Reading, Reading and More Reading.

Each summer I select a slate of books to work through. In fact, I'll spend a good bit of my vacation - if and when I take some - reading. This summer I am delving more deeply in Missional Ecclesiology and Emergent literature. By "Emergent" I mean Emergent Village's recently published "An Emergent Manifesto of Hope."

I'm looking forward to all the non-definitions that are sure to be found in my fellow seeker's and friend's work. While I'm sure the book will light some of the path forward for many of us, I suppose others will be frustrated. Those who want all of life to be tidy and as unwrinkled as hospital corners, have a difficult time with those associated with Emergent Village. The reason is that we are all very different and that makes some people uneasy. Emergent Village is made up of conservative baptists and church of Christ folks from the south, Biblical liberals from the west, northeastern academics, mid-western radicals, staunch Republicans and vehement Democrats and that makes for an eclectic group that is no where near univocal.

Personally, that's why I'm engaged by it. I'm fascinated to meet and know other committed Christians who read Scripture differently than what I've been taught to read and hold to an alternative ecclesiology than I know. These people make my experience and knowledge of God richer. So I read them, praise them, disagree with them, and love them as the Father loves me - or at least I try to. And at the end of the day we're all trying to walk in the way of Jesus.

On the missional front, I've got a copy of Alan Roxburgh's new book, "The Sky is Falling" and Patrick Kiefert's, "We Are Here Now." In my book, the best emerging church practitioners are deeply and intentionally missional. The two should go hand-in-hand.

I'm also in an online group that's reading Rob Bell's "Sex God" and I've also got to finish BarackObama's "The Audacity of Hope." I had to Obama down recently as I waded my way through Jones' and Lakeland's Constructive Theology, the writings of Freidrich Schlieirmacher, Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth, Luis Pedraja's Teologia, and the sermon's of John Wesley.

So, what are you reading this summer?

The Blogosphere

Lat week we hosted and led two memorial services for dearly loved members of our community. One was 93 and the other 74. In the midst of all this, one of our elders' wives was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which they thought was malignant at fist glance. To say the least, it was a hectic, emotional week.

That explains my absence from my keyboard recently. My apologies for those of you who frequently check on the blog.

While I haven't been writing a lot, some of my friends have posted very thoughtful pieces on theirs. I'm always mixed when I read friends' blogs. I'm glad that they are finding their voice and engaging the world, but then I get a knot in my stomach because I think to myself, "Shoot, I wanted to write that." Then, I feel guilty over my jealousy.

Anyway, here are some things you might want to check out.

1. One of my "old kids," Jessica Reese (I've known her since she was 15, now her oldest daughter is older than my youngest), who is - or will soon be - an emerging writer, has some good thoughts on Christian art at her site.

2. My friend, and recently returned missionary now working with Compassion, Russ Debenport, has some great music and thoughts about CCM at his blog.

3. Though Easter has passed, William Willimon has a great piece on the last to believe in Easter on on his blog, "A Peculiar Prophet."

4. Bill Kinnon, who I don't know, has some interesting thoughts entitled, "The People Formerly Known as The Congregation," at his site.

Happy Reading

History as Spiritual Discipline.

I just finished reading Rowan Williams' book, Why Study the Past: The Quest for the Historical Church. I'm typically resistant to theological books that are on a "quest" for something. Usually they are an experiment in heresy and essential put forth some line of reasoning or argument that has long been debunked -- think "The Da Vinci Code". However, Williams work is different. At once it is boring, thoughtful challenging and inspiring.

Here are some of the more interesting quotes:

"The inspiration of Scripture, as some modern writers have said, is not a matter of the Holy Spirit holding a writer's hand as a book is written; it is the present reality of a divine mediation that makes recognition possible as we now encounter the strangeness of the story. Abraham isn't 'one of us'; yet we and Abraham do make up an 'us' in relation to God, a shared reality before God which will take a lifetime to fathom."
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"God is free to do what He wills, and his freedom takes the form of acting so as to change us. It is a mistake to think that Luther (or any other classical Protestant) believed that 'justification' meant only a change in God's attitude without effect in us. On the contrary, what changes is that we become the locus of God's free activity. Unprovoked, unconditioned, and unconstrained by any other agent. God steps into the void and chaos of created existence and establishes himself there as God."
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"The challenge posed by the Reformation era is whether it is possible to conceive the question about unity and communion in the Church as bound to a witness to the priority of God's act rather than to issues around visible structures...In other words, baptism already encodes the theology elaborated by the doctrinal disputes of the early church."
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"If it (unity) is most clearly done in worship, then when we sing canticles, psalms and classical hymnody we express a unity across time as well as a unity in space."