We are smothering God. And our church. We're engaged in an unholy combination of implicit theocide and communal suicide.
That is the conclusion I have reached in trying to understand the long, anguished, painful decline of mainline Christian denominations. I look around and realize that I can't find among them a robust depiction of God's immediacy in the world. It's as though we offer only a view of an antique God of yore, rolled out and displayed like a museum piece on Sunday mornings, not a Mover and Shaker of today's reality. When only the hate-filled pronouncements of "Christian" imposters like Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps presume to represent God's current temperament, it makes me understand why the younger generations have not repopulated our denominations.
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