Comments on: What if we started over?

By: steve

steve — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:25:54 +0000

thanks for clarification,

steve

By: steve lewis

steve lewis — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:37:52 +0000

Thanks for the comments everyone.

Chad – good question about which rules to break. I’ll keep chewing on that and post on it.

Steve – thanks for stopping in from your side of the world! I guess my response is to agree that the early church had some specifically negative memories to get over. But that’s where the “breaking the rules” aspect of what I wrote comes in. That may not fully address what you’re after, but I certainly don’t mean to suggest that they had a totally clean slate to work with.

By: steve

steve — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:44:46 +0000

hi,
i’ve posted this over at jordon cooper’s — that while I agree with your sentiment, it’s not fair to imagine pentecost as blank slate, those folk had hundreds of years of religious memory – religious memory, to get over,

steve

By: Why don’t we start all over? | JordonCooper.com

Why don’t we start all over? | JordonCooper.com — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:42:01 +0000

[...] Because we really don’t want to Second, we’re not being honest about what we’re trying to do. We’re not even trying very hard to go all the way back. We take a vast amount of theological, historical, and cultural baggage with us when we look back. Even people who read authors like N.T. Wright in order to understand the first century Palestinian context stop too short. When I hear people saying they want to do church the way the early church did it, they don’t really mean they intend to strip down their evangelical systematic theology, their Western wealth and (white) power, their Protestant Reformation, their Christendom power, their Augustinian conceptions . . . they just want the pragmatics of meeting in peoples’ houses and sharing possessions and giving money away to those in need. The idealism is commendable in some ways, but it’s mostly just that – idealism, and an artificial idealism at that.* [...]

By: Chad McMillan

Chad McMillan — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:44:15 +0000

Nice job, Steve. Your post a couple of days ago made me sit through about 35 min of the demo. Very cool, but way over my head. I’ll wait for the geeks to explain it to me about 3 years after it comes out.

I agree with your assessment that those wanting to “get back to basics” don’t really want that at all. If so, then they’d re-argue the humanity/divinity of Christ, which books to include in the cannon and whether or not men need to be circumcised to join the faith. We have too much history/investment to do anything remotely like becoming the “Acts Church.”

Obviously, what is usually being said is that we are/have gotten off the path in some areas. Henderson and Casper talked about that some. Fog machines and techno light shows come to mind (although, even those can/might be used in ways to bring the gospel message into current culture, if not done in a cheesy way). So the question that we should ask is “What path does Jesus want the 21st century church on?”, not “How can the we make the 21st century church like the 1st century church?”.

I am intrigued by your statement “…we’ve got to be creative enough and courageous enough to know when to break the rules of our day…” I wonder what the top 3 rules are that you’d say we need to consider breaking in order to bring the essence of the early gospel into modernity.

Great conversation starter. Now let’s watch the “Wave” grow.

By: Cameron Crabtree

Cameron Crabtree — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:27:55 +0000

I really appreciate your thoughtfulness in approaching this. For my initial off-the-cuff reaction: God’s dream was for a people rather than their form of organization. We concern ourselves with the form way more than God does. In part, I think, because it allows us to wring our hands with inaction rather than getting involved in the lives of people around us and walking along with them.

By: rexhamilton

rexhamilton — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:14:37 +0000

Great post, Steve! I think your right about what pastors say in terms of going back to the NT model and that it’s incomplete and not entirely what we should be imagining for today’s church.

I myself have said these kinds of things more often than I care to admit, with too little knowledge of what I was really saying. I hear more and more pastors saying they want to “break the system” and to be honest, I think most pastors are too reliant upon their fulltime church salaries…coffee house work schedules…and the general laid back approach to ministry. It’s not to say they aren’t working hard and making sacrifices to love and serve people, but if we’re to do what I think you’re suggesting, it’s going to mean massive personal change for church leaders and their families before we can even talk about systems and structures.

While doing some rebuilding down in the New Orleans area last week, I met a man who used to be a pastor…quit his job and now relies completely on support from friends and organizations. He introduces himself as a missionary to the St. Bernard Parish where he creats short films and documentaries, all with the purpose of bridging churches and secular organizations together. The fact that he considers himself a missionary while livng in his hometown was something that stood out to me. I thought that maybe we need fewer people with all kinds of church titles, and more who really go about being simple missionaries.

Just some thoughts. Again..great post on an important subject. Especially for those of us here on the Eastide.