Category: reflections

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