Irenic Thoughts

Irenic. The word means peaceful. This web log (or blog) exists to create an ongoing, and hopefully peaceful, series of comments on the life of King of Peace Episcopal Church. This is not a closed community. You are highly encouraged to comment on any post or to send your own posts.

7/14/2005

Krispy Kreme Church

In a recent post at A New Life Emerging, Rick writes
When I was a kid in the summer my family would venture off to the shores of South Carolina for a family vacation at the beach. Right down the boardwalk from the hotel was a Krispy Kreme Donut shop. Dad would give my older brother a few bucks and soon he would return with a dozen or two of hot freshly made Krispy Kreme donuts. The donuts would actually melt in my mouth and I would wash them down with ice-cold whole milk. My brothers and I would boast as to how many donuts we could eat. Once I ate four donuts and thought I was king.

Each donut is about 210 calories.

Four donuts and a cup of milk are about 1,000 calories—empty calories.

As a child I thought I could live off of Krispy Kreme donuts but as you know, sugar-glazed donuts and whole milk are not very nutritious, and ultimately not very filling.

Just because one is consuming massive quantities of Krispy Kreme donuts doesn’t mean he is healthy.

Spirituality is a lot like Krispy Kreme donuts.
At some point you have to change your diet or you will die.

I think there are many folks who are being fed sugar-glazed theology and they leave the building with a sugar rush having consumed 1,000 calories of bad theology thinking they have been fed when in realty they are just buzzing from the sugar.

After a half-hour nap they are hungry again. Many go back to the donut shop not realizing that they are being fed white flour and sugar, or that they cannot get healthy off the white flour and sugar regardless of how much you eat.

They have the Church of Krispy Kreme tee-shirt,
the Krispy Kreme Church Study Bible,
the Krispy Kreme Church Praise CD,
the Krispy Kreme Church Small Group
but no one is getting healthy.

Folks get addicted to the sugar buzz rather than God.

And when the sugar buzz diminishes they think God has gone some where and so they create a new version of the same donut. It’s still white flour and sugar no matter how you serve it.
That’s the problem, eventually folks wake-up sick and in great need of spiritual food.

Their minds attempt to send them back to the Church of Krispy Kreme, but their bodies are begging for something nutritious. Consuming massive amount of sugar-glazed theology only makes them sicker.

Just because there are long crowded lines at Krispy Kreme doesn’t mean the food is healthy.

Will someone please tell this to the church?
In his profile at the blog Rick describes himself saying, "Personally, I don't have the guts to follow Jesus, so I often settle for being a Christian." Do you settle for less in your faith than than that to which you think Jesus is calling you?

Then, as concerns theology with holes in it, it's never safe when reading something like the post above to assume that it applies to someone other than yourself or in this case, your church. How can King of Peace keep protein and vegetables in our nutritional plan? What are the ways we balance our church diet, rather than going for lots of quick spiritual calories with no nutrional value?

2 Comments:

  • At 7/14/2005 7:11 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Wonderful story and development. If you go along with this analogy, it is as you point out, so tempting to exclude one's self. But I have a hard time going there in the first place. To me, there is something more than vaguely unsatisfying about western, consumerist style church where [of course] you "get fed". This sort of church is never able to meaningfully engage the world in either it's joys or sorrows - it's imitation of the world is thorough! Sometimes, don't you just yearn for a church that has gotten over itself enough to be discovering that feeding is incidental to worship and service. Not what we so blithely call "worship service" where we won't go unless we get fed. Where what feeds you won't necessarily feed me. How disgustingly marketplace. This is not gospel.

     
  • At 7/20/2005 4:16 AM, Blogger King of Peace said…

    Steve Rice links to this post, with some thoughts of his own on "sugar=glazed theology" at http://waynesboro.blogspot.com/2005/07/nations-largest-attendance-church.html

     

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