So let's be honest

www.adventconspiracy.org www.rethinkchristmas.com Love to hear anyone's feedback on these two ideas. This flies in the face of many of the traditional cultural habits we allow ourselves to slide into at Christmas time.

" The business of the church is to tell and to embody a story, the story of God's mighty acts in creation and redemption and God's promises concerning what will be in the end . The church affirms the truth of the story by celebrating it, interpreting it, and enacting it in the life of the contemporary world. It has no other way of affirming its truth. If it supposes that its truth can be authenticated by reference to some allegedly more reliable truth claim, such as those offered by the philosophy of religion, then it has implicitly denied the truth by which it lives. In this sense, the church shares the posmodernists' replacement of eternal truths with a story. But there is a profound difference between the two. For the postmodernists, there are many stories, but no overarching truth by which they can be assessed. They are simply stories. The church's affirmation is that the story it tells, embodies, and enacts is the true story and that others are to be e...

Are we as a Church involved in society? "... whenever the church's involvement in society becomes secondary and optional, whenever the church invites people to take refuge in the name of Jesus without challenging the dominion of evil, it becomes a countersign of the kingdom... The content of our gospel then is in the devastating formulation of Orlando Costas - "a conscience-soothing Jesus, with an unscandalous cross, an otherworldly kingdom, a private, inwardly spirit, a pocket God, a spiritualized Bible, and an escapist church." - David Bosch Any thoughts about the quote? Would you agree or disagree?

Just got this quote and question from Nathan this past week. What do you think? "Discipleship is no easy church program. It is a summons away from our characteristic safety nets of social support. It entails a resolve to follow a leader who himself has costly habits, in order to engage in disciplines that disentangle us from ways in which we are schooled and stupefied and that introduce new habits that break old vicious cycles among us, drawing us into intimacy with this calling God. Discipleship requires a whole new conversation in a church that has been too long accommodating, at ease in the dominant values of culture that fly in the face of the purposes of God." Brueggemann, Walter "Evangelism and Discipleship: The God Who Calls, the God Who Sends." in Chilcote and Warner, The Study of Evangelism: Exploring a Missional Practice of the Church. Eerdmands Publishing: Grand Rapids. 2008. Do we, as leaders have "costly habits"?

Full of God? I appreciate what McLaren in his book "A New Kind of Christianity" says: "So our quest calls us first and foremost to nurture a robust spiritual life-not only a deep commitment to serve God, but also a deep desire to know and love God, to make room, as Gamaliel said , for God to be truly in us and in our quest. That means that we need as our models more than great thinkers and theologians; we need great saints; women and me of the Holy Spirit, women and men who are full of God."(italics mine) Two thoughts: 1. People think of a "model" as perfect or an ideal. Not sure that is the best way to think about this concept in todays culture. I do not want to copy someone because it destroys my uniqueness and can shift my self-perspective. Better to understand a desire to train my live to "see" people who are full of God. What does that look like? If we do not know what that looks like we may catch ourselves emulating something slightly diffe...

What are your thoughts on Brian McLarin's quote from A new kind of Christianity : "As we near the five hundredth anniversary of the day when Martin Luther came out of the closet, so that all would know what he had been thinking in secret, it is time, I propose to reinvigorate the dialogue by having many of us come out of our closets and admit we have been asking these and other important questions in secret. We must stop being ashamed of our questions, and we must stop pretending to be content with unsatisfying answers. Instead, we must let our questions and our fresh readings of Scripture become passageways out of the thought boxes and mental stages and cages that can confine us. We must let our questions be the picks and shovels of a Spirit-inspired jailbreak. Once free, we can launch an exodus and continue our adventure, our quest for truth in the wild, unmapped places, as the biblical story beckons us to do." Doing so is scary. We don't want to betray our heritag...

I have always tried to create an environment of learning and questioning. What I now realize is that many people I had and have the opportunity to encounter do not have a place where they can question faith, life, God. I hope that this blog will allow you the space to question, in the hope that you will ultimately become a more mature, integrated, passionate, disciple of Jesus. Bottom line. . . I care about you. My heart wants to help you experience Jesus as I have and still do everyday.