The King of Kings and Lord Of Lords doesn't just want an hour or two of your time during the week.
God wants to be the one to permeate the atmosphere of your entire life'.
If we want to find the best for our lives we won't find it through a "Sunday go to the meeting faith" where the sports, work, shopping or anything else sets the priorities and rhythm for our daily life.
We need to be able to reinvent our timestyle and lifestyle to create a liturgy of life you can love, and free up more time and resources to invest
in the advance of God's Kingdom. In fact most people find it isn't really possible to seriously implement either their mission statements or their goals without making some major changes in how they steward their time and their resources.
For to many of us life has become little more than a living blur. If we have any kind of liturgy of life it is to be shaped more by the Today programme, the "fly on the wall" television and or our e-mail routines than anything that comes from our Christian faith.
But we find people everywhere who want to take back their lives. They not only want to overcome their "hurry sickness", their stress and their 24/7 lifestyle but they want to rediscover an easier rhythm that is more in touch with both the creation and their Creator. They also want to be more responsible stewards of both time and their money.
A new pattern of time is emerging, one that moves to a digital beat that has no regard for night nor day. Fueled by a global marketplace that leaps across time zones in a single bound. The internet is both it's emblem and it's foundation, and e-mailers and web surfers have been among the first to learn it's paces." We are paying high costs in our lives and churches for our blurred existence.
Many of us find we are out of sync with the created order, our own natural rhythms and even spiritual core. We can pay a very high price in our health, our relationships and personal values for this epidemic of "hurry sickness". It can cost us the vitality of our faith and the viability of the church as we race ahead into this 21st century living. We find that as Christians that our Bible reading among other Christians has declined rapidly in recent years in spite of an explosion of print and on-line Biblical resources.
There is an alarming number of Christian leaders in local churches that tell us they are so pressed for time that their only prayer is with the pastor before the Sunday morning service. Believers tell us that the only rituals of faith they celebrate are Sunday morning worship and Christmas plus Easter. And what is tragic, they have largely succeeded to transform those "Christian holidays into celebrations of consumption!
As the global consumer culture increasingly gobbles up our time and resources it is not only undermining the vitality of the church but also undercutting our support for missions around the world. We are witnessing the slow but serious hemorrhaging of time and money invested in the work of the church.
I am sure most of us are deeply concerned by this serious decline in the amount of time and money we are investing in our faith,
the church the mission. We should be concerned. But what are the causes? Why has our per capita giving declined over the past decades while our incomes have increased? Why does our faith seem to have so little impact on the rhythm of our lives?
Reverend William Bowers
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