One Holy church

My favorite Christian band Third Day has a lyric in one of their songs about all Christians belonging to one Holy Church.  I like the idea of that.  Unfortunately, I know it will never happen until Christ returns.  Proof of that was revealed to me last week.  I atempted to plan an interdenominational worship with another local church ( the church that one of my fellow residents attends).  Sarah and I met with a few young adults from their church and we were all really excited about the possibilities.  We figured we could easily have well over 100 young adults and high school kids come for a BBQ followed by a praise service.  Bands from our church and from theirs would lead music and we would share a few testimonies.  I was upfront about who we are a church today but I did not hide our history either.  They left our meeting excited and wanted to invite their entire church to attend.  When they asked their pastor, he said we should not meet together for worship because we are too theologically different.  I am not even sure he knows anything about what our church believes.  It was very discouraging, honestly I felt like I got punched in the stomach.  I emailed their pastor with my point of view.  I assured him our only reason for meeting was to fellowship & worship Christ together.  That's it. No deep theological discussions or anything.  I told him we wanted to focus on what we have in common as Christians and not on what divides us.  Jesus never wanted to start a new religion let alone one with so many divisions.  In my view, churches exist to serve Christ and fulfill his mission and not the other way around.  Different denominations exist for a reason.  It takes many different worship styles and theology to reach different people.  However, those things should be secondary to the greater call of service to Christ.  The Community of Christ church is not without fault either.  For generations, we professed to be the "one true church".    I am SO glad we no longer collectively have that view.  What message are we as the larger Christian community sending to non-believers?  How are we ever supposed to reach others for Christ if we can't even come together for an hour and focus on Christ in worship? 

I like Joey….

I am confessing to being one of the apparently few people who likes the show Joey. No it will never be friends, but I really enjoy it still. I purchased season one last week and I honestly don’t see why this show failed. Joey is great and the rest of the cast is funny too. His agent ( MILF from American Pie) steals most of the scenes she is in. I read that they have just filmed the last 4 episodes but NBC may not even air them. I hope they at least release them as part of a season 2 DVD set. I feel like NBC gave up on this show too quickly. Joey averaged 11.7 million viewers prior to its move to Tuesday where it got destroyed by American Idol. It’s not like My Name is Earl is a rating juggernaut (46th last new episode). You can’t tell me it isn’t better than some of the horrible shows they put on now. On the last episode they aired Joey hooked up with his neighbor (he also did so in real life helping to prove Alli’s theory about actors and romantic roles ). I was hoping that might lead to a wedding/Friends reunion. I guess that’ll never happen now. At least a visit from Chandler would have been nice.