Mission.

Church
This would be a pretty cool ad for some church or mission statement or core beliefs or values or something like that.

We are committed to exploring Christian Spirituality in a whole new way. We recognize that the world we live in is an entirely different place than it has ever been. Our world has undergone a massive shift. Globalization and post modernity have changed the way we live our lives on every level; socially, politically, economically and spiritually. We feel that too often Christianity has lost touch with where people are really at with their spiritual lives. The language,practice and focus of most contemporary Christianity leaves us cold, so we have decided to do something about it. We are not a typical church, we believe that many of the problems people have with Organized Religion and Christianity in particular is related to a general inflexibility both organizationally and theologically. Instead we call ourselves a spiritual workshop, a ‘liquid church’ if you will. We are asking lots of questions, toying with ideas, thinking critically, examining religion, faith and spirituality and attempting to reclaim the mystery long left in the dust by black and white theology. The modern world compartmentalized everything. Spiritual life was privatized and separated from the rest of life but we believe that all of life is sacred and that spirituality and faith is something which should permeate all aspects of our lives. With that in mind, we explore many things together, not just religion but the arts, economics, politics, whatever seems appropriate and deserving of our attention and focus. Oscar Wilde once wrote that “nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.” The Christian Church has married itself to the modern age and become hopelessly out of touch. Our aim is to re-imagine Christian faith and spirituality in our new world. The questions raised by living in a global, pluralistic society are not the same questions which molded and shaped the modern Church. Rather than addressing those issues we choose to find the new questions and wrestle with those. Many of the people who come are committed to a spiritual life rooted in Christianity, but not everybody, and we welcome anyone who wished to come and journey and dialog with us.

A Life.

I have no prayer
No offerings
No words
Only a whisper of You
You’re so deep
Profound
I can’t understand or explain
Your knowledge is unlimited
Widsom infinite
You created and know all things
Paled in comparison I stand
Able to give so little
Presenting nothing that You don’t have
Except for a whisper
A life to echo You
A life to give to You
A life to live for You

Excerpts.

Excerpts from Soul Tsunami
by Leonard Sweet

Every generation before now learned about the world directly from authority figures through seat-based learning. Parents, teachers, and priests, among others, were the credentialing gateways to knowledge: social and academic and religious. Now kids learn about the world on their own from people they don’t know, never see, and never touch. Authority figures have lost their authority. Authority increasingly is something earned, not learned. All traditional authority figures are toppling. This generation doesn’t want to “study under” any authority figure; they want to study the authority figure. They don’t need “authorities” to help them gain information. But ironically, they need “authorities” more than ever before to mentor them in how to use, perform, process, and model the information. – pages 186-187

Christianity is the first religion that was not temple based. Jesus decentralized the temple. He made every local expression of the church an expression of the temple (1 Cor. 3:16). To determine what degree your church is temple based, look at your budget and figure out what percentage of your money is spent on maintaining your temple. Nor was Christianity priest based. The decentralization of ministry in the glocal church means a decentralization of leadership and responsibility from one person (priest) to a collective community of “priests”. Modern versus postmodern ministry is the difference between creating a church that reaches out to the world and creating mature believers who team together to reach out to the world. The church must begin to wander outside its usual haunts. Can it go “over the wall”? – pages 170-171

Solitude.

In the solitude he spoke
In the silence:
I can’t lead until I learn to be led
I can’t teach until I am taught
I can’t be trusted, until I have been proven trustworthy
There is still much more to learn
A good heart though
You’ll see before its over
You’ll see and I’ll show you

Tired.

Man I’m tired. It seems like the days never end and when they do they just blur into the next day. At this point in my life it just all seems the same. So routine. So ordered. I mean its “where I’m supposed to be right now”. But it just gets old. I’d like a little adventure every now and then. A little danger. A little of something more than this. Its just all getting redundant. And I’m starting to get dissastisfied with it all. I don’t know if thats a good thing. But when I usually start to get restless, some transition usually opens up. So maybe thats whats going on. I don’t know whats around the corner and I guess I can wait here until I hear otherwise. But man its getting old. And fast. I just wish I could be so much farther along than I am. Financially, emotionally, spiritually. It just seems like such a rat race sometimes. I just wish God would hurry up and come back and get rid of all this in between stuff. But then again, if He’s not ready, then maybe I shouldn’t be either. Who knows, I may be in the place where I’m supposed to be and I imagine that would make my perspective all the more better. I don’t think that is grammatically correct but I like it.