Home > christianity, church, culture, god, jesus, spirituality > church first, God second

church first, God second

A couple of months ago my wife and I were watching the movie The Good Shepherd starring a slew of talented actors.  There’s this one scene where Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie are at a ball with his former “fraternity” brothers, and before they ask God’s blessing, all the men honor their group, The Bonesmen.  Angelina Jolie the says a line that has stuck with me for a while.  She says, “Bonesmen first, God second.”

It made me wonder how often our church services are like that.  How often are they more about being a production than meeting with God in community?  

Do we pray to God during a service because we acknowledge that we are His children–together for our weekly family reunion; and we are intent in seeking Him in that moment?

When did prayer become the bookends of our “services”?  Why is it just something we do to kick off church, and bring it to an end?  Does that mean prayer is that nice rug that really ties the room together?

When did we start doing church; and stop being The Church?

  1. Meriah
    February 9, 2009 at 7:05 pm | #1

    I wish we could begin a service with prayer, asking HIM to be a part of our gathering. Out of all the churches I have ever attended, I have only been in one that did it that way, and it was fantastic.

  2. July 24, 2009 at 7:17 pm | #2

    i am not a christian but i do understand…i just think that since as you’ve realised…make others realize…how?..by talking about it in the church :)

    smiile n make onthers smiile
    there’s no end to knowledge

  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.