** I was working on this before Mark blogged the last post. I hope this comes across right **
The Apostle's Creed has to be one of the most well known and famous creeds. I've been thinking about it recently, and specifically challenged by the line "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church". It strikes me that Christians all around the world say this creed, but everywhere I've been and in all streams of church I heard people slag off whole sections of the Church, or imply that 'so and so' isn't really church. "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church".... Can you say this?! "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church". Can I say it?
Based on this take a look atthis thought on Jason's blog. I guess the challenge is: what primary characteristic is going to mark the 'emerging church'? "Reactionary"? "Anger"? "Love"? What impression will we leave people with?
Now I'm not saying there isn't any place for critique and correction. But how will this be communicated, and is it our primary message? Do you want to be a prophet of doom or prophet of hope?
Can we have more stories of hope please! Where have you seen God working in you community? How has God been refreshing you and you community with new things? How has God been revitalizing you and your community with rediscovered traditions? How have you been able to communicate God's love recently? How have you experienced God and learned more about Him and his ways?
This is taken from an interesting speach by Bono at Penn Uni:
There's a truly great Irish poet his name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it." What does that mean to betray the age?.Posted by: jonny_norridge | 5/26/2004 05:11:00 pm |
Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.
Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was--which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.
Fast forward 50 years. May 17, 2004. What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age? What's worth spending your post-Penn lives trying to do or undo? It might be something simple.
It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth. Could that be it? Could that be it? Each of you will probably have your own answer, but for me that is it. And for me the proving ground has been Africa.
Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our pieties and our commitments because there's no way to look at what's happening over there and it's effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider Africans as our equals before God. There is no chance.
The worship in many churches is now chiefly made up of songs, more specifically the songs that make it on to popular worship albums. When choosing songs for a worship album one consideration is whether it is commercially viable. Will people buy it? An album has to make a profit so subsequent albums can be made. So our worship has become ‘commercial worship’, dictated by commercial markets. In the process ‘Worship’ or ‘Contemporary Worship Music’ has become a genre of music in itself, with its own particular melodies, sounds and arrangements — the result is a sort of Christianized Soft-Rock. If commercialism is humans giving other humans what they are prepared to pay money for, then has our worship has become human focused and self-serving? The thing that concerns me, is that is my reaction to it also self-serving? Am I bored of Pop Worship because it no longer satisfies me? Perhaps I need something like Andrew Jones’s ‘deep ecclesiology’ (embracing the Church in all it’s forms). Anyone for some deep worship?
* - Paraphrased from: The Story We Find Ourselves In (preface)
We just popped out to Tesco at 6.30pm to get a bottle of wine, so we can have a nice night in together in front of the TV - we got back at 7:15pm to find our door had been kicked in and my laptop taken with my case which also had my PDA in it... they can keep the laptop and the PDA...
It's the invasion of my home, not wanting to leave our house, not wanting to be here. It's the years worth of church accounts, the 4 years worth of art work and endless word doc's and stuff I've written... that just p's me off... big time!
Arrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Please pray for Tammy, she's feeling really insecure about stuff...
From May 3rd of my Schott's Original Miscallany desk Calendar:
Characteristics of Living Things
One of the main points I came away from the round table was to do with a new model for church. One reason I've given people in the past when they said, "So Jonny, when are you going to plant a church?" is "I wouldn't know what to do, I haven't seen a model for the type of church I'd like to 'plant'". Having said that, I have seen many good examples of church but none to copy out right. After last Saturday it occurred to me that my very answer showed how I'd missed a vital point.
One thing that came up a couple of times during the day was "what if instead of planting churches we plant seed of the gospel and nurture what grows." Andrew Jones said a similar thing at the NKOC conference last november. Now, I been thinking along with many others across the blog world what it means to be church and a follower of Jesus in the context of todays culture. I guess I've been thinking in terms of time/history and cultural paradigms, and thinking about what it means to plant the gospel in that situation. A good start, but what occurred to me as Jonathan Roe and Mark Berry spoke was that not only are we planting the gospel in time but all so in specific places and more importantly among specific people.
So what? Well, I'm starting to think, I will never find a model for a perfect type of church to plant in a postmodern culture. Because, I believe, for a church to work in this context it must be a natural expression of the specific people that make up that church. I suppose this is 'indigenous church' — a reaction to the globalization of church culture, where a one size fits all church culture it put on everyone (and if you don't like it then thats your problem). I'd been thinking (in hindsight very modern thinking) of coming up with a perfect model and then getting people to join. What if you see God working in peoples lives and see what the Spirit is doing in you particular context and locality and nurture that. As you do this you still won't know exactly what you model for church is because it will be something that evolves and changes as the Spirit moves among the people. I think Steve has just posted similar thought to this. So is there no model or is the model indigenous-evolving church? Planting seeds of the gospel and nurture what grows, making disciples of all types of people.
