March 2004 Archives

Bear with me. I'm hoping to get together some more thoughts soon. I think I've been going through a bit of a transition, and I've been processing my thoughts rather than posting them. I'm not the only one.

Some good information at Signposts, including this:

It [the model presented] seems to be able to encompass the idea that all models of Church are suitable and applicable for different contexts. So much of the talk in the emerging Church scene is often centerered around the evils of the christendom model. It changes things when we can say: God has, and God is working with all of his people, through all different forms.

The whole post is worth reading.

Quoted by Charles Colson:

Remember the warning of C. S. Lewis: If you're seeking happiness, don't choose Christianity, choose port wine.

Found through Connexion:

Our churches, like secular associations, are concerned with fund-raising, beautiful buildings, large numbers, comforting sermons from highly qualified preachers, while they display indifference to the poor, and to the pariahs in society - drunks, whores, homosexuals, the poor, the insane, and the lonely. Jesus himself would have no place in our all-too-respectable churches, for he did not come to help the righteous but to bring sinners to repentance. Our churches are not equipped to do that sort of thing. (John White)

I'm now on the brink of giving up, not Christianity, but church. Not the true church, not the community of Jesus-followers who journey together toward God for his pleasure and for the sake of others, but the organization that has replaced the living body.

Too often, the whole church event feels like that, like a well-orchestrated event more than a throbbing-with-life community. The raw realism of the Bible is too often sugar-coated with cheerily optimistic promises that God wants you happily married, financially secure, and alive with a sense of adventure and romance. Whether it's a megachurch parading its A-team every Sunday before a packed house of struggling people who are helped to pretend things aren't so bad, or whether it's a single congregation of a hundred faithful members trying to believe that life can work better than it does, the problem is still the same: Too often the church is aiming its people toward self-fulfillment through God's blessings and away from the failure and pain that could bring people together as the community of the broken but loved and hopeful because of Jesus.

I once gave up Christianity as I knew it and discovered Christianity as the Spirit reveals it. I'm now giving up on church as I've experienced it and looking for church as the Spirit designed it. (Larry Crabb, introduction to Reclaiming God's Original Intent for the Church)

I haven't posted in quite a while because I've been preoccupied. I just returned from my first residency of a D.Min. program at Gordon-Conwell. A few things happened there that gave me a lot of hope.

We were sitting around the room the first day introducing ourselves. I met all kinds of people - an Anglican pastor from Ontario, pro-Bush supporters, even someone who was just ordained a prophetess to the nations in a charismatic group. Oh yeah, there was also a pastor of an emerging-type church from Portland. I wondered what we were all doing in the same room.

We tend to gather in tribes, and view others with suspicion. This even happens in the emerging church. I've been disappointed as I've sensed the same type of exclusion-ism take place there, no matter what the issue.

But for two weeks, I was stuck together with people who believed and acted differently than I do. How refreshing to be forced into it. And how refreshing to find that it was a joy to be stuck together.

Part of what I need to die to, I'm sure, is my tendency to see what God is doing only in those who resemble me. The Kingdom is much bigger than I realize.

No, that's not a suicidal cry. Well, it is in reference to the flesh, I guess.
As Christians we all want to be what God wants us to be. Even as the earth does, we long for the day when we will become what we were truly intended to be. For now we're in this "in between state"; the state of who we already are, and who were still becoming. In this state, we must make a daily choice, to die. Over and over again, I must choose, not my will, but yours be done. There is no time when this is easy, and I've lived long enough to realize, be careful if it's seems easy, because "pride comes before a fall."
But herein lies the hope, the point isn't just to die or in dying, the point is in what is made possible if we choose to die. And the reality is simple, through Christ, death leads to life. Life, right here and now.

Even as a seed must die to bear fruit, so we too must choose to die, not just to do it and win that battle, but because it's through that death that the resurrection of the new you comes. It's through that death that we remain attached to the life giving vine. It's through that death that our master bears fruit in us and through us. It's through the experience of the death of ouselves, of our flesh, that we experience the resurrection, the truth of God's Kingdom, here and now.

And so, even as Jesus endured the cross because of the joy set before him, we endure death, because of the joy set before us; Kingdom life!