Sunday-Monday disconnect

found a great thread on The Forgotten Ways blog which explores the idea of Sunday-Monday disconnect. It's something that goes by lots of other names: dualism, sacred vs secular etc. Here's what blogger and emerging church thinker Alan Hirsch has to say:

This dualistic spirituality has been called a number of things, but perhaps the idea of the Sunday-Monday disconnect brings the experience to the fore. We experience a certain type of God on Sunday, but Monday is another matter—“this is ‘the real world’ and things work differently here.” How many times have we ‘professional’ ministers heard variations of that phrase? “You don’t really understand. It’s just not as easy for me as it is for you. You work in the church with Christians”, etc. The two ‘spheres of life,’ the sacred and the secular, are conceived as being infinitely different and heading in opposite directions. It is left to the believer to live one way in the sacred sphere and have to another in the secular. It is the actual way we do church that communicates this non-verbal message of dualism. The medium is the message after all. And it sets people up to see things in an essentially distorted way where God is limited to the religious sphere. This creates a vacuum that is filled by idols and false, or incomplete, worship.

here's a couple of helpful pictures from that blog entry,

but rather than plagiarise any more, go and read it yourself. It's interesting how this picks up on the discussion we had last night about where our Cafe Service was going, and how what we've decided to do in the autumn is thinking very much along these lines, so that's a nice confirmation!

On a related topic, the After Sunday Project is a Christian initiative looking specifically at the relationship between faith and work. It's a good resource for people trying to relate faith and work, and the website looks well put together. It's based in Durham diocese, but is relevant everywhere.