the journey

Life is a journey, a process, and apprenticeship where we strive to go deeper and seek to walk in light. I was raised a non-Christian in the post-Christian world in New York, Florida, Las Vegas [a place not given to traditions] and California. I have a very different view of church and the faith then many in the evangelical world seem to have - and I am ok with that, I truly am [they may not like it, but I am ok with it] in that, I see things differently. I do not make friends to "share my faith" - I make friends to make friends, and I live my faith. If in living my faith [being incarnational] they desire to know more about what I believe I am happy to share. I think it’s a difference in starting points; in a traditional approach the starting point is the person wanting to share, in what I see as an emerging/evolving view the starting point is with the person seeking the information.

It is my personal reality, chaos is where I function best - and so do many of the people I know in the world around me - "linier" is not a thought pattern I understand, and many of the people I speak with daily have the same view I do. I think my bud Leonard Sweet wrote it in one of his books that 95% of life is non-linier, why do we strive to place our non-linier life into a linier pattern? Gleick, in his classic book "Chaos" writes, "Non-linier terms tend to be the features that people want to leave out when they try to get a good, simple understanding. Friction, for example. Without friction a simple linier equation expresses the amount of energy you need to accelerate a hockey puck. With friction the relationship gets complicated..." the reason it does is because one then has to take into account all “small things” that we desire to ignore. While chaos can be hard to deal with, I believe one can never truly see the world as God desires it to be seen if we seek to have a linier understanding of who we are in relationship to God and to each other.

So, in viewing life as a journey, we see different paths to take. Which path we take is based on all the information at hand. We think in different waves, we see in different colors and we like the smell of different flowers - we look at our world in very different views - we see life in a very different way. This is not "bad" but it is different. We use different words, and we express in different realities. I would venture to say that we have very little in common, with the possible exception of Christ. in that, I am very willing to give a great deal of room.

what needs to be remember, and seems to fall way short, is that to reach and emerging/evolving/postmodern mind the old ways have very little effect and are having even less of an effect as time goes on. for many in the modern/evangelical world an "emerging" church service is just another "style" like offering a "contemporary, traditional and blended" service; “emerging” has become a new program in the modern church - they think they can add an "emerging" service and all will be fix - many in the online ministries seem to think the same way - add an "emerging" looking site to ours and we can reach "the next generation" [not knowing this is far deeper then a generational thing] - never once thinking that they are not even close to reaching anyone with such a site - because people see through it. it is not about having a cute design on your site, or hiring some blue haired 20 something to "lead" the service - it is about truly changing, truly becoming different, truly being missional [which has nothing to do with missions work or writing a check], truly being incarnational - truly being more then what is.

just so you know, we [I do take a strong objection to the word "unsaved" because it is "christianees"] are walking by the church not because people fight over the color of the carpet, or the style of music, or what you call the service - we walk past because we are the great "unnoticed" and we believe we are of no value to the church except a number, an offering, and a cheep form of day labor. You need to understand, it has nothing to do with fighting, that happens in families all the time - it has to do with the modern church is completely irrelevant to our lives and just does not get us and is unwilling to change.

In my view the church has become its own best listener and voices from the outside are not of value to people inside the church. It needs to learn that to truly reach us, know us and think like us - or move out of the way for others who do.


tags: emergent church, emerging church, john o'keefe, ginkworld