"Contemplative Spirituality"

I'm drooling... soooo many great articles that speak to this thing inside me that's been stewing... this feeling that change is needed... this "thing" that prompted me to start this blog, actually! :o)

The first I'm going to comment on was taken from this page... written by Dan Kimball and Josh Fox:

There is a rising feeling among emerging church leaders and followers of Jesus, that in many modern contemporary churches, something has subtly gone astray in what we call “church” and what we call “Christianity”. Through time, church has become a place that you go to have your needs met, instead of being a called local community of God on a mission together. Through time, much of contemporary Christianity subtly has become more about inviting others into the subcultures of Christian music, language and church programs than about passionately inviting others into a radically alternative community and way of life as disciples of Jesus and Kingdom living.
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Vintage Faith is simply looking at what was vintage Christianity. Going back to the beginning and looking at the teachings of Jesus with fresh eyes and hearts and minds. Carefully discerning what it is in our contemporary churches and ministry that perhaps has been shaped through modernity and evangelical subculture, rather than the actual teachings of Jesus and the Scriptures. We need to begin asking a lot of questions again. We shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. Too much is at stake not to.

This is their definition of the "Emergent Church". And, it's exactly how books like "Velvet Elvis" (Rob Bell), "A Scandalous Freedom" (Steve Brown), and "The Barbarian Way" (Erwin Raphael McManus) have basically put it. These books have been my absolute favorites of the last couple of years! I love their "out-of-the-box" thinking! This resonates with me soooo deeply....

These next bits were taken from this article:


I read all the right books, went to all the right conferences and said all the right things. For years, I played by the rules and tried hard not to think too much about the lingering questions in my soul. Doubt, after all, was dangerous. Who knew where it might lead?

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...so many people have stopped thinking for themselves-and those who haven't, no longer feel safe to express a dissenting opinion.

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Jesus challenged the religious establishment in his day. He answered his critics with powerful, thought-provoking questions. He wasn't afraid to take on tough topics or discuss contentious issues. Spiritual McCarthyism, meanwhile, promotes exactly the opposite. It encourages people to orchestrate their lives to avoid censure and minimize risk. In short, it teaches people to live in fear-to put up and shut up. I don't know. I guess I'm just not sure that fear, intimidation and control should be the defining hallmarks of Christianity.

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Over time, I seemed to meet more and more people who didn't fit with the stereotype of the good Christian. By their very lives, these people challenged me to stop speaking the code language of my youth--and start engaging with the wider culture around me.

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In that moment, I think I realized that God could handle severe honesty. Authenticity, in all its messiness, was not offensive to him. There was room for doubt and anger and confusion. There was room for the real me.

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...tolerates differences and treats people with opposing views with great dignity. To me, that's the essence of the emerging church.

To me, this just epitomizes all that I've felt. All of this makes sense to me...

Lastly, here is an excerpt, taken from this page, from Chapter 1 of “A Heretic's Guide to Eternity” by Spencer Burke and Barry Taylor (published by Jossey-Bass August 2006)....

I believe that the next phase of faith is to move beyond religion. Nowhere does Jesus call his followers to start a religion. Jesus’ invitation to his first disciples was to follow him. It was a call to journey, a process that leads us away from some things and towards others. It wasn’t a call to adhere to a set of rules for all time. In fact, one of the most commonly heard critiques of the Christian message is that it is out of touch with what is really going on in the world around us.

“The purpose of theology,” writes the theologian Sallie McFague, “is to make it possible for the gospel to be heard in our time.” For the gospel to be heard in our time requires a commitment to spiritual growth and maturity. It involves being willing to break out of the boxes that have served us well in the past but no longer suffice today. While it’s possible to preserve and pass on a centuries-old understanding of the nature of society, ethics, and even morality, we have to realize that these constructs are often powerless to speak into today’s world.

Faithfulness to the message of Jesus does not mean that we must simply imitate our forbears in the Christian tradition. To do so might help preserve their formulas, but it will freeze us in history. I believe that we must attempt to recontextualize the story—to find equivalents for our world today.

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This tendency to hold on to the familiar remains a problem for many followers of God today. Religion becomes a place we retreat to, where we hear the old stories, lovingly preserved but frightfully disconnected from the realities of life. The rise of interest in fundamentalism is evidence of the desire for reassurance—for ways of fitting a complex world into manageable categories. But religions don’t function at their highest and best when they attempt to provide simple answers to life’s biggest questions.

The answer is not a retreat into the past. We must look instead at the “beliefs and ideas that stunt holiness today,” as one writer put it. I believe we must resist our Israelite-like impulse to look back longingly at Egypt.

Undoubtedly, some people will see this call to reposition questions of faith beyond religion as dangerous and unscriptural. Many who come from a religious point of view may be threatened by the challenge to consider Jesus beyond religion. But as I see it, religion finds its gravity in the light of the sun. It finds sustainability and life through its relationship to the sun.

All I can say is "Wow". This goes along with the phrase I've always heard touted... "Christianity is about RELATIONSHIP, not religion". And, I love the idea of looking for the "real" Jesus... not the one that Christianity as we know it has put "in a box" -- defined, and made "nice". Jesus as Lord... Jesus as God.... Jesus as my Savior.