Repeating Your Parents Instructions

Most people at some point in life discover themselves repeating instructions and phrases their parents would say to them. I expirianced something similar tonight when I found myself repeating a voice from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (a group I was once very involved in) at a church meeting. When pressed for what I was suggesting be a vision for our church, I paused and realized that what I really wanted was for my church to become a group that was "bolder, broader, and more ethnically diverse". Its strange how I have not thought about that phrase in a few years, I had forgotten that it was such a major theme for the Intervarsity group while I was involved with them. At the time, I thought it was little more than a slogan of the year. I am amazed at how these phrases can sink in and work at reshaping my thoughts, all the while I have completely forgotten they existed, and only realize the power when I find myself repeating the someone else's sayings, and then having to ask,.. "did I make that up, or was that someone else's words?". If I have kids, I can only imagine how frequent this feeling will return.
Anyhow, I should finish my homework, brush my teeth, and go to bed so that I'm not late for school in the morning.
Cheers

Reason?

Reason is the devil's whore.
Luther

More Thoughts on Diversifying

I have trying to think of ways to express a direction that we must head at out Church if we are to be more than a church of our temporal culture. I am not putting this out there as some thoughts that it is a brilliant manifesto or anything like that, I realize that many people out there have done for more thinking on this topic long before I even thought about it, but I want to write up some of my thoughts just for practice in clarifying why I believe my church might be numerically growing while at the same time acting as a collector of the dead if we do not take on this issue.
P.F.

We must seek to intentionally encounter a broader diversity inside our local church body.
We must seek ways of inviting people of cultural, racial, ideological, and economic, gender and generational diversity into visibly meaningful participation and contribution of this church.
As this develops, several things will happen.

#1 We as a church will be blessed with a fuller picture of God’s love and redemption.
#2 We as a church will play a song of praise to the Lord that will include more of the instruments which He has created. These instruments were created by God as distinctly different instruments, and to go about either ignoring them or trying to change them into sounding like us is a rejection of God’s wisdom in creating beautifully different voices.
#3 A passion for God’s mission on earth will grow inside of us as we begin to hear other voices expressing ways they see God’s kingdom can be done on earth as it is in heaven.
#4 We become a church better prepared for the future and will not fall into irrelevancy as one current culture fades and another rises.
#5 We become a place where those who are coming to God with honest questions will be encouraged in their honesty. As people see that our church is made of people who do not all understand and express reality in the same ways, they will not feel pressure to put on spiritual masks in hopes of fitting in. Instead, they will see a choir composed of different sounding voices, and God will teach them his songs as they open up and sing without fear from their different sounding voice.
#6 We become a place where loving one’s neighbor may be actively practiced for our benefit and God’s glory.
#7 As we encounter and welcome people with different backgrounds and understandings of the world, we become a people increasingly humble before each other and God as we begin to realize the inadequacy of a single culture’s wisdom as well as the inadequacy of all humanity’s wisdom. Knowing the right things and saying them in the right ways will take a back seat to loving each other and loving God.
#8 We learn something about the Gospel and God’s Kingdom when we engage with voices different than our own.

A call to diversity at my church?

I am terribly torn. I have felt a growing distance between my church and where I stand in honest beliefes. Overall, church would not be such a lonely place if there were some type of diversity there. I could more easily stand to be different, if there were others there who were not nessesarily like me, but at least others who were different. It is one thing to feel alone, it is quite another to feel alone because everyone else around you has got the very same opinions about where you went wrong. I could deal with many people thinking I am errant if they thought so for a diverse arrangment of reasons.
An odd twist to this, is that I feel like the worst thing I could do at this point would to leave the fellowship of my church when the current lack of diversity is precisly the problem. But then, maybe mono-cultural churches should die off as their one-culture controled faith fades? I am leaning toward believing this.
I don't know what to do, and I feel like a coward of imeanse proportions for saying and doing nothing. Perhaps worse yet, I occational say a little when its convienient and consistantly do nothing. There is talk of doing something outreach oriented, and I have much hope for where that could lead us, but as of right now, when I am most honest about how I feel we are doing as a church, I believe we are dying. Our faith has become our culture. We can not accept others outside of this culture because they express their faith in the unaceptable terms of another culture, which to a mono-cultural church sounds like the dangerous herecy of a different or degenerate faith. Whether it encounters ideological, racial, gender, economic or gererational diversity, our church seems intent on a onesize fits all veiw. I just don't know what to do, I am praying for an opportunity to call people toward something higher and better rather than calling out bitterness. I know we are a group who has not been given any opportunity to see that we have forced all of God's flutes, pianos, and violins into trying to sound and act like trupets. But when I try to sound like a trumpet I sound and feel like that shitty trumpet imitation on a casio keyboard from Wallmart.
I know that we have not been told that the Kingdom of God is a symphony orchestra rather than a trumpet cannon. We have not been told that most any genuine instrument is better than that fake Casio trumpet. Welcome to faith in the age of synthesizers.
That being the case, how much longer should one wait? Does a time come when someone who has been there since the early years of our church decide to call out an invitation to play a new song? Do we start encouraging the people to find new instruments that didn't feel welcome? Do we dare to encourage the female instruments to play as loudly as the men? If the men continue complaining, shall we encourage the even more females to play in order to compensate and play louder to cover up the complaining?
I do not want to play the role of an arrogant and pretentious conductor, but right now I feel like I play the role of a coward who has hidden his lamp under a basket because it did not shine in the same way as others.

Hurray for Heretics!

"The belief that man can change his surrounding environment through personal discipline, government regulation, and global effort is monstrously offensive to the sovereignty of God,” said Al Mohler in a statement Wednesday evening, “According to the Christian worldview, man is in a state of total inability to do anything good, and the so-called ‘creation care’ of the evangelical left is a heresy that exalts human effort above the glory of God.”