What others are saying about doing church

Here’s some of the conversation around the blogosphere this week about doing church — 

Thanks to Emergent Village for putting me onto Nate Bettger’s post about “‘Doing Church’ like everyone else…”  Here’s a sample:

As I wrestle with accepting having 6 to 10 people at our weekly gathering, people “shopping” gets to be pretty brutal. We had a few when we first got things going that came for a few weeks and then decided we weren’t for them. To have one new face is a rush of encouragement… but to find out later that they want a sweet and hip worship service is rough. It’s like losing 15% of your church. Hah! the joys of being small.

Over at God’s Politics, Diana Butler Bass has some thoughts about Willow Creek’s discovery that church programs don’t work.  Bass wrote Practicing Congregations (a very good book) and has this to say about the Willow Creek dilemma:

As I have traveled across the U.S. and Canada, I have found that many congregations—including mainline churches, progressive evangelical communities, and synagogues—are rebasing their life on spiritual practices including prayer, theological reflection, doing justice, generosity, storytelling, discernment, shaping community, hospitality, and leadership. These faith communities have developed a healing sort of grassroots wisdom and have grappled successfully with the very issues that Willow Creek is now seeking to address.

At the Abbey Journal, Zach Roberts has a helpful post about the distinction of truth as relational vs. relativistic.  Zach has started an emerging church with the help of an established First Baptist Church.  This post is part of a Q&A that he did about the new venture they call Dogwood Abbey.  Here’s an excerpt about truth as relational, but the whole post deserves reading:

Human knowing is a relational thing. We know as we are known. It is not a subject/object based hierarchical encounter, but rather a subject/subject based mutual exchange.

And the beat goes on.  Peace.