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?

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.

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.