What to say?

I’m blogging.  Really I am.  It has been a challenging start of the school year (not to mention the adjustment to having 2 kids!).  Life continues with its ebbs and flows (mostly flows at present).

Church planting pondering and dreaming and planning continues.  Had some good conversations with the RCA recently and Sarah and I will be going to the RCA church planting event called Thrive! coming up in October.  I’m pretty excited about the possibilities.

I’m hoping to blog more, but frankly I’m still a bit gun shy about what I say and how I say it.  My desire is to reflect honestly on my life and to edify the Church (and the emerging church plant in our midst).

Speaking of said church plant… what of it?  I’m not sure yet – it is still a dream looking for a form.  But I sense that form is coming.  Part of that form-ing is the “who” question.  Who will be part of the beginnings of this new community?  We shall see.

Here’s another copy-paste from some church plant journaling I did in June:

Why another church?  Because there is an “unreached people group” right next door.  There is a missional space – a gapping hole actually – that God is calling us into.  I believe that the time is right for a church in the gap… a church that connects young professionals, creatives, artists, single moms, stay-at-home dads, mystics, dreamers, blue-collar workers with and in the Kingdom of God and the Person of Christ.  But this is not a church for everybody.  This is not one-size-fits-all, generic, vanilla, mechanistic, programmatic, buffet-line church.  This is not quick-fix, get out of jail free, self-help, with a dash of Jesus on the side church.

This is People of God church.  This is community church, where we live and breathe and move as a community – a People (of God), a Body, a Band of Brothers (and Sisters) AND we care for, love, look after, tend to, cry over, work in, and live in our community (neighborhood, street, block, apartment building, dorm, village, ‘burb, and city).  We are a church that is grounded in space and time.  We are not merely an abstract, spirituality center for health and well-being; rather we are a living, breathing organism that is present in a place.  We may not (and probably won’t) own any property, but we take seriously where we are.  In fact, I would love for those who call us home live together or at least in close proximity to one another.  What could it look like for more that 50% of our life together would be spent within walking distance of each other on a small group (house church) level.  Our church network may span beyond walking distance, but we don’t walk by our neighbors to go serve God and other people somewhere else!

Time matters to us.  We stand on the shoulders of 2,000 years of Jesus-following – we actively learn from and build on all of that rich (and sometimes poor) history.  Our worship and our theology (the thoughts we think about God and related matters) live within the context of our heritage.  We don’t worship the past, nor do we try to “get back to how it used to be”, we’re not stuck, still, or stasis.  We innovate, experiment, create, and lean way out over the edge… but we don’t do it blindly or without a healthy measure of skepticism (and probably cynicism thrown in for good measure).  We aren’t the greatest thing since sliced bread (or toasted communion wafer).