...thoughts expressed here are not necessarily final.
May 10, 2004 Totally Addicted to My Blog
| (Sung to the tune of "Winter Wonderland") |  |
Doorbell rings, I'm not list'nin', From my mouth,
drool is glist'nin',
I'm happy -- although My boss let me go
--
Totally addicted to my Blog!
All night long, I sit clicking, Unaware time is ticking,
There's beard on my cheek, Same clothes for a week,
Totally addicted to my Blog!
Friends come by; they shake me, Saying, "Yo, man!
Don't you know tonight's the senior prom?"
With a listless shrug, I mutter "No, man;
I just discovered laugh-a-lot-dot-com!"
I don't phone, don't send faxes, Don't go out, don't pay taxes,
Who cares if someday They drag me away?
I'm totally addicted to my Blog! Happ-ilyyyyy, ad-dict-eeeed to my Bllllogggg!!!
(Yeah)
[Written by Ozguru, seen at Chasing
Daisy.]
From the totally useless information department.
How to build a RAID out of Floppy
Discs- ha!
May 12, 2004 Somebody stop me…! NoMo PoMofailure ahead- wrote this last night...
|
Well it seems the topic won't go away- a couple of people I know have mentioned they are reading McLaren's A New Kind of Christian so I guess I will read and comment. So far, as Voltaire (sorta) said, I don't agree but I will defend his right to say it. I appreciate anyone looking for a way out of the status quo but I am not so sure this path is the right one. My thoughts and ponderings will populate this blog over the next couple of weeks, I suspect. You can link to the book here too- Amazon has a substantial excerpt. |
 |
Check out this site. I've read other works by the author so I wonder if I will make it through to the end? I’ll have to belay the notion of NoMo PoMo for now. (Didn't last long did it?) At the onset I want to forward a caveat. My ministry experience has been in the world Christ called me to. It has not always been limited to the traditional four walls of the church building. I don't know squat about doing it any other way. I was not called to a pulpit ministry but I am just a shepherd who feeds the sheep God sends my way with the best food I've been given. That is by grace alone and the results are up to grace as well.
One thing I notice with the various pastors I read and
listen to is that many feel bound by false structures that they don't
see in the biblical model. The place for change to start, I think , is
in the preparation of their message to their people. Open up the sheep
(I always use this word in a good sense) to the possibilities a focus
on One Thing can afford.
 |
I would note that one of the labels moderns have placed on the desert fathers and the devotional writers of the middle ages is to call them "mystics". Any writings dealing with the intimate enjoyment of God seems to be categorized this way. I would say these writings may be mystical but that is because there is mystery involved with all knowing. We see through a glass dimly. We should delight in the things we can know without equivocation and we should delight in the hidden things as well. Our beautiful God is both/and in this regard. |
I hope to expand a dialogue with several people I know as I continue to form and reform my thoughts on the church in these times...whatever we call them. I am convinced that folks in the throes of change in other eras have struggled to define what is going on around them.
| I hope to live long enough to exercise 20/20 hindsight on this issue. If not I'll join the great cloud of witnesses, if that is a proper interpretation of that passage. I'll probably have more compelling things to witness THEN, so that says something about what our focus should be NOW. |  |
As an aside I would say that some of the voices of the high renaissance advanced the idea of renaissance pretty explicitly, and doing so effected change. It was top down, an elite who had access to mass communications that managed the change. (Pretty dramatic oversimplification, I realize!) This time around there is a cacaphony of voices promoting a muddle of ideas of unsurpassed proportions. But we can still attempt to articulate the idea of the renaissance of the awe of God in our generation by making much of Him before the world. Maybe this will be known as the time of the sifting. "Churchly postmodernism" will hopefully heed the call to champion the faith once delivered to the saints, but I fear some of the poMo gurus may throw THAT faith out with the bathwater for want of sound doctrine. Paul's pastoral letters seem ever more pertinent.
Introduction- Comments on "the true story" from A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren
|
AF Comment: the author says he considered
leaving the Christian path as an alternative. p. ix Maybe I should hear this as a cry of anguish- a place on the ashpile where the one who is scraping his sores cannot reckon the reality properly. If so then I should go over and throw my arms around him and say- "I cannot understand your pain but I love you." |
 |
The book says letting go of a worldview- a way
of seeing life- typically follows five phases-
Stability- life is fine current theories explain everything adequately,
and questions are few
Discontinuity- when old system seems to be working less well
Disembedding- when we feel the current system is unsupportable and we
begin to disconnect from it
Transition- when we haven't fully left the old world and we haven't fully
entered the new world
Reformation- when we decide to make a go of it in the new world we have
entered.
 |
AF:This sounds more like an instructional design model than a description of real life changes which rarely follow a linear path in my estimation. It's more of a convoluted and skewed spiral. |
Question 1. What if God is trying to move us
out of Egypt into the wilderness? P. x11.
AF:What if we were never meant to be in Egypt in the first place? That's
where we languished before when we were in the world. Maybe the call to
Christ is a call to the wilderness- not to become wise in the ways of
the wilderness, but to recognize that the sojourn is the way . The journey
in Christ is the life. The alienation/separation of being In Christ is
the truth. Our lives are hid with Christ in God and so His way becomes
our way. He sojourned among us in a wilderness that is filled with manna.
We don't have to wait for years to move "on to something"...
that is what we are about every day.
AF: Re.: General experience or my specific experience as data. My data
CANNOT be the general experience or my specific experience. Nothing is
less sure this side of heaven. My data must derive from the living Word.
Vocabularies change incessantly. there is no vocabular canon in the culture,
so to speak. Words have meaning but they are informed by the perceptions
of the hearer so we must endeavor to illuminate and clarify what we say
by any means available to us.
This is a key practice in Biblical hermeneutics- to uncover the author's intent.
On the world front: MSNBC has been on for most of the time Ma Smith has been with us- At 93, she is drawn to curent events like a moth to the flame. While I quite often do not agree with her perspectives on world events, the dialog is an important one.
This was at TheyBlinked.com
"The face of evil seen in what is happening in Iraq cannot be accepted as a justifiable tit-for-tat. Mr. Berg's decapitation was something nearly impossible to imagine: one's head being sawed off; the shrieking and slow, very slow, process of feeling every inch of one's own death as it approaches; amidst the gurgling mess of warm fluids recognized as one's own the unthinkable end of sentience violently imposed. Horrific. The definition of barbarism. Singular and without adequate recompense. Such evil is not snuffed out: it is only bred out. It is eradicated through the experiences that preclude its future appearance. We stop the Abu Ghraib's and the decapitations that are to come in how we live and speak now. We would do well to begin in mourning."