The trip to Austin was great. I got a lot of great teaching ideas for the coming school year, and I got a chance to coalesce them into some kind of plan for starting the year. Oh yeah, and the District paid for all of it. Sweet.

Here’s my schedule for the next few weeks:
-AVID (school workshop) training in Austin, TX Tues-Sun, June 24-29
-Hike with Amy and the Ogles at Mount Rainier State Park, Tues-Sat, July 1-5
-TfU class at Western Washington Univ, Bellingham, the following Mon-Fri July 7-11
-Amy’s family visits around the 12th of July, and my sister is coming up for a Phish concert
-TfU lab (teaching summer school), Aki Kurose (my school), July 14-Aug 1

So much for a slow summer. It’s good to stay at least a little busy.

It’s been 8 days since my trial-run cell group, which consisted of watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and discussing it. I want to revisit some of the lessons I learned from the evening (none of which are about vampires).
-Church cell groups must be overtly spiritual. They must be open about the fact that they are run by a church for the purpose of having spiritual discussions. Any misdirection on this point, for example, acting like we’re just doing it for fun on our personal initiative, is just plain deceptive and wrong.
-Though these groups will be led by unpaid (”lay,” though I don’t like the term) church members, they must have the same legitimacy as if they were run by a paid minister. We need to view each church member, each Christian, as a minister, and not relegate that role to only a few paid people.
-While some people will not be comfortable attending a church-sponsored event, this is probably due to a negative experience with previous church-sponsored events. We need to show people that Christians can hang out with non-Christians without being legalistic, self-righteous, or judgmental - in short, we need to show people that we can be friends with them.
-While we need to be open about the fact that the group is church-initiated, it doesn’t need to feel churchy. We don’t need to follow Robert’s Rules of Order in someone’s family room, and we don’t need to open and close every meeting with a prayer. If “doing things decently and in order” is the extent of Christ’s transformation of our corporate life, we have a long way to go. And we need to make sure people who aren’t committed Christians feel comfortable. (I should note that I’m using the term “cell group” to refer to open, community-building gatherings designed to foster relationship-building between and among Christians and non-Christians. This is different from a housechurch or bible study).
-The topic (or at least some element of the discussion) should touch on spiritual topics, or there will be little reason to have the group. While there is plenty of room for gatherings that are just “incarnational hanging out,” like having people over for dinner, these aren’t really church cell groups. I’m planning to revise the Metro Model (see sidebar) to incorporate this idea, though it may be nothing more than a categorization of what will emerge naturally.

I need to re-design our church website, www.seattlemetrochurch.com. I’m thinking of using Post-Nuke to manage the content, though the design itself will be done in Dreamweaver. It will have a bulletin board, as the current version does. Hopefully the digital camera will come in handy. Any suggestions?

Hopefully this one will get published in TheOoze or Next-Wave. I’m trying to show why the worship service is so pervasive in Western Christianity, and why it’s counterproductive to rely exclusively on the worship service as the means of experiencing God and the church. I’ll post various thoughts and the final article here and on Open-Source Theology.

The Seattle Times has an article on house churches that’s worth reading. This is by the same reporter who did the “Emerging Churches” article a few months ago. Thanks to Ike from Fellowship for passing this along.

I’m getting rid of SquawkBox, so no more popups for comments. Just click the link under any post to add a comment, and it will appear below my post whenever someone clicks on the comments link. Hopefully this will be a more long-term comment solution. It isn’t dependent on a third-party server, and it doesn’t cause page errors. Additionally, I get to keep a file of all the comments, and it splits email addresses apart in the source file, so you can leave your email without fear of being picked up by an email-harvesting spambot. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions about the commenting system.

By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently (Luke 15:1, The Message).

This reminds of me of an excellent article from The Ooze by John O’Keefe entitled “Withnessing.” He contrasts “here are the facts, and you have to act now” evangelism with incarnational, hanging out together, forming true relationships, leading people on a journey evangelism. Quite a difference.

Central to this idea is that of incarnation. The opening verse of Luke 15 has shock value because no one expects God to be hanging out with scumbags. But that’s exactly what he came to do; it was at the core of his incarnation, his becoming human so he could hang out with humans and change their lives forever. Jesus did it, and it was a huge drop in his job category, from eternal king in heaven to street “withness.” He returned to his former role and left us to continue what he started.