a Global culture where people can travel anywhere and share ideas, to the current status of a Glocal culture where people from everywhere are moving to everywhere on a regular basis.)
•The population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants.
•Nearly one in five Americans (19%) will be an immigrant in 2050, compared with one in eight (12%) in 2005.
•Hispanics will make up 29% of the U.S. population in 2050, compared with 14% in 2005.
•The non-Hispanic white population will increase more slowly than other racial and ethnic groups; whites will become a minority (47%) by 2050.
•In the Twin Cities in 2009 there were an estimated 141,000 muslims (96 Mosques);  68,000 buddhists;  57,000 Jews;  33,000 Hindus;  additionally theTwin Cities have the largest Hmong, Somali, Liberian, Karen, and Oromo (Ethiopian) population in U.S.


RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPES
•Millennials are the least overtly religious American generation in modern times. One-in-four are unaffiliated with any religion, far more than the share of older adults when they were ages 18 to 29.
•In the Twin Cities 34% of the population is unchurched; 10% are part of world religions, 3% are members of Cult, Sect, or Occult groups.
•Two-thirds of adults ages 65 and older say religion is very important to them, compared with just over half of those ages 30 to 49 and just 44% of those ages 18 to 29.
•Only about 14% of Twin Cities population is in church every week.
•8 Minneapolis churches closed in last year, 20 more will in the next 5 year.




In the midst of these changes how will the Church react? 
Here are a few points regarding how I beleive the church must react to stay effective in today's world.  Over the next couple weeks I will discuss each of these points in more detail in future blog posts.
•We need to deliver timeless truths of an unchanging God through new media, new music and new venues.
•We need to separate faith from cultural values.
•We need to realize that many people know nothing about the Bible or Jesus.
•We need to love those around us in spite of differences.
•We need to create church communities that are stable and intimate. 
•We need to understand that sometimes God uses pain to further his mission.
•We need to stay true to the Bible and the preached Word.

NOTE: Most of the above statistics were taken from publicly available studies on the Pew Research Center's website: http://pewresearch.org/.  The local Twin Cities statistics were taken from the CityView report from City Vision, a faith based research organization in the Twin Cities: http://www.cityvisiontc.org/.

We are starting a new sermon series this week and really this will be a bit of a new focus for us as a church.  Over the next 6 weeks we will be working through the book of Ephesians and what we will find each week is that the central theme is love.  Love is central to every chapter.  It is kind of the focal point around which everything else revolves.  For this reason I felt that we really should take some time and dig into this topic and see what God desires to teach us about love.

A few points to get us started.  First, love does not start with us, it starts with God.  That is what we will see this morning.  Before Paul, the author of this book, even addresses the church at Ephesus and the believers there, the first thing he talks about is what God has done for him and for them, and it starts with love.  Paul says that it is because of God’s love that we have been chosen as his people from the beginning of time.  What I hope to show you today is that this sort of love is unimaginable.  Truly, God’s love for us is so intense, so deep and so passionate that we cannot even comprehend it. It is wholly different than anything else we know.

So today, I hope to show you a small taste of God’s incredible love.  As we move forward through this series we will see in Ephesians that as we experience God’s love it changes our lives and we react to it in certain ways.  It causes us to love others, in a selfless, non-judgmental fashion.  We desire to serve others because we know God cares for them.  And finally we hope to bless others by showing them God’s love and the truth that he is real, he cares, and he sent his Son, Jesus for us and for them.