We have some interesting ideas about life. Most of them tied to Greek philosophy. In the church among follower of Jesus, we have tied our way of thinking, reflecting, and living around more Greek philosophy than Biblical theology. Here’s a recent presentation that deals with some of those issues.

Enjoy!

What if church used Open Space Technology on occasion? The following are its four basic concepts:

• Whoever comes/is here are the right people
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
• Whenever it’s over, it’s over

I might add, everyone gets an opportunity to speak. What would that look like? Maybe we should ask Paul, he wrote about it somewhere!

Another Sunday has come and gone in which I spent a short period of time inside a building where we followed a pattern that has come to be called church. We gather. We drink coffee and have surface conversation. We sing. We hear announcements. We listen or not to someone teach/preach. We are invited to ask God into our broken lives or we are beckoned to an altar to ask forgiveness of our sins. We drop by a glass with wine or juice and broken crackers and dip and eat or small shot glasses reminiscent of a bar are passed around with juice or wine and we call it communion. Yesterday as I left this weekly routine, I asked myself the same question that the song title asks: “Is that all there is?” Surely, the answer has to be no!

One wonders when we will change our paradigm. When will we discover that Sunday is the day of the week that should remind us that in Jesus we live in a new creation as new human beings with the assignment of demonstrating that new creation to others around us. Tom Wight asked in his recent book, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today, the following question: “What are you going to do this Sunday that is creative, that brings justice and mercy, that offers healing and hope” (170). One has to wonder that instead of living to turn the world right side up, we continue to live in the world thinking its thoughts and practicing its actions. One wonders what would occur if we took Wright’s question seriously? One wonders why we are always inviting God to do something when he is working already nonstop? One wonders when we will comprehend that he is inviting us into what he is doing, inviting us into his unbroken world instead of us inviting him into our broken world. So, what are you going to do next Sunday that brings justice, mercy, healing and hope to your neck of the woods?

Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ
Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola
Thomas Nelson (June 1, 2010)

Years ago, as a rather insignificant young pastor in a large denomination, I fearlessly (too fearlessly, as it turned out) stood before some 10,000 delegates to propose we change the order of our denomination’s statement of faith and move our No. 3 article of faith, “The Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ,” to the top of the list and the then No. 1 article, “The Scriptures Inspired,” to the No. 3 slot. Was not interested in changing the language of the articles, just their order. My motive was pure, I thought. I believed that Christ, as the Bible said, should “have the preeminence in all things”; especially, one would think, in a Christian creedal statement. To my shame, I was jeered off the floor. One colleague later scolded me and said he was “ashamed” of me. It took years for me to live down a reputation of being “renegade” and “liberal” (I was neither). Yet here I am, some thirty-plus years later, more convinced than ever that my proposal was a good idea and I have just found vindication in a new book by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola: Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ. (Where were these guys when I needed them?)

Occasionally, despite all my pious religiosity, I get the uneasy feeling that Jesus has left the building. I, like you, have a tendency to become wrapped-up, even obsessed, in whatever my pet issue is at the moment. It may be anything from evangelism to the environment to end-time prophecy. This is understandable since every year hundreds of titles flood the Christian market dealing with every topic imaginable and we sometimes find ourselves swept up in the current hot topic. But in the end it all comes back to that elemental question Jesus once asked Peter: “Who do you say that I am?” When Christ ceases to be the nexus of our faith and we become absorbed in all the stuff “about” Jesus, and not in Christ himself, we lose our focus.

“The Christian life properly conceived and experienced,” affirm the authors, “is simply a reproduction and a reliving of the life of Jesus.” But Christianity is not just a matter of striving to be “like” Jesus. If that is our sole aim, we are doomed to failure. No one has done or can do it. Rather, we must “be” Christ. Don’t jump to conclusions by that statement. The authors go on to say, “Jesus doesn’t want us to be ‘like’ him; he wants to share his resurrection life with us, [not just] imitate him. Christ wants to live in and through us. The gospel is not the imitation of Christ; it is the implantation and impartation of Christ. We are called to more than mediate the truth. We are called to manifest Jesus’ presence.” Or, as George MacDonald prayed, “O Christ, my life, possess me utterly. Take me and make a little Christ of me.” Quoting Bishop Ryle, with whom the authors agree, “Christ is all. Those three words are the essence and substance of Christianity. If our hearts can really go along with them, it is well with our souls. If not, we may be sure we have yet much to learn.”

Author’s Bio
Leonard Sweet currently occupies the E. Stanley Jones Chair of Evangelism, serving from 1995 to 2001 as Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Theological School at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. A Visiting Distinguished Professor at George Fox University in Portland, Oregon, and President Emeritus of United Theological Seminary, he is a weekly contributor to the online preaching resource, Sermons.com. Author of more than two hundred articles, twelve hundred published sermons, and almost forty books, Sweet is currently working on two textbooks: one on preaching, Giving Blood, and one on evangelism, Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who is Already There. His most recent book is So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church and his weekly podcast is “Napkin Scribbles.”

Frank Viola is a best-selling author and international conference speaker. His books include Revise Us Again, Reimagining Church, The Untold Story of the New Testament Church and the best-selling From Eternity to Here.

Different but Equal: Going Beyond the Complementarian/Egalitarian Debate
Derek Morphew
Vineyard International Publishing (December 29, 2008)

In the introduction to his latest book Different But Equal: Going Beyond the Complementarian-Egalitarian Debate, Derek Morphew points out that in recent years some sweeping theological changes have taken place in his thinking regarding the place of women in Christian ministry and leadership. Not changed so much, he writes, “but I would rather say that it has evolved, as I have tried to keep pace with literature on the subject.” With that I can relate. Growing things change—even growing beliefs. To never vary one’s point of view and hold the same position one did a decade or more ago is no virtue; it just means that a person has stopped learning, stopped growing. There’s nothing admirable about an adult still sucking the same decades-old pacifier. At least that’s what I have told myself and after reading Morphew, I felt vindicated. Evolving Evangelical—I think that’s a label I can live with.

Morphew’s developing outlook especially regarded the role of women in official leadership within the church, an issue that has been a perennial hot topic in religious circles for centuries. Conservative groups holding to a strict literal interpretation of scripture often exclude women from ecclesiastical leadership on what they consider “biblical grounds.” In this view women are to “keep silent in the church,” and not exert authority over, but always be in “subjection” to, men, holding that only men lead in the church because they are, well, males. In this view, only men are pastors, teachers, and theologians and women, um, their contribution is appreciated—they can cook the meals at church banquets and clean up the mess—but by and large they are expected to dutifully follow … silently. Women, who are qualified in every respect except gender, are repeatedly passed over in favor of often less qualified men. Early-on I wondered how a person’s sex could possibly make an unqualified male more qualified than a qualified female based solely on gender. I wondered what the wisdom was in subjugating half the population of God’s kingdom? But over time, with the rise of feminism (both secular and evangelical) and the blistering debate about women’s place in the church heated up, I, like Morphew, decided to take a closer and hopefully more objective look at scripture and come to some independent conclusions.

In Different but Equal, Morphew articulates some of the changes that took place in his thinking as he weaved his way through the minefield, re-read more dispassionately those hotly debated gender-specific biblical passages, and considered Jewish customs, Christian theology, and church history to offer this timely view that lies somewhere between excessive “complementarian” (men and women have complementary but different roles and responsibilities in society and religion) and extreme “egalitarian” (in God’s sight all people regardless of sex are equal in every respect) viewpoints. Morphew’s is a position that allows for differing interpetations while preserving unity. He writes: “The arguments between these two positions are too nuanced for the differences to become the basis for a breach in fellowship.”

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Artist Bio
Derek Morphew, Ph.D., University of Cape Town, South Africa is a theologian, pastor, and teacher who has been involved in pastoring and church planting for the past 30 years. He serves on the national leadership team of the Association of Vineyard Churches in South Africa, is the international director of Vineyard Bible Institute, and is a highly respected author and speaker at conferences, churches, and universities.

Growing with Purpose: Connecting with God Every Day
Shane Hipps
Zondervan (February 1, 2009)

I am of a generation that thinks a TV remote control is something like high technology. But I’m on a learning track, I think. Along my journey to technological savviness I chanced across a book that has opened my eyes even wider to the world in which we live: Shane Hipps’ Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith. For those of my generation, I probably need to explain that pixels are those imperceptible little dots of light on your TV screen that taken together make up the image you see. These tiny flickering pixels go unnoticed while we watch the larger picture that feeds our imagination and, as Hipps shows, manipulates our lives. He warns, “We are only puppets of our technology” if we remain asleep and allow our lives to be shaped by the shimmering points of light that invade our consciousness (and unconsciousness) all day long. He hopes to awaken us with this book.

Flickering Pixels is actually a follow-up to Hipps’ 2006 book, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture, written primarily for church leaders and professionals. Hipps newest takes much of the material from his earlier book and makes it less technical, more user-friendly. Hipps is himself a pastor with a prior career in advertising hawking Porsche automobiles, a career that gained for him an understanding of how media is employed through advertising and entertainment to entice and exploit the culture. These forces are the “flickering pixels” of our lives, which little-by-little shape the values we come to embrace and live. The scary thing is, as the subtitle of the book points out, these forces can also shape our faith.

The most insightful part of the book (for me) is chapter 4 where Hipps confronts Western culture’s marriage to human reason and how the influence of written language and the invention of the printing press have fed our exaltation of cognitive linear thinking, logic, and reason. This devotion to reason has influenced even our theology to the point where human emotion and feeling have been subjugated to the caboose while empirical bytes of factoids have become the engine that drives everything, even our theology. By way of example he demonstrates how the evangelically sacrosanct “Four Spiritual Laws” approach to salvation is linear thinking, the “Laws” clearly warning us not to “depend on your feelings.” Subjugating emotion and feeling, Hipps shows, is a Greek Aristotelian invention that has become the Western worldview; not the worldview shared by Mid-Eastern or Eastern cultures—the culture, incidentally, in which the Bible was written. “The heart does not take kindly to being ignored,” writes Hipps. When feeling is suppressed by stoical logic it often remerges in unexpected ways—addiction to food, sex, abusive relationships, and power. I came away from this book with the idea that God is all about communication. Hipps believes the church—“Y’all,” as he calls it—is God’s medium for every generation, even this technological one.

In the process, Hipps proves to be a superb storyteller, making use of memorable metaphors and anecdotes from such things as great literature to Saturday Night Live, making Flickering Pixels both an informative and very interesting read.

Artist Bio
Shane Hipps is pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church, Phoenix AZ, a growing, urban, Anabaptist congregation. Prior to accepting his call as a pastor, Shane was a strategic planner in advertising where he gained experience in understanding media and culture. Much of his time was spent working on the multimillion-dollar communications strategy for Porsche Cars North America.

Several years into his career, he had a “Damascus” experience in which he realized he was spending his life working diligently to perpetuate consumer culture and promote values that ran counter to his most deeply held beliefs. So he left advertising to pursue his long held interest in spirituality and theology.

He went on to earn a Master of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary and in 2004 accepted a call to serve as Lead Pastor at Trinity. Shane is a dynamic communicator, author, and sought after speaker. He lives with his family in Phoenix, Arizona. For more information about Shane link to www.shanehipps.com.

This past weekend was really fun. First, there was Off the Map conference in Seattle with Phyllis Tickle, Michael Frost, and Todd Hunter presenting us with an Anglican Eucharist. Phyllis is so spry for her 75 years and the author of The Great Emergence. Michael talked about refocusing church through a Missional lens while addressing Worship, Discipleship, and Evangelism.

On Sunday Morning David Ruis was the guest at Vineyard Community Church in Shoreline, WA and Phyllis Tickle was the evening guest. David is always fun to listen to. Phyllis gave us a tour of 2000 years of church history in about 30 minutes plus a Q&A time. She has a great sense of humor. She said something like, “If you are a female and 76 you can say any damn thing you want.”

David Ruis

Phyllis Tickle

Phyllis Tickle Video

Clip provided by Recycle Your Faith.

Download PDF: The Heaven on Earth Light Show

Pentecost is one of the three annual pilgrim festivals in Judaism. The other two being Passover and Tabernacles. Pentecost was when every male Jew was required to proceed on foot to the Temple in Jerusalem. It is also called the Feast of Weeks, because it was held after the counting of seven complete weeks after “the morrow of the Sabbath” when the barley sheaves were offered as recorded in Lev 23:15-20. The festival is then held on the 50th day, i.e. Pentecost. All the pilgrim festivals possessed agricultural significance. So, Pentecost marked the end of the barley and the beginning of the wheat harvest. That is significant to remember. Pentecost as the end of one season and the beginning of another.

Let’s use the metaphor of a computer program to get at the story of the church and the significance of Ascension and Pentecost. In the computer generation, we are constantly offered newer and more featured software solutions, usually designated with version numbers. We are accustomed to installing a new version of software, which often calls for the uninstalling of the older version that we have been successfully using. And sometimes if we buy an upgrade, we have to have the older version around before the newer version will install.

So let’s think of Pentecost, as a newer version of the Church, which came into effect after God added features to his Church program and then rebooted for the new features to take effect. To reboot there is a momentary loss of power in order to regain a new surge of power to run the new features of the program. It is no different at Pentecost where Church Version 4 came into the world. By my calculations we have had:

• Church Version 1: The church in the garden story
• Church Version 2: The church in the Abraham story
• Church Version 3: The church in the Jesus story
• Church Version 4: The church in the Acts story

We are also familiar with the fact that new versions of software disable some former features or present them in a different way. This was certainly the case between Word 2003 and Word in Vista which is the old Word presented in a new metaphor. This same concept is true for Pentecost. To understand the concept of Pentecost in Acts 2, we must first look at Acts 1.

There are many movies that begin with a dramatic sequence of events that sets the plot in motion and sets up the key characters, conflicts, and themes that will drive the rest of the story. Ascension and Pentecost serve that function in Acts as a telling and tantalizing beginning that makes us realize that for all the drama of the resurrection, there are more extraordinary events still to come. However, most modern Christians have not paid close attention to the dramatic structure of Acts. Ever watched a James Bond movie?— the sequenced sets up at the beginning of the films, which often look like they have nothing to do with the actual film, were setups for the audience, promising even more action as the movie moves along.

The first section of Acts provides the main shape and themes of the whole book that is to come. Luke’s Acts could be entitled “the heaven on earth light show.” Acts is about what it looks like when the light of heaven comes to earth, (heaven meaning the place where God dwells now, not the place where we in the West think we go when we die). Acts portrays what it looks like when the rule of God comes to earth. Acts demonstrates what it is like when heaven and earth come together as one, a foretaste of the end of time when heaven and earth are married for all eternity.

Luke writes:

In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

In the first few sentences of Acts, Luke sketches many of themes that will flow out in the full telling of the story of Acts. We must constantly remember that the story of Acts is all about Jesus. While the first name ascribed to it was “the Acts of the Holy Spirit,” it was such because of Jesus. Yes, it is true Jesus had done all that he is going to do while in his earthly form living in Israel for some 38 or 39 years. The Gospel of Luke, as well as the other Gospels, tells the story of the ministry of Jesus doing and teaching the Kingdom of God, and now the Acts is a continuation of the story of Jesus doing and teaching the Kingdom of God through his disciples empowered by the same Spirit that empowered Jesus all along.

In much of USAmerican church theology, the Kingdom of God is seen as the place out there in time and space where God lives, a place where, if we become followers of Jesus, we get to go when we die. The word heaven, that place where we go when we die, has become the synonym for the Kingdom of God. Or, as Augustine brought to the fore, the Kingdom is another way of saying Church. And in good Western fashion of being colonial, we then take on the job of extending or building the Kingdom which is simply referring to the building of the church. This is pure and simple wrongheaded theology.

The whole book of Acts is about the Kingdom of God. From the first page to the last page:

• For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit (Acts 1.5).
• For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. 31 He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ—with all boldness and without hindrance! (28.31)

So the Kingdom of God frames the book of Acts.

In our Western telling and living of the story of God, we have forgotten the Israel dimension (Church: Version 2) within the story of God. We are often given to tell the story of God as:

• God created humankind
• humankind sinned
• God sent Jesus to rescue humankind

By telling the story this way, we have excluded a large part of the story which is found in the Old Testament. We must remember that God called Abraham and Sarah and their family as the means to rescue the world so that God could come into his creation as Israel’s solo representative in order to secure that rescue. The identity of Jesus is formed as the focal point of the whole story of the Old Testament. What Jesus did was what God called Abraham and Sarah and their family to do in the first place. The tension in the story of Israel in the Old Testament is that she knows that she is the bearer of the story of the Creator God, but seemingly cannot, as she stands, actually accomplish those promises to their fullest extent, although on occasion she comes close. That version of Church did not have all the features necessary in place to perform its ultimate mission, the blessing of all the nations. The tension was to be resolved by a newer version of Church with Jesus and his disciples and continue to be resolved by the Pentecost version of the church.

In Acts 1.6, the disciples inquired of Jesus, “Is this the time that you are going to restore the Kingdom to Israel?” The answer is yes, but it is not like you thought it was going to be. It would not be in a political sense as Israel thought it would be, when the world would bow at her feet. But, it would be different because of the newer features of the Church, all the world would bow at the feet of King Jesus and confess that he is Lord.

This surely raised the question then: “What will the Kingdom be like?” In the new version of the Church, everyone will have the opportunity to be empowered by the Spirit to be witnesses of the Kingdom Rule of God in this present age. What kind of witness? one might inquire. Not a witness about a personal relationship that one has encountered and everyone else should encounter it also, but a witness that the King of the world has been enthroned and we are to express what that King’s world is like. It’s a subversive story, meant to change the cultures that we live in.

The next part of the story that Luke shares is about the Ascension. What is the Ascension all about? Part of the difficulty about talking about the Ascension is due to the mental furniture that we have about heaven and earth. We believe that earth is here and heaven is out there somewhere, usually a long way away. This is the result of our Greek thinking, rather than the Bible’s way of thinking, which was and is Hebraic. Our imagination is stuck in our Western worldview about heaven and earth and we try to talk about the Ascension within that framework. So, we think Jesus went up away from the disciples to heaven. The story of the Ascension, as every good first century Jew would know, was a way of thinking about heaven and earth that we Westerners think and reflect from a different worldview. The story of God presents a different worldview about heaven and earth. Heaven and earth overarch and interlock with each other. Heaven and earth were always made to be joined to one another. At his Ascension, Jesus did not go away to some sphere not available to humankind, because heaven and earth really do interlock and overlap. The Creator, the Savior, and the Empowerer are all right here and now. When we minister, heaven crosses that thin vale and what is there in heaven is now present on earth. When we pray for a sick person and healing occurs, heaven has been revealed on earth. When we feed a poor person or better yet when we work on the systemic evil of poorness, heaven has revealed itself on earth.

It is true that heaven is God’s space, earth is our space. However, they are not so separated as the Westerner has come to believe. The Jew believed that there was a place where heaven and earth became one. It was the Temple in Jerusalem. For them, the Temple was where the sphere of heaven, the dwelling of God, and sphere of earth, the dwelling place of humankind, came together. So when a Jew was in the Temple, he or she was still on earth, but at the same time he or she was in the place where the sphere of God actually intersected with earth and at that moment in time that Jewish person was believed to be in the presence of God.

The Temple was not a place where one ran to find safety from the pressures of the world. The Temple was the symbol of what God was going to do for the whole world in his newer versions of the Church.

Heaven and earth are joined together in Jesus and demonstrated as such on the day of Pentecost. The new creation embodied in the risen Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, is now available in the new version of the Church via Pentecost.

Acts is about Jesus and the Church as the true Temple. Paul picks this line of thinking up in the book of Corinthians where he tells the Corinthians that they are the Temple of God. Jesus is surely the place where heaven and earth came together in perfect harmony. And in his Ascension we have a piece of the new earth now in heaven. And in Pentecost we have the power of heaven now on earth. The Ascension and Pentecost join heaven and earth. This joining is the means by which God’s glory will eventually fill the whole earth. The good news here is that we get to play a part in this ongoing story. Luke then tells us in Acts what it will look like when the glory of the Lord begins to fill the earth.

We must gain a new imagination about heaven and earth. We must think about heaven as the control room for earth. We must stop thinking about heaven as a detached-from-earth place to which we go, so we don’t have to have anything to do with the earth.

In today’s world, we are faced with a false antithesis of Deism and Theocracy. The Deism of the Enlightenment Project or as some may call it, Epicureanism, which was a philosophy advanced by Epicurus that considered happiness, or the avoidance of pain and emotional disturbance, to be the highest good and that advocated the pursuit of pleasures that can be enjoyed in moderation.

Deism/ Epicureanism believes and acts out from its mindset that God is upstairs. He’s a long way away from us. It believes and practices that religion is about how we in private get in touch with a far-away-distant God to relate to him, but religion has nothing to do with the real world in which we live because that world is about being happy by avoiding pain and emotional disturbances thus becoming happy in our pursuit of pleasures. This is the story that USAmerica is built on and the story that many in the church think is the Christian story.

Or, Theocracy, which is a government ruled by or subject to religious authority, which believes and acts out, like the fundamentalist of all religious parties, that we are going to force you into submitting to our way of thinking and believing about God. You are an infidel because you don’t believe like we believe. Islamic fundamentalism, with this mindset, simply wants to kill you if you don’t believe about God in the way that they believe about God. Or, in Christian fundamentalism, you simply get to go to hell if you don’t believe in God the way in which they do.

The world, who the Church is supposed to reach with the good news of the Gospel, on the other hand, looks at those two stories and says, No! to theocracy! If that is what it looks like for God to run the show, we would rather have our Deism. Incidentally, the belief in Deism is one of the reasons why there is a constant move to keep God out of public life because he is a private God.

However, theocracy changes according to which theos you believe in. If you believe the wrong theos, in a big bad God who is ready to kill you for non belief or to send you to hell because you are evil and sinful, then you need to change your theos! What if we came to believe in a theocracy that is centered around the person Jesus? How would that change the way in which we live and move and have our being? The Kingdom of God is about theocracy. It’s about saying to the world—this is what it looks like when God is running the public show and is not scurried off into some private chamber where folks practice private rituals.

What would it really look like if God was running the show? Showing how God runs the show was and is the ministry of Jesus. Here’s a leper, I will heal him. Here’s a prostitute, she can travel with me. Here are those without food, I will feed them. Here are the rich, I will show them how to use their financial gains. The book of Acts demonstrates what it is really like when the Creator God is running the show through those empowered by the Spirit and are running the newer version of Church.

The Ascension of Jesus into heaven allows him to empower and send his people with a new version of the Church into the world to demonstrate what it’s like to live in a theocracy where the true God is ruling.

For a moment, let’s move to the end of the story and say a word about the second coming, which is the final act in which heaven and earth will come together for eternity and replace this fallen heaven and earth. Jesus is not coming back to take us home, as so many in the church believe, but he is coming back to establish his rule and reign by transforming the old heaven and earth into a new heaven and earth. The point then of the second coming is not to take people away from the earth, but to restore the earth to its garden shape. That is the focused goal of the story of God.

Ascension and Pentecost set up the movement of the book of Acts as the continued preaching of the Kingdom unhindered and set in motion a series of developments that culminate in a crisis. The entire audience at Pentecost is Jewish; they are from every nation under the sun, so to speak. That is a hint of the magnitude of what will happen as the story unfolds. The Jews, who had taken God for themselves, will now be asked to take their God to the Greeks and the tension was for the Greeks to Judaize themselves to receive the gospel. Peter’s vision at the house of Simon the tanner, an occupation considered to be unclean by Jews of the day, suggested that God was up to something. Later in the story in Acts, after Paul’s first trip abroad, the powers that be in Jerusalem were concerned because their form of viewing God was being expanded beyond their ability to accept. Clean and unclean had been redefined by the great creative programmer in this newer version of the Church. Paul’s message was that everyone was welcome at the table to find and fellowship with the one Creator God. The only entry to that fellowship was Jesus, not, Jesus plus boundary markers created by the prevailing culture.

You should come to Acts 2 with the theological construct of Acts 1, i.e., that is how heaven and earth are brought together. Then, the Acts story of Pentecost becomes a counter-Temple statement. What was only possible to experience in the previous version of the Church, God and earth intersect in the Temple, is now going to be different. In the Temple you experienced the presence of God here on earth. In the new Temple, the new version of the Church, the community of faith is equipped and empowered to carry the glory of God into the world. When the church goes out into the world empowered by the Spirit, she is a sign, a foretaste, if you will, of the flooding of God’s glory into all the world. The church has to catch the vision, that in her, Jesus is truly the hope of glory.

Pentecost is a thoughtful reminder that empowers us to cultivate the garden, to rebuild the ruins of our world by creating a new culture of life, not just condemning the present one we are living in. Our job is not to be only a critic of culture, not only to copy or consume culture. Our job is to be creators of culture, i.e., make something of the world in light of the story that may have taken us by surprise. This is not an either/or way of life. We do not create out of nothing, we must take these gestures, i.e., critiquing, copying, and consuming as creative tools to bring cultural activity into our story. Poking holes in every cultural happening produces in us the inability to be able to see the good and redeem it. Remember, God created and saw his creation as “very good.” And even after sin entered into the picture, he never changed his mind. Pentecost restores us to creativity. In addition, Pentecost was a way of suggesting that every present human language and cultural form is capable of bearing the good news of the kingdom.

Pentecost can be understood as the reversal of Babel. God’s response to Babel was to reboot humankind once again and select one group of people to be his people. Their job was to bless the world. Over the years they took the message of the kingdom, i.e., to demonstrate, among all the nations, what the God of the universe was really like, But alas, they turned the message inward and not outward. They made the windows of their lighthouse into mirrors. God’s gift on Pentecost expanded the people of God to demonstrate that his work would no longer be contained within one cultural group. It was the gift to the world. We in USAmerica often make the mistake of thinking that the culture we have created in which the church was central and the chaplain of society, should simply send that cultural manifestation of Christianity abroad and let the world copy what we have, regardless of their own culture. We may have repeated the sin of Israel and turned our own windows into mirrors. Pentecost makes the good news of the kingdom available to every group, to create a way of being Christian while creating within their culture a new culture of being truly human.

So what? Good question. God had added some new features to his program of the church. The church had been rebooted at Pentecost and the newer functions are now available to everyone. We need to think of Pentecost within the structure of where it was presented within the larger story of God. Together with the Ascension, Pentecost provided a bit of heaven come to earth as the church was and is empowered to take the message to the streets of the world. That Pentecost power encounter is still being offered today. Read the story again for the first time and discover how your community of faith and your participation within it can play a part in the greatest story ever told. Go ahead, join the heaven and earth light show. It’s an adventure beyond belief.

The following is an interview of N.T. Wright by Dr. Tod Bolsinger on a variety of topics. Dr Tod Bolsinger is Senior Pastor at the San Clemente Presbyterian Church and Tom Wright is Bishop of Durham for the Church of England.

Enjoy!

N.T. Wright on Heaven

N.T. Wright on the Postmodern Movement

N.T. Wright on Satan and Evil

N.T. Wright on Debate about Homosexuality

N.T. Wright on Women in Ministry

N.T. Wright on Filming the End Times

N.T. Wright on the Authority of the Bible

N.T. Wright on Darwin

N.T. Wright Responds to John Piper

I participate with Vineyard Community Church in Shorline, WA. Any of you folks around Seattle want to celebrate “dark firday.” Here’s your opportunity.

Last Friday I went to an early matinee showing of Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino. I have always likes Eastwood ever since B/W Rawhide on TV. Of course, that might be a bit before the time of some you who are reading this.

This film is surely packed with theological dialogue and on occasion theological visuals. If you are interested in seeing current culture played out on the big screen with theological overtones, then you should see Gran Torino. Of course, what movies don’t have some theological overtones.

The language could be considered by some a bit rough, but realistic for the character. The cultural clash that drives the plot is fascinating. If you don’t laugh and cry somewhere during this film, you might need to check your emotional meter in for new batteries.

On a different character, Jack is back! Jack Bauer and the latest edition of 24 has returned to FOX. This year’s day (Day 7) has started on the Right coast in Washington D.C. I think someone should, or maybe they already have, write a “Theology of Jack Bauer.” He is surely a new Western kind of hero without the tobacco stain running down his chin.

Why not leave some thoughts about what you think the theology of Jack is and what theological insights you pick up from Gran Torino.

In Peter Rollin’s book, The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief he posited the concept of a parody of the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) with What Would Judas Do. One has to wonder, if one is given to such things, what you would do if faced with a radical version of your own religion. Of course, our own self-bred piety would quickly jump to the conclusion that we would not do as Judas did. But, not so quick. While Judas had walked with Jesus for his almost ten years of ministry, he apparently grew weary of this new form of belief that was updating if not outright replacing his old form of belief. Judas lived in one of what Phyllis Tickle calls a “hinge” time in history. Nope, not all was well for the Jews with Romans in town, but on the other hand, they did get to go about a pretty normal life. Yep, there were the rebels like the Zealots, who one of his friends Simon had been a part of. But, for the most part, the social and religious cultures were livable. But, Judas became restless and in one final decision, he showed his true colors and reneged on the Kingdom message of Jesus.

It’s easy to ridicule Judas, but remember his world as he knew it was turned upside down. He was asked to change the story that he and his family had lived in for centuries. Those of us living in USAmerica, we live in a story that is profoundly American. While it has been influenced by the Judeo-Christian motif, it is not, nor never has it ever been, Christian. We have lived in a version of Christianity not only influenced by Enlightenment’s Modernity, but also influenced by a different covenant. I like the American covenant, i.e., the Constitution, but it should not be confused with the Jesus Covenant. They are not one and the same. We, like Judas, are being faced with an increasing tension with what we have lived in and what we should be living in. So, what are you going to do? Betray the church as it has come to be, in favor of one that is more radical than it has been for many years. Does radical mean weird? Wouldn’t being truly human be weird in a good way and not in a weird way? If you were Judas, living in the present form of Christianity, what would you do?

I am facinated by Tickle’s book, Great Emergence, The: How Christianity Is Changing and Why In just a few short, but poignant pages, Tickle produces a review of history that that can take one’s breathe away while still bringing the reader right into her/his present time.

She recently spoke at a conference in Memphis, TN a true Southern city with BBQ and Southern yarns too boot.

In USAmerica, today is voting day. Regardless of who wins, we are again presented with living in an USAmerican cultural story that will either be led one way or another by the upcoming government. Many USAmerican followers of Jesus simply follow and live in that story without asking if there is another story that they should be living into. Many simply believe that the USAmerican story is the Christian story. The hybrid story is so well mixed one can’t tell where the Christian story is and where the USAmerican story is.

It seems to me a good time to review what story we are choosing to live into. So in the few words below, in the tradition of Reader’s Digest and the art of Modernity’s reductionism, here is a synopsis from my book God’s EPIC Adventure (318-319) of the proposed story of God from Scripture.

The drama begins in Act 1 of his play in the Genesis account of creation, “there was a time when God spoke all things into existence.” He created humankind and gave them free run of the most beautiful garden, which was his created world. But, in Act 2, as the crown of the Creator’s creation, humankind made a decision to worship what God had created rather than worshiping the Creator. What God had created perfect, humankind had flawed and the true humanity of the Garden became distorted and their view of God became dimly lit. The missionary God sought his created beings out and banned them from his Garden.

Act 3 continues the story, which is the content of the rest of the Old Testament, by God’s creation of a people whose vocation would be to become the “light of the world” so the pagan societies in which she lived could see what God was really like. Israel’s creation came with four great acts of God. He first delivered/redeemed them from their bondage in Egypt in the great act of the Exodus. He took a group of slaves from the slave market of the day and freed them. The next great act of God for his people was the giving of a national charter, a Covenant, so that they would know what it was like to live out their vocation as the people of God. Next, he made them into a kingdom where there vocation moved from nation to individual, which looked forward to a day in which a new kingdom with a truly human being would inaugurate God’s Kingdom here on earth. In the last scenes of Act 3, we find Israel in Exile and a short return from Exile. She had all but lost her vocation of being God’s “light to the world.” In the physical return from Exile, spiritual return did not occur. The Temple rebuilt did not return to its former glory which produced a conception of life that they were continually living in exile waiting for the one promised by the prophets who would bring them their freedom.

Act 4 tells the story of Jesus who stepped into human history, in the fullness of time. In his ministry, he came proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was present in this Present Evil Age. A truly human being, as humans were intended to be, had arrived as God honored his promises to this people. Four different writers tell us four different stories about the events of the life of Jesus. His message: “Repent and Believe!” The first hearers heard him say in this message that they should stop living in their present stories of military means, quietism, or their compromising ways with the present powers and begin living in a different story. He demonstrated for his followers, then and now, in his words what an authentic disciple should be like and demonstrated in his works of healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead what actions his authentic disciples should follow.

Moving into the final act of God’s EPIC Adventure (Act 5, Scene 1-6), we find the creation of the church by the Spirit as God’s new humanity. Like Israel before her, this new community of the Spirit was and is to be the light to the world by the releasing of gracelets given by the Spirit to help followers of Christ accomplish his mission.

We, as Christ-followers, now live in the scene between the sixth scene of the early church and the final scene yet to be written. Out mission is to discover our part in God’s EPIC Adventure and imagine and improvise how we live our part out for his sake, our sake, and the sake of the world. There are some clues about how this grand narrative is going to end, but they are only clues. We are truly God’s new humanity, living as followers of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit to be effective agents of the Kingdom in this Present Evil Age.

Yep, The cool Dr. Todd Hunter is back online and from the looks of him he has taken the pill. From the bowls of Boise, he has created a new ministry called Three Is Enough (TiE). He envisions TiE groups to take shape form Boise to the ends of the earth. He has entered the TiEtrix.

He states in his welcome post:

In one way TiE (Three is Enough) is the culmination of a lifetime of thinking about the intersection of The Gospel, culture, church, kingdom, spiritual formation and evangelism. In another, more humble way, it comes from the closing chapter of my upcoming book from IVP—Christianity Beyond Belief: Following Jesus for the Sake of Others. In CBB, I try to lay out some of the practical outcomes which surround one’s understanding—or misunderstanding—of the Gospel. Much of the conceptual work for the first section of the book comes from my D.Min. dissertation which was titled: Re-hearing the Gospel: Toward Improved Practices for Evangelism and Spiritual Formation.

So go ahead at take a look. Click here and you will be on your way. Don’t forget to take your pill before you make the leap.

The traditional Christian view of life is get right with God by saying a sinner’s prayer, then wait for him to rapture you away from this awful, sinful world, or die and go to heaven. Sound familiar? This story has captivated the church and is the story that many, many Christians live in.

There is another story and it is well articulated by Tom Wright in his article from Time Magazine. Go ahead, take a look, which story do you want to live in? It’s your choice.

I echo Tom Wright’s view in my book God’s EPIC Adventure:

If you went to the streets today or within the corridors of the church and asked what Jesus meant by “repent and believe,” you would most likely hear that he meant “Give up your private sins (most likely sexual, alcohol, and drug abuse) by accepting Jesus and gain some “inner peace” by believing a body of dogma and joining the local church at the corner of walk and don’t walk so you can go to heaven when you die.” God’s EPIC Adventure, 187.

AND

With the resurrection of Jesus, God created a new world and sent Jesus’ followers off to announce it to the world. If you go to the resurrection chapters in Luke 24, or in Matthew, or Mark, or John, and say, “What do the evangelists think this stuff means; why are we telling this story?” The answer is not, “Jesus is risen again, therefore, we can go to heaven when we die and be with him.” It’s interesting they never say that, those resurrection chapters. Rather, they say, “Jesus is risen from the dead. Therefore, God’s new creation has begun, and you are commissioned to go off and make it happen.” That’s the emphasis. And it’s a new world of justice and freedom; it’s the exodus world, the return-from-exile world, the world where Jesus already reigns as Lord, it’s the world with good news for all, especially, as in the New Testament, for the poor, 213.

Also see Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Over the last few months (October 21 and December 17), the Barna Research Group has surveyed folks about their belief in several well know Bible stories. In the survey they conducted belief about the following stories were quarried.

Survey respondents were asked if they thought a specific story in the Bible was “literally true, meaning it happened exactly as described in the Bible” or whether they thought the story was “meant to illustrate a principle but is not to be taken literally.” Six renowned Bible stories were then offered to adults for their consideration.

October 21

• The resurrection of Jesus. About 75 percent (75%) of those surveyed believed this story to be literal.
• Daniel in the lion’s den. Almost two-thirds (65%) thought this story to be literally true.
• The parting of the Red Sea. Just a shade less that the Daniel group, sixty-four percent (64%) believed this story actually happening.
• David and Goliath. Sixty-three percent (63%) found this story to be literal.
• Peter walking on water. The percentage of folks who took this to be literal was sixty percent (60%).
• The six days of Creation in Genesis. Those who accept this as literal was also 60%, but the breakdown was interesting. Seventy-three percent (73%) of the sixty percent who believed this story had not attended college, while only thirty-eight percent (38%) who attended college believed the story was literal.

December 17, 2007

• The Virgin Birth. Three our of every four people survived (75%) believed this story to be literally true.
• Turning water into wine. About seventy percent (70%) accepted this story about the event at Cana as having actually occurred.
• The feeding of the 5,000. Two out of three people, sixty-eight percent, (68%) view this story as factually accurate.
• Noah and the flood. The percentage was sixty-four percent.
• Eve and the Serpent. The survey results reads, “In total, 56% of adults believe that the story of the devil, disguised as a serpent and tempting Eve to sin by eating the forbidden fruit, is literally true.” I always find this interesting in that the text of the story nowhere identifies the serpent as Satan. So, it seems in this case, that the fifty-six percent who believed this story, believe it in a way that the story itself does not present. I often ponder how many things we believe about the stories are not really in the stories.
• The Strength of Sampson. Less than fifty percent (50%) believe this to be factually true.

How People Live Stories
Barna concludes from these statistics that Americans struggle with “the concept of truth, the nature of God, and the value of the Bible in personal decision-making.” He also notes that there is a “significant disconnect between faith and practice” and that the Bible has become “a respected but impersonal religious history lesson that stays removed from…life.”

Within modernity, we have presented the Bible in such a fragmented way that it is amazing that anyone believes any of these stories. As Barna points out, believing the stories and applying them is two different things. Maybe the problem is with the process. Usually the text of Scripture is presented and then a suggested “one-size-fits-all” application is given by the presenter. This supposedly is to keep the text from just becoming something one only believes to become something one actually does. The problem is the fragmentation of such an approach. Both a fragmented presentation of isolated verses used in a prooftexting fashion and a presentation of stories independent from their context or shuffled within the context of the books they come from produce a fragmented or quilted follower of Jesus.

What if we tried another approach. What if we stopped trying to apply parts of Scripture to our lives and discovered the Story of Scripture and how as an actor/actress within that story we are to play out our part in his EPIC adventure. How would that change the way in which we present the Story/stories of Scripture?

Reading the text is important. To that end I am preparing a reading program called Reading the Bible Without Additives in 100 Days, using Today’s New International Version’s presentation of the text in The Books of the Bible™ as the text to read.

Go to Reading the Bible Without Additives in 100 Days for more information.

Bulimia nervosa, commonly known as bulimia, is an eating disorder and psychological condition in which the subject engages in recurrent binge eating followed by feelings of guilt, depression, and self-condemnation and intentional purging to compensate for the excessive eating, usually to prevent weight gain (see anorexia nervosa). Purging can take the form of vomiting, fasting, inappropriate use of laxatives, enemas, diuretics or other medication, or excessive physical exercise. The cycle damages bodily organs. Bulimia is common especially among young women of normal or nearly normal weight (Wikipedia).

I am reading a book What the Best College Teachers Do coincidentally, about what great college teachers do to motivate their students in their courses. It is fascinating. Early in the book I ran across the term “bulimic education” a kind of cram (binge) for a test because its important to remember and give back (purge) on a test all those facts the instructors wants the student to remember, thinking that with this common exercise, one has learned something.

When I saw that term, I thought about the thousands of followers of Jesus who have “bulimic spirituality.” They binge on certain spiritual activities and then purge all over anyone who will listen to their new found spirituality. I used to call this part of the flock “constipated Christians” always taking in and rarely giving out until the preverbal cork pops and then they vomit on whoever is the closest. But, I think it is time for a “phrase upgrade” from “constipated Christians” although I still like the ring of that, to “bulimic spirituality.”

In what “spirituality” are you bulimic? If it works like the physical / psychological, we probably don’t ever recognize the condition in our lives, much less know what specific spiritually we binge and purge with.

Here’s a short video clip of Brian McLaren asking me a question about God’s EPIC Adventure. Enjoy.

Two important events have occurred this week. My first book, God’s EPIC Adventure, is in print and I’ve been Simpsonized!

It has been and interesting process starting a publishing company HarmonPress and publishing my first book, God’s EPIC Adventure through that imprint. It’s an interesting feeling to hold a book in your hand and seeing your name on the front cover. For years I have researched and written lots of material. I was used to writing things like, Sweet says, or McLaren says, or Wright says, but when I saw my name appear in that context in the ForeWord which is written by Len Sweet, Griffin says, it seemed a little strange. Brian McLaren wrote the Afterword. You can read all about it at HarmonPress.

You are quite correct in observing that the traditional seminary will train you for the body of Christ in residence, and the denomination will deploy you among bodies of Christ in residence, and those franchised bodies of Christ in residence will fully expect you to stay in residence! Keep office hours, maintain fixed worship times, renovate the property slowly and with great concern for memorial plaques, and above all, keep the other residents happy! Mission Mover: Beyond Education for Church Leadership. 92.

When I read the above paragraph from Mission Mover, I reflected on my own experience of the first two churches that I pastored in SoCal. They were “resident churches” and they wanted me to stay in residence abiding to office hours, washing my car once a week so that it set an example to others who arrived on Sunday morning and saw the car in the Pastor’s parking space. They wanted to have church at the “holy” appointed times Sunday AM and PM and Mid-week worship on Wednesday. They wanted me to be the caretaker of the property including mowing the grass on the front lawn so the church property would look picturesque to those passing by in their cars. They wanted me to keep the “memorial plaques” spit shinned. They certainly wanted me to keep everyone happy.

Well I was a complete failure! I did not keep regular office hours. I refused to wash my car on Saturday or park in the Pastor’s spot on Sunday. I changed the holy Sunday service to a different location and format. I refused to mow the lawn, I moved the “holy altar benches” into the men’s room of the gym so the guys would have a place to sit and tie their gym shoes. I moved the trophy case and trophies from the foyer to the gym. None of these changes made the “saints” happy. They were rather “crappy” in their attitude instead.

Of course, I did not last long in the “resident styled” church. I’ve always wanted to be innovative and missional. That hasn’t changed.

If you are thinking about theological education, you might want to read this book.

Brain McLaren suggests that we who live in the West may be living in an Echo Chamber where it is difficult to “listen to the voice of others.” One solution to this potential difficulty is to get out of the Echo Chamber by reading and thinking about how folks in other parts of the world think and write. The following article is a great start toward that goal.

A UNIVERSAL CORE?
by Sherman YL Kuek, OSL
Sherman is an itinerant minister and an Adjunct Lecturer in Christian Theology at Seminari Theoloji Malaysia (STM). He spends much of his time journeying with his friends in reflecting on faith, life, and culture in a profoundly theological and yet simple way. Sherman blogs on www.ShermanKuek.net.

In speaking of contextualisation, there are (rather simplistically) two trends of thought:

1) The gospel consists of a “static universal core”, a series of articulations which is time insensitive and perennially unchanging. The contextualisation project is simply about enfleshing this core with a cultural facade for the facilitation of communication and understanding. The core, essentially, does not change.

2) The gospel consists of a “dynamic universal core”, a series of articulations which is time sensitive and perennially changing with the development of our theological understanding. The contextualisation project, whilst being about the cultural expression of this “dynamic universal core”, is also about allowing the enfleshment process to provoke us to re-examine the legitimacy and relevance of the universal core. This means that the universal core, by its sheer dynamic nature, is vulnerable to being modified, changed, eradicated, retained, or reaffirmed in accordance with that deemed necessary.

I suspect that the “emerging” people are those who are more ready to embrace the second of the two approaches, and not anyone is willing to sit well with this methodological vulnerability.

But anyone who is seriously going to engage his/her context authentically would almost immediately see that the second of the two is probably the only way by which one can be authentically contextual in his/her theological methodology.

II
This section dwells on some further sustained thoughts pertaining to the “dynamic universal core”. If we posit that the dynamic universal core is “time sensitive and perennially changing with the development of our theological understanding”, what reasonable sources possess legitimate ascendancy over the dynamism of the core?

It is open knowledge that the emerging people are serious about engaging with the dominant culture confronting the Christian gospel (in the West the postmodern culture, and in Asia perhaps the postcolonial ethos). First and foremost, this engagement is about the vulnerability of allowing the dominant culture to challenge the Christian gospel with serious questions regarding the adequacy, accuracy, and even the absolute rightness of the latter.

But it is probably a misunderstanding beyond proportions that these people engaging with culture are actually permitting the culture to redefine the core. It is most likely that culture raises questions which shed doubt on the perennial universality of the core, but not necessarily that culture redefines the core.

In my observation, it seems to me that whilst culture is permitted the role of the “interrogator”, the contextual thinkers are going back into the Great Christian Tradition to seek solutions for these problems raised by culture. They do not claim that culture itself provides the answers. They seem to have an implicit understanding that the Great Christian Tradition itself possesses more than a sufficient wealth of wisdom to provide plausible solutions for challenges posed by culture. The Great Christian Tradition causes one to expand and deepen the core such that one realises that his definition and demarcation of the core may have been overly limited and unnecessarily fossilised.

Thus, it is not uncommon for contextual thinkers to move beyond the boundaries of their own limited traditions (i.e. their denominational / traditional boundaries and familiar scope of theological positions) towards other even older traditions in search of responses to the problems posed by culture. This explains the openness of the emerging people towards the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions and their willingness to listen to other ecclesial voices beyond that with which they are familiar. Again, this is not something deemed acceptable to every Christian thinker of every tradition. Some traditions are, by their sheer nature, implicitly closed to conversations which challenge the rudiments of their all-familiar categories.

The Christian faith is more than 500 years old. In fact, the memory of the Christian Church goes back beyond 2,000 years. The contextual thinker holds on to this wealth of ecclesial life and therefore understands that there is no need for theological insecurity, for he has a long, long history – a Great Story of which he is a part – consisting of multiple voices of wisdom who have come before him and who would be able to infuse wisdom and impart solutions in his endeavour to be a relevant voice within the present scheme of life. This is the reservoir of ecclesial jurors for the contextual thinker which many others fail to observe or choose to ignore all together.

For him, the challenges posed by cultural confrontations do not cause him to pander into a state of intimidation and self-preserving defensiveness, for he looks beyond himself and his restrained traditional familiarity; and behold, a world of endless possibilities is open before him as he gleans from the voices of his many Fathers who once treaded the path on which he now finds himself. Someone aptly comments (and the contextual thinker certainly mirrors it well): “It’s not about the old ways, it’s about the much older ways.”

I am part of a book club at the community of faith that I participate with. We are reading The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. This was one of the books we read as a cohort in the DMin program at George Fox. The following is one of the responses that I posted on our community book club reading board. I had listed several question from chapter 1 of the book and then reflected on one of them.

Here’s one of the questions that I am continually reflecting on:

“How does it feel to be a part of a community that is living “between the times,” (the concept of liminality, i.e., between the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity (or what ever it will be called by history) and knows it?”

When one stops to think about the time we live in, we usually think “present” time versus “past” or “future” time. The NT provides us a concept that we really live “between the times.” The time we live in is referred to as “this present evil age” and it fits between the “first coming” of Jesus and the “second coming” of Jesus. We don’t live in the “past” or in the “future” but in the “presence of the future” a “between the time” time.

Let’s apply that concept to now. We live between the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity. We actually live in neither all the time. We are influenced by both modernity and postmodernity at the same time, a “between the time” time. There is a slight difference. Modernity has not disappeared and neither has Christendom. Postmodernity (or what ever it will be called by historians 1000 years from now) is not fully here. On has not replaced the other. It took modernity 1000 years to replace the middle ages. So we live in the tension of the “between the times” time.

As my wife, Donna Faith, stated to me, different personality types respond differently to life. Thus there is not a “single” answer to the question. There is only how one feels about it.

Personally, I love the tension. I seem to thrive on it. It excites me to think about some “older” things passing away and some “newer” things coming into existence. I love “older” things, after all I am one. I often wonder what wonderful things that my children will face in the years to come that aren’t even a part of my imagination in the present. The only constant thing is change and that is what living “between the times” brings. After all, nothing stays the same. I look at my hand and say, “yep, that is a hand,” but a year from now it will be completely new. Every cell in my hand today will have died and been replaced by new ones, while my hand looks “static” it is not. My hand lives “between the times” of being what is and becoming what it will be. Such is the destiny of VCC. She lives today as she is becoming what she will be tomorrow.

I think VCC knows she is a “between the time” community. She holds on to the “older” things that are not hindrances to creating “newer” things, a blessing from her creator.

Here is a link to the concept of Liminality by one of the authors of Missional Church. The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality (Christian Mission and Modern Culture) by Alan J. Roxburgh.