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Posts tagged as:

worship

Questions on church gatherings

by Lon on March 26, 2009

I’ve got lots of questions, here’s a series of questions I’ve been pondering lately on church gatherings – and by that I mean that thing folks do in the New Testament when they get together.

What do you call yours?  I was going to say Sunday gathering, but lots of folks don’t meet on Sundays. Worship service came to mind, but ain’t all life worship? and are we really being serviced?

Last sunday I did a collaborative message in silence (You can read about when I did it last before here).  If you brought me into your church to ‘preach’ and all I did was help Christ be formed in them one of the best ways I know how, would you be disappointed?

With the centrality of Scripture, and it being text, content, information (and yes, Story for you emergent folks, and the Living Word of God for you fundies), I wonder if we’ve overemphasized it’s generally unidirectional mode of communication in our own practices?

Does ‘the gospel’ need to be proclaimed with every gathering?

Could the full weight of the gospel ever be transmitted this side of life?

Could we compress the gospel to a 140-character tweet and spend the rest of our time living it out?

How much literal reading of the Scripture do you do?  Things vary for us, but typically we collectively read a mix of passages following a lectionary, and I tend to expound on a short text.  Some folks want full exposure to the breadth of the Bible, others don’t want to gloss over it and hone in.

Does the Pareto principle of 20% of the people doing 80% of the ‘work’ apply to your gathering?

Do we really need to gather weekly?  versus daily or monthly?

What does God desire for us collectively as we gather?  And are there elements in our worship gathering that don’t contribute towards that?

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Vultures

by Lon on August 20, 2008

A snapshot of our world. This is the pulitzer prize winning photo by Kevin Carter of a vulture waiting for a young girl to die in southern Sudan. Carter killed himself soon after.

What does it mean for us to be the church in light of this? What does it mean to worship God? Can we possibly empathize with the pain of the child? Or are we more akin to the vulture that waits to consume?

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Pagan Christianity…

by Lon on May 30, 2008

I finished Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna about a month ago.

I can see why people say it’s a controversial book, though I really wasn’t all that shocked by the content at all.  I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Below are some quotes (I swiped from Tony Morgan’s blog) of the book

  • “If the church is following the life of God who indwells it, it will never produce those nonscriptural practices this book addresses.”
  • “Almost everything that is done in our contemporary churches has no basis in the Bible.”
  • “The stunning reality is that today’s sermon has no root in Scripture. Rather, it was borrowed from pagan culture, nursed and adopted into the Christian faith.”
  • “There is not a single verse in the entire New Testament that supports the existence of the modern-day pastor!”
  • “Nothing so hinders the fulfillment of God’s eternal purpose as does the present-day pastoral role.”
  • “Therefore, to our minds, these passages show that every Christian has the right to participate in ‘leading worship’ under Christ’s headship.”
  • “Giving a salary to pastors elevates them above the rest of God’s people. It creates a clerical caste that turns the living body of Christ into a business.”
  • “The one who plants a first-century-styled church leaves that church without a pastor, elders, a music leader, a Bible facilitator, or a Bible teacher… They will bring their own songs, they will write their own songs, they will minister out of what Christ has shown them–with no human leader present!”

    • Your thoughts?

    Below is a spoof trailer of the book

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