The Church: Emerging, Receding or Restoring
By Bruce Keisling December 8, 2006
I must be getting seasoned in life when I can reflect on several “movements” in modern church life. I can recall the Jesus People era, which in my world gave new fuel to a reaffirmation of the Fundamentals. There has also been the Left Behind, resurgence of the Right, the “seeker sensitives”, the return to the Reformation, and now the “emerging”. I am getting seasick from all this lurching. I need a break, and so again turn to Robert Frost and a pithy poetical observation on change:
From his poem, The Black Cottage (lines 109-124):
| Most of the change we think we see in life |
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| Is due to truths being in and out of favour. |
110 |
| As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish |
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| I could be monarch of a desert land |
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| I could devote and dedicate forever |
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| To the truths we keep coming back and back to. |
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| So desert it would have to be, so walled |
115 |
| By mountain ranges half in summer snow, |
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| No one would covet it or think it worth |
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| The pains of conquering to force change on. |
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| Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly |
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| Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk |
120 |
| Blown over and over themselves in idleness. |
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| Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew |
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| The babe born to the desert, the sand storm |
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| Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans— |
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Posted in Poetry Friday |
