Church

What if we took all of the standards we have set up for the church and threw them all out.  What if we took eveything that we know church to be and put it to the side and started with soething completely different and new?  What if people came because they were just curious to see what their friends were talking about?  What if the church didn’t have a banner outside saying here we are?  What if it was a constant moving organism and functioned much like the underground churches?  What if people just knew who to ask where to meet the next time?  What if the church didn’t take an ad out in the paper?  What if the church ust sat down with people were the are and built relationship for the sake of building relationship?  What if there was no hidden agenda to bring the heathens to God?  What if our focus and our agenda was not  to convert the world to Christianity?  What if our agenda was to be the church and show the love of God in our everyday life?  What if our agenda was to show Jesus to the world?

Why?

Why is it that at church you can be in a room full of people and be all alone?
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

The Agape Standard

What if the church set a new standard of loving one another?  What if the church decided to undertake setting the standard of loving one another to agape love?  What would the church look like if the focused on loving people with agape or unconditional love?  Would churches be splitting?  Would people feel unloved and unwanted in the church?  What if instead of focusing on liking the people in the church and trying to be like Jesus in their life, in the way we see it, we started just loving on people with God’s agape love?  The love that says, it doesn’t matter what your past if and what you issues are.   The love that says I know you are probably going to hurt me and you are probably going to gossip and make stuff up, but I am going to love you in spite of all of that.  I am going to try and show God’s love to you.  Would churches be growing?  Would the World freak out?  It says in the Bible that they will know we are Christians by our love for one another.  So why is it that there is so much backbiting and gossipping and lying and hurting going on in the church?  This needs to be changed, so my challenge is to set the Agape standard.

Discover Church

So, as many people know I am starting a church and today I was thinking about all of the things that I need to figure out.  Things like what is my mission and vision, do I am a team to help me, where am I going to do this church thing? In this process I began to think what if the church was a living breathing organism?  What if the church met somewhere different every time and people just came via word of mouth through relationship that was built. What if the church was not so caught up with doing the church thing and focused on being the church.  What if church came naturally through relationship with people and people just came together and prayed and studied the word and did not depend on some person preaching but instead teaching and discussing.  What if the focus was love... Things could get crazy

Love on Purpose

Ok, so I have been reading books like crazy and when I go to Berean I have to try really hard not to buy every book in the emergent voices section because everything looks so interesting to me. However lately I have been reading just a couple of books.  Through everything I have read I have come to the conclusions that the church needs to love God and Love one another on purpose.  What I mean is to not just say that you love people and that you want to see them be blessed but to actually spend the time to build the relationship with them, the one that says no matter what happens I am here.  I had a conversation with a girl at my church recently and she could not understand why I would spend time with her, even though she has all these issues and she has so much drama.  I explained that none of that matters to me.  Let me explain further... I do not care how many issues a person has or how much drama is in their life, I am still going to make the time to love through the issues and drama because then Jesus will shine through me in a real way and not just some I am a Christian T-Shirt.  Anyways enough of the ramblings