Category: faith

The marbles are on a roll

http://flickr.com/photos/kacey/253793036/

Those marbles in my head are rolling around this morning. Lots of thoughts swimming around. Good thoughts I do believe. Maybe heritickle thoughts.

Watched 4 episodes of Tony Jones’ trek across america with Trucker Frank early this morn. Really makes me want to find Jones’ new book, “The New Christians” and read the rest of the story.

Trucker Frank

In the videos Jones rides along with and talks to former pastor turned trucker and home church leader Trucker Frank along with a number of other individuals across the countryside. (As a side note – Jones talked with Frank and another pastor turned truck driver in the videos. Andy Stanley also used a story of a trucker/evangelist/pastor in his book (“Communicating for a Change.”)

Trucker Frank and Jones talk a lot about the importance of church community and the importance of sharing our faith and ideas with each other – no matter how heritickle they may be.

The Wiki effect

Reminds me of the “Wiki effect” (as in Wikipedia). The Wiki effect is the idea that you can take 5 top geometry experts and put them in a room to figure out how many marbles are in a jar. The geometry folks will use specific formulas to figure their answer. Then bring in several hundred “average joes” to guess how many marbles there are. If you take the average answer of all the “average joes” it will almost always end up closer than that of any of the “experts.”

So if we applied this to our faith, the idea is that a true community sharing faith will be just as likely – if not more likely to come to “correct conclusions” about God than someone who’s spent 10 or 15 years studying scripture as a member of the clergy.

Doesn’t mean you don’t study and use church libraries and commentaries and other resources to build on and strengthen your faith – it just simply means that we should all be doing this and then sharing our thoughts, experiences and truths with each other.

And when you have one or two people throwing out “outlandish” ideas they can be tested and approved by the body as a whole.

A Peculiar People

So these thoughts are swirling through my mind… and then I get on the bus this morning and pick up Rodney Clapp’s “A Peculiar People.” My History of Christianity professor at UMHB encouraged us to read this book while we were in his class. We even had a “book club” that discussed it… but at the time it was over my head and/or interest.

Clapp writes:

…the near-identification of Christianity with the nation-state has been nothing short of disasterous… I want to argue that American has so eagerly and thoroughly been Constantinian that it does have a true “old-time” and civil religion, but this religion is not Christianity. It is instead that eminently interiorized and individualized faith called gnosticism… what Americans have long been interested in is the gnostic type of religion, the tendency to believe and act as if faith and salvation were essentially private, acultural and ahistorical.

As Philip J Lee notes, “The gnostic escape, in the last analysis, is an attempt to escape from everything except the self.” The world, history and community are ultimately viewed with suspicion. The gnostic believes faith is a solitary affair between himself or herself and God. As Harold Bloom puts it, “Salvation, for the American, cannot come through the community or congregation, but is a one-on-one act of confrontation with God.” The American Jesus, Bloom suggests, “cannot be known in or through a church, but only one on one.”

As N.T. Wright notes, once we grasp a distorted and overemphasized “pro me of the gospel, the idea that God is ‘being gracious to me,’ we no longer need Jesus to be too firmly rooted in history.” Indeed, concentrating on the self and its individual salvation, we do not want a Jesus rooted in history, for that would be a particular Jesus who might reveal a particular God with a character and purpose different from our own. Nor do we want a Jesus who might be known in community or through the activities of a culture. All this runs against the American grain of discovering God within the self, a direction set at least since the early 1800s.

Hmmmm…. this brings me back to…..

Organic Church

I’m thinking this all ties in with some of the thoughts Lindsay Cofield shared in our interview this week about the “organic church”….

“I’d rather have a church of 12 people who can replicate the DNA of the Kingdom of God than a church of thousands that will infect people with something less. Take time to build the real thing, not watered-down, lukewarm look-a-likes. If we’re going to be the church at all let’s be the real thing. Build the church God’s way! As an organic movement of unpaid servants.”
– Michael Slaughter, unLearning Church

You can look for that interview on the Something Beautiful Podcast on Friday.

Related ::

SSL: Heritickle
The New Christians
Tony Jones’ channel on YouTube (with the Trucker Frank videos)
Tony Jones’ website
Boston Globe article on the Wiki Effect
About Wikipedia
A Peculiar People
NT Wright on the Colbert Show
everywherechurch.com
something beautiful podcast

Quote for today

“Church communities ought to be cauldrons of theological participation and imagination. that’s why we make churches… we are supposed to gather together in communities to engage in theological participation and imagination just as Christians have done all along.”

– Doug Pagitt
Aug 30, 2007
emergent village podcast

something beautiful :: 1.4 :: matt wilson

for those of you who haven’t checked lately, or subscribed to the something beautiful podcast, this week thomas talks with matt wilson, who heads up the message trust, in manchester, england – along with andy hawthorne – the original founder and visionary.

wilson is also the author of “eden:called to the streets” and is an active blogger at faithscape21.blogspot.com.

and don’t forget to drop us an email for your chance to win shawn mcdonald’s CD, “roots.”

related links ::

The Simple Way fire :: one year later

From Ordinary Radicals and The Simple Way:

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the 7-alarm fire that consumed an entire block of Kensington. The Simple Way has been working hard trying to get justice for their neighbors. But still, a year later and the city has yet to rectify this situation. Below is the press release, and videos about the fire and its aftermath.

7-alarm fire destroyed an entire block of Kensington, residents still face tens of thousands of dollars worth of fines from the City.

On June 20, 2007 an abandoned, city-owned, factory caught fire and burned down an entire block of Kensington, forcing evacuation of over 100 families and leaving 400 others without power of families as it ripped through the 3200 block of H Street. Dozens of homes were damaged and destroyed, cars exploded, a neighborhood in turmoil. Now, one year later, those families are being told they owe the City of Philadelphia money.

Victims of the fire were sent notices from the City of Philadelphia’s Licenses and Inspections Office saying the charred ruins that remained of their homes was an “eminent danger” to the neighborhood. This is all after the neglected City property caught fire for the third time that year and consumed their homes. The lot where the factory used to stand, along with the dirt block where there homes once sat, is now filled with broken glass, tires and trash, a scar on what was once a vibrant block of North Philadelphia.

One of the buildings lost in the fire was a community center belonging to The Simple Way, an influential nonprofit organization that has been serving in the neighborhood for over 10 years (along with the home of Simple Way founder and best-selling author Shane Claiborne). As people heard of the crisis, financial gifts came in from around the world and The Simple Way has worked with a neighborhood coalition over the past year to help families stabilize as they rise from the ashes. The fire garnered national attention, and now their petition to the city has thousands of signatures. Despite pleas to all major players, and a visit from Mayor Nutter himself, the City of Philadelphia they are having a hard time not going to court over this.

“Despite being advised to declare a class-action lawsuit, we are doing everything we can to invite the new Mayor and administration to do what’s right. All we are asking is that the City forgive the fines that have been imposed on victims of the fire so that we can continue to rebuild our neighborhood. It’s an easy opportunity to shine in an ugly situation.” — Shane Claiborne (author, resident and fire victim)

“We have been told by sympathetic folks in nearly every department in the City that this situation is embarrassing and shameful on the part of the City. But at the end of the day, one year later, we still face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.” (Darin Peterson, Exectuive Director of The Simple Way)

related links ::