(Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping)

Another way of putting the question is: What criteria do you use to evaluate your community?

If you look at how most churches evaluate, you'll tend to think that it's all about numbers. The more, the merrier. How many "got saved" this year? What was the mean attendance at Sunday? And at Sunday School? How many are involved in the ministry?

I don't believe in numbers to evaluate the success of a community. There are better ways of evaluating the success of a community. A good christian community is a community where relationships are strong, no mater what may go wrong. Where there is an equilibrium of gifting, and a sense of respect and humility for each other gifting. That makes a difference wherever it is. That has connections with the outside world. It is also a community that is generating (or in he process of generating) other similar (not equal) communities (this last thing being the signal of complete maturity in a community).

What we have to question ourselves is: Is our community doing that? If not, is it taking measures to do it? Those are very important questions.

Yesterday, during a very nice time with Joshua and Laura (we have to do more of this), there were several nice "theological" conversations. One of those kept running in my mind after we left. That normally happens when I feel we didn't get to an answer in the subject. The theme was feelings and intuitions.

I personally use my intuition whenever I have to decide something major in my life (and according to Blink, there may be a logical reason for that after all). And that contrasts a lot with the way I do other decisions, which happens always in a very logical and thoughtful process.

Joshua confronted me with a very good point: If we rule our lives by intuition, how can we be sure we will not choose always the easier / most comfortable way (as in the opposite for the right way). For example, I may not "feel like" helping a certain person, but I should. If I go with my "feelings", I will not do the right thing.

After some thinking (which always happens when we try to verbalize the way we do things that are routine to us), I got to the conclusion that I separate my intuition from my feelings. For me, they are two different things. My intuition is checked by convictions of what I should be and do (love God, love everyone as myself, etc). My feelings are this ethereal thing that changes constantly with the mood. I can say that because when I choose something intuitively, I don't choose the easy way out, but something else based on my convictions. And in my opinion, that's the way it should be.

So, next time you hear the famous phrase "I don't feel led to..." coming out of your mouth, ask yourself what kind of feeling is it :)

I would really love to see comments with your opinion on the subject.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in business we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Say things like, "This is the way we have always ridden this horse."
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
7. Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
8. Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
9. Comparing the state of dead horses in todays environment.
10. Change the requirements declaring that "This horse is not dead."
11. Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
14. Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
15. Do a Cost Analysis study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
16. Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
18. Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
19. Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
20. Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
21. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

(taken from here)

I spent all day thinking about the following quotes today, applying it to church:

"There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile." (Gladiator movie)

"Is Rome worth one good man's life? We believed it once. Make us believe it again." (Gladiator movie)

Someone made me think about them. You know, I've been in this emergent, familiar, simple, communal, missional, apostolical, whatever church thing for the past 4 years. But until today, it's still a dream to come true. A dream I still need to fully comprehend. A dream for which I still pay dearly every day I live. I refuse to give up on this dream, it's too important.

Have you ever noticed that in the Bible Unity and Gifts are themes that go together many times? For example, you can see that in Ephesians 4:1-16 and in 1 Corinthians 12. Is it a coincidence?

I don't think so. The fact is that people with different gifts tend to push an agenda that has everything to do with their gift. A pastor will push the church to be a caring community, neglecting other areas. A evangelist will push it to be a missional one. And so on. And if we are not careful with that, we will sacrifice unity in the process, because people with different gifting will feel displaced (not to mention that the community will be seriously handicapped). Conflict will arise, churches will split, and new denominations will be born.

There is nothing wrong with emphasizing our area of ministry. But as members of a local and global community, we have to be sensitive to the fact that there is no single gift that is more important than the others. In love and humility, we need to recognize the advantages of the gifts other people have, and what is lacking in our own gifts. This way we will learn to respect every person no matter what their gift, maintain a spirit of unity in the body of Christ, and have well balanced communities.

There is a very popular concept in both modern and post-modern churches called "neutral place". This is a concept coming from the seeker-sensitive movement, and the idea is that you should have meetings in a public neutral place, because unbelievers will feel more comfortable to go there then to go to a more personal space, like someone's house

I think it is time for someone to say it. Neutral places are completely overrated. Looking back on my experience, neutral places were the second biggest simple community / house church killer I have ever seen, right after re-institutionalizing. More specifically, moving from a personal space to a "neutral" space is a church killer. It will destroy much of the personal touch in the community, and in the end, the community itself.

The real question is that we move to "neutral" places because we are trying to evangelize people before we create relationships with them. We want them to come to the "neutral" place, and then we may want to create a relationship with them. But that's a much harder thing to happen than the opposite.

So, why do we want to evangelize before creating relationships? For a number of different reasons. The most common is that we don't have time to create relationships because we are too busy "doing church" (will you have time to create relationships after?). another popular reason is that when you work full-time in ministry, you don't have non-christian friends to create relationships with. Or you are so christian that all your friends are christian. All of those are really lousy reasons.

Are this words too harsh? Is your experience different than mine?