No doubt the hip thing to do in churches that are engaging their culture will be to write about LOST on their blogs today. Not sure how hip I, or our church, really is but I am writing about LOST today. I know that for 6 years I watched this show, and enjoyed it, I even felt a strange sense of joy by all the “lack of answers.” In fact, the lack of answers was so much of what defined the show. People spent hours around coffee shops and living rooms talking about the content of “last weeks show” and what it meant, or what they thought it meant.This intrigues me.
My first thought this morning was a question. How often do people spend large chunks of time questioning or talking about what they heard in church this last week? I mean really, we have the same amount of time (40 minutes), and we even have our own version of commercials (announcements). Yet, most people spend little or no time pondering, wading, or digging below the surface of what they heard in church. You may have small groups, sermon based home groups, or whatever your church has labeled them…but it just isn’t the same (in most cases). The large majority of people just don’t care what you said in church…and certainly didn’t care enough to ask someone else about what they missed, or go back and review the DVR to see if it was recorded. I actually heard today that someone took notes each week and would use that to start conversations with friends for the sake of understanding better what happened.
This sounds like things people who loved God would do. (Yes, I know some do) However the vast majority of Christians don’t ever reflect on the last sermon they heard…they certainly don’t throw sermon watching parties at their house! You can argue 
your case for your small group ministry, but chances are that is a separate meeting having little or nothing at all to do with the sermon from that week, and even if it’s sermon based most people aren’t really engaging the content but instead they muck their way through the meeting to get to the food or games they enjoy afterward.
I guess if anything LOST left me feeling like the Church needs to show as much interest, even more interest in the things of the Bible than they do the latest pop culture fads. While Lost will be slated to run in a never ending parade of repeats on various channels for the next 10 years…at best it’s shelf life is 15, maybe 20 years with some reunions (although it will be hard to reunite the dead. But if anyone can manage a TV resurrection I am sure it is going to be the producers of LOST). My point is that the Bible has lasted thousands of years…maybe it’s time we develop a sense of awe about it’s content. How do we elicit a hunger for it’s story and message each week that keeps people asking questions and diving below the surface for a better look at the truth? Can we sustain a long term interest in what will be a lifelong pursuit of God’s truth in the Bible? Is this just a matter of personal growth, and is church leadership unable to have any effect on such matters?
Maybe what was great about the show is that it made some of us church type leaders ask some of these kinds of questions. Maybe in doing what it did the show led other Christians to ponder deeper truths than what they had come to accept as comfortable. I am sure this is just the first of many musings on this subject, and I am 100% sure there will be others who are much better writers join the fray. I look forward to the faith challenges in the same way I looked forward to each weeks episode of LOST. Goodbye lost… it was entertaining, and maybe more?
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