buildings suck!?

So I am the worst consistent blogger the world has ever seen! Thanks everyone for encouraging comments about this blog though..I intend to get back into it this Jan!

I will get straight to the point of what prompted me to start blogging again today... [on New Years Eve of all days!? and when I should really get packed and showered as I leave to go away in under two hours!]....one of my Form "huddleees"; the amazing Franklin Mason sent me a book today called Pagan Christianity. I am sure that a lot of it I will agree with but the first chapter has made me kinda frustrated and confused.

The whole book is about how most of our Christian practices are not biblical and in fact are more sinisterly influenced by pagain practices and therefore we should not be doing them. The first chapter is all about church buildings and how we should not have church buildings for a number of reasons. The book so far is very weak in convincing me that we should not have church buildings...its main reasonings seem to be the following:

1. The early church did not have buildings. So what? They couldn't have buildings because it was illegal to be a Christian, let alone build a church. Yes we must learn from the principles of the NT church in terms of community and not having a building as the focus of our community but this is niot a strong enough argument to do away with church buildings.

2. Jesus predicted the destroying of the temple and when he cleared the temple it also pointed to his anger at the temple even being there. This is simply a pants argument [sorry frankie!]. The fact that Jesus overturned the tables in the temple argues almost in favour of buldings having at least some level of importance to God. Nowhere in that passage does it infer that Jesus is angry at the building being there. Ridiculous.

3. Buildings were brought in by Constantine for his own gain and building "temples" was a move by Christianity to copy Paganism. To debate about Constantine is a massive area that I cannot really go into but again...so what? Why must our response be "buildings are bad?" As far as Christianity copying paganism - have the writers [Frank Viola and George Barna] read the Old Testament? Whole books [i.e. Numbers] are about the building of the temple and tabernacles...Paganism has hardly had the monopoly on buildings...the Bible is full of them. Obviously with Christ the new overtakes the old and we now have Christ in us and we do not need to go to a particular place to meet God; we have the Spirit. Similarly in John 4 Jesus said to the Samaritan woman that no longer would people need to worship in a particular place but would worship in spirit and in truth.

The issues surrounding the use of church buildings in the church is not going to be argued away by saying that buildings are pagan and therefore we should get rid of them. That to me sounds so religious! God can use and work through anything and everything - including "pagan buildings." The issue for the church today is whether they are going to care more about the buildings than the community inside them AND the people not meeting inside them. In the circles of Christians I generally find myself in I rarely find someone who genuinely thinks they must go to a sacred building to meet with God.

Buildings are not necessary for church but they are necessary for life and as long as they are viewed properly surely they can be a help rather than a hindrance to the kingdom of God. Buildings are where people can be fed and clothed, where people can be rehabilitated; others can be taught and trained so they can go out and plant oragnic churches. Buildings can be a place of prayer, a place to go to get away from the messiness and jobs and computers and TVs we find at home that distract uis form spending time with God.

If we want to see revival in this nation it will most likely come through Organic Churches - because its a multiplication method [read the book Organic Church] not an addition method [like Alpha etc]. However to sustain such an evangelisic method and see continuity in this we need centres for training, for healing, for rehab, for prayer, and for meeting. Being at St Thomas Church Philadelphia is brilliant because the buildings generally are not that nice and are certainly not a focus or an ideal and yet they are used for amazing things...young people can meet there, assylum seekers can come, single mums, children, students. Its only if we cared about the buildings more than these things that we have a theological and biblical problem. Buildings are not pagan - people can be! and they don't need a building to be.

sowing and reaping

I am a big believer in adopting evangelistic and missionary tools that are culturally appropriate, spirit led and I am so grateful to the emerging church and fresh expressions movements for pointing out that we need to Go and adapt to the people rather than make people adapt to our church structures. However I am increasingly challenged about what this actually looks like in my everyday life. We must not stay in a place of reflecting and discussing and grappling with the question of mission at the expense of losing an intentiality in our evangelistic action. We must act, we must step over a line.

How bizzarre the days we are living in...VAT down to 15%. When did that last happen? We are in an opportune season with Christmas coming, a new year not far off and so much in the media to make people think about life and its meaning. After Christmas the buses we have probably all heard about with the humanistic slogan "God probably doesn't exist so stop worrying.." on will be driving about the place. This really is a time to step up, be diligent, devote ourselves to the kingdom, pursue a deeper relationship and be intentional and active in our evangelism. For me at the moment this is potentially swallowing my pride a little and engaging in some more bog standard evangelistic methods but hopefully bringing the edge of the spirit and the mix and creativity of what the emerging church movement encourages us to do. Please pray for an event I am doing called Carols and Cappucino which is an evangelistic carol service for students in a starbucks in town on December 16th.

So sowing and reaping...we have so many strategies and compared to a few years ago we are so much ebtter at sowing into peoples lives thoughts and little tid bits about Jesus. It used to be standard to be afraid to do this. However most of us are kinda getting the hang of this [if you are still working on this side too sorry...go for it!]. However do we have faith to actually reap and see people move much closer to Jesus? Are we expecting this to happen this Christmas for someone?

Grace: Effort and Earning

"Grace is not opposed to effort but it is opposed to earning." I heard this recently in a talk on Galatians 4. A very regular featured discussion within my own thoughts has been how to balance striving and being passionate for God. I have come to realise that the answer is not a balance but whether you are free or not from a religious mindset and if you have embraced the message of grace. If you are caught in the middle you are simply not fully free and need to press in for that freedom. As I write this I am so amazed at how much God has freed me from all legalistic tendencies that I cannot even enter into the mindset I used to have to blog about it! I can't recall what it was like to feel I have to do something in order to be acceptable to God. I know that I know that I know that he loves me just the way I am.

So if grace is not opposed to effort then that means that the other extreme of "oh I am not going to spend time with God coz its all about grace" is also a lesser form of living than God wants for us. I believe we cannot have the mindset that God will spoon feed us or drop everything into our plates because he is "graceful." That is not grace in my view. Jesus came and lived like us to show us what grace can achieve in us if we partner with the Holy Spirit and let God channel through us all of heaven. This requires a transformation of the mind and a dedication and passion to seeking God, being intentional about being alligned with heaven and occupying and receiving all that is legally ours because of the cross. There is no SHORTCUT to this except effort, prayer, stepping out in faith, failing, study and all the other glorious spiritual disciplines. This MUST NOT be confused with striving to earn God's affections.

We must also acknowledge that there is such a warfare against us in this journey. The enemy does not want us to pursue all this. In fact I believe the enemy has probably given us this false view of grace that means we don't pursue God, or put any energy in and as a result we see not near enough kingdom activity as we could do.

How about grace with each other? For me at the moment this is the battle ground. God is pruning the socks off me at the moment in relation to accepting the grace others want to give me and also realising I can't earn the affections of others - well I can but it is a tiring and ungodly way to live. I am letting go.

I have the lovely Sarah Bailey staying at the moment. She is hanging out with Form and soaking up the atmosphere at Philly.