What Gets Me In Trouble

If people visit our community because they think it's cool, they are going to be disappointed. Sure, our music is contemporary with a full band. We dress down and casual. We are laid back. The teaching time is sometimes loose, interactive, and different than what's normal. We have coffee. We are quite young (I'm among the oldest). I often read from unorthodox versions. But that's all incidental. We don't try to be these things. This is just what we are. I disdain the thought of being cool just for the sake of being cool. Some might complain that we're not cool enough. We have a building. We are found within the broad parameters of what others would recognize as normative. Generally speaking, we haven't strayed away, in my opinion, from the teaching. We do have a basic structure to our Sunday mornings. We have elders. We have staff (me and one other guy who does kids and youth). We have bibles. We are a part of a denomination. But this is incidental also. I am not interested in modernization. I'm not interested in progressivism. I'm not interested in being contemporary. I'm not interested in being cool. But, neither am I interested in being orthodox or true to tradition. What I'm interested in and passionate about is how we as a community can live the truth that the Son of Man was in all things reconciling them, and that the Other is now the all in all. How do we live that out? I'm not interested in theologies that don't wrestle with this. They fall short of the cataclysmic disclosure of universal grace. Because I am more interested in the reconciliation of all (and yes, in one place), in preference to being orthodox, this causes problems. We are more interested in orthodoxy and being right than changing our minds in order to love, include and respect those who we think are believing and living wrong. When it comes down to it, I would rather include an unbelieving sinner, present tense, and be a heretic than to exclude him and be orthodox. This, I believe, is what is offensive about my blog. This is what, upon scrutiny, is offensive about our community. And this, I believe, is what gets me in trouble. twitter me