counting heads

Dan has stopped counting heads at church. More power to him! I wish all our denominational pastors would be so courageous.

scot on church plants

Why Me?, Scot Williams

"i have been asked to give my reasons why i no longer go to real church anymore, why i handed in my ordination and though repeatedly asked, why i refuse to take it back, and why i no longer advocate planting churches for the vast majority of evangelicals. how could i, a career planter, bite the hand that has almost fed me for so long? i hope that it is because of this longevity in a field with few lifers that i have at least a smattering of some credibility. here's an excerpt...

"I was getting my passport this week. You know how it is… you sit and wait and then someone calls you up and asks you a bunch of questions. So she asked me, 'why are you going to Orlando?' I wanted to say something like, 'I’m starring in a Body Building Movie', but instead I confessed, 'I’m going to a conference about starting new churches'. Then she asked me a question, and it’s the only question I’m going to address. She said this, "well then maybe you could answer this for me… 'why would anyone want to go to church?'"

It's worth reading scot's entire post. I'm anxious to hear how this speaking engagement goes for him.

paradox

Jamie at Our Missional Pilgrimage writes on The Community Longing to be the Church, out of his church planting experiences of late. He also beautifully summarizes the truth of the life of the believer as part of the body of Christ.

Here is just the last paragraph. I want you to go to his site to get the rest.

"We are The Community Longing To Be The Church. We live in the paradox of longing to become while already being. We are the Church. We are the Body. And yet we are so far from it. In this tension- in our sin and selfishness- we discover our desperate need for God and even, often grudgingly, for each other. We love God with all our hearts, but those hearts are divided. So we come together, through His Spirit to seek the love of the Father as we seek to become more like the Son. And we see that this is achieved in the chaos and brokenness of the Cross. Our hope is that, as we are poured out by and for Him, we can become the community He has created us to be. It is here that we discover the deeper truth:

"We are The Community Longing To Become Christ."

twit

Why I won't be twittering.

thanks to Glenn.

what's right

For all my whining, complaining, and pointing out what I see that's wrong, I do see some things in the institutional church (local and otherwise) that I think are good and right. I will hereafter be more intentional about highlighting those things.

I'll start with yesterday in our own church. We had a (limited) Seder meal during worship. It isn't the first time we've done it, but it was again meaningful to a lot of people, myself included. The occasional hacks and gags from children tasting horseradish for the first time, to the "what's that again?" queries from adults only added to the beauty of it. When we do the Seder, it feels like we're participating in communion the way it was intended and taught at that last Passover meal with the Christ.

It definitely was right.