One of the most frequent criticisms of the church has been that it has demonstrated itself to be so much behind the times. The church needs to get over it, get with it, get on with it.
A sure example of the modern church being so stuck in the past is when a church decorates its lobby with light cycles featured in the movie TRON: LEGACY. If a church wants to have an "At the Movies" sermon series, then can't it please get something much more current? Do you realize that the movie TRON: LEGACY was released at the end of 2010? We are talking over six months ago! How behind the times can we be when we have a movie that has been released on DVD for over three months now? Not even Redbox has it on its current releases list.
It is really embarrassing how much the church is lagging behind again, especially when the world has moved on to other things. How many movie releases have there been since the end of 2010, and all we can come up with is a fantasy world thriller that is so 2010ish?
The ideal solution is this--have a church advertise all over the place that Harry Potter is coming to their church. Talk about being current, talk about being on the cutting edge, and talk about mega box office hit with the finale, DEATHLY HALLOWS 2, and talk about bringing in the teens and the twenties to church. Picture this for example: young people lining up outside a church building in the late hours of a Saturday night waiting for the church doors to open on Sunday morning. The TV cameras would catch the spectacular. Most of these young people would be dressed in the familiar Harry Potter garb, complete with Potter's glasses and wizardry attire.
The church could have giveaways which would entice an even bigger crowd to show up--like a complete DVD series of all the Harry Potter movies, once the finale makes it to DVD. Once inside the church, the young people would be met with people from the church dressed just like themselves and the town of Hogwarts would be recreated in the lobby and on the auditorium stage. Background music from the movie would be playing all the time leading up to the start of the worship service (excuse me, here I am showing myself stuck in the past!), I mean, entertainment hour, experience hour, reconnection hour, or whatever we want to call it.
The preacher, excuse me again, the speaker could come out on stage dressed like Potter himself or maybe Lord Voldemort. We must identify with the world if we are going to reach them. The ideas behind all this are LIMITLESS and quite magical.
For a Scripture-based sermon, there are much more possibilities with a Harry Potter than a TRON. I looked in my big Young's Bible Concordance, and I didn't see one verse anywhere with TRON in it. But the word "potter" is a different story. In Jeremiah 18, God told the prophet to go to the potter's house. There you have the obvious connection. What more does a speaker need?
But then again, maybe that will not work. After all, Jeremiah is a book in the OLD Testament, and OLD does not compute with what is new, current, up-to-date, trendy. So maybe we better scratch the idea from Jeremiah 18. Of course, we can hide the fact from where we are reading, and most people would not know the difference, but it is still too risky. We need to be new and fresh and safe.
So I kept looking, and behold in Romans 9, this is the NEW Testament, it talks about God being like a potter who has absolute power over everyone of us, represented by clay, and it is His prerogative to make some of us vessels of wrath for destruction and some of us vessels of mercy. That He shows mercy on whom He will have mercy, and He has compassion on whom He desires to have compassion. And none of us can talk back to God about this, because it is His sovereign right to do all the above, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, and. . .
On second thought, we might need to scratch the Romans 9 word connection with young Potter. It might be new, but it definitely is not safe these days.
So, back to the drawing board, and I stumbled upon a verse in Isaiah 29:16. (I know it is the OLD Testament, but we will just not mention the scriptural reference. The Potter fans would not be carrying their Bibles to church anyway.) There we read people who were getting things backward. They were saying that they were the potter and God was the clay.
Now that will go over big time! We control God, God answers to us, we do something, and God must respond, that He is a responder and not an initiator, we push the right buttons and God does His thing, we hold the keys to determine our fate, etc. So we have found our angle from Scripture. Plus, it has the added advantage of fitting right into the world of Harry Potter.
What church out there will be the trendsetter and get us out of the six-month, behind-the-times, rut we are in? Who out there will be the first one to invite Harry Potter to their church?
(After we are through with Harry, the next coming attraction could be HORRIBLE BOSSES. I know it is very racy and rough in parts, but once you cross one line, it is so much easier to cross the next line. And besides, do you know how many people out there work for horrible bosses? Disgruntled employees would be flooding through the church doors.)
One final word. . .I read this summary movie review of TRON: LEGACY. "The result is a cheerful, colorful and solidly PG popcorn piece that won't leave you deep in thought."
Maybe I was too harsh on the use of TRON at first. I get it now. The connection is so obvious, how could I have missed it? It makes perfect sense now. I have seen the light, just like the light in that church's newly decorated lobby.
After all, we certainly don't want the Sunday crowd at church ever to be deep in thought about anything. O foolish me, what was I thinking?
Sarcastically yours,
Chris
