We're Not Alone

I enjoyed reading the following, which is about others on a journey that reminded me of ours:

"We don’t have a name, and don’t plan to have one either. We are a 24/7 community whose lives intertwine throughout the week. We have found a place of openness, trust and confidence that has enabled us to go through some truly awful things together. That’s cool. We gather in a home. We’re pretty lousy at integrating the kids (4-18 yrs). We’ve not been brilliant at the whole worship thing and we’re still figuring out mission. We have seen a number of de-churched restored to God and His Body. That’s cool too. And we are in the process of discipling a Muslim family in their home. See our vision is not to grow our thing bigger and bigger until it bursts into two, we reckon it’s more fun having babies than getting divorced. (I think that’s the right way round.)
In fact our plan is not to build anything at all, we just want to give stuff away, we want the Kingdom we have experienced to flow ever outwards. We’re not interested in having a sexy looking church in the middle to which we are constantly trying to get people along, where we desperately try to hold onto everyone and everything in sight. We want to see people going and making disciples wherever God says to go and if we can serve them in that we’ll be happy.
Why the heck should we expect people to leave their culture to come into our weird Christian culture? Jesus told us to leave ours and enter into theirs."

If you are interested, you can read the entire article at:
http://www.emergingchurch.info/stories/bath/index.htm

Same Old Soapbox

This thing of polar opposites, and having to chose one in order to find a place in society, is just plain messed up.

I think there are two "real" polar opposites: good & evil.

Yet we often get confused and buy into a lie that the real polar opposites are some other dichotomy. So we pick one side of that dichotomy, assume it is "good," the opposite of it is "evil," and then we align our entire lives according to that belief system. And the longer we play along with it, the stronger the delusion becomes. And, if you try to deny this lie and live outside the given polar extremes, then you end up having very little voice in the world because everyone else is running around promoting their pole while hating the other. Here are a few of the dichotomies I am talking about (I suspect there are many more):

Catholic vs. Protestant

Democrat vs. Republican

Liberal vs. Conservative

White collar vs. blue collar

______ism vs. ________ism (you fill in the blanks)


Good and evil, in my opinion, have been clever enough to invade all of the labels above. They cannot be neatly divided into one of the two labels, but both have found a subtle home in both side of each. Kingdom people must be brave enough to quit playing the given polar games and to admit the larger reality.

OK, I'll come down of the soap box . . . for now.