What is church?

Alan Hirsch makes this excellent post concerning the definition of church. I'm impressed with the entire thing, but especially the second point down at the bottom of the post.

Alan says that a definition of church must include this activity: "Cultivate covenant community." Hey, three consecutive occurences of "c" in a row! Let's unpack it for just a second.

Cultivate. This is what you do in the garden to help your plants grow. You rake and hoe around the plants to kill weeds, and to keep the soil stirred up and soft which helps watering be more effective and allows nutrients to get more directly to where they need to be. It's putting forth effort toward the good of the plant.

Covenant. This is a promise. It's the nature of relationship in the church, because our common denominator is Jesus, and our relationship to him. We have in common our promise to him, and that includes promises to care for each other, to be involved in each other's lives.

Community. This is actually being together. Most people are involved in multiple communities. Work. School. Friends with whom they stay in regular contact. Church. Small group (Sunday School is one).

10 things i love beginning with the letter 'M'

Antony suggested this meme and assigned me the letter 'M.' I'm afraid this is way too long, but here goes.

Mercy –

I love receiving this. I love being merciful, also. Goes right along with empathy and encouragement. It's a relational act, this giving of mercy. If you're not pulled closer in relationship as you give mercy then I think it's indifference. If you're not pulled closer in relationship when you receive mercy then I think it's ingratitude. It's a formative element in relationships.

Memes –

I'm fascinated with memes. Units of cultural information that spread by verbal or physical repetition, is what the Wiktionary says, more or less. The power of a bad meme is scary. I find their viral nature very interesting.

Mars Trilogy – Kim Stanley Robinson –

_Red Mars_, _Green Mars_, _Blue Mars_, _The Martians_ (put out after the trilogy, it's stories that didn't make it into the trilogy, plus other stuff). I love the way this guy writes. I love the characterization. I love his voice, though it is not as evident here as it was on earlier novels like _The Memory of Whiteness_ and _Icehenge_. I love that he's a big fan of prog rockers Yes. I'm a big fan, too.

Music –

I love music. I've been playing guitar for over 30 years. I love the layout of the fretboard. I love theory, without knowing a great deal of terminology. I love melody. When I was a sixth grader, we lived in married-student housing, a small apartment. I was taking piano, but had no piano on which to practice at the time. I really wanted my dad to get me a cheap little melodica – basically a song whistle with it's own little one octave piano-like keyboard.

"What would you do with it?" my dad wanted to know.

"Sit around and play melodies," I said. This explains a lot about me.

Mullins, Rich / Mark Heard –

Our sadly departed poets laurate of Christian music. I love the stuff these guys did. Favorites of their catalogs: Mullins – _A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band_ / Heard – _Satellite Sky_. Mmm mmm good. I think we lost a lot when these two departed.

Marsha –

This is my wife of 25 years, and my best friend. That sounds really mushy, but there you go. She's smart, funny, good-looking, and the mother of my three children. She's who I want to talk to most of the time. She's who I want to sit beside quietly when nothing needs to be said.

Maledil –

From C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, this is the fictional cosmic name for Jesus, so I'm using it here as a cheat to mention Jesus, our Emmanuel (I could have put Manny, like in Philip K. Dick's _The Divine Invasion_), so it also functions as code for the Incarnation, or incarnational.

Meta –

I really love this whole thing. Meta-document: a document about documents. Meta-map: a map about maps. Meta-narrative: a master narrative informing all subsequent narratives.

I think we're headed more and more in this direction in the church, because we're more and more aware of how things change. We don't want to tie up our local church bodies years down the road after we're gone, so rather than write up by-laws of this is what a staff must consist of, we're starting to write down something like meta-by-laws, which would consist of things like "how do we decide to change the staff line-up, and what might some helpful guidelines be?" And even include some stuff like, "and this is why we think that's a good idea," and maybe even "here's our reasoning based on these scriptures," which would be, you see, not proof-texting, but simply the sharing of criteria, so that future generations could see where we were coming from, and decide if that was still the best application of scriptural understanding.

Meta is the thing that helps you think like this.

Missional –

I'm just learning about this, through blogs and books and sometimes podcasts. But I like the idea. I know it's kind of trendy, but I think there's meat there. I think this is a useful way of looking at stuff, as long as we don't fall for just looking and theorizing and never actually doing the stuff.

Mother Theresa –

What little I know about Mother Theresa is really appealing. Humility. Service. Love for Jesus as he appears in the guise of the poorest and sickest. When I think of how I would like to be, how I would like to pursue becoming more like Jesus, this is one of the major human examples that come to mind.

Love in the middle

Col 3:14 (NIV) "And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity." (TM)

Binds is the key word here. Holding together. Taking disparate items and joining them together into a useful compound. Unity.

Love is kind of like the milk in a batch of pancake batter. You mix the milk in thoroughly, but you don't stir forever. Your batter can handle small lumps of dry flour in there, because the milk will soak in during the cooking process and moisten it. But if the lumps are too big, then you'll have big, gross, icky lumps of dry flour in your mouth when you're eating.

So what's the point? Love needs to permeate every level, every part of your project, your community, your life, your whatever. You don't need to force it or be a nazi about it, because love just needs to be in close proximity to do its thing. It will have its influence on everything nearby.

Love at the beginning

Mt 22:36-40 (NIV) "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (TM)

So love is foundational. That means it's something you build on. That means it's a pre-requisite, meaning, you need it first. Then the other stuff. It's not just that Jesus says these are the two greatest commandments. That's pretty big, all right. But, no. It's that he said, "All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." That's what makes it foundational. Jesus saying first love, then everything else.

So that might be a good thing for us to be mindful of. Love first, then everything else.

1 Corinthians 13:1-13 Outline for Sunday 17 December

Here's an outline for this week's scripture. You can always click TM for the passage in The Message .

• 1 Whether I can speak with the utmost intelligence or the greatest spiritual insight, without love I'm just making noise.
• 2 If I'm able to say what God's up to, and understand my environment, and figure out all kinds of things, and if I can hear God and work in concert with him, but don't have love, I'm nothing.
• 3 I can give away everything to help the poor, or even become a martyr for the faith, but without love, I've gained nothing.
• 4 Love is patient and kind. It doesn't envy, or boast, or become proud.
• 5 It's not rude, it doesn’t look to please itself, it doesn't fly off the handle quickly, it doesn't keep score.
• 6 Love isn't happy about bad things, but good things, true things.
• 7 Love does this: protects, trusts, hopes, and hangs in there no matter what.
• 8 Prophecies will one day end. Tongues will one day quit. Knowledge will one day pass away. But love never quits, never fails.
• 9 We know only partly, and we can prophesy only partly.
• 10 But once the perfect comes, it doesn't leave any room for the imperfect.
• 11 When I was a child, I acted like a child. But now that I'm a man, I've had to put away childish things.
• 12 Now what we see is like what you see in a really bad mirror, but then what we see will be like standing face to face. Now I only know some, my knowledge is incomplete; but then I'll know details and the big picture, just like Jesus completely knows me.
• 13 These three remain: faith, hope, and love. The single greatest one is love.

1 Peter 1:3-13, 18-21 Outline for Sunday 10 December

Here's an outline for this week's scripture. You can always click TM for the passage in The Message .

• 3 Praise God! Through his mercy, God has allowed us to start fresh in new hope through raising Jesus from the dead,
• 4 and into a forever inheritance, kept in heaven for us,
• 5 who, by faith, are protected by God's power until the day we have it all.
• 6 You can count on this, and be really happy about it, even though you might have to go through some tough times on the way there.
• 7 Gold put through the fire shows its purity; faith put through trials shows its reality when Jesus returns
• 8 Even though you haven't seen Jesus, you love him, and even though you don't see him now, you are experiencing super-strong happiness
• 9 because of the work of this faith in you – you're being saved
• 10 The prophets were looking forward to this salvation, really searching it out,
• 11 They were trying to find out when all this was going to happen,
• 12 And it was revealed to them that it was to be in the future, so their work was serving us (as future persons) rather than themselves, when they talked about the gospel. Angels would love to look into this stuff.
• 13 So get ready. 1) Be self-controlled, 2) depend on God and nothing else.
• 14 Be obedient like a good child. Don't shape your life around the evil desires you had when you didn't understand anything about God.
• 15 Instead be holy like God is holy.
• 16 God's the one who says that.
• 17 Since you call on a God who sees everything for just what it really is, live like a stranger here on earth, never completely comfortable with things, and have a healthy respect for God's desires.
• 18 Because you know that it wasn't earthly stuff like gold or silver that redeemed you from the empty way of life our culture is steeped in,
• 19 But with the special, donated blood of Jesus, like a sacrificial lamb without any blemish, completely perfect.
• 20 This sacrificial plan was in place from the beginning of the world, but only revealed to humankind late in the game.
• 21 It's through Jesus that you're able to believe in God, who raised Jesus from the dead and drew all eyes to him, and so your faith and hope are in God.