I thought I’d follow on from my review of They Like Jesus but not the Church by blogging on the six issues that Dan K identified following his conversations with those who LJBNTC and evaluate a bit further whether these apply in the same way here in the UK.

Certainly here in the UK as a society this current generation has an issue with membership. Join a trade union? No thanks. How about a political party? Nope. OK, the church then? Please. The only thing this generation joins are slimming classes and gyms. Last week on our Alpha course (we have seven seekers aged from 17-late forties in our group) we discussed the issue ‘what about the church?’ and we covered the ‘I can be a Christian without joining the church’ issue but it wasn’t a huge issue. Getting up on a Sunday morning seemed to be the bigger challenge.

Dan’s second assertion that they see “the church being about hierarchy, power and control with a political agenda” just didn’t come up. I can’t remember ever having that conversation with someone who isn’t a Christian and it’s not that I don’t know anyone outside the church. Because the church in the UK is relatively small we no linger have much influence politically and there hasn’t been a drive to recover it – but instead to influence the agenda on campaigns like global debt and global warming.

The third reason was that “the church is made of leaders who function like CEOs and desire power and control.” Again that is largely a non-issue here, perhaps because in the UK we have hardly any mega-churches (2000+), about a dozen perhaps in the whole country so I think on the whole leadership remains pretty pastoral, accessible and relational. The church as corporation hasn’t emerged here yet, thankfully. Again in our discussion of the church that didn’t come up at all.

So while we have our own-issues the big one is the privatisation of the spiritual as a consequence of our high individualism is the biggest. What do you think? Am I on target or off beam?