As I think about what a church should do with its resources, I started wondering about the amount of resources that would ideally be spent on the practice of religion compared to living the religion.
My assumption is that practicing religion is a means to live the religion. You go to church on Sunday not for the exclusively to worship God but to equip or fortify yourself to live out the tenants of your faith. God doesn’t need to be worshipped, we need to worship God to do what is right, just and compassionate.
How would this concept be implemented in the activity of a church? I guess I think too many resources can be allocated for practicing religion (particularly in the time and energy of many in the upper heirarchies) and not providing opportunities to live the faith. Helping the least of our brothers, making peacemakers (they are blessed) encouraging all to give up their things and follow their faith-isn’t that what a church should do?
The church should provide opportunities to enrich one’s faith but the enrichment should lead to action, lifestyle changes and good deeds. In that the fruition of faith development is action, should not the a sizable portion of the life of the parish be directed to providing opportunities of charity? Also, if these charitable acts might be considered as successfully developing the faith of the members, shouldn’t the implicit intent of all other activities be getting to the point where one does good deeds with compassion?
I guess my fear is that churches get overly caught up in the ritutals of the faith and lose sight of why they do the rituals in the first place. There is a new set of rules being put forth (or I guess more stringently enforced is more accurate) that would seem to reflect that a major priority for the larger church is concentrate on the rituals of faith rather than living the faith.
