Pt. I continued- All quotes.

"The missional church represents God in the encounter between God and human culture. It exists not because of human goals or desires, but as a result of God's creating and saving work in the world. It is a visible manifestation of how the Good News of Jesus Christ is present in human life and transforms human culture to reflect more faithfully God's intentions for creation. It is a community that visibly and effectively participates in God's activity, just as Jesus indicated when he referred to it in metaphorical language as salt, yeast, and light in the world."

Three overarching principles...

1. The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology. By incarnational we mean it does not create sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel. Rather, the missional church disassembles itself and seeps into the cracks and crevices of a society in order to be Christ to those who don't yet know him.

2. The missional church is messianic, not dualistic, in its spirituality. That is, it adopts the worldview of Jesus the Messiah, rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God's place in it as more holistic and integrated.

3. The missional church adopts an apostolic, rather than a hierarchical, mode of leadership. By apostolic we mean a mode of leadership that recognizes the fivefold model detailed by Paul in Ephesians 4. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flat-leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as the currently popular pastoral and teaching gifts.


-the emerging missional church must see itself as being able to interact meaningfully with culture without eve being beguiled by it.

-to see itself as a missionary movement rather than as an institution.




The above were all quoted from chapter 1, The Shaping of Things to Come.

Thoughts from The Shaping of Things to Come. Pt. I

I am currently reading the book: The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. It's kinda thick, kinda heavy, and it takes a bit of wading to get through. All of that because it is full of ideas and insight into culture, church and the world we live in. So to help process my own thoughts, I am going to spew out some of what I am processing, some of what sticks out and whatever else deems itself worthy of being spelled out. Note: most of the following will be extracts taken from the book or their thoughts in my words, with my occasional thoughts thrown in. I will try to mention when it is me thinking out loud.

Part I

There is a phenomenal shift taking place in our Western World, a spiritual awakening happening and everyday the institutionalized church is becoming less and less relevant. Perhaps the description of a festival that takes place in the Black Rock Desert in the Western United States can describe this awakening, this hunger that is being felt by humanity.

The festival is called Burning Man.

"Each year thousands of artists, musicians, bohemians punks, taggers, rappers and other artistes or simply interested bystanders journey into the 107-degree heat of the desert for a festival like no other. It is a temporary community of people committed to generosity environmentalism, celebration, spirituality, and above all, art. Burning Man has been so successful over the past five years that it has come to represent those trends that pose the greatest challenges to the Christian church. It dares offer acceptance, community, an experience of god, redemption, and atonement. In short, it resembles everything the church is supposed to offer. But many people are finding the transformative power of Burning Man to be far and away more effective than anything they experience in church."

What is it that is attractive and so real and so true? There are six key elements:

BELONGING: (says the official website) "You belong here and you participate. You´re not the weirdest kid in the classroom- there's always somebody there who's thought up something you never even considered. You're there to breathe art... You're here to to build a community that needs you and relies on you."

In a society that has been fractured by economic rationalism, globalization, racial disunity, ideological differences, fear, and violence, the Burning Man community claims to offer solace, welcome, and acceptance.

SURVIVAL: It is not for the faint-hearted. It involves venturing into the desert and surviving without restaurants, air conditioning, or shopping malls. With all the comforts of home stripped away, participants are forced to look deep within themselves, to discover who they truly are, and to summon up from within themselves the will and the power to survive- both in the desert and after they return to the world outside.

EMPOWERMENT: (says the official website) "You're here to create. Since nobody at Burning Man is a spectator, you're here to build your own new world..." Everyone is to participate, no one is deemed to be without talent.

SENSUALITY: Burning Man is a highly sensual, experiential community. "You're here to experience..."

CELEBRATION: The crescendo of the festival is the burning of the large human effigy in the middle of the camp. Participants have said that as the Burning Man goes up in flames, they experience a deeply spiritual sensation. Artists also cast their works into the flames. There is apparently a purging, a form of atonement, and a sense of liberation and joy.

LIMINALITY: The word liminal in Latin signifies an in-between time. A transition, temporary period of human transformation. The Burning Man community appears in August and takes over the seeming untouched playa (desert), then leaves in September leaving no trace it was ever there.

This festival, judge it how you will, is a cry from an emerging postmodern generation for a community of belonging, spirituality, sensuality, empowerment, and liberation. Of course the transformative power of the gospel of Jesus Christ is greater than anything offered at this festival, but is the church living out and expressing that? (excerpts from pages 3-5 occasionally in my own words)


Me thinking out loud-
What does the church currently have to say or offer? Is the church prepared to be a community that offers those (Biblical) characteristics in some form to people who will never cross the threshold of a church building? These needs, desires, and longings expressed by the artists at Burning Man are not so far off from most people's. There are real and they are legitimate. Surely Jesus has something to say to those feelings and states of being as much as the Burning Man festival. As the church, we find ourselves a long way off from being relevant to anybody willing to express the spiritual awakening which they are experiencing. There is something of those six elements in each of us, whether we have smothered them in the name of security and institution or not. There is something of truth being expressed in them. I believe Jesus has something to say to it and as his church we had better too.

lack of tiredness

aye aye aye. insomnia in august. early monday morning classes cancelled. all motivation to go to bed- out the window. perhaps i'll just have to stay up all night squeezing my brain for words. and this is all i manage to come up with for a post! maybe inspiration will come around 3.

Sonnet

The Chasm


Laughter or sarcasm. Sarcasm, laughter . . .

Contagious, infectious and likely to spread
into rushing flames. Be careful which you
choose.......(No matter- you'll probably lose.)

But lest you worry about choices and friends,
remember that fog turns quickly . . .
where rusty creeks run, and a tree ends up turning
into tiny debris. Water spigots and lost friends
have - not much in common.

..................................So avoid Radio Flyers
with small children in back, for what they may lack,
are those false things in the night.

But always make sure to embrace the knife that bridges
...the chasm
so oft created not from laughter- but sarcasm.

alone

This is the photo of someone sitting in an airport. Someone who has been there for a while, someone who no longer has a suitcase. Or perhaps someone who is about to lose it. Sitting in Madrid. Or was it Heathrow? Thinking about it now, coulda been Chicago. There was a foreboding sense that it was about to happen. It was nearly said out loud as they parted ways at the check-in. Go figure. It was as if the connection between suitcase and owner was tangible up till London and then all went blank. The changeover was way too fast, there was no way it could have made the switch... Something wasn't right.

Waiting in Madrid at the luggage belt watching bag after bag come out.

Waiting in Madrid at the luggage belt watching no bags come out. Alone.

Long walk to the lost baggage desk.

Walk out of the airport alone, with empty hands and nothing but the clothes on my back which were about to be worn for more hours straight than was ever meant.

That is what this photo is about.

into someone else's life.

Tonight I came across a blog by a guy I don't know and haven't ever met but we happen to have a friend or two in common. As I read through his thoughts on his life I was struck by the honest, open simplicity of the way he described various occurrences from the last while. No pretenses, just communication. It was refreshing actually. It was like he was writing for himself, yet aware that people like me would be looking in, and so he explains everything very neatly, almost like it was for a child. Although what he writes about is not remotely childish, perhaps it is as a child would view the world. I dig it.

It is one thing to read a friend's blog. It's great actually. But it's something entirely different to look into someone's life whom you have never met and wouldn't even recognize on the street- and finish feeling like you have been been for a two hour coffee with them for the third time that week...

I think we'll go for coffee again.

quote by Eugene Peterson

The great masters of the imagination do not make things up out of thin air; they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. They train us to what is right before our eyes. They then train us to see it whole- not in fragments but in context, with all the connections. They connect the visible and the invivsible, the this with the that. They assist us in seeing what is around us all the time but which we regularly overlook. With their help we see it not as commonplace but as awesome, not as banal but as wondrous. For this reason the imagination is one of the the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a lap out of the everyday but a plunge into its depths.