Loverboy and church

Found some really thought provoking stuff on Pastors "working for the weekend." The majority of our time and energy is spent prepping for one hour. What about the rest of the week?

Below is the stream consciousness that came out of the Loverboy post:

what if we occasionally cancelled Sunday morning and as a local community went and did something, you know as the hands and feet of Christ?

What if Sunday morning was “learn by doing time?”
Maybe a given Sunday Morning was all prayer? Not a message about why we should pray or exegeting great prayers of the bible but the whole community actually praying? Something we are supposed to do without ceasing gets center stage…

I think saying it (There is more to following christ than sunday morning) over and over is a good idea also. In addition to saying it, what if we took a sunday morning and asked the question to the community how can we make Sunday morning part of your journey instead Sunday morning being the journey?

Origins Conference

I spent the last few days in sunny Pasadena Ca at the Origins Conference hosted by Erwin McManus and the folks at Mosaic.

I have read Erwin's stuff before and heard alot of the concepts and ideas that drive Mosaic. A few things hit me this time around.

Creativity is a natural result of Spirituality.
Every person is created in the image of a creative God. As each one of us begin to understand who we are and where we come from creativity should be the result.
Creativity is not the possession of the few but of all. The creative process reflects and glorifies God. Creativity's natural home is the church. We have reduced our gatherings to nothing more than a lecture surrounded by often times completely irrelevant music.

The F-word
The word fellowship is kicked around christian subculture like a hacky sack. According to the folks at the origins project, the bastardized (my term not their's) version of fellowship which so many people settle for kills churches. It causes the people of a given community to become internally focused and they cease to reach out to those who are hurting and lost. They exchange warm comfortable discussions for dangerous messy life changing relationships. Peter Jackson painted a more biblical picture of fellowship in the first Lord of the Rings movie than most churches do. Fellowship is supposed to be what Christ followers do together to reach others with God's Love.

Phrases worth remembering:
Talent can crush character
Adults only learn in crisis. In order to develop character we need to create crisises.
The gospel brings out the beauty of a culture.


Contextualizing conference stuff:
The pace and values of Fairfield county, CT are killing people from the inside out. How do we help people discover the individual they were intended to be?
The church needs to open it's front doors as wide as can possibly be imagined. At the same time the church must narrow the stair that allows people to positions of influence and authority.
Where am I taking wrong turns on the journey of developing Christ-like character?

Origins and Ethos are coming to Manhattan November 28, 29, 30th, 2006. If you are an east coaster and hesitated to make the trek to Cali you won't want to miss this. Click here to check for info as it becomes available



technorati tags Erwin McManus f-word character
arts

Hank Hill goes church shopping

I don't kow whether to laugh or cry....

Newbie

A friend from the "real world" has joined the ranks of the blogosphere. Stop by her blog and show her some love.

Welcome to it Trace. I'm glad you are here.

National Day of prayer-revisited

So for the past few years our little community of faith has been hosting our local National Day of Prayer Event. Every first Thursday in May, people are supposed to gather in their local communities to pray for our country, our government officials, our troops, our families, our communities, the media, the poor, the aged, the imprisoned, and our youth. Each local session is supposed to start at noon across the country. (I don't know what they do with the whole time zone thing)
The national effort is championed by the Dobsons of Focus on the Family, fame or infamy, depending on your perspective.
I went; more to support my friend and boss who was leading the day's festivities. I had a lousy attitude about the whole thing. When I got there, he asked if I wanted to lead a section of the program. I politely declined. Instead of approaching the afternoon with a sense of hope and expectation of meeting God in prayer I had my back up. In hindsight, I feel like the day has become more of a political event rather than a prayer event. The thing felt like it had an underlying religious right agenda rather than a Kingdom agenda. I'm sure a lot of that is my own baggage and hyper-sensitivity to some of the less than Christ-like comments and actions that tend to originate from the right. Whatever the reasoning, I missed an opportunity to meet with the Father, who loves us all, right, left, middle; independent or lunatic fringe.
I didn't intend it to be but there is my confession.

technorati tags National Day of Prayer