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Confession

why do I tell myself “this doesn’t count”?

09/03/2012
Church & Culture, Community, Confession, Spirituality, Story
1 Comment

Last night we met with our faith community for a unique evening.

We had a guest, Kevin from Mars Hill Café in Australia, and participated in a lo-fi video project he is working on. The project is meant to catalog people’s experience with traditional church, the joys and pains, victories and sorrows, and to spark discussion about alternative ways of being the church in our time and place.

As we took turns sharing our stories for the camera, a conversation began to develop. People shared their hearts, their dreams, their frustrations, and the ways they have come to find their place in our community.

It turned out to be one of the most exhilarating, thought provoking, life-giving, honest, and challenging spiritual experiences I’ve had in a long time.

And in the course of the conversation I realized something – this community has been church for me for three years, but whatever reason I’ve not allowed myself to fully acknowledge that.

Not because I don’t value it, I do, but because I’ve told myself it isn’t really “church”.

I wonder why.

Yes, it’s technically a ministry of a local church (which I respect but don’t attend), and yes it meets on Thursday night not Sunday morning. But so what?

Why do I tell myself “this doesn’t count”?

This community has been their for me through some of the best and worst times of my journey, it’s the place I find life and the people I do life with, and even when I worked for another church it was this community that fueled my growth, pastored me, and shaped my walk with God.

So why don’t I just acknowledge it?

This is church, and it counts.

The Gospel According to Wiki and Wright

29/09/2011
Community, Confession, Gospel, Jesus
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Thanks to everyone who participated in our Wiki Gospel project!

As promised, here are the results.

The good news is the message that Jesus Christ – his life, death, and resurrection – has accomplished, once and for all, God’s victory over sin, death, and Satan, and he has, therefore, brought the Kingdom of God to bear on the world.

Thus, the plan God began with Israel, to set the world to rights, has been fulfilled in Jesus, the Messiah.

God, by virtue of the victory of Jesus Christ, is reconciling all things to himself, and making all things new.

I quite enjoyed reading through the changes each of you made to the 1.0 document. Might have to do this again sometime soon.

In the meantime, here is a short summary of the Gospel, and why it is “good news”, from N.T. Wright.

The Wiki Gospel

28/09/2011
Community, Confession, Cruciform, Gospel, Jesus, Theology
4 Comments

I want to try something a little different today, and I hope you might take part in it.

Yesterday I shared my off-the-cuff “Gospel by Text Message” and asked you to offer your own summaries of the good news.

I found the resulting conversation fascinating, and it got me thinking about how I would define the Gospel if I had a bit more time to think about it than a one off text message.

This was the result. 

The Gospel Is: The proclamation that the story of Israel, and by extension the world, has come to its climax in the Messiah.

In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, apparent defeat was revealed to be the victory of God over sin, Satan, and death.

By means of this victory God is setting all things to rights, and now God sees us, not as we are in ourselves, but as we are in Jesus Christ.

Or, in short, Jesus is Lord.

In some sense this definition is yours as much as mine. Yes, I wrote it, but in doing so I collected all your statements about the Gospel and did my best to amalgamate them into one succinct confession.

But it’s not finished, and that’s where you come in.

The reason I explicitly used every entry was because we do not approach this good news alone, it will always be something worked out in community. And, today, I want to engage in an exercise in collaborative theology.

Here is my idea – lets create a Wiki Gospel.

And here is how it will (hopefully) work – the first editor cuts and pastes this summary, edits it as they see fit, and then post it in the comments. Then, the next editor takes that edited summary, and does the same, so that each version is a revision of the one immediately before it.

Feel free to add new content, take parts out, add them back in, rephrase the wording, whatever you think would make it a better summary of the Gospel message.

Tomorrow morning I will post the result.

That is the idea, but the direction it goes relies on you. So, I hope you will take a moment to join in on this experiment in collaborative theology! 

Confessions of a Homeschooler

08/09/2011
Confession
3 Comments

Yesterday Sarah at Emerging Mummy shared an update on her first day of homeschooling.

Confession time.

I was homeschooled, up until the 9th grade.

And I used books like these.

That’s right, they’re from Bob Jones.

And right about now your either shocked, or thinking “That explains so much!”

Of course when back when I was homeschooled it was viewed with far more suspicion – as in numerous long conversations with truant officers who’d walk up to you at the park and had a difficult time believing this was your gym class – so I suppose the textbook options may have been limited.

_____________________________

- Were any of you homeschooled? What was your experience?

- For those who weren’t, do you have any questions about growing up homeschooled?

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