gathering in light

Chillin to In Rainbows from wess on Vimeo. [Read more]

Series contents | Introduction | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

For this last post in my church in mission series I want to explain the five practices that John Howard Yoder offers the church as a means of faithfulness and witness in mission. But first, by way of review, I’d like to restate my overall argument. I’ve argued that much of the church’s style of mission in the West has been shaped around consumerism, something we see in the way the church uses the word ‘relevancy.’ Following Yoder, I said that the church’s mission and ethics is to be first and foremost rooted in taking the life of Jesus (the incarnation) as our starting point for mission. Then I moved on to explaining how the church is to be a bi-cultural community. This community is always positioned within exile, refuses to become absolute (whether through physical power or other means) and seeks to transform, or bring the peace of the city in which it finds itself. The church is a remembering community, one formed around texts, practices, songs, and stories, but it is also an active, transforming community and is called to live out the reality of God’s kingdom now. This is an outlook, I think, the church must accept more and more Christendom crumbles.

If the Church, as Bi-Cultural community, is to be a people that not only seeks to remember its history but transform whatever society it is in, then how is it to go about this transformation? How do we go from self-preservation to societal transformation? Yoder, in his book Body Politics, names five practices he believes all churches can and should do, practices that not only govern and shape the church (or help it remember), but also point outward as a model for a new way of living that all of society can be transformed by.

[Read more]

Series contents | Introduction | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

According to John Howard Yoder, one aspect that distinguishes this bi-cultural faith community we call the Christian church from the world is it’s insistence upon being non-coercive. This point of view has major implications not only for the mission of the church in our culture as well as in others, but it also brings up some important points about how we read our history.

A Quick History of Christendom

Since the start of Christendom, when the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian and Christianity became the state (re:enforced) religion, the church has struggled to take the teachings of Christ seriously on matters of violence. This is why we call the marriage between Christianity and the state is called Constantinianism. This theological, and political shift for the church, which was a move from the margins of society to the center of power, had profound effects upon the way it understood itself.

Yoder says:

The deeper shift behind it all was the loss of the identity of the Christianity community, as visible over against the world, replaced by the effort to “Christianize�? (thinly) the entire society. Once the premise that Europe is “Christendom�? has been granted, the rest follows. The church-state tie and even the Crusades can make sense (as they still do in our day, in modern forms, to a host of Americans) once the first assumption, namely, that everyone is “in,�? is made�? (104).

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Things have been a little slow this week since I am in the process of finishing up the quarter, but I’ve got some interesting links this week. Oh and sorry to flood your inboxes with Twitter, I wanted to have them on my blog as posts so people could comment on them, but not go through my feed, anyways, it didn’t work. I am looking into plan B.

Is facebook becoming evil? With privacy becoming more and more of an issue will Facebook start cooperating? See here as well.

Here are the nine most Badass verses in the Bible (be forewarned some of this is pretty crude).

Are you looking for a new gravatar or favicon?

For all you music fans be sure to check out NPR’s recent All Songs Considered website re-design. They’ve got some amazing stuff on their. I think the coolest feature is the playlist feature where you can select a list of music you’d like to listen to from their website.

For those of you who haven’t heard, the Daily Scribe is up and running again, with some new and old faces in the community. Be sure to check it out.

Have you heard of the Fisherman yet? I think I like the Air Jordan/Rock Climbing version.

Build a cheap solar heater (I wonder if it works).

Article linked to photo - original picture from flickr.

Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her. On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother said, “No; he is to be called John.� They said to her, “None of your relatives has this name.� Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. He asked for a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John.� And all of them were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God. Fear came over all their neighbors, and all these things were talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea. All who heard them pondered them and said, “What then will this child become?� For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him (Luke 1:57-66).

Waiting. Waiting for an offspring. Waiting for a voice. Waiting for salvation. We all know what it is to exist in a state of waiting, but what do we expect, and how do we respond? Waiting can leads us in at least two directions: despair or hope. With despair can come the sense of entitlement; I am waiting for what is mine. Hope is situated within the context of God’s ongoing faithfulness.

Elizabeth and Zechariah have spent their lives in wait and at the birth of their son have chosen to remain hopeful - that is see their ‘blessing’ as a gift from God not something they had a ‘right’ to. One way we see their hope is in the way they go about naming their son. In this passage, we see there was an expectation that the newborn be named for the father, Zechariah. When asked the name of the child, however, Elizabeth and Zechariah dramatically relinquished their parental ‘right’ to carry on the family name and the legacy. Because Elizabeth and Zechariah were willing to view their long awaited blessing (to have an heir) within the context of God’s faithfulness, John’s life was freed to be a blessing for all Israel. [Read more]

This is the third part of the Church in Mission series where I am attempting to appropriate some of John Howard Yoder’s thinking in direct relationship to the mission of the church in our culture today.

Series contents | Introduction | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

So far we’ve look at the church in relationship to the question of how the church is to remain “relevant” to our culture, and secondly the question of how Jesus interacted with his own culture. Another way of thinking (that is complimentary to what’s been said) about the mission of the church as something over and against commodified relevancy can be seen this in Yoder’s primary missiological text, Jeremiah 29:7:

“But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

For Yoder the Jews’ being scattered into the Babylonian empire is not a sidetrack of their history, but a new beginning. “It was rather the beginning, under a firm, fresh prophetic mandate, of a new phase of the Mosaic project” (For the Nations, 53). Dispersion is now the calling of the Jewish community of faith (52). And within this dispersion, YHWH calls the Jewish people to “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.” [Read more]