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Shrook has me hooked, I’m making to final jump to this from netnewswire.It handles atom as well as xml/rdf feeds flawlessly, has a great itunes interface and with a free account with shrook, can sync all my favorites online, so I can view or share my news feeds online away from the application.
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Want to see how a pastor in a mega church is engaging meanginfully with post-modernity, visit Randy at http://www.thehouseblog.com/ his RSS/XML feed is http://www.thehouseblog.com/xml/rss.xm
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(With these reflections I’m going to pick one topic a week and spend time discussing in the comments, and maybe post out of those during the week).
I sometimes summarize the last 7 years of my life as a time of asking 3 questions, “what does it mean to be a christian?”, “what does it mean to be church?” and “what does it mean to be a pastor/minister?” in our post modern context. I thought I’d start my sabbatical reflections, thinking about the nature of being a pastor/minister, paid by a church, which is what I have been for the past 4 years.
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Well after a 18 months of planning with our elders and trustees, some friends we know through emergent finding us a place to stay and 24 hours of traveling, we are in Bend, Oregon for part of our sabbatical. Seems one of my neighbors has a open wireless internet access, fantastic!
We flew into San Fransico, and had a 4 hour wait for our connecting flight to a very small plane, so hopped into a taxi and made it to the Apple Store, and with the exchange rate, and student discount I picked up the new Airport Express for £60 :-)I thought I’d bring my blogging into my sabbatical process, and post over the next 7 weeks, as they occur to me, things I think I have learned after 5 years of us trying to plant/grow an emerging church, in london, doing post graduate theology during that time, and setting up Emergent-UK. I’ll start posting my reflections on monday.
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He’s back from the blogger grave, Todd Hunter, newly resurrected and back up here with blogger.
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Well I have decided to spend the mornings of the next few weeks of my vacation and sabbatical time, with the help of NT Wright’s “…for Everyone series”, reading and reflecting with two of my favorite bible books, John and Philippians.
I have also found this page for a detailed listing of N T Wright resources. I am also looking forward to listening to N T Wright on “Reclaiming Worship”, see continuation for description…
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The past 3 days have been fun and frustrating.
Fun
Hearing NT Wright talk about Jesus, the Gospel and the nature of church has been wonderful (my notes are attached for what they are worth). I now need to get all of his writings. I feel as if he has “handed the bible back to me” to use the words of my friend Tim who is with me. I have an appreciation for the Anglican Church that I did not have before, and feel I need to reflect in how NT Wright’s ecclesiology should impact upon mine.Frustration
I might be wrong, but some of the loudest voices have been from delegates who want to reduce the church to just “family” me and my kids, or see everything as church. When everything is church, nothing is church.Some people have been very upset with Tom’s ecclesiology. Yet several times he talked about broad ecclesiology and how some people are going to need to move into less structured forms of church but others are moving in to more structured. It seems many in the emerging church groups here are ideologically entrenched in the view that the be authentic in a post modern context, means the disestablishment of structured, gathered, organized church…to talk about church in any gathered forms with leaders is a bad thing. This is a view I can’t agree with for many reasons I have outlined before.
Most frustrating is people wanting Tom to tell us what his theology means for their context of emerging church, which feels a little like me as a vineyard pastor being brought into an anglican conference, to talk about theology, and then being asked pointedly to tell them what it means for their ecclesiology, and how can my theology lead me to be in the vineyard church?
A new friend Richard has written a great reflection from the event. Also this link via Jordan Cooper gives a summary of Wright’s theology, and why he is important to current theological debate.
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Here’s a quote:
To the Anabaptists, however, atonement meant much, much more. According to Pilgram Marpeck it was far more than a legal transaction in the heavenly court.41 It meant at-one-ment with God and referred to all the ways in which God and humans have been reconciled through the work of Jesus Christ. It points not only to Christís death, but to all the various phases of his activity on behalf of humanity including his ministry, his death, and his resurrection.
The article is here
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Now this post by Richard gave me a laugh today :-)
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Allelon have an event 2-4 September, exploring:1. What does it mean to be missional?
2. How does the church hear the voice of God?
3. How do I help an existing church to begin to think missionally?
4. How do we impact the consumerism of our culture?
5. What does it mean to participate in the Kingdom of God?
6. How does the gospel speak to our culture?
7. What does leadership look like in a missional context?
8. What skills do I need to possess? How do leaders become cultivators of communities?
9. What is the role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of ordinary men and women within congregations/communities?
