Passionate Church

I think it's eeriely timely that the keynote speaker at the conference talked about passion in the church. The youth of today are desperate for a spiritual connection, that faith is an unspoken and unmet need. In the quest for meaning (and passion), she identified three characteristics of the search:

• fidelity - belonging
  
• transcendence - awe
  
• communion - intimacy

Yet the dominant understanding of faith in our society is "moralistic therapeutic deism" (a personal sense of do good, feel good, somehow connected to God). Nowhere, or very rarely, does Jesus appear in the equation of mainline North American Christianity.

So we're left with a lukewarm sense of spirituality instead of religion. If we don't have passion ourselves for our church, how can we expect others to want to join us? Just some questions.