a time to tear down | A Time to Build Up » The Benefit of Doubt: Coming to Terms with Faith in a Postmodern Era

a time to tear down | A Time to Build Up » The Benefit of Doubt: Coming to Terms with Faith in a Postmodern Era

Peter Enns expresses well what I have experienced and been learning about spiritual doubt through the years. Doubt is not something to fear, but something to embrace, for it is the door to a truer knowledge of God and to a deeper faith.

Church Year Spirituality

Here is a superb overview and explanation of the Christian year, which is the basis of our church's spiritual formation/discipleship ministry.

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/church-year-spirituality

The Next Christians

Gabe Lyons discerns some fresh, exciting traits of the next generation of Christians in the U.S. and describes them in his book with the above title. Here are the six traits he observes in Christians in their 20s:

1. Provoked, not offended
2. Creators, not critics
3. Called, not employed
4. Grounded, not distracted
5. In community, not alone
6. Countercultural, not "relevant"

Lyons calls the Next Christians "Restorers": "because they envision the world as it was meant to be and they work toward that vision."

20-Somethings and churches

From Scot McKnight on JesusCreed, November 9. The punch line is at the end:

One of the reasons I wrote One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow is because so many parents have said this to me and then asked the big question:

My son or my daughter is a Christian but has no use for church.What can I do about it?

My conservative estimate is that I’ve been asked this 200 times. The answer is not simple. I tell them church is not just important but it is the locus of what God is doing through Christ in this world.

The problem often enough is connecting what they think church is with what young (sometimes radical) adults think church is.

20somethings can be profoundly serious about following Jesus Christ and find church shockingly alienating. One of my former students who no longer goes to church said to me not long ago “If I found the church interested in Jesus I’d be there in a minute. Believe me, following Jesus is what matters most to me!”

Many of us desperately want to change our world.

But is an illusion to think we can change anybody else but ourselves. The truth is that we cannot change them - we can only change ourselves. We need to remember the alternate version of the Serenity Prayer, and repeat it regularly:“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it is me

From: http://wecan.be/

Open Worship

On November 7 we experimented with an "open worship" format patterned on 1 Corinthians 14:26 in which each person has the opportunity to share a word of encouragement, a scripture, a testimony, a song, etc., for the "building up" of everyone. The early Baptists in the 1600s worshiped in a similar way. The seating was arranged in a horseshoe or semicircle so we could all see each other. The Communion table was at the center. My sermon was only 15 minutes long, followed by a time of discussion, another practice of the early Baptist movement. The entire worship time was enriching and delightful.