run with it

the church that mirrors a failing system

2009-07-14T06:26:00.000-07:00

Grace has some insightful thoughts on the implications of a failing economy on the church system that was designed to mimic capitalism. Here are her conclusions:

I don’t know if there is hope for economic and political change or revolution in that arena. That isn’t what I want to address. These articles highlight the depth of failure by the church to model an alternative truth.
A few thoughts…
The dominant cultural model of our churches has been to copy the models of corporate business in organizational structures, leadership styles, productivity, performance, and marketing.
Perhaps those systems that mirror the corporate culture will also mirror their collapse.
Should we look to these same systems to organize the recovery of a church that could be different?
The church that exemplifies the kingdom is not conducive to the powers of an elite oligarchy.
The church that is an alternative witness to this culture will look radically different than the celebrity-led, consumer-fed, mega-campus complex.
God forgive us for the turbo-capitalism that drives us to success rather than faithfulness.
Sometimes the failure of all that previously worked is the doorway to an opportunity to be stripped of what is unnecessary and introduced to the beauty and simplicity of life in the kingdom. I have a glimmer of hope that the church is being turned in this direction.

Be sure and read her whole post.

Welcome to the Faith

2009-07-09T05:13:00.001-07:00

David Hayward(nakedpastor) hits it out of the park with this one

Finished!

2009-07-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

The School Room:

The Art of the Archive

2009-06-25T05:24:00.000-07:00

Elesha Coffman at The Christian History Blog has a great article on archive research. Not for everybody, but there are a few of you out there who, like me, will want to tuck this information away for future reference. Here's is just the beginning:

1. Contact the archivist before you arrive. Archivists are an underappreciated lot. Most of those I’ve worked with are based in university libraries, tucked away somewhere far from any windows that might permit deadly sun rays to strike fragile manuscripts. They know their collections, they know their policies, and they’re generally eager to help any researcher who actually manages to find them, but they need more lead time than your basic librarian

that time again

2009-06-17T19:34:00.000-07:00

it's that time again. summer project update.

i've cleaned out the school room (and cleaned and cleaned), patched the holes in the walls, and started masking. i'll start with painting the ceiling and then move on from there. want to guess the wall color the wee one chose? here's a hint: it's the color of a fruit.

here are a couple of photos. I'll have more on my facebook page for anyone who wants to go there to see them.

almost empty

where it all went

summer

2009-06-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

Summer is in full swing here now. I'm preparing for my annual summer paint project- this year it's the school room/study, and will be augmented by the wee one's tastes and choices. (read- it's going to be a bit wild.) But that's okay- it's her room too. It will be fun, once I get all the books and projects and shelves and computers and junk out.

This coming week I have jury duty for the first time. My daughter has violin camp, which Keith will take her to since he'll be working from home due to my aforementioned civic duty, and we will have a house guest. If you see me, don't be surprised to see my head spinning around. It isn't demonism--just confusion.

Here is a photo of our vegetable garden this year. It's doing well. The squash are again affected by mildew/mold but I've learned that spraying with a milk and water mixture is better than fungicide for treating plants with that problem. I haven't yet worked out how often and what concentration of milk is optimal in our garden, but i'm optimistic (er- overuse of "opti" words). We've had a few good squash grow to maturity and that encourages me.

The Great Emergence, Continued

2009-05-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

from The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle:

"...when pinned down and forced to answer the question, 'What is Emergent or Emerging Church?' most who are will answer, 'A conversation,' which is not only true but which will always be true. The Great Emergence can not 'be,' and be otherwise..."

Tickle quotes Donald Miller:

"I believe that we are witnessing a new reformation that is transforming the way Christianity will be experienced in the new millennium. This reformation, unlike the one led by Martin Luther, is challenging not only doctrine, but the medium through which the message of Christianity is articulated... these 'new paradigm' churches have discarded many of the attributes of established religion. Appropriating contemporary cultural forms, these churches are creating a new genre of worship music, restructuring the organizational character of institutional religion, and democratizing access to the sacred by radicalizing the Protestant principal of the priesthood of all believers."

Tickle goes on, later:
"The actual nature of the Atonement, for example, or the tenet of an angry God who must be appeased or the question of evil's origins are suddenly all up for reconsideration. If in pursuing this line of exegesis, the Great Emergence really does what most of its observers think it will, it will rewrite Christian theology--and thereby North American culture--into something far more Jewish, more paradoxical, more narrative, and more mystical than anything the Church has had for the last seventeen or eighteen hundred years...Regardless of what its theology eventually matures into, however, there is no question that the Great Emergence is the configuration of Christianity which is in ascendency.

"What is not nearly so easy to discern just yet is how the Great Emergence will interface with the results and consequences of such realignments; and more than any other of North America's Christians, it is emergents themselves who are going to have to reconsider Emergence Christianity. They must begin now to think with intention about what this new form of the faith is and is to become; because what once was an engaging but innocuous phenomenon no longer is. The cub has brown into the young lion; and now is the hour of his roaring."

I don't know whether or not to agree with this last statement of Tickle's, but I seem, nonetheless, to be experiencing it. I no longer find that I can easily push aside my disparate thoughts about church, God, and our relationship with Him. These thoughts (or the children of them) keep coming out- not oozing quietly- but plopping out at inopportune moments. Usually when surrounded by people who can't fathom what is going on in my mind, nor do they seem to want to. I regret this on several levels, yet I'm still a bit confounded about how to manage it.

The Great Emergence

2009-05-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

As I've been given time off from cooking and other chores today (yea!) I thought I'd tell you about The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle.

She begins with the supposition that, according to Rev. Mark Dyer, "about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale. And, he goes on to say, we are living in and through one of those five-hundred-year sales."

The five hundred year points are typically referred to in terms that begin with, or are associate with the word "great," hence, "The Great Emergence."

There was the beginning of the church in the 1st century.
Then around 500 years later there came Gregory the Great and the beginning of the monastic movement following the fall of the Roman Empire.
Next, around the 11th century came the Great Schism, the divide between the Eastern Orthodox Christianity (Constantinople) and the Western Church (Rome.)
The most easily recognized "great" is the 16th century Great Reformation with Martin Luther and his 95 theses nailed to the door at Wittenberg church-- thus laying the foundations for Protestantism.
That bring us to the 21st century and what Tickle is calling the Great Emergence.

I'm with her on this. The majority of the book is a well researched explanation of these events in the life of the Church, bringing us to many observations about the changes in Protestantism in the 20th century which got us to the state of flux we are in today. I think she does a good and thorough job of this, without crossing over into tedium.

The point being made that the Church was ripe for a rebirth, the author goes on to explain the emerging church as she sees it. I'll write a little about that explanation in a follow up post.

10 survival tips

2009-05-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

David at nakedpastor has some in depth food for thought:

"I think all religious communities, like our earth, are on a collision course with their demise. And it’s our own fault, not the “world’s”. I’ve been mulling some thoughts around. If we are going to survive into the future, our communities need to:

get and stay small (like the best farms);
be autonomous but accountable to other communities (like tribes);
be indigenous in expression (local creativity and freedom of expression);
see love as the new hermeneutic of our books (instead of obedience, justification, salvation, etc.);
reject even the subtlest forms of coercion (no imposed agendas);
abandon visionary thinking (love without the oppression of expectations);
cultivate thinkers who explore the reconciliation of all things (global intelligence);
commit to long-term or even life-long oversight (relationship);
build an attitude of resistance to success-story thinking (anti-pop);
engage all sciences, religions and philosophies with an open, compassionate and humble mind (dialogue)."

counting heads

2009-04-28T08:23:00.001-07:00

Dan has stopped counting heads at church. More power to him! I wish all our denominational pastors would be so courageous.

scot on church plants

2009-04-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

Why Me?, Scot Williams

"i have been asked to give my reasons why i no longer go to real church anymore, why i handed in my ordination and though repeatedly asked, why i refuse to take it back, and why i no longer advocate planting churches for the vast majority of evangelicals. how could i, a career planter, bite the hand that has almost fed me for so long? i hope that it is because of this longevity in a field with few lifers that i have at least a smattering of some credibility. here's an excerpt...

"I was getting my passport this week. You know how it is… you sit and wait and then someone calls you up and asks you a bunch of questions. So she asked me, 'why are you going to Orlando?' I wanted to say something like, 'I’m starring in a Body Building Movie', but instead I confessed, 'I’m going to a conference about starting new churches'. Then she asked me a question, and it’s the only question I’m going to address. She said this, "well then maybe you could answer this for me… 'why would anyone want to go to church?'"

It's worth reading scot's entire post. I'm anxious to hear how this speaking engagement goes for him.

paradox

2009-04-12T18:21:00.000-07:00

Jamie at Our Missional Pilgrimage writes on The Community Longing to be the Church, out of his church planting experiences of late. He also beautifully summarizes the truth of the life of the believer as part of the body of Christ.

Here is just the last paragraph. I want you to go to his site to get the rest.

"We are The Community Longing To Be The Church. We live in the paradox of longing to become while already being. We are the Church. We are the Body. And yet we are so far from it. In this tension- in our sin and selfishness- we discover our desperate need for God and even, often grudgingly, for each other. We love God with all our hearts, but those hearts are divided. So we come together, through His Spirit to seek the love of the Father as we seek to become more like the Son. And we see that this is achieved in the chaos and brokenness of the Cross. Our hope is that, as we are poured out by and for Him, we can become the community He has created us to be. It is here that we discover the deeper truth:
"We are The Community Longing To Become Christ."

twit

2009-04-08T06:12:00.000-07:00

Why I won't be twittering.

thanks to Glenn.

what's right

2009-04-06T19:07:00.001-07:00

For all my whining, complaining, and pointing out what I see that's wrong, I do see some things in the institutional church (local and otherwise) that I think are good and right. I will hereafter be more intentional about highlighting those things.

I'll start with yesterday in our own church. We had a (limited) Seder meal during worship. It isn't the first time we've done it, but it was again meaningful to a lot of people, myself included. The occasional hacks and gags from children tasting horseradish for the first time, to the "what's that again?" queries from adults only added to the beauty of it. When we do the Seder, it feels like we're participating in communion the way it was intended and taught at that last Passover meal with the Christ.

It definitely was right.

one of those things

2009-03-25T18:27:00.001-07:00

Did you ever have to do something that you knew would make a bunch of people mad while the rest of the people would be indifferent (at best) about it? But you didn't have a choice about the matter and still had to it no matter what your reservations? And even at the last minute you couldn't decide exactly how to go about it because no matter what you know you'll feel like you failed?

I've got one of those things.

BTW, I'm sorry I've been so AWOL. I guess I don't feel that I've had much to say lately. The tide will surely turn, eventually.

small town hero

2009-03-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

Samson town comedian may have prevented more deaths

"In life, he never really got the spotlight he was seeking. But in the days
following the massacre that shattered their small Alabama community, some have
dropped the comedian label and replaced it with another: Hero."

"On Friday, witnesses and authorities said Maloy, the 10th and final
victim of Tuesday's shooting rampage by Michael McLendon, single-handedly tried
to end the violence with his beat-up old pickup."

weekend

2009-03-09T05:39:00.001-07:00

I spent my weekend with a 48 hour migraine. That's 24 hours more than usual. I think it's the first time.

I probably don't have to tell you how I feel about that, now that Monday morning has arrived.

a new look at sustainable agriculture

2009-03-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008

"Food is not simple. To make it, you have to balance myriad variables—soil, water, and nutrients, of course, but also various social, political, and economic realities. But because our consumer culture favors fixes that are fast and easy, our approaches toward food advocacy have been built around one or two dimensions of production, such as reducing energy use or eliminating pesticides, while overlooking factors that are harder to define (and ditto to market), such as worker safety.'
"Consider our love affair with food miles. In theory, locally grown foods have traveled shorter distances and thus represent less fuel use and lower carbon emissions—their resource footprint is smaller. And yet, for all the benefits of a local diet, eating locally doesn't always translate into more sustainability. Because the typical farmers market is supplied by dozens of different farms, each transporting its crops in a separate van or truck, a 20-pound shopping basket of locally grown produce might actually represent a larger carbon footprint than the same volume of produce purchased at a chain retailer, which gets its produce en masse, via large trucks."

"And for all our focus on the cost of moving food, transportation accounts for barely one-tenth of a food product's greenhouse gas emissions. Far more significant is how the food was produced—its so-called resource intensity. Certain foods, like meat and cheese, suck up so many resources regardless of where they're produced (a pound of conventional grain-fed beef requires nearly a gallon of fuel and 5,169 gallons of water) that you can shrink your footprint far more by changing what you eat, rather than where the food came from. According to a 2008 report from Carnegie Mellon University, going meat- and dairyless one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating locally every single day."

There's much more worth reading.

speaking of profiteering...

2009-02-26T07:59:00.000-08:00

I receive weekly emails from WorshipTogether.com. They offer free lead sheets weekly, and I'm more than happy to use what I can that's free because leading worship music these days means learning new music constantly. I appreciate the service and have even recently subscribed, through the church, to their monthly new song resource.

That said-- I received an email yesterday announcing a seminar coming to the area next month. It seemed standard fair for this sort of thing, until I read the bottom of the page. If you can't/don't need to attend the afternoon seminar for $55, you may still attend the evening worship service. For only $10.

Yes. These folks who are leading a seminar for worship leaders are bringing the day's teaching to a grand finale with a great big dose of table turning heresy. You must pay for worship. (Their words.) They didn't call it a concert; they called it worship. And it costs $10 to worship with these fine worship leaders. They must be a lot better at it than Jesus, since he never charged for worshiping with him.

holy courage

2009-02-26T05:55:00.001-08:00

Andy had the courage to admit that he and his family went to the Holy Land Theme Park. With photos. Interesting...?

High Hoops

2009-02-26T05:37:00.000-08:00

By David Hayward.

I just love this one.

representing Jesus

2009-02-24T05:31:00.000-08:00

From Kingdom Grace:

"If we represent Jesus, it isn’t okay if people think we’re an ass."

Enough said.

more than what I do

2009-02-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

From Drifting Free, by Erin Word:

"However, that place deep within our spirit where we hide away our freedom can be integrated into our various responsibilities with an honest admission that there is more to us than the things we do, the roles we play, and the needs we fill. We can allow those “other” aspects of self to surface and shine. If we chose not to fear the unknowns of the ocean, setting ourselves adrift into ourselves, we just may find that those around us will find healing - healing through the touch of a free woman."

Now, if only my dear friend Erin can teach me to do this. If I were to be honest, I'd ask what if there is no room for the rest of me in my life? The things I do, the roles I play, and the needs I fill seem to take up 110% as it is.

community and belief

2009-02-18T05:32:00.001-08:00

Pete Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal:

First- let me apologize for the length of this passage. I couldn't find a suitable way to break it into 2 posts. Second, I would much appreciate your comments on these thoughts of Rollins'.

"...if a Christian is sharing his or her faith, the discussion will likely concern a set of beliefs that one is asked to accept--beliefs that will often include the existence of God, the deity of Christ, the existence of sin, and the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. If these are accepted then the individual will be asked to engage in certain behavior, that is, to pray, repent, and join the local church. Then, once this has taken place, that individual will be welcomed into the Christian community, being invited to get involved in the life of the church."

"This approach works with the underlying idea that belief is of prime importance in Christianity, followed by behavior, followed by belonging. In contrast to this let us briefly consider the birth of an infant. When a child enters the world she does not begin with a system of beliefs that must be accepted before she belongs to the family. The infant, in a healthy environment, begins her life with absolute unconditional acceptance. The infant belongs to the family as the family now belongs to the infant. As the child grows she gradually learn to engage in the various rituals in which the family engages. These will include times when the family members eat together, play together, relax together, and so on. Then the child will begin to form a set of beliefs about the world into which she is already embedded. these will generally begin by mimicking the beliefs of the parents. Then these beliefs will likely come into conflict with hose of the parents, as she attempt to wrestle with the world for herself and test limits. And finally she will often come into some equitable relationship with the parents' beliefs, agreeing with some and disagreeing with others. Within a healthy, loving family each of these stages will be welcomed and allowed room to breathe."

"This approach thus places belonging first, followed by behavior, followed last and least, by belief. This model is what we find in operation within a broadly Hebraic approach to faith, and approach that emphasizes belonging to the community and engaging in the shared rituals of the community... What is important is that, regardless of the doubts and beliefs we have, we know that we have a vital place in the community and are encouraged to remain involved in the traditions--traditions that, at their best, provide ample space for doubt, ambiguity, and uncertainty."

For an interesting parallel observation, see Tony Jones' post Is Virtual Community True Community?.

the call of faith

2009-02-16T18:32:00.000-08:00

Pete Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal:

"If the truth affirmed by Christianity lay in something that people could intellectually grasp, then the truth of faith would be something that one could hold without ever hearing or following its demand. But Christianity, as a religion without religion, is too elusive to be held in this way. It does not allow for such a divorce between the hearing and the happening, for its saying does not occur in that which is said, but rather in the undergoing of an event. The divine Word, like that spoken of in Genesis, results in life being birthed in the depths of our being... However, the call of faith is one that is heard only in its transformative effect. It is a still, small voice that is heard only in being heeded."