A Burden has Been Lifted!

This past week has been stressful as I have had a weight on my shoulders. After a couple of meetings sanity has prevailed and I have learnt a number of things:

• No one individual has absolute authority on the truth.
• In a theological fight there are no winners as someone always gets hurt.
• We can work together if we are able to understand the first two points.
• Healing the hurt after a theological fight takes time and hard work, the pain will not go away overnight.
• It would be better not to have to learn the points above the hard way. We should rather learn from the vast amount of history around theological fights.

Well that is all for now. I look forward to the future, the possibilities and making a difference in the community that I live in through the work of my local church.

A Good Day.

Well today was a good day as I met with a man. Much older and wiser and he confirmed a little of what I have always believed and that is that not one of us has a monopoly on the truth. If one man did, where would the mystery be.

A Theological Week

I have a interesting week to look forward to for a number of reasons which I am not able to mention here but one question that I do have is this.

Can any one individual have absolute authority on what is truth and if this is so what happens to the rest of us who are wrong?

Preaching on the 30 August 2009

I am preaching at First City Baptist church on the 30 August and would like to have a look at the parable of the "Good Samaritan". I would like to apply the story to the here and now. I have many ideas and stories pray that they will all come together in a good way.

"What Gets Me Into Trouble" by the Naked Pastor

This is a fantastic post on the nature of community.

If people visit our community because they think it’s cool, they are going to be disappointed. Sure, our music is contemporary with a full band. We dress down and casual. We are laid back. The teaching time is sometimes loose, interactive, and different than what’s normal. We have coffee. We are quite young (I’m among the oldest). I often read from unorthodox versions. But that’s all incidental. We don’t try to be these things. This is just what we are. I disdain the thought of being cool just for the sake of being cool.

Some might complain that we’re not cool enough. We have a building. We are found within the broad parameters of what others would recognize as normative. Generally speaking, we haven’t strayed away, in my opinion, from the teaching. We do have a basic structure to our Sunday mornings. We have elders. We have staff (me and one other guy who does kids and youth). We have bibles. We are a part of a denomination. But this is incidental also.

I am not interested in modernization. I’m not interested in progressivism. I’m not interested in being contemporary. I’m not interested in being cool. But, neither am I interested in being orthodox or true to tradition. What I’m interested in and passionate about is how we as a community can live the truth that the Son of Man was in all things reconciling them, and that the Other is now the all in all. How do we live that out? I’m not interested in theologies that don’t wrestle with this. They fall short of the cataclysmic disclosure of universal grace.

Because I am more interested in the reconciliation of all (and yes, in one place), in preference to being orthodox, this causes problems. We are more interested in orthodoxy and being right than changing our minds in order to love, include and respect those who we think are believing and living wrong. When it comes down to it, I would rather include an unbelieving sinner, present tense, and be a heretic than to exclude him and be orthodox. This, I believe, is what is offensive about my blog. This is what, upon scrutiny, is offensive about our community. And this, I believe, is what gets me in trouble.