The Bubble

07Jun10

My church celebrated its 40th Anniversary yesterday and leading up to that, my church had revival meetings for each congregation. We had the intern worship pastor from RHCCC talk to us and he really touched on things that have been happening in my life in the past few years. The first night, he talked about not becoming a Jonah and idolatry. The second night, he talked about being missional and the biggest thing was being in that Christian bubble.

The Christian bubble was what hit me the most. There are four phases of the bubble:

• Phase 1: We become Christian – we’re learning new things and are being “fed” and really excited to tell our non-Christian friends about our new faith
• Phase 2: We become a part of the church life – we start getting involved in church activities, while making friends with Christian friends and start losing touch with our non-Christian friends and rush to be baptized
• Phase 3: We become part of the Christian sub-culture – we start thinking that evangelism is the responsibility of our church leaders through programs and events and not ours anymore; we get excited about going overseas on mission trips instead of doing it in our own neighbourhoods and we start inviting non-Christian friends to church events instead of hanging out with them to build relationships and eventually we stop socializing with out non-Christian friends – eventually we find that most, if not all, our friends are only Christian
• Phase 4: We become like Jonah – we start to complain and blame others about the things that are happening in our culture like Jonah; we start choosing our churches based on the performance of the leaders, of the worship team, of how well we’re being “fed”. We don’t realize this because other Christians around this are doing it too.

When he talked about these four phases, it really hit me: this is exactly what I’m going through, unfortunately. It makes me think, “What can I do to break out of this bubble? What can I do to help others not fall into this?”

At the same time, I want to get more involved in my church this summer and really get to know more people at my church. I don’t want to continue being a part of this bubble, but I’m still at that stage where I’m still meeting new people at my church and I want to do more in my church.

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