aside: willow creek
Published by reverendmother 8 months, 3 weeks ago13 Responses to “aside: willow creek”
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» I have been remiss in posting SBJ’s latest stats: 23 pounds and 27 inches at six months. Yes, I’ve got the big mama biceps.
» Aaaaaand little she-who-is lost another tooth this week!
» SBJ is four months old, 19 pounds 5 ounces, and 26 inches tall. GIGANTOR!
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Gee, what a shock.
Ah, sarcasm, the grumpy man’s wit.
I was going for agreeable irony. Why would anybody who’s ever been a participant in group activities think they’d increase love of people?
Depends on the group activity, I suppose. And the definition of love. If love is an emotion, then yeah, bumping up against others and their not-so-lovable idiosyncracies is going to have a negative effect. If it is a practice, then how else do we learn to love others except by sharing our lives with them and they with us?
Your point is well taken though. On one level, a huge duh. On another level, a profound indictment of just about every measure we have for success in the church.
In my experience, everything is accomplished by deciding to do it and then acting in accordance with the decision. The more you start joining teams and counting up other people, the less you’re doing anything that gets you anywhere.
Why does a church need a measure for success?
Of course success is a loaded word that doesn’t get us where we need to go. However, we are told in scripture, “By your fruits you shall know them.”
So how do we evaluate the fruit of what we do as a spiritual community? That is the question.
(Some would say, why do we need a spiritual community at all? Jesus said what we’re supposed to do; we have our marching orders; go do it. That’s a separate issue and one I’m not interested in debating.)
I can tell you that as a result of the Sabbath Experiment, that people are being more intentional about using their time in life-giving ways than they were before. People are receiving support and also being held gentle accountable; at least I hope they are. So that ministry is bearing fruit. On the other hand, there are other things we do because we feel like we “should” but that do nothing to Those are the things to look at.
I think the question as phrased conflates two separate things. You can either evaluate the fruit of what you do as an activist community, or you can evaluate whether you’re all becoming more spiritual. They affect each other, but they’re not identical.
The former is goal-oriented, you have tallies, milestones, reevaluations, committees, profit-and-loss, number of people persuaded, and so on.
The latter is path-oriented. I don’t know, how did Jesus say you could tell?
It does conflate them, in the sense of combining them into a whole, rather than conflating in the sense of confusing them—because they are so very related to one another.
Well, Jesus had a variety of things to say, but he did ask us to feed the poor, heal the sick, visit the prisoners, etc.
Which does seem rather goal oriented, does it not? We can count how many people we serve in those ways. Doesn’t tell the whole story though, which is where the path oriented (as you put it) comes in.
I approach issues of “evaluation” rather intuitively, because I think rubrics don’t tell the whole story (or perhaps even some of the story) when you’re talking about human hearts and minds. Intuition is very subjective, of course, which bothers me less than it does others.
I don’t have a problem with intuition either, but I deleted “Be talented and look at the results” as my answer because you were talking about community.
I meant neither “confuse” nor “combine into a whole.” I meant “flowing together.” You’re implying that this creates a single new river. I accept this way of seeing it, which is necessary from within a faith system, but I don’t think your question can be considered honestly without looking at the inherent qualities of each river. For me, their waters sometimes commingle–but there are two rivers.
Okay, so Jesus said:FEED POORHEAL SICKVISIT PRISONERS
If a church can put checkmarks in those boxes, how is this article a profound indictment of the measures that church has for success?
That’s what I get for attempting [UL type=”square”].
Sorry, I was just going by the dictionary definition of conflate.
Because we are also charged to “equip the saints for ministry,” which means that the church performs these ministries directly as a whole, but we also are supposed to be about equipping individuals to do these things in their daily lives. Many have believed for some time that bringing people in to worship, education and small-group opportunities does accomplish that equipping, but they’re finding that it doesn’t, necessarily.
I’m petering out here, and eyeing that to-do list too!
Conflate
It’s related to “inflate,” “deflate,” or (possibly more relevantly to my position) “flatulence.” I used rivers because air columns would have been stupid.
“Peter out,” however, is of unknown origin, but is understood by debaters.
I was about to send this in email, but then I thought there might be some value to putting it here.
I realize some of this is annoying, but if I don’t have this back-and-forth here (I don’t see them as debates, but I get that they sort of are), I don’t get to think about these kinds of issues at all.
The subject line of the email was going to be “Lucky you.”