Today's thoughts definitely call for a bit of a back drop in order for you to be able to follow my line of thinking. I found the need to take a holiday this past week (as Bilbo Baggins did in his day). And although I didn't disappear at my birthday party I took some time off work and attended a Tenth Avenue North concert (one of my favorite CCM singing groups) with a group of my friends. One thing that the concert emphasized was stopping modern day slavery and helping children around the world through Compassion International. On a personal level the concert emphasized the fact that Jesus meets us in our sin and brings healing as we bring, even our darkest secrets, to the open through confession.
The next two days after the concert I attended parts of Gregg Harris's "Raising Kids to Do Hard Things" conference. Some of the main things this conference emphasized were becoming a leader in the field you are called, understanding the seasons of life, and realizing that the God we serve is good and wise and so we are called to be wise and follow God's good plans.
The real meat of the weekend and the thing that that has inspired this blog is the hours of discussion time with a group of my friends....in the restaurants, when we walked down the street, in the car, in the living room and kitchen of our hosts, and everywhere we went from when we first go up in the morning until we went to bed early the next morning. Enter a weekend of discussion and a weekend of raising questions I'm still trying to answer. I don't have the answer but I have some thoughts thanks to the group of philosophers and theologians I had a chance to spend my weekend with.
Over the course of the weekend I was able to hear from two different regions of thought being proclaimed in the modern church. The message delivered by Mike from Tenth Avenue North was, I believe, scriptural but distinctly different from the message brought by Gregg Harris. Currently I have been processing a lot of ideas brought to the table by men like Francis Chan and Shaine Claiborne (one of my heroes) as well as listening to the concerns of men who have been whistle blowing on the ideas of the Emergent church (which I guess technically is a movement that has just recently died). Whatever the status of the Emergent church movement we are being confronted with a several distinctly different messages from current church leaders. Many of these men I highly admire and in listening to their messages I am trying to determine how these different messages fit together. Are these different messages exclusive or are they simply different aspects of the same movement? Should we be rejecting the messages of certain current leaders or are each of these messages different aspects of the same larger message.
Before we can go too much further we must first clarify that in order to have any discussion our total purpose in our quest for truth must be to "gaze on the face of God" by finding His truth in the Bible (concept from the Truth Project). However, in the current church movements there are a host of ideas being presented by articulate communicators and I as I read and listen to these ideas I feel the need to determine whether or not these ideas or true. So it is not so important what one man says but what the Bible says, however, as men extrapolate the principles found in the Bible and apply these principles to daily life different movements are clearly ending up at different places. It is the quest of my current journey to discern how these different ideas fit together and which ideas we should be accepting and applying to our churches and which ideas we should be rejecting.
What is my proposition? Please see Part 2
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