TheOOZE has an interesting article, Detoxing from Church:
Now I’m going to say something harsh: In order to BE the Church, we need to leave the church. In other words, in order to truly become God’s people as he intended, we must abandon our cultural version of organizational church. The application of this statement might vary, but it must happen. And as we abandon the church to become the Church, we will go through a detox period.
I was thinking about this the other day. Jesus was known as a friend of sinners. The places that he hung out was out in the streets, in the marketplace, where people lived, and where people worked. And the times that he did hang out at the religious institutions were to give the religious folks some strong words of rebuke. Christians need to get out of the walls of the church and stop expecting non-Christians to scale that mighty wall and somehow come inside their church. If Christians can’t scale the wall, how can non-Christians scale it? Christians need get out and about and engage the culture and to meet people where they are.