Crash Helmets & Pastor Hileman’s Sermon

Last week Pastor Cynthia Hileman from the Metropolitan Chicago Synod preached.  She talked about how churches were being reinvented, resurrected and thriving.  She also mentioned much about the sacrifice such change can cost.  She closed her sermon with this quote from Annie Dillard’s “Teaching a Stone to Talk.”  I find it exhilirating to think about.
 On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs,
sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what
sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a
word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their
chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is
madness to wear ladies hats and straw hats and velvet hats to church; we
should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and
signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake
someday and take offence, or the waking god may draw us out to where we
can never  return.

from Annie Dillard Teaching a Stone to Talk  p40

This entry was posted on 27. April 2008 at 07:05 and is filed under Changing Church, Developing a Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.