The medium is the message (perhaps Part 1)

Some reading of Neil Cole, Alan Hirsch, and Michael Frost, and now some Leonard Sweet, has me thinking in the two lines as I approach this:
1) contextualizing the church to a culture -- this requires understanding what are the core purposes and values of what a church should be, and understanding a culture.
2) understanding the medium is the message. Simplified a bit, this means actions speak louder than words.

I spoke before on this last one, where I visited a church meeting of 25, where we spent 45 minutes in song before a guy spoke on how this was a family. The medium -- sitting in chairs, facing the back of the head of person's in front of us, singing then hearing a monologue sermon, spoke much louder than his words.

So what do our standard mediums speak about our message? Some examples that run us into trouble --
1) Peter wrote that we are a priesthood of all believers. The Hebrew writer wrote that Jesus is our high priest to whom we can approach directly. Yet a very common practice is to make a "clergy class" between us and Jesus. This clergy class is very much like a priesthood that stands between us and God. Paul wrote that apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers (all to commonly lumped together and called just "pastors" as a group nowadays) are for equipping the church. They are authorities in the sense that they with God help us become who we are meant to be, not "lord it over" us.
2) all our life is to be worship, yet we create distinct times of the week to call worship, and create separate spaces as "sacred".
3) Jesus called us to be active worshipers, participants, and contributers. Paul wrote about "orderly" assemblies in I Corinthians 14. Yet we've seen "orderly" changed to "ordered" to the point of having a script for our gatherings. We are called in assemblying together to encourage one another, admonish one another, to spur one another on to love and good deeds. But the custom has grown to be centered along a scripted service that runs somewhere from 60 to 120 minutes, where most show up no more than 5 minutes before and those who linger do so no more than 15 minutes and talk about the weather or the immediate past sporting events or the one coming up that afternoon or other trivia.
4) A typical church's "small groups" program consist of people gathering and studying some curriculum for six weeks to 12 weeks. And the small group "script" must be followed and a 12 week study must be completed in 12 weeks. What does this medium teach? That knowledge is more important than loving others. Spending time of a session with someone in need is not allowed under this format. I fear that the message of the medium to many is that knowledge of God is more important that loving and knowing God.

IF our gatherings and discipleship approaches are to speak of the Christ, what would they look like?