Trying to figure this one out. We need to have good songs/music, but…well, there are a lot of buts. We don’t want the hassle or complexity of a band. We don’t want bad songs from our past. We don’t want shallow “Jesus is my boyfriend” songs. We do want quality, meaningful songs that are possible to sing decently without a rehearsal. And we need to adapt more contemporary P&W songs for acappella settings.

UPDATE: Having a great email discussion now with Richard, my dad, and the team. Very good insights so far. I’m focusing on the whole-church gatherings, which will likely not be “worship services” as such, and will not be weekly. I suppose this is a separate question from the one above, but an important one.

Now, after our 3-day team camping trip, I’m going camping with 100+ 6th graders from my school. Should be lots of fun…

UPDATE: It went well. It’s amazing how kids can stay in the pool for two and a half hours without getting bored. We played two-step ball tag, where you’re out until someone gets out the person who got you out (follow that?). Probably the longest I’ve exercised in years. I also got to know Peter, another teacher from school, a lot better.

In Luke 8, Jesus tells a parable about a farmer who scatters seed over various types of ground - soil, gravel, weedy patches, a footpath. He explains that the parable is so that those who don’t get it, won’t get it. It seems from most translations like Jesus is actually saying he speaks in parables to confuse the outsiders. Eugene Peterson words it differently in The Message:
You’ve been given insight into God’s Kingdom - you know how it works. There are others who need stories. But even with stories some of them aren’t going to get it:
“Their eyes are open, but they don’t see a thing…”
While this cannot be justified as a translation, perhaps it’s true both ways: Jesus did communicate in a fairly straightforward way, intending that we would understand him, but it’s still possible to miss his meaning, and some people cannot understand what he’s saying because of the condition of their own selves.
That we would find ourselves in the Story he is telling in the universe.

We’ve visited Mars Hill Church (not seminary) here in Seattle a few times, and I think we have a lot to learn from them about doing urban church:
+People can plug into programs
+Movies are great ways to start talking about important things
+Walls should be painted in colors that are currently (as opposed to once) attractive
+Sound systems and projectors matter when communicating to large groups of people
+It’s nice to have a kickin’ website, even if you have to hire an Elliott Bay firm to do it for ya. The MP3 thing rocks.
+Doing your own music rocks, especially if it’s vastly different from what’s out there
+Fiddles and flutes add a lot
+Big-group gatherings need to be supplemented by small-group gatherings
+Chairs should be movable
+Good page layout is worth the effort
+Doctrine needs to be taken seriously
+Food should be a part of everything. It’s sacramental.(o)
-Doctrine needs to be worked out in community, not pounded down from the almighty pulpit
-People cannot sit and listen effectively to 60 minute sermons. They might be polite and quiet, but they’re not learning anything after 15 minutes.
-A sermon and “the Word of God” are not the same thing, and raising the stakes of agreeing with you doesn’t make you more right.
-The shock value of swearing in a church setting wears off after the second time. Then it’s just gratuitous.
-Songs should not be sung with intentionally offensive harmonies

UPDATE: We went to their new building for Sunday 10am service (they have fewer now that their seating capacity has quintupled), and it rocked. Mark Driscoll preached one of the best GenX-targeted sermons I’ve ever heard. I regained a lot of respect for him, some of which was lost when I listened to his dreadful talk on the Soularize CD. But he has a message that he knows how to communicate to his audience, and I saw that Sunday. And no calvinist dogma! Yeah.

I’m going to re-read Michael Slaughter’s UnLearning Church (Group).

A few thoughts and questions on the common practice of making arguments
from scripture (e.g. in a teaching/preaching setting) that are not
exactly water-tight:
-Do we do the church a disservice by providing rationale/arguments that
would not hold any water in the face of a counter-argument?
-Is there a place for casually reminding the already-convinced, or does
that just send the message that you should believe without thinking?
-There is always value in considering the opposite of your argument -
the old “one seems right until another speaks” thing.
-How can we make sure we’re thinking straight without being nit-picky?
How can we be critical thinkers without being mere critics?

We just got back from a 3-day, 2-night camping trip in Port Ludlow. We had a blast. Jesse, Lukas, David, Dawn, Amy, and I all went to a friend’s land in the woods and camped (slept in tents and sat around a fire) for our Memorial Day weekend bash. It was great - no work to do, no city noise, just peace and quiet. We even had a blacktail deer wander into our camp, hardly noticing us. Thanks to Kurt for letting us use his property, and especially for working for days to get it ready for us (he built an outhouse just for the occasion!).

A few thoughts and questions on the common practice of making arguments from scripture (e.g. in a teaching/preaching setting) that are not exactly water-tight: -Do we do the church a disservice by providing rationale/arguments that would not hold any water in the face of a counter-argument?
-Is there a place for casually reminding the already-convinced, or does that just send the message that you should believe without thinking?
-There is always value in considering the opposite of your argument - the old “one seems right until another speaks” thing.
-How can we make sure we’re thinking straight without being nit-picky? How can we be critical thinkers without being mere critics?

Brian McLaren has produced another great semi-fictional story about becoming, as the first book in the series put it, “a new kind of Christian.” While he focuses on evolution a bit in NKOC, McLaren elaborates in Story on a Christian worldview that accepts the Big Bang and evolution as a part of God’s design. He doesn’t go into the intelligent design theories as such, but presents characters who hold such views as credible and authentic. My impression is that he is trying to present a Western Christianity that is neither fundamentalist, modernist, nor postmodernist, but rather personally constructed through an authentic seeking of truth and meaning from God’s self-revelation.

I won’t attempt a full book review, since that has already been done well by others. I will, however, mention a few highlights from my perspective.

From p127:
…we need to develop a new kind of Christian more along the lines of the original disciples - people who are called together, as Neo said, to learn from Jesus, and then are sent out into the world to exemplify and pass on what they learn.
So, one of the major leaders in the emerging church has basically restated the Restoration Plea (a Church of Christ term that refers to the idea of getting back to 1st-century Christianity. Hmm…

McLaren’s characters point out the trouble in separating the cultural aspects of what early Christians did from the timeless, essentially Christian elements. This difficulty is not resolved in the book, nor should it be.

I believe we need to engage ourselves seriously in determining how best to be Christians as the early Christians were, but not by wearing sandals and sleeping on straw mats. In the Restoration Movement (so named because of that very intent), determinations were made over 100 years ago as to what elements of early Christianity were to be preserved and which were cultural and therefore disposable. It was good that the founders of the movement took this quest seriously, but it’s a mistake to think that their decisions were final. Every generation - indeed, every Christian - needs to be engaged personally in that quest for authentic Christianity. No one else can decide for us, though we can and must look back through history to learn from those who have gone before us.

Perhaps the new kind of Christian is more like the old kind. The really old kind.