Once the weekend arrives (I have a busy day tomorrow and the next, but look forward to the weekend when I can dive into this stuff)….but I’ve already seen indications that I will be seeing a lot of stuff from which I will derive much to affirm that vision of church which is always about teaching us the meaning of life lived as a Kingdom people; life lived radically different; relationships lived wholly different; priorities radically altered.

the church and postmodern culture: conversation: Postmodernity vs. the Gospel?
the church as an embodied presence is the social strategy in the new fragmented worlds of declining modernity. The church becomes the means of a living breathing display of justice from which we engage the world with an all the more compelling justice that comes out of God’s work in the church. From such a social display, our ability to support justice efforts and even know which justice efforts to join hands with is made more possible because we have such an embodied justice to live and discern out of.

I place this post also in my “Authentic Church” category because of its proximity and close relationship with the vision of The Church of the Saviour communities which are, in that tradition, deeply ecclesial; centered on the life and siginificance of the church; the CENTRALITY of it.  And to boot,  I have been deeply influenced by that;  and also feel it as a wound of sorts,  since this vision of church as “politic” and as “new community” (“new” as in completely of a different sort from the world’s “communities” which often means any type of association at all) is so rare that it leaves a gaping hole in my experience of church.  Very much in the same sort of sense that eric refers to as “not getting it” as the non_Christians do,  the expectations for “church” today betray a serious gap in what Jesus had in mind and what “Americans” and our culture has in mind when they say “church”.