VI. Seven Mini Meditations For Your Lenten Reflection: What Should Christians Be Up To Today?
Welcome to this series of seven short meditations for the seven weeks of Lent – these Mini Meditations. This represents a departure from my practice of several years now: issuing occasional blogs. I plan, the Lord willing, to return to that practice after Easter.
Here, in a Lenten mode, I’m attempting to do something orderly – and something that anyone can handle, however busy you may perceive yourself to be this Lenten season. A once-a-week reading!
Thank you for tuning in – and I look forward to hearing from you in response, should the Spirit so move you. If things work out as I hope they will, you will be receiving one of these Mini Meditations each week in Lent.
—Paul Santmire, Ash Wednesday, 2025
I. Coming to Terms with an Era of Apparent Church Decline
II. Understanding Our Post-Christian World
III. Attending to the Signs of These Times
IV. Spiritual Discernment or Looking Before You Leap
V. Reclaiming the Child Within
VI. Revisiting Your Local Church
VII. Growing Up Into Christ: But Really Growing Up
Mini Meditation Six: Reclaiming Your Local Church
In today’s world, denominations are passé. Ecumenism is “in.” Better yet, give me – interreligious dialogue. That’s cool. Nobody wants to be “narrowly denominational.” I’m on board with all that stuff, in principle.
But could it be that you can’t do all that cool ecumenical and interreligious stuff without really knowing where you’re coming from? More than that, shouldn’t the place you’re coming from be a real place? If you’re going to be part of a great ecumenical and interreligious orchestra, shouldn’t you really know how to play your own cello? So I want to offer you this counsel. Whatever else you’re about spiritually these days, give serious consideration to reengaging with your own local church or maybe claiming it personally for the first time.
Now I know. St. Swithens around the block might not be the most exciting place in the world. That there might be a host of post-Christians or potential gung-ho Christian activists in the neighborhood around St. Swithens doesn’t help that congregation either. But know this. Looking in on the life of St. Swithens disdainfully as you pass by on the way to Starbucks won’t inject any new life into that congregation. Who, by the way, doesn’t want to cozy up with the New York Times on Sunday morning in your pajamas? Pastors, by the way, never really want to preach just to the choir. That can be depressing. You dig? So get yourself to church.
By the way, you might not have noticed – how could you have noticed, since you’re reading your Times in bed: that Sunday church crowd at St. Swithens probably has changed a lot since the last time you were there. People tend to go to church these days, because they want to. Not because they have to. They find a way to get themselves to Sunday Church on time, not to meet the movers and shakers of the ruling elite, for sure, because that crowd’s elsewhere, maybe following Elon Musk around like a bunch of puppy dogs.
Will you meet hurting people when you finally get yourself to St. Swithens? Will you encounter odd and rickety people of all ages and of every station in life and of all gender orientations? Of course, as a friend of mine used to say: get real, the church is more like a hospital, than a country club. But could it be that what you really need at this time in your life is a spiritual hospital? What if it’s even more? What if it’s a spiritual hospital that rocks? Go on in, I say.
(to be continued)