Wednesday, March 14, 2007

late night thoughts

i have been working on uywi stuff and have had way too much coffee. so i decided to start reading some articles on-line that i have been meaning to read. i remember an article that was recently published called the "five streams of the emerging church" by scott mcnight. i had looked over it quickly, but wanted to read it more in depthly as we are beginning to start this house church experiment in alhambra. i do consider myself more aligned with those in the emerging christian conversation or a red letter christian. i think it was more ... i stumbled into the definition and saw that i was already in this category but did not really have language to define it. enough me and me trying to discover who i am and not really caring how others feel about it and back to the article.

the five streams are the following ... 1. Prophetic 2. Postmodern 3. Praxis-oriented (how the faith is lived out) 4. Post Evangelical 5. Political.

you can read the article to get details about each of the "streams" but a couple aspects jumped out to me as i was in thought about the house church network. in the third component of praxis-oriented, it hit a key strand to our ideas about the network. the house churches that are launched should/must have a missional component to the community that the house church is located. it should be striving to better understand what it means to love our neighbor and have that as high of a priority as meeting in a building or location. our spiritual act of worship should be tutoring at a school, serving at a shelter, a garden, the police station or where ever there is a need for the purpose of us being the hands and feet of Jesus. we need a theology that changes the way we act and not just worried about how we think.

i am tired, so if i write any more in will probably not make sense and i will not even understand it myself. so i will try and blog about this more later.

1 comment:

Mrs Tellez said...

Excited to hear about New Orleans. I believe that God did intend for us (christians) to reach our neighboors (those close to us) and definitely be a light in the dark dark world. Katrina is and was a perfect opportunity for christians to come out of the church and show the world Jesus Love. Blessings to you John Lewis and your friend Chris that are going to be out there doing God's work. You will all be in my prayers. (After UYWI sat., i realized I remembered you have a blog- so i looked for it and decided to visit)