I have been searching for words and ways to say what has been eating at me for months. Reading Hauerwas and Bonhoeffer and others like JKA Smith, Daniel Bell, William Cavanaugh, and then making a visit to Church of the Saviour last November, has really brought to the fore all my frustrations and yearnings about the church. When I got back, it seems to have taken forever to get to spill some of this. People were busy. When I finallly got an opportunity, I feel like I blew it. There were no further questions. And no wonder, since I barely scratched the surface, and gave very few specifics. I thought I “held back’ on the level of my frustration, since , being in the face to face prescence of a listener, unlike in blogdom, I shied away from revealing too much anger/frustration at the church, but the result was that I seemed to treat it like just one “idea” among many. I totally avoided the subject of how improbable I feel it is that the church will ever be that “Good Company” that is about forming, re-shaping, instilling of habits and modes of living and relating that pose a direct contrast and challenge to life “as is”; the status quo.

I’ve been seriously down over the past 4 or 5 months becuase of this. I mope around feeling like no one wants me around. When I tell myself that this is “just depression” and everyone seems to be going through it, I start thinking instead of how I might just changed, and have developed irritating or discomforting habits of relating.

I felt pretty popular in high school and college and seminary. I had numerous groups of people with whom I felt totally at ease. It seems that since we moved to Nashville, all of that is no more. Is it my getting older? I had just turned 40 the year before we moved to Nashville. As a late thirtysomething, I seemed to have no trouble at all relating and being enjoyed by younger twenty something fellow computer-geeks I worked with.

Someone told me the other day that today’s 20 something (the ‘X’ ers) are a totally different lot than the twentysomethings of the last decade (the latter of which I seemigly had no problems “hanging” with). I sense a very different relationship to today’s youth culture.

The sum of it is : I’m in a totally bewildering place. When I met with Gordon Cosby in November, he told me it sounded like from all my experiences and from things that I was saying that I have been “ruined” in a good way, (to the church as typically constituted) and that I have to “get going”, which I took to mean that I need to get about the business of finding that “Beloved Commmuniity” where the reason for being is to help one another resist the addictions of the culture. This is the theme and the challenge of “Becoming the Authentic Church”. (the booklet I came back with which I started posting on this blog under the Category “Authentic Church”) I was thankful that Eric made comments, but I was sorely disappointed in how there was virtually no response from the rest of the blogosphere, which bothered me greatly. With all of the talk about “Radical Orthodoxy” and ecclesia and the emphais on the church as the only true polis, I thought there would be a few remarks at worst, and a serious dialogue and exploration and perhaps even some “I’ve also been runied and I want to get going; how can we do something about this? What is God calling us to do?

And so I have been disappointed that I have been unable to do much persuasion that these ideas put forth in Becoming the Authentic Church are a serious enough vision to warrant at the very least, further dialogue.

The matter of how many people are actually reading here anymore is also fuel to the duldrums I have been feeling. Techorati has yiellded less than a handful of links to any of my posts over the entire period since I returned from DC in November. ONE blogger noticed the postings and promised to “get back to it” for further consideration. All the other Technorati links are people who have either the Methodist Blogroll or the Progressive Christian blogring listings on their site, so they’re not even the links I’m looking for when I click on my Technorati link. Trackbacks are also useless in this scenario, since so few are even linking to me.

None of this is to say that I am without hope or anything. It’s just my perhaps pitiful way of letting you know where I’m coming from so often these days.