last night was cool...

so, our experiments continue with anchor point... just seeing what a church of people could look like... you know, we are not that spectacular, still trying to wrestle through our own grief, selfishness, confusion, dogmatism, etc... but i think we all see that the established church is not for us...

a good point was made last night (was it by ben i think?) that in the evangelical church, there are defined corners and edges of a box that the tradition exists in... that is, you can go to any given evangelical church and hear the same 100 sermons at some point in time, safe, three points, and hey, perhaps that is not such a bad thing... i mean, there is a sense of consistency, security, and practicality in this system... you can give people concrete conclusions that will hopefully lead to living specific things out that help us in relation to god...

but, for the five of us that were in my living room last night (and the other three or six that were away), its not enough... we have seen god move out of that little box called evangelicalism too many times... so the established church doesnt work well for us...




rhianon explained that the difference between greek thought (which pervades western culture, including the christian church) and hebraic thought... you see, a person of greek thought will look at this table and say that its messy, that there is a flat part on top that is about 18 inches by 40 or so inches... it is light color wood... it explains it from a, well kind of more scientific thought... at least, from a perspective that is under the assumption that we can know all about this table...

now the hebraic thought would describe it from a more mysterious point of view... describe its shadows, its effects on the things around it, not trying to draw a conclusion too quickly...

so, this is just a metaphor for our discussion last night... that is, how we read (or dont read) our bibles... chara said that it is hard to read her bible in any other way than 'basic instructions before leaving earth' and of course, that is how most of us were taught to read it, disecting it like a science project... seems very greek...

as opposed to letting the stories evoke emotion (joy, gravity, even outrage) and work their way into you... okay, so thats way less qualifiable... and perhaps the 'basic instructions' isnt a bad way, but its an incomplete way... perhaps we have to interact with the mystery as well as the certainty...

man, these thoughts arent coming out as well as they were last night in our discussion... what i began with in this post was saying that we are continuing in our experimentation of what a church could look like... so these next couple weeks, we are eating dinner together, watching a nooma™ video and then discussing its implications and then seeing where the conversation goes...

okay, well i am going to listen to ray vanderlan's dust of the rabbi tape this afternoon and begin my study of the gospels that will last me the rest of my life...

on to living, have a good day,
ryan...