On my mind

I don’t have many clearly focused thoughts today…. working on various projects here at work – including a video for a big shindig this weekend and playing with our new SchoolPad… looking forward to Family Time tonight… continued happiness that the basement is livable….

But here is a bit of what I’ve been reading today on the Great Network in the Sky…

Obama Says He’ll Consider A 2008 Bid for The Presidency

Book Review: the book – The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, the review – Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching by Terry Eagleton

Glenn quotes Andrew who quotes Roland who’s onto something really really tiny, but BIG. (This hits really close to home and echos much of my thinking of late.)

Tiny is the New Small – by TallSkinnyKiwi

Restored Church of God says blogging is wrong (excluding their own blog, natch)

A Theology of Social Space (ala Jason Evans)

Jason Evans posted this on his blog A5 1T 15: sausage, wine, frost and social space…. He ponders the idea of social space and its implications for mission… or visa versa. I’ve been pondering this similar space as well… certainly as VC made the decision to begin Sunday worship in our public space (St. E’s). This has been a tremendous blessing for our community. My thoughts on this are morphing and evolving again as I consider a new opportunity. I’m still working out the details, but I’m interested in how space forms mission and mission forms space. How do we function as faith communities in an affluent society that is recovering from Christendom (ie. we have all these “religious” spaces… what do we do with them?).

Über-Small

Last night our Über-Small House Church (maybe we should be called Über-Church) didn’t meet. We were going to, but Liz had a show, Maria and Brennan were both feeling under the weather, the Wetzels can’t meet on Weds. now that we moved nights, and John has a sculpture class till Christmas. Truly it worked out well because Sarah and I needed to move our furniture into the basement which is basically finished.

(** Oh, we have leftover drywall if anyone needs some, no big sheets, but several half sheets. Let me know **)

Russell came down and helped move some heavy stuff and I’m sure Sarah and Cloey are working on arranging and cleaning today. It is really coming together and should be ready for Cloey’s B-day party on Saturday. We’ll have a few more things to do over the next several months…. baseboards and window sills and trim-paint….. but it is livable! It only took 2 years!! Oh, and now we’re getting a couple leaks when it rains hard… great. Got get those fixed.

Anyway…. Über-Church …. I was struck again last night at how very fragile these little ecclesias are. The organizational, Evangelical, Church-Growth part of me feels anxious about such things…. will we survive? Are we “growing”, reaching people, spreading the gospel? Are we legitimate? Are we worthy, valuable, significant?

To which, I must confess, I say HOG-WASH!

Are we being faithful?

Are we loving? Are we orienting our lives more and more to Jesus? Are we living Kingdom lives – when we gather and even more so when we scatter? Are we sharing our lives, our fears, our dreams with one another? To these I say, YES! Certainly not perfectly, but we are. We’re moving that way. I see us – our little Über-Small House Church – getting into rhythm with the Spirit. I sense us feeling the beat beat beat of the Great Drum of Heaven. I feel us finding our rhythm and beginning to dance. To dance to dance to dance to His rhythm.

“Then He smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum
Me and my drum.”

Portrait of the Teacher Idealist

A couple folks at school took online personality tests so I thought I’d take one too. The last several times I’ve taken such things I came out ENFJ and I did again. As I read the description I must admit that it nailed me…. just call me a Teacher Idealist.

I’m in good company:

Enacting the Kingdom

In house church we’ve been pursuing this perplexing question for the last several weeks…

“What is normative for a group of followers of Jesus? Are there norms? If there are norms then where do they come from, how do we discern them, and how do we enact them?”

Last week we talked about “how Jesus was something of a Performance Artist for the Kingdom and how we are called to be the very same.” This week we continued the conversation. I suggested that what is normative for followers of Jesus is that we enact the Kingdom. We looked at Matthew 10:7-8:

“Go and announce to them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure those with leprosy, and cast out demons. Give as freely as you have received!”

Jesus instructed his disciples back in the day and still does for us today. We are to do the same… announce the Kingdom and enact it. Live it out. Healing the sick, raising the dead, curing leprosy, exercising demons, eating with “sinners and tax collectors”, etc… those things and more so. That’s what is normal for Jesus followers.

Ryan Bolger’s post gets at this too:

I’ve been doing a good amount of reading on culture this quarter for the class I’m teaching. I ran into this writing on carnivals by Mikhail Bakhtin. He wrote that in the medieval carnival, there was no separation between performers and spectators. In fact, performers were really not performers at all; instead, they lived in this carnivalesque space. Much more than a performance, the carnival was a life lived. Both ’spectator’ and ‘performer’ held their roles lightly in this newly shared space.

Bakhtin went on to explain that all the oppressive conditions of everyday life — and there were plenty in medieval Europe — were suspended during the carnival. Revelry replaced terror, laughter replaced gloominess, abundance replaced scarcity, freedom replaced all restrictions. All social inequalities, hierarchical structures, and rules of social distance were set aside as well. The carnival space combined “the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”

When I read this, I immediately thought about a comment I heard from Karen Ward, how her community “plays in the kingdom”, i.e. practices heaven. In their church life together, they are more than simply performers — they participate in a life lived under a different logic, they indwell a different time and space, a future time, the ‘now and not yet’, the rule and reign of God.

I wondered, as followers of Jesus, how we might create these free zones, these spaces where the oppression of the world does not reign. I was thinking not only in our times of meeting together but separately as well, in our workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, parks. How do we create this alternative space where hierarchies are not observed, where everyone has a voice, where people experience liberation, where laughter is frequent, where the terror is lifted, even for just a few moments? What if our ‘witness’ is not a performance but the creation of an alternative space, a space that does not yield to the powers of this world but strives to point to the next?

What would it look like for a church – a group of followers of Jesus – to enact the Kingdom or to be Kingdom Performance Artists? Or, to look at it a different way, what would it look like for a church to create “free zones” where folks could “play in the Kingdom” – like how kids play in a sandbox? Honestly, what excites me most about that is not that we simply do it on Sundays or when the church gathers, but when the church scatters. How can we Play at work, at home, in the drive-thru, in our parenting, in the grocery store, at the local coffeeshop, or out on a date with a significant other. This reminds me of Newbigin’s thing about how the local church is the hermeuntic of the gospel and that its job is to be a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the Kingdom of God.

A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future by Robert Webber

A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future by Robert Webber in Christianity Today.

again with nice.

15 Theses. Wolfgang Simson

15 Theses. Wolfgang Simson

nice.

I Can't Tell

I can’t tell if I have a lot on my mind or nothing at all. I’m kinda sleepy today and my head feels a bit scrambled egg-ish.

I have a bunch of partial thoughts about the nature of truth and our knowing of it. Stuff related to relationality and love. That we only truly know anything by way of relationships. That Love is the prime characteristic of our universe.

I have thoughts on church size and multiplication…. unformed largely. Scot McKnight polled on the matter and got some great comments. I surfed from there to this link which presents an interesting proposal – a vision really – of a church multiplication philosophy that is primarily driven by small churches (think house churches) but that is not exclusive to large gatherings. I find it quite compelling. See Small, Clustered, Multiplying Churches (note there is a pdf as well).

Then I hear about this movie, The Nativity Story. Somehow I’ve missed this…. Looks good. Mary as played by Keisha Castle-Hughes (of Whale Rider fame). Nice. Should produce lots of media buzz and consternation for some.

I continue have a sense that God is up to something in our midst. House Church was good last night. Maria and Brennan were there and we had a relaxing night with good discussion (and yummy meatloaf, mashed taters, broccoli, and brownies). Brennan brought his art journal to share and I was very impressed. I love how God speaks through art and artists. We talked about how Jesus was something of a Performance Artist for the Kingdom and how we are called to be the very same.

We’re off to our neighborhood camping trip. We’re going to Indian Lake State Park with 7 families from our ‘hood. I’m very much looking forward.

Peace to you this day.

Chad's Podcast

A few weeks ago I mentioned Chad’s sole podcast he recorded when he was starting Poema. I was grieved to find that it was no longer online. Thanks to the good graces of Joe Long (www.eachnotesecure.com), the podcast is back online. You can download it here:
Chad Canipe Poema Podcast 1 (mp3, 7 MB, 15 min)

Remembering Chad

I was looking through old blog posts and saw this quote from Chad’s old blog (I can’t find the archive link), but it was a copy/paste from him. Chad was so soft-spoken and not quick too speak, but when he did he spoke volumes. Case in point:

Capturing Some Late Night Thoughts…
It’s late and I should be in bed, but I needed to get a few things off my mind and typed out before I forget them and they’re lost forever. Nothing terribly profound, but some things that are worth thinking about.

Coming out of some conflict that I’ve witnessed recently in the midst of some fellow believers, I began to ask myself the question, “How does a body of believers made up of imperfect people coming from so many different backgrounds and perspectives stay together…unified…of one mind…live in peace?” (Moreover, how does something like that grow and mature and multiply?)

I started to think of the first disciples that Jesus called — a motley crew, no doubt about it. But what the Lord, I think, was leading me to see was that here was a diverse group of people, made up of salty fishermen, a doubter (Thomas), a turncoat (Judas Iscariot), a tax collector (Matthew), and a political revolutionary (Simon the Zealot), but they somehow got past their differences and stuck together (minus Judas, I guess). And not only did they stick together, God used them mightly, empowering them to spread the Gospel even under intense persecution and spark a spiritual movement that has lasted nearly two millennia.

Amazing when you really think about it, really. Particularly when you look at two of these characters who were definitely like oil and water — Matthew and Simon the Zealot. You cannot have two more divergent political persuasions. Matthew was in bed with the Roman government, using his position to skim funds from the public who despised him. Simon, especially, would’ve seen him as a traitor and thief. And Simon was, as his title suggests, a member of the Zealots, a Jewish nationalist party ardently opposed to the Roman rule. Those folks were serious about revolution; overthrowing the government — and doing it by any means necessary.

So what holds these guys together? What keeps their individual ideologies in check?

I want to suggest that it was Jesus — a singular allegiance to Jesus.

Jesus had called them. He had changed their lives. And He was now their focus. He was who they were following. Allegiance to Jesus was what that group of misfits was about — not their pet ideologies. Everything else came second to Jesus as they were learning to seek first His Kingdom and righteousness.

I dare say that we all have our own pet ideologies, ideas and opinions that, given too much emphasis, will inevitably vie for our allegiance over and above Jesus. Our ideologies can too easily become our idols. And when this happens, division within a church is, sadly, just around the corner.

This all just impresses upon me that when we get together as congregations or churches or small group fellowships, that we ought to be focused singularly on Jesus and becoming his apprentices. Let’s lay aside our own agendas and seek His agenda for our life together.

Ok, I’m off to bed. Peace.

posted by Chad | 2:31 AM 9/28/04