Deitrich Bonhoeffer – Life Together Quote

In my Meaning of Christian Community class we are reading Life Together by Bonhoeffer –  This is a book of pure Christian Ninja-ry.  

There are loads of great quotes and here are a few

“Only those who give thanks for little things receive the great things well.”

“Pastors should not complain about their congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God.  Congregations have not been entrusted to them in order that they would become accusers of their congregations before God and their fellow human beings.  When pastors lose faith in a Christian community in which they have been place and begin to make accusations against it, they had better examine themselves first to see whether the underlying problem is not their own idealized image, which should be shattered by God.”

“Like Christian sanctification, Christian community is a gift of God to which we have no claim.  Only God knows the real condition either our community or our sanctification.  What may appear weak and insignificant to us may be great and glorious to God.”

hmm.  Things to think about.

Am I the lamest blogger ever?

Well maybe not, but I feel like I’ve been dropping the ball on the whole blog-o-sphere-a-verse lately.  It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks.  Jocelyn was born a little early, I started my masters degree, and I am reading like a maniac.  So when I do have free time to blog, I don’t really feel drawn to create more words.

In case you are wondering, school has been going great.  I love learning, and I love being force to learn through some sort of program.  Our first class talked about the nature of church community, and the spring of our discussion was the trinity, and the community of the trinity.  It was incredibly insightful and I posted on my twitter that it was leping me to love Jesus more.

We talked a lot about the inlfuence of Karl Barth and the Trinitarian relational model for salvation.  it went above the Calvinist and Arminian debate.  That was pretty incredible.  I’m still trying to process all of what it means and I am trying to figure out how to apply it to our church community.

tonight and tomorrow I will be in class again.  This time Interpretting the Hollywood Narrative, movies, theology, super fun times will be had by me.

The business brickyard

I just finished reading the business brickyard by Howard Mann. (I would get all kinky right there but I’m writing from my phone so google it.)

This a I great little books on the fundamentals of running a business. There are a lot of applicable point for church leadership as well. I would recommend it. When I acquired the book it was a free e-book download at only 63 pages it’s totally worth the read.

Great Worship Music

One of my current projects that I’ve been working on is updating our website.  So part of what I’ve been doing is looking at some of the top church websites, features, content, and all that.  And I was clicking around at marshillchurch.org, which is one of the multi-site churches in the puget sound area.  They have a collection of their original worship music that is incredible.  Check it out here.

I think Mars Hill is one of the most influential forces in the greater Seattle area, and I think the fact that they are willing to give away so many great resources to be very encouraging.

I’ll try to continue to post great church resources on my blog.  Partly so I have my own little record of what I like.  But also to pass along the goodness.

Momentous Moment

this past weekend was pretty momentous for our ministry.  We moved the last vestiges of >>beyond>> out of the storage room at our Northgate Campus.  So why is that momentous?  Because we will never have another youth group activity in that room.  It’s a pretty big deal.  We haven’t been using it for a while and now we actually can’t use it.  

It’s feels kind of like Cortez when he came to the new world.  When his people wanted to go Back, Cortez did the unthinkable, he burned the ships.  There was no way they were going back.  Cortez was committed to the mission.  I think as a church we can so easily want to go back to what is familiar because with familiarity comes ease.  But the mission was never meant to be easy and moving forward is always more diffiicult that moving backwards.  So while it doesn’t seem like much, moving out of that storage room is actually a pretty big deal.