Pearls Before Breakfast – washingtonpost.com
This is a VERY good article from the Washington Post Magazine. It won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for Gene Weingarten. The experiment was to place one of the worlds greatest violinists playing some of the world’s greatest music on one of the world’s finest and most rare violins in the entrance of a train station to play the part of a street musician. Weingarten’s story and observations are found in this piece. I would love to read your responses to the story.
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so here we are in the field... 
The ideas of context and not having or taking the time to take in the beauty that might be around us are very interesting thoughts. I don’t think we can downplay the rush people are in, but the most interesting part for me is what we come to expect in a particular context. In a metro station we expect to see a mediocre (at best) musician who is playing because he needs money. When we buy a $150 dollar ticket for a concert we expect it to be outstanding and would be gravely dissapointed if it wasn’t, yet stil tell everyone it was because of the money we spent. Research has shown that we will evaluate things differently depending on the amount of time/money/effort we put into it.
I wonder how this relates to what we expect to find on sunday morning in church. After ‘dedicating’ the new building of our church this morning, one wonders if with the millions we have poured into this thing, the more we come to expect a certain product and the more difficult it becomes to be radical, and experience something different and see beauty where we did not expect to find it…
In response to Mark’s comment about time/money/effort, some of the old church growth studies indicated that people responded positively when the standards were set high and they were given a significant challenge. When expectations are set low, responses are mediocre.
I think we have come to the point in the church where we have set high expectations for buildings, “quality” of worship, etc., but have set pretty low standards for spiritual growth, ministry, humility, etc.