Searching for Meaning and Purpose...

As I've written about the church, many (including me!) would be tempted to say- "See, those people are the problem, can't we fix them?" instead of starting where it needs to, with us.  Whenever we talk about community, it has to start with ourselves. So, who do you think you are?  Valid and very important question, right?  Mark Driscoll covers that in depth in his new book, "Who Do You Think You Are?" and we're going to be talking about it in depth the next several days, because until we have our identity, purpose, and place down telling others to fix themselves is failing in our mission and mandate from Jesus (who famously told us to "yank the plank" before trying to dig out specks in others' eyes). To start, we have to answer the question for ourselves.  I think I'm a person who's saved by grace through faith who's following Jesus.  Does that mean I'm right?  No.  I think so, but it might not be true.  So let's put...

I'm going to continue some of my musings on the Kingdom of God and community. In a nutshell, you'd say we're simply dissecting the church and the way it ought to be. Community inside the church is far different than most places, in part because we should be such a diverse group that normal categorizing fails (or it should, as Martin Luther King famously noted- Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week)!  There should be all varieties of people- race, socio-economic status, education levels, work type, age, gender- in the church.  It should be an eclectic mix of people who come together not because we like being together, but because we are each subservient to Jesus Christ and drawn together because of Him.  It's not about the music (rock, organ, chant, hymns, orchestra, a cappella, Psalms, or otherwise), the charisma of the preacher (because let's admit it: we like hearing preacher's who engage us and often choose our church based on that),...

Community.  Church.  Identity.  Who are we as individuals coupled with the question of who we are together.  It's tough, because it seems like there are a million different answers to the simple question, "Who do you think you are?"  Particularly difficult is parsing who we are in this crazy thing called the church.  The following is taken from a video (embedded below) from the Rend Collective Experiment (and written out below if you're a word person instead of an aural person): Is there anything quite like a campfire?  The community that’s built there by people sharing their stories and singing their songs is truly special and so intimate.  It’s like being 10 years of age again and sharing all your secrets with your best friend.  And that openness and vulnerability is exactly what we should see in the greatest community on earth, the Church.  There are no walls out here and there should be no walls of defense, towards god or eac...