I apologize in advance for this post. I hope to produce higher quality posts in the future. This is raw, fresh, and from my soul.
I would like to pose a question: why is the church so disconnected from the "real world", reality, real life, etc?
Allow me to preface for a moment. I visited a homeless camp today for lunch. I like to visit this particular camp weekly. The folks there are high quality. So many dilemmas, so few complaints. Their company is unrivaled.
My boss, a friend of ours, and I took the camp a humble lunch today. After we set everything up and were prepped to serve, one of the men at the camp halted our progress and said we needed to bless the food. He was up for the task, but stopped himself. He exclaimed, "I don't really know how to bless the food. I don't know how to pray." He quickly delegated the prayer duties to me. In my mind I'm thinking, "I've prayed before. A lot, actually. I've got this." As soon as I started to pray I realized that I had no idea how to pray. This devastating realization had all but completely gripped my inner being by the time my 7 second "prayer" was over. I couldn't believe it. I can't believe it.
Of course, I know how to pray. "Lord, thank you for this food..." I've said that a thousand times. It's easy, right? Correct: reciting a prayer, mantra, or even a pagan chant is easy. After a little more thought, I realized that I didn't know how to pray for these folks. Where do you start? They need so much, they have so little. People die out there. One of our homeless buddies was brutally beaten to death last weekend. So, again, where do you start?
All of this leads up to the following question: why is the church so disconnected from the "real world", reality, real life?
We preach about "the least of these" almost every Sunday now. Combating social injustice issues is very relevant in today's popular Christian culture. Yet, we're so completely disconnected. What are we doing? What am I doing? What are you doing?
We go to church in the same parts of town we live in and wonder why the ghetto isn't healing. We're so preoccupied with the upcoming Sunday service that we don't share the Good News during the week. We "amen" Feed-the-Poor messages, but don't concern ourselves with issues like the correlation between poverty and obesity.
If I don't even understand the basic needs, mentalities, dilemmas, adversities, circumstances, and causes of poverty, then how can I know how to pray about it? Understanding and awareness will cost me my innocence. My naivety. My time. It will cost me.
I guess a better question would be this: Is the church disconnected because we're not willing to open up to understanding and awareness?