We Live As We Are

As I walked I thought about a church I pastored.  The members had a notion of what church should be. One couple, for instance, bought the church a used pipe organ, because a 'real' church should have a pipe organ.  We were part of a mainline denomination that is dying (and not slowly, either).

Speaking with a friend in the church we currently attend I mentioned being part of another church, one that (for awhile) embraced a new way of "doing church".  This was the founding congregation of the "church unleashed" movement, and when we began attending it had eleven congregations meeting around Denver.  The church mentioned in the first paragraph could not even keep itself meeting.

I thought, "we live as we are, and if we keep living as we are we never grow, never change, never tune in to the currents and shifts in the culture we are part of.  So we die as we were.

How sad that churches which have so much to contribute to the world are dying because they will not re-vision the ways they can speak, act, organize, and serve.  The temptation to conservative ways is powerful, but it always leads to death.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let us know.

Sacred Ground

Really?  What makes a place "sacred" or "holy"?  

No one made pilgramages to the place Moses saw the burning bush.  Or to the top of Mt. Sinai.  If God was everywhere, surprising people again and again, then all ground it holy and all places have the potential to be "sacred" -- meaning no place is more sacred than another.   

Choosing to believe that the so-called 'holy land' is more sacred than Berkeley, CA, or Littleton, CO, or Vaughn, WA may be a form of idolatry.  Only God is 'sacred'.  If God is everywhere, everywhere is sacred.  If no place is special, all places are special, and pilgrimages are silly.  Just go somewhere because you want to, not to make pilgrimage to a sacred place.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let us know.  

Fanaticism in the Old Testament?

One of the distinctive features of fundamentalism is the "all or nothing" attitudes they take.  Christian fundamentalists stake the authenticity of a person's faith on that person believing everything the fundamentalist says is true, must be true, has always been true and will be true for eternity.  Come to think of it, the Muslim fundamentalist, the Hindu fundamentalist  the Jewish fundamentalist and the capitalist fundamentalist along with the anti-gun-control fundamentalist take on the same "all or nothing" attitude, although the everything differs between each type of fundamentalist.  Even within a group, Christians (for instance) one person's demand is another persons heresy.

I don't insist on what I just wrote.  I am not an "Al fundamentalist".  But it seems pretty accurate today, May 7, 2013.  We could disagree a bit and no one would be hurt.

I got to thinking about the un-thinking insistence by Christian fundamentalists that every word in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Scriptures is exactly, precisely true.  What if they are wrong?

I think they are wrong.

Suppose, then, that the record that says God, the LORD, Yahweh, commanded the Israelites to kill ALL the Canaanites was attributed to God by people of a fundamentalist persuasion.  Or, perhaps by people who were crass, craven killers who wanted Hebrew people with a tendency toward fundamentalist attitudes to believe that God told them to be weapons of mass and total destructions.  The Nazis of the decades after the Hebrews crossed the Jordan River and entered the land of Canaan, so to speak.  "Kill everyone not like us.  God said!"

What if genocide is always wrong, and our Creator never, never sponsors it?

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let us know.