-
How many times do we over-promise on church.
Over the years I have been to gatherings with 10,000 people where revival was promised (it never came), read books that promised me the ultimate marriage, the deepest possible relationship with God, the most superlative whatever. You name it, we’ve promised it.
I’ve also got memories of seeing dozens of people over the years being prophesied over, ‘I see you changing a generation’. Given that maybe one or two people have that kind of influence historically, there are a lot of disappointed people out there, who that has not come true for.
So we move away from this stuff but what are we promising? I’m still reading, hearing, seeing promises of the newest and latest, it might now be called holistic, incarnational, missional, emerging, but in the enthusiasm of us involved, are we over promising again? We can now all be freed from the evils of the modern church to be ‘authentic’ and ‘real’, we can all be missional revolutionaries now.
But are most people going to reach this promised state of self-actualisation and revolutionary mission? I’m all for calling each other to radical discipleship, but if we over-promise, we’ll leave people wondering what was that all about, it didn’t happen for me.
How about some books on ‘the half good marriage’, ‘the routine and slightly sustainable quite time’, ‘10 possible, maybe thoughts, that could be wrong about leadership’, ‘limping through life and knowing christ’, ‘managing to finish, just’
The miracle of faith for me is that Christ comes to our messy broken lives, the common experience of humanity, our constant fears, failing, brokenness, and pain, and transforms them. Despite our struggles, our inability to cope at work, wishing we were someone else, carrying around the hurts from the past, marriages that are strained, identity issues that are crippling, finances that are stretched beyond control, doubts and questions that overwhelm us…He comes and transforms all those things, into life and living. Now that’s something we can promise.
-
Some cartoon art work from Philip Johnson who does not like emergent and the emerging church has been doing the linked rounds of the blogosphere. I found his cartoon satires hilarious, and like a good laugh at myself, and a reminder not to take ourselves too seriously.But in reading the comments, from dozens and dozens of christians, who seemed to enjoy being snide, rude, denigrating, biting, cutting, in talking about Brian McLaren and those os us involved in EC, I wondered, why do we do this to each other. And emerging church people do it just as much to others.
Why do we have to lash out with so much bile, and vitriol? Jesus said others would know we were His disciples by our love for each other, not our hatred, and venom, and dehumanization.
I had one of those moments reading the comments when I thought, if this is christianity please get me out of here. Then there has been the Christianity article, that was so personal and cutting, and inaccurate. Why, do christians need to legitimize what they believe by pathologically slating and criticizing other people.
Jesus told so many parables, about the Kingdom, I must have missed the one that said, it was like the politicians who slagged each other off.
Technorati Tags: Church, Emergent, Emerging, Emerging Church
-
Yahoo Desktop Search goes from beta to full release later today. Struggling to find things on your computer, try this. Not available for Mac’s, but then we have the amazingspotlight within OS X.“Yahoo Desktop Search includes a new feature called LiveWords, which allows people to highlight text within documents and click a button to search for those words in other documents on their hard drive. The free program searches e-mails, attachments, Word documents, music files, images, video, Yahoo address book entries and Yahoo Messenger archives. Yahoo Desktop Search, released in beta in January, competes with similar products from Google and MSN.” CNET
Technorati Tags: Resource, Technology
-
Thanks everyone who commented and those of you who wrote me e-mails. Here is my final letter that I sent. I landed on something short (to make sure it’s included), something positive rather a reactionary response, as the article was inflammatory rather than something of substance that needs a response.Jason
—————–
Christianity Magazine in their October edition, carried an article titled Emerging Church: Lacking the Spirit (download here as PDF). As Chris is a fellow Vineyard pastor, and as the article has some strong accusations and claims about Brian McLaren and Emerging church, I thought I would respond to it.I contacted John Buckeridge the Editing Director of the magazine, and John said if I got something to him soon, they would include it in the December issue. So can I ask for your help with my letter?
I want to make sure, my letter isn’t too long, is warm in tone, but deals with the issues of the article. Also there are responses that would help that I might have missed. So if you have the time and inclination, can you download my very rough first draft letter here, and post suggestions in the comments or e-mail them to me at jason@emergent-uk.org.
-
I just got this from my friend Josh in Geneva, seems Brian McLaren made it onto MTV :-)
————hello all
pardon the mindless activity mentioned below…
not so sure if brian has been on mtv before, but on the recent room roaders episode his book made the show! It is a show about a guy who goes around and through three girls rooms and without meeting them decides upon the one he wants a date with. In return, the ladies get to go through his room just before the show reaches its climax where he chooses which one he wants.
recently, there was a guy from harvard (who is a political writer) who was going around to three girls rooms. As they entered his room and began to go through his shelves, they opened a drawer with “more ready than you realize” in the top position. I just laughed and laughed! I hope you can share in my laughter of brian’s mtv preview on the mtv show room raiders! it wasn’t a mention, but was definitely a good piece of product placement!
laughing out loud!!!
joshua c
Technorati Tags: Books, Brian McLaren, TV
-
PubSub released LinkRanks for blog feeds yesterday.“LinkRanks differs from competing ranking systems on a number of fronts. Relying on a nightly analysis of Web feeds, PubSub calculates which blogs are the most influential, which are getting the most number of links, and which links come from the most influential sites.”
In other words, the site with the most links does not win in this search facility, as not all links are created equally. A link from an influential site, carries more weight than a link from a site no-one else links to. It’s another tool for finding and listing blogs, and comes at it in a different way that can help you see things you might miss if your just using google etc.
You also might want to check out the main PubSub search facility. With this search engine, you create a search request, and it carries on looking for you, and notifies you when it has found something new. A search that carries on searching and can notify you via a sidebar in your browser or RSS feed when it has found something extra for you.
Technorati Tags: Blogs, Resource, Site, Technology
-
Thanks for all the suggestions for library filing. Becs found this great little application for apple mac from Deep Prose, for a cheap and versatile catalogue system. I’m going to give it a try.
-
I am surrounded by books, piles and piles of them from my research. I need to take them all out and then put them back in some order. But what order? Do any of you have/use or know of a simple library system I can used for my books. most are theological, sociological, and philosophy books?
-
Today my mother told me not to come to her funeral. Today I feel like an orphan.
She e-mailed this to me not out of love, and concern, but out of bitterness and resentment. I can’t remember a time in my life when making sure my mother was happy was a not an ongoing concern and pre-occupation. It’s called co-dependency.
My childhood was one of abuse, violence and emotional at the hands of my mother. I idolized my father, he was a an increasingly absetn hero figure. But when he started working abroad for 6 months at a time, and my mother took her frustrations out on my brother and I even more, I failed to understand he was escaping.
Technorati Tags: Diary
-
This blog has always been about providing resources and links to books, sites, events, and discussions. I have tried to avoid lots of personal photos and diary entries, as it is a resource site. I know I can use categories to separate out things, but now feel the need, mostly for my own benefit to try another extra blog.So you can read my personal diary/journal thoughts here.
