After a long hiatus away from contributing to RawReligion.com, I’m making a conscious decision to return to this blog. I use the word “conscious” because it’s a key necessity when talking about decentralized Christianity.

When you set out to pursue organic, simple, outwardly-focused models of “doing church” (i.e. ecclesiology) you find that it is your own responsibility to set the pace and sustain momentum. To respectfully paint a picture of this, you’re leaving the well-oiled machine of the traditional church, where procedure and sub-cultural expectations are defined and observed, and launching out into the great unknown where format is fluid and the modus operandi is undefined. You’ve set out on an pioneer adventure, there are no roads, and only you can “blaze the trail” westward towards the unknown.

This week, I’m traveling to New Hampshire to install a phone system (It’s my day job). I brought two books for reading, (1) Vol. 1 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers and (2) “The Shaping of Things to Come” by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch (n.b. hereafter referred to as “SOTTC”). The Ante-Nicene Fathers are good, but heady; the SOTTC is earthy, practical, and deeply prophetic. Not camel-skin-suit prophetic, nor expensive-suit-and-white-feathery-hair prophetic. The words of this book are a timely and much-needed wake-up call for believers to deeply consider the way we operate in our cultural context.

What follows are a few quotes and my own commentary on chapter one, “Evolution or Revolution?”:

D.H. Lawrence said as long ago as 1924, “The adventure has gone out of the Christian venture.”

I think most of us can relate to this feeling. Where is the excitement? Where is the lasting sense of adventure? We are overfed, overeducated, and jaded to the excitement of innate within the wild Mission of God. Hence, the reason for revolution.

[We must ask ourselves] “What has God called us to be and do in our current cultural context?” The issue of cultural context is essential because the missional church shapes itself to fit that context in order to transform it for the sake of the kingdom of God. By definition, the missional church is always outward looking, always changing (as culture continues to change), and always faithful to the Word of God.

Heeding the cultural context is important for two reasons. One, it implies that we as the people of God are looking outward, outside the physical or societal walls of our group. Two, it recognizes that the expression of Jesus’ Bride will be different depending on the cultural context it is within. Missional church can (and should) look different across cities, countries, and people groups.

Albert Einstein, one of history’s greatest thinkers, once noted that “the kind of thinking that will solve the world’s problems will be of a different order to the kind of thinking that created those problems in the first place.” … If Einstein was right, then the problems of the church, like all real problems in any context, cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created those problems in the first instance. In other words, boxlike thinking simply cannot solve the problems of the box.

Mr. Einstein, there was a deposit of the wisdom of God in you. However, the record still stands that King Solomon was (and is) the wiset man who ever lived.

A metanarrative is an overarching story that claims to contain truth applicable to all people at all times in all cultures.

A definition like this forces us to ask ourselves what the gospel REALLY is. How much of what we preach as doctrine is rooted in our own cultural norms? Can we be focused (and brave enough) to challenge the sacred cows in our ecclesiological praxis to whittle things down to the essential gospel of God, that spans culture?

Table 1: Depicting Three Phases of the Church and its Characteristics

Many of the items are the same between the “Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Mode” and the “Missional Mode.” This is not illustrated in an attempt to prove that the missional mode has it “all correct,” but rather that the missional mode seeks to restore some of the timeless principles that were in operation in the early church age.

Christendom thinking…assumes that the church belongs prominently on the main street, and it claims that the church has the right to take over a public space and clean out the local people while creating a so-called sanctified religious zone.

What do you think about this (above) statement?

The missional church always thinks of the long haul rather than the quick fix.

As believers, we must be after lasting change. It takes a summer to grow a zucchini, but generations to establish an oak tree. What is our goal? Are we willing to invest time and resources without the reward of instant gratification?

Below are fifteen hallmarks of a missional church. I won’t comment on them in this post. I believe they can stand on their own and challenge our current understanding of “church.”

1. The missional church proclaims the gospel.
2. The missional church is a community where all members are involved in learning to become disciples of Jesus.
3. The Bible is normative in this church’s life.
4. The church understands itself as different from the world because of its participation in the life, death, and resurrection of its Lord.
5. The church seeks to discern God’ specific missional vocation for the entire community and for all of its members.
6. A missional community is indicated by how Christians behave toward one another.
7. It is a community that practices reconciliation.
8. People within the community hold themselves accountable to one another in love.
9. The church practices hospitality.
10. Worship is the central act by which the community celebrates with job and thanksgiving both God’s presence and God’s promised future.
11. This community has a vital public witness.
12. There is a recognition that the church itself is an incomplete expression of the reign of God…
13. The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology…
14. The missional church is messianic, not dualistic, in its spirituality. That is, it adopts the worldview of Jesus the Messiah, rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God’s place in it as more holistic and integrated.
15. The missional church adopts an apostolic, rather than a hierarchical, mode of leadership. By apostolic we mean a mode of leadership that recognizes the fivefold model detailed by Paul in Ephesians 6. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flat-leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as the currently popular pastoral and teaching gifts.

I love reading, especially reading books on theology.  Over the past five years, I’ve managed to build a fairly nice amateur library of theology books. There was a time when the library was much larger, but lately I’ve been determined to only fill these cubby holes with books that I wouldn’t want to do without.

Last week, I bought an IKEA bookshelf and divided my books into seven categories.  I thought about making a theologically-geared Dewey decimal system, but that was a little too much to take on during this busy work season.

My seven categories (as of today) are:

• Bibles
• Ancient Languages
• Biblical Studies
• Missional Organic Church
• Church History / Cosmogeny
• Theological Studies
• Deeper Christian Life

As you can see by the bursting cubby holes, I am going to need to make another $70 investment with my spending money (next month?) to increase my book retention limit.

Here’s just a few books that I’m excited about reading:

The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 10 vols.

Source: ChristianBook.com

Price: $99.99 (Retail $299.99)

The Ante-Nicene Fathers ranges from the Apostolic Fathers to various third and fourth century sources including the liturgies and ancient Syriac documents. It was intended to comprise translations into English of all the extant works of the Fathers (with the exception of the more bulky works of Origen) down to the date of the first General Council held at Nicaea in 325 A.D. This American edition by Arthur Cleveland Coxe is a revision of the original series edited by Alexander Roberts and Sir James Donaldson and published in Edinburgh. The revision involves a major rearrangement to conform to the historical sequence, the addition of brief introductions and notes indicating variances in readings, specifying references to scripture or literature, clarifying obscure passages, and noting corruptions or distortions of patristic testimony (as forged in the Decretals). The basic aim of the translations has been to strive for literary exactness, placing the English reader as nearly as possible on an equal footing with those who are able to read the original.

Beginning Biblical Hebrew (Futato)

Source: Amazon.com Used Bookseller

Price: $34.99 (Used)

Achieving the right balance of amount of information, style of presentation, and depth of instruction in first-year grammars is no easy task. But Mark Futato has produced a grammar that, after years of testing in a number of institutions, will please many, with its concise, clear, and well-thought-out presentation of Biblical Hebrew.

Because the teaching of biblical languages is in decline in many seminaries and universities, Futato takes pains to measure the amount of information presented in each chapter in a way that makes the quantity digestible, without sacrificing information that is important to retain. The book includes exercises that are drawn largely from the Hebrew Bible itself.

The New Testament and the People of God (Wright, N.T.)

Source: Amazon.com

Price: $25.08 (Retail: $38.00)

This first volume in the Christian Origins and the Question of God series provides a historical, theological, and literary study of first-century Judaism and Christianity. Wright offers a preliminary discussion of the meaning of the word “god” within those cultures, as he explores the ways in which developing an understanding of those first-century cultures are of relevance for the modern world. By examining the history, social make-up, worldview, beliefs, and hope of Palestinian Judaism, Wright introduces you to the world of Judaism as situated within the world of Greco-Roman culture.

This morning, my taste buds experienced the world’s worst protein shake.

Seriously, I know for a fact that it was the worst shake ever. How do I know this? Well, for starters, not many shakes have raw Italian sausage in them. Even fewer shakes have carrot juice AND raw Italian sausage.

Yesterday, I began a 21 day cleanse in an attempt to detox from two years of bad eating habits and, perhaps, lose a bit of weight along the way.

This morning, I asked my wife for some frozen bananas. She grabbed a bag out of the freezer and handed it to me. As I examined the see-through Zip-Loc package, my assessment came back clean.

The slightly curved, pale looking objects looked like bananas. Why should I doubt my wife’s selection?

Deciding to be efficient, I grabbed two “bananas” and proceeded to make a double-batch to satisfy my requirements for breakfast and lunch.

I first suspected something was wrong when I removed the lid from our BlendTec blender. This concoction lacked the sweet, homely smell of ripe bananas. This was my first warning.

The second, and most significant warning light went off when I put my lips to the container and took a hearty, full-bodied swig of my “banana” shake.

Now, I’ve had my share of protein shakes in the past. I know that a chocolate protein shake doesn’t taste like a liquid Hersey’s bar. However, this experience was an all-time low.

I then made a fairly significant blunder. Assuming the shake was legit and recognizing that I had a duty to drink it, I tilted the glass at a downward angle and begrudgingly chugged that sucker down like my life depended on it.

Realize here, I still was unaware that I had ingested raw, icy, liquid pork matter. It wasn’t until later in the day that I realized my blunder. I grabbed the bag of “bananas” to make another shake; only this time, I happened to smell the contents of the bag. Hmm. That doesn’t smell like bananas. Those are frozen Italian sausages!

That was the drama of my day. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed my unfortunate experience.