Church

Since graduating and coming home from college I have been in pretty much culture shock. This isn't because I went to school in another country or on a different part of the globe, it is mostly because of the culture of my house, how my family lives and what it deems important. While at school I experienced some monumental figures of influence, voices that told me that the life of my "home world" was missing something. (That something, I was to find out, was the absence of huge amounts of things) My first contact with these certain people engaged my mind in confusion, a confusion that, once begun, continued to push me forward, and compelled investigation into them. There was something different, vastly antithetic to the culture I had grown up in, lived in, believed in without knowing I believed anything of the sort.

Through these people I understood why indeed every aspect of living is completely formulative, whether we like it or not. The fact is that wherever you are, whenever you are, things are affecting you, things are shaping and molding you. Its not a matter of resisting which amounts and which parts of the things you are surrounded by, it's about choosing what you are surrounded by. This is not to say that we have total control of our environments, but it is to say that we need to choose very carefully, critically, what the environment that shapes us most is, and that is, for Christians, what church is.

And heres the problem: if the moments in every day are what make us, if the people we are around become a part of us, then there is just no way that an hour in a steeple-topped building with someone talking at us can counteract the minutes, hours, and days that are rubbing off on us everywhere else. Even adding in an hour on Sunday and Wednesday nights just won't do. The church in the traditional sort of understanding simply doesn't cut the cake. Church must be more than a building, must be more than just a time and place. In fact, American culture's version of the church has so pervaded, invaded and hoarded our attentions and our understandings that we may have to turn over the whole pile of linguistic rubbage linked with it. Our words are our worlds. Our words form our mental landscapes and consequently our words, our behavior, our complete perspective. Some have transliterated the Bible's original greek to give us a new venue for the language of the church: koinonia. Koinonia is what was used in Acts to first speak about the group of believers there. There is a book written by Alan Hirsch titled The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church, and it calls for an overthrow. Sermons and Sunday School lessons always are teaching about overthrowing the ways of living that the culture is offering us outside of the church, but Hirsch is calling for an overthrow, a revolution, of the church. This is not to say that this should be done forcefully, coercively, but it does call for a reformation that goes far beyond any of the grounds that the traditional church operates on presently; it calls for koinonia. Spontaneously organic, engagingly interpersonal, quietly exhilarating, it is what we need to wake up.

I am not talking about a coffee-shop experience, another remodeled, warm, suavely-lit version of the more anemic white consumption-driven monuments that are church buildings. I am talking about something that draws on a more normal, more mundane level, because for koinonia must land right in the midst of our lives, not in the form of program, but in the form of everyday life. And everyday life is the wholeness of where we live, what we eat, how we have fun, the whole shabang. Here is where we build the environment that matters most to us, forms us the majority of every day, every moment.

Starting

I've started this blog because I want to make more of a habit to write consistently, with the view that writing more is writing better. But really I think small is what counts in many times we can think of, and so this blog will be sparse, mostly because if I have nothing good to say I simply won't say it. But of course what I think is good probably goes against what many others might prefer, so for them it might be even a smaller amount of anything actually said. Most of these entries will be reflections on spirituality. I am trying to step into what looks at least halfway like the contemplative life. If you don't have a clue what a "contemplative life" looks like then I hope through my entries I can show you. For the greater part no one will likely read these entries, but really I am not up for fame and fortune, so here I am!