A Dangerous Invitation for Newness.

Thoughts on Advent from Signs of Emergence continue:

...The perception of the new step will come only to those brave enough to stop dancing the old. We fear that if we stopped for a week, a month, a service, a moment, we might be forgotten, or lose our momentum, weaken our profile, appear ill-thought-out and failing.

Our friends at NorthView Community Church recently cancelled their weekend worship services at the church campus and encouraged those in their community to get together in homes so that they might know and be known, life on life. Our friends at Bridgeway cancel their celebration gatherings a couple of times a year. One reoccurring Sunday that gets the boot is on Memorial Day weekend. Services get canned so that people can go play and enjoy friends and family without feeling any kind of obligation to show up. And even in the Mars Hill community, we've shifted gears or cancelled our weekly KAMP's Gathering in order to foster life, not church life, but life to the full. We have to stop dancing from time to time so that we can get caught up in the song of God and his people the church all over again.

We must be brave enough to stop if we are to see change. Our structures must serve us, not us serve them. The only way to consider whether our structures are serving us is to stop and reflect on them. To dismantle them; take them apart piece by piece. Expose them to the air. Lay them on the ground and let everyone walk around them and get a good look at them. This is the beginning of empowerment; we must allow people space and time to return to the deep simplicity of things, and spend time mulling over the fundamentals.

What in your life are you "mulling over"?

To stop people in their tracks, to stop yourself, and suggest that the way to higher peaks is actually to return to the valleys, is a brave act of true leadership.

I hope I am found brave.

This is a dangerous invitation for newness, carrying the risk that those we give such freedom to might freely walk away, or freely imagine something better than we had. But freedom must be what we are about. So the truly free, the brave who truly seek God, will always have periods, commas, full stops, punctuation marks, pregnant pauses, silence. Where those around them are given the freedom to reimagine and rethink.

My hope is that together as the church and together in local communities we can have genuine dialogue, and that we will reimagine and rethink TOGETHER. Pockets of the frustrated and embittered do us no good. The best form of criticism is creativity and the best form of creativity comes out of community.

It seems that at the start of this new century we are living in a particular advent, that we are being called to wait for new birth again. No matter how impatient we get as a society, with processing speeds rising and our whole culture velocity increasing ever faster, we cannot speed up pregnancy. In this advent that we find ourselves in, between the "modern" church that was and is dying, and the emerging church that is not yet, we must exercise patience. We must stop and wait.

The church is experiencing separation, marginalization, trivialization, and exile from the world it seeks to serve. And it is therefore experiencing these things from God too, for if the church is not connected to its host culture and society, it is not where God wants it to be, and therefore not where God is. If the church is not missionary, it has denied its calling, for it has departed from the very nature of God.

So, we seek for where God is already at work among us and we join him there.

If God is doing a new thing, we must apply ourselves to perceiving it or risk becoming custodians of empty stone buildings and historical curiosities ourselves.