Thursday, March 30, 2006

The Final Deconstruction?

Last week i was teaching at a conference and i got to hang out with some guys like Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, Zaks (newsome and Lind), Mark Baas (mars hill g.r.), and some guys from scum of the earth church and i picked up on what may be postmodernisms final deconstruction of the traditional modern church. Basically, people are more and more content to simply meet as house churches. Note, not as a small group, but as a house church complete with administering sacraments, etc. In many ways this MAY be the final deconstruction of the traditional church because its a reaction to Corporate church. These are good people and they simply seem to hunger for church without the bureaucratic or political trappings. But I dont think the modern church can be deconstructed much more. You cant get any smaller than a house church. I havent read it yet but a friend of mine who read "Revolution" said that Barna's book pretty much said the same thing about boomers, i.e., people are leaving good churches to have their spiritual needs met elsewhere. Note again, they are leaving Good churches!
I'm excited by this option but i also have
3 1/2 Questions?
What does this mean for traditional modern churches? How should they respond?
How can the North American church max out on this trend?
I wonder what our friends in the underground churches (e.g. China, Arab world) etc would think about this?
Hope to hear from you.
One Love

Saturday, March 18, 2006

With Mao Behind Me??

Teaching in the Andy Warhol room provided me w/one one of the most spiritually surreal and ironic moments of my ministry.
I was teaching on the How to Use the Bible in our Spiritual Walk but with the new room set up there were images of chairman mao behind me. This was sooo ironic bc that morning i had seen this show on history channel about how mao came into power in china one of the first things he did was to bonfire bibles by the boatload. And now...here i was teaching on how uniuqe and supernatural the bible is..how to use it in our spiritual walk and all of this w/warhol images of mao behind. now thats a postmodern moment. "The earth is the Lord's" Ps. 24:1