After Ranty

Just realized I still have this blog/account after it got merged into my gmail account. Browsing over what was left here, as sort of artifacts to my heart's wandering in the past, its like a time-warped mirror. I see myself in the posts. I feel the passions that typed what was shared here (and a ton of what ultimately wasn't). In many ways those passions have matured with age. I'd say they had subsided, but that makes it sound like I don't care any more or have plunged into apathy. That's not the case. I've just seen angst and rant grow into compassion and dialogue on the topics of church and truth. I'd have guessed other trajectories from where I started and how I build. I've not moved on my staunch commitment to Biblical authority or abandoned concepts of absolute truth. I've just read a lot more books, met a lot more people and somewhere along the way glimpsed Christ more fully in various pages and faces. You can't encounter Christ unchanged or woe to you if you can. I still care about the church, but as I reflect over what led me to start this blog and post on it, my care has grown from angst to love. I love the church. I still have this blog. It's titled paradigmSHIFT as though that is what the Church needs. I've found that it was what I needed more.

DOCTRINEfought

...so what should we fight for? When it comes to church, what issues do we need to stand on and what issues can we just hold while giving grace? I mean, I know where I stand on a lot of doctinal issues (at least for now), but how many of them are important enough that I would want them in my church's doctrinal statement? How many are actually damning to the contrary veiws?

I guess what I am asking is: "Can a guy be an old school dispensdational calvinist with conservative veiws on marriage, abortion, courtship, music, etc... and still be an vague-ish emergant church sorta guy?"

Perhaps the post-emerant church is coming around. It would be like labels-are-crap mixed with mid-modernist views. Post-modernist questioning post-modernity and holding to truth without becoming drug dealer style truth pushers.

Ah, I am digressing. Sanity is a limited rescource.

Come Lord Jesus, or give us Grace for the days ahead.

fellowshipCHURCH

What is the church? When you strip away all our notions, traditions, cultural expectations and contrived interpretations, what is the church? We get so caught up defining the "church universal" and the "church local." I wonder if our terminology war is merely an evidence of our failed understanding.

Church is not "more than a building". That statement implies that the building might still be a part of it. Church is not a building in any sense.

Liturgy is cool, but it is not church. Singing is a profound part of worship, but it is not church. Special services, holiday cantatas, candle light vigils, are all conjured up when our "christian ghetto" dwellers think of church and yet I think these images have crowded out true church.

We have been so long without it that few of us even feel the hunger pangs any more.

I wonder if we have lost the church. More on this thought to come.

ABOUTtitle

Don't mistake the address for this site. I am not preaching "another gospel" in the scriptural sense. On the contrary, Chrstianity today is. I hope here to put a vioce of humble, earnest conviction. Things should be different. Let us not forget our first love.