A Generous Orthodoxy arrived today. I’ll probably break one of my personal rules and bump it right to the top of my reading list. I usually don’t start a new book until I have finished a previous one (otherwise I’d be halfway through a lot of books!), but I’m pretty eager about this one. I’ll probably do the same thing when Donald Miller’s new book is released.

I’ve had a few conversations lately with some friends who read blogs like this, but they are too chicken to comment. (You know who you are!) That’s the whole point of this. I know that myself, and many other bloggers, consider our thoughts to be only partially formed. (In fact, many of mine probably classify as embryos at best!) We blog so that others can contribute and help us develop our thoughts further. It’s all about emergence. So speak up, whether it be here or elsewhere!

Some continuing thoughts from the previous entry…

Why do I feel drawn to less structure within church?
Structure within churches has been something that has turned off many. It is at the core of the argument for those who want no part of ‘organized religion’. Structures can become corrupt, but we shouldn’t assume that all structure is therefore evil. Quite the opposite, I think that there is a form of structure that is defined for us in the Bible that is a vital part of what needs to be included in a church. It is not a structure of hierarchy (which is really what turns most people off) — it is a supernatural structure of giftedness.

God created us to all be a part of the church structure by contributing our gifts. I think it is pretty clear that he did this so that we would need each other, and not go about following Jesus alone. It seems to me that the usage of gifts is critical to creating a genuine community as God intended it. 1 Corinthians 12:7 points out that gifts are given for the benefit of all. We also have a responsibility, according to 1 Peter 4:10, to use our gifts for the benefit of others.

There is a supernatural structure that is already in place. I’m not sure what it has to look like, but it brings up many questions. I’m just going to ask them for now…maybe I can share more thoughts on them later. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your feedback as I try to hammer out what this can/should look like.

• Is a community incomplete unless all the gifts mentioned in Scripture are present within it?
• If not all the gifts are necessary to form a complete community, are there core gifts that need to be present?
• If we are in a community where we don’t have an opportunity to share our gifts, are we really in genuine community?
• Here’s one I’ve been rethinking of late — When 1 Corinthians 12:7 says that the gifts are for the common good, is that for the common good of fellow believers, or the common good of the world?

Note: There is still more to the structure conversation — I’ve just chosen to focus on the gifts part. However, this is clearly a precendent in Scripture for some to take shepherding/leading roles of some sort. I’ll just have to tackle that another time… (My “Things to Think About Later” list is getting longer!)

Been playing around with different means of reading RSS feeds, and wondering what others like using. Up until now, I’ve been using BlogLines, which I find useful, especially the notifier that goes in the system tray. However, I’ve been playing around with Pluck as well. It looks like it could be great if I take the time to get it all set up. The downside is that it is built in to Internet Explorer only, and I have all but abandoned IE for FireFox.

It’s not often that I recommend books that I haven’t even finished, but I am enjoying one so much right now that I must. It is Mere Discipleship by Lee C Camp, and it is excellent.

I’ve been in the process for several months of thinking through what it would like it to look like if I were participate in a church plant. I like some of the thinking that is happening among those align with the emergent church, and yet I’m not quite as eager, as some seem to be, to completely abandon everything that happens in most evangelical churches. (Thanks to Jordon Cooper and Maggi Dawn for some of their recent thoughts on this.) This is a some of my thinking as I try to figure it out…

I recently received an email some friends who have been looking for a church. In their email, they ask these questions:

Why do I feel like church should be small and intimate?
Why do I feel drawn to less structure within church?

These questions were likely rhetorical, so I figured I’d just answer them for myself — and anyone else who may be reading this, of course. Though those questions seem to go together, I’m not sure they need to. Small and intimate and structure are not necssarily mutually exclusive. Let’s look at the questions one at a time:

Why do I feel like church should be small and intimate?
John Eldredge in Waking the Dead speaks to this far better than I can:

Going to church with hundreds of other people to sit and hear a sermon doesn’t ask much of you. It certainly will never expose you. That’s why most folks prefer it. Because community will. It will reveal where you have yet to become holy, right at the very moment you are so keenly aware of how they have yet to become holy. It will bring you close and you will be seen and you will be known, and therein lies the power, and therein lies the danger.

I think there is a hunger in all of us for what he describes. There is a safety in the pews, but it there is also a dissatisfaction as well. There is a sensed need for something beyond that. I know my friends have a sense of community like this with a few others. Perhaps that is why they are so dissatisfied as they drop in to church services where they know no one and interact on only the most superficial of levels. They know those services can’t better bring something to them that they have already found.

If that is true, do my friends even need to be a part of a ‘church service’? Obviously, many have said no, at least to the common worship service as most Christians know it. Is there a need for someone to experience the body of Christ beyond these small intimate communties. This brings us to their next question, but I already know that will be a longer entry, so I will tackle it in a future entry…

Just finished reading How People Grow by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. This book presents a great picture of what growth as a Jesus follower looks like. These guys truly understand, better than me at least, that following Jesus means that we come to a point of wholeness in our lives. Jesus just doesn’t desire for us to grow spiritually (as if that can be it’s own category), but we will grow in all area of our lives because transforming us into who truly shaped us to be is what Jesus does best. I’ve felt it before, but more than ever, I think that counseling is something worthwhile for everyone…not just those with problems.

Perhaps most interesting were the many examples they used of group sessions they’ve been in. So many times, these examples showed a picture of what an authentic vulnerable community could look like. If the small group ‘programs’ of churches could somehow look like this, then we would begin to realize the wholeness that God has in store for all of us.

I love the teaching of Rob Bell. I recently ran across some audio files of some teaching he did which I think represent him at his best. It is from a conference at ResLife, which is another church in Grand Rapids. From listening to it, I think the topic must have been “Reaching the Next Generation” or something like that. You will need to click on 2004 Conference, and then on Ministry Intensives.

Those of you familiar with his teaching might have heard variations of these messages in other forums, but these are still worth hearing. For those of you who haven’t heard him, this is a good place to start.

I had an intriguing conversation with a friend a few days ago. He was in a conversation with a friend of his who was asking all sorts of questions about who Jesus was. One of his questions was whether or not Mary Magdalene was the girlfriend of Jesus. His reasoning was that it just didn’t seem reasonable that Jesus could remain celibate for 33 years.

Interesting enough, this guy is very interested in buddhism. The Dalai Lama and buddhist monks apparently have no problems pursuing a life of abstinence. Why would someone not question that, but question Jesus’ ability to do it?

I suppose our first reaction would typically be to blame satan for deceiving people. Or perhaps to blame the world for being so blind to who Jesus is/was. Maybe we should blame his followers (including me)? Perhaps our spirituality, at least in western culture, has not shown its mystical edge. And if Jesus’ followers don’t seem mystical, perhaps his don’t as well…

But what does it look like to be a mystical Jesus follower?

I decided to switch to WordPress. It’s a little more difficult to do some of the layout on my end, but beyond that, it is just a lot more user friendly for readers to leave comments, as well as for me to post. I still will have a few things to add to get this site up to speed, but then again…is a site ever finished?

(By titling this “celebrate the residue”, I’m willing to bet that I’ve just put together a phrase that has never before been used in the whole of human history!)

For the first time in a long time, I’ve been using a commentary for my devotional reading: Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters by Tom (NT) Wright. This morning, while reading from his comments on 1 Timothy 4:1-5, I thought he had some comments that would be a good addition to the discussion below on cultural relevance:

“This, in fact, is the underlying point, and it needs making again and again in almost every generation. If in doubt, read Genesis 1: God saw all that he made, and it was very good. That is the foundation of all genuine Christian (and for that matter Jewish) thinking. Anything which implies that some part of the created order is bad in itself is the first swish of the axe which will cut off the branch on which we should be sitting — the belief that the God who made the world in the first place is remaking it through Jesus and the spirit, and that we are called, not to abandon our humanity but to celebrate its rescue, redemption and remaking.”

A good friend of mine came back from a trip to the mountains this week, and he described his experience as heavenly. Few, if any, of us struggle to see God’s beauty when we are in nature. We have no need to indicate whether or not a babbling brook is ‘Godly’. In light of this, how interesting is it that we can so easily determine that a person, who is made in the image of God, can be described as ‘ungodly’?

The challenge for us, is not to determine whether or not someone is with, or without, God. Rather, it is to see the residue of God’s image in every person, and, in the words of Tom Wright, ‘celebrate its rescue, redemption and remaking’.

I very much like this quote from The New Testament and the People of God by NT Wright:

“The main thing that would have struck observers of early Christianity was not its ‘religious’ side, nor indeed its early doctrinal formulations, but its total way of life.” (emphasis mine)

I ran across a great article by Brian McLaren which is recommended to all. Thanks to Pernell Goodyear for posting this link on his site.

Was doing some study for a teaching a few weeks ago and ran across a little insight I’ve thought about a number of times since…

In Acts 3:19, Peter is speaking to a crowd in Solomon’s Colonnade. He tell them that times of refreshing will come when they repent and turn to God. The word refreshing in the original language carries the idea of a cooling that comes from a breeze.

However, there is also a medical meaning to this term. Luke, the author of Acts, had a medical background, so certainly this meaning would have been familiar to him. The word can also mean the healing that comes when a wound is exposed to the open air or breeze. Not to be lost on this is the fact that the word breath or breeze is also the word for Spirit.

So the idea is that when we open our hearts and reveal our sins to God, his Spirit is able to come in and heal the wounds. What better way to look at sin than a wound to our lives that needs to be healed by God?

I was playing around with some colors to add a little more flavor to the site. One my desktop, it’s kind of hard to read, but comes out very clear on my laptop. Don’t know if the problem is just my desktop monitor, or if these colors are a little more difficult. Please let me know how it’s looking for you… (Of course, if you’re just reading the feed, then what do you care?)