You’re being watched (and blogged about)

In an interesting coincidence, for two consecutive weeks our congregation has been visited by people who keep blogs and have written about their worship experience with us.  I find this very interesting, bizarre, encouraging, and challenging all at the same time.

On Sunday, August 9^th, we were visited by Steve.  Steve is in his lower 30’s, teaches at UC, and is doing an experiment of visiting 52 churches in 52 weeks, writing a blog entry about each experience.  He’s not a sociologist doing field research.  He’s had an experience of being converted into the church, then being burned out on the church, and is now undergoing a spiritual searching process.  He’s visited different churches, but also mosques and a church of scientology.  I talked with him after the service that day and got to know these basic things, discovering that he would be blogging about us soon.  Regularly, I wouldn’t necessarily write openly about the personal information of a visitor, but he has all that info posted on his blog, so I guess it’s public.  He didn’t give the name of his blog, but it wasn’t too hard to find since I knew his first name and what he was generally doing.  I appreciate his honest, transparent reflections.  I should note, however, that it is by bad on the MISinformation I gave him about CMF formerly owning the Peace House on Riddle Road (I believe it was the Mennonite Church from the Conservative Conference in Cincinnati who owned it, although CMFers were involved with the day care there?)  I sent him a comment to set the record straight.  A quote from him: “And the most intriguing part of my visit was learning about their passion for social justice…”

Then, just this past Sunday, August 16^th, we were visited by Meg Cox and her brother.  He lives in Oakley and Meg attends Living Water Community Church, a Mennonite church in Chicago.  She works for the Christian Century magazine and also does editing, a most recent book of hers being Cynicism and Hope. One of the main lenses of her blog entry was how the service was experienced by her brother, who has a cognitive disability.  She appreciated the humor present in the service, observed that our bulletin shows a lot of activity for a small congregation, but noted that the sermon was quite complex and difficult for her brother to understand.  A quote from her, “Maybe one way to evaluate whether a congregation is fully communicating the gospel is to consider how the good news is heard and experienced by congregants who don’t understand all the words.”

I encourage you to read both blogs.

You can read Steve’s blog entry here: http://churchexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/08/church-32-mennonite-fellowship.html

You can read Meg’s blog entry here: http://cynicismandhope.net/

I’m glad people are reflecting thoughtfully about worship, spirituality, and church.  And it makes me ponder things deeper when those reflections are about Cincinnati Mennonite.  What do you learn from these two people who are thinking out loud about these things?