Through Eric I found a Time Magazina article called There's No Pulpit Like Home. The article is about the rising popularity of house churches. It's interesting to see a magazine like Time talking about this movement. A sign of the times?

Simon writes a nice critique to the Church Growth Movement. Using the example of Yonago, a city in Japan, they go about saying how many churches are needed for the city to be blessed. As if 2 or 3 persons gathered together was not enough anymore. Anyway, how can they get to that number without the blessing of God? Weird people, talking about the church as if it was a production line.

"How we treat each other as we make decisions together is as important as what we actually decide." (Christian Smith in Going to the Root)

In this world of target-focused people and organizations, we tend to forget there are people involved! We tend to think that what matters is getting the results. Well, that is simply not true. If we carry on that way, one day we will look around and notice we are alone...

I recently discovered the Post-Charismatic website, and I have been reading it since then. It's a great resource to read. I identify with a lot of it, since I am probably a post-charismatic myself.

"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." (Galatians 6:9)

We don't like this. What we really like is fast results. We want to travel fast, eat fast, talk fast, fast everything. Not becoming weary takes too long.

What we don't realize many times is that the path we take is more important than the place we get too. Jesus never asked the disciples to focus on results, but on paths. He showed the disciples what to do and how to do it. Go into all the world and do this and that until he returns. What is the target? Spread the kingdom of God. Who is responsible for the results? The Holy Spirit will convict people. And if we keep doing stuff the right way, results will come.

Why do we focus so much in results? Numbers, numbers. Where do they come from? That is the corporate world way of doing stuff. We try something for 6 months, if we don't get the results (profit), we change the way we do it, until we get the results. If we go along this road, soon we'll start thinking that results are more important than the path, then we start changing the interpretation of the Bible, and finally we end up thinking the ends justify the means. We start searching for the leaders that achieve results, instead of the ones that walk the Walk. And what is the result? A "church" that resembles more a company than a family, that doesn't really care about the unmeasurable quality but only about the measurable numbers.

Are we there yet? Maybe we are...

Bob Hyatt has a very interesting post that says Practicing the Disciplines is a sign of Spiritual IMmaturity.

"In a way, the more we love God and the more we love our neighbor the less we will need the disciplines, in so far as what the disciplines give us becomes second nature and more and more a matter of our character and less and less a matter of our will." (Bob Hyatt)

It was one of those things that I never thought in that way, but immediatly agreed on. I mean, I'm a web developer. In the early days I had several programming practices that I would have to do and redo looking at the manual. But now, those same practices are second nature to me. I continue to search in the books for deeper knowledge, that's another thing. But now I don't have to force myself to it, it just comes naturally.

If our inside is changed, it will show on the outside. If we change our outside for long enough, eventually it will influence the inside and become faith, or it migth become a ritual/religion, it depends on your objective, your atitude. Disciplines followed by will power, if not checked by a correct relationship with other christians, will probably become a meaningless ritual.

"It is no longer the Lord's Supper. Today it would better be called the (...) Lord's Appetizer! I am sorry, but we can hardly call a cracker crumb and a shotglass of juice a supper!" (Frank Viola in Rethinking the Wineskin, p.45)

Having experienced the Lord's Supper as a real meal, I can really understand this frase. Its not only the size of the meal that has been minimized. Everything about the Lord's Supper in the modern church is a mere glimpse of what it's supposed to be, of what the early church has experienced. It is impossible to experience the same fellowship, the same equality, the same meaning the early church experienced while silently having a small cracker! It's like having a fast food Christmas dinner alone!

Bring back the food to the Lord's Supper! Bring back the round table! We urgently need the fellowship, equality and meaning it brings.

"Far from being a body or a family, the church for most of us is an organization or an institution. The contrast between the institutional shape of the contemporary church and the relational shape of the first-century church could hardly be more striking." (Hal Miller)

Something got lost in the process. Slowly the church reshaped from a relational community to a hierarchical institution. Relationships in the church of today is but a dim image of what it once was.

Trying to experience the same presence of God the early church did without experiencing the same practices, is like trying to experience the power of F1 cars with a bicycle. It's just not possible to experience it completely inside the institutionalized church. We have to rethink the practice of the church, making it more subject to Jesus, if we want to experience his presence.

Being a boss is much easier than being a leader. A real leader inspires people. A real leader motivates people. A real leader finds the gifts of each one and helps them find the best way to use them. A real leader shares all happy and sad moments. A real leader creates relationships with his followers. A real leader is an example to his followers, and instead of telling how to do, shows how to do.

The boss, on the other hand, only has to tell people what to do.

Churches should have leaders, not bosses.

Simon Cozens makes some good questions on missionary organizations. I plan to speak more about this subject in the future, but I'll leave it for now. All in due time.

How many of us as experienced a moment like this: I was blind but now I see! I'm not talking os physical blindness. I'm talking about suddenly understanding something that you didn't understand all your life.

Our life is full of moments like that. But one thing we must realize is that there was a full journey that prepared us for a moment like that. It didn't come out of the blue. Sometimes we don't even know what prepared us for such knowledge, but something in our life did.

That's why it's difficult to pass knowledge to other people. Many may not be prepared for that, maybe they didn't have the experiences necessary to assimilate that truth. Let's be patient and tolerant with each other. Besides, the same people that can't assimlilate our knowledge have knowledge that we are not prepared to receive...

This Stanley Hauerwas profile is an old article, but one that deserves some revisiting.

"Being Christian and being a pacifist are not two things for me. I would not be a pacifist if I were not a Christian, and I find it hard to understand how one can be a Christian without being a pacifist." (Stanley Hauerwas)

I could not agree more with him. The way of Christ is the way of peace. And like him, I don't believe in pacifism because I am not violent. The opposite is true. The way he says it is like this: "I'm a pacifist because I'm a violent son of a b****." If the human being was not violent, there was no need to be a pacifist.

"Things which are complicated tend to disappear and get lost. Simplicity is difficult, not easy. Beauty is simple. All unnecessary elements are removed - only essence remains." Alan Hovhaness

When we are young, we think that the important thing to obtain is the knowledge. That as we get knowledge, we evolve.

It is true that knowledge is important, and is something we should search for, but it doesn't substitute experience. And as we get older, we start valuing experience even more. We start to understand that this world is made of ever changing relationships, unexpected things, and our knowledge changes constantly with the experiences we have.

Then we get to a point where we prefer to savour all the experiences we can, instead of letting the books give us the knowledge others obtained from their experience. And thats when we are really capable of attain the knowledge given by the books.

Today, Andrew Jones wrote a very interesting article in his blog: what i would say to the young american emerging churches. I have had to deal with the same problem several times, the wrong idea people have about the emerging church given by some churches that call themselves emergent.

"The emerging church, if i listen to the more extreme critics, is just about changing the style of church to attract people and keeping them happy, of accepting any wind of doctrine without critique, of finding the coolest hippest trends and adopting them in a sunday service. Of being postmodern to attract postmoderns. Of careless adoption of any ancient practice regardless of its origin or affect, of finding identity in protest against the Modern, Enlightenment or Constantinian models of church."

As he says in the article, that has nothing to do with the emerging church. A very good post to read. A critique to some "emergent churches" and a good description of what the emerging church is not.

We got together on saturday to play some games and eat cake. We did play some cards, and almost playes mikado, but we ended up doing very little and just talking about stuff and having fun. Its good when the relationships get to a point where we can just be together and never find it boring. This is being a community. This is being church. We really need to spend more time like this.

This article speaks of the leadership crisis in the japanese churches, but its easy to understand that other countries are having the same problems. The worst blind is the one that doesn't want to see.