attitude vs. achievement
freshest thought, hot off the presses, just crossed my mind, while waiting for my laptop to boot up.. noticed this common theme among many Christians (when I say “many”, I don’t have a empirical quantitative measurement on it, whether it’s 30-50% significant numbers of, 50.1% simple majority, 66.7% majority, 85-90% overwhelming majority, or 91%+ almost all) that they value heart attitude and sincerity over all else, well, not just over all else, but to the detriment and neglect of other aspects of a person’s actions and thoughts..
one prominent communicator (former pastor, and I won’t use the word teacher here) often quips, “Your attitude determines your altitude!” Nice kitchy rhyme, but only a part of the picture.. it takes personal capacity, ability to work with others, quality control and planning, timely execution, for something to be achieved, something to be accomplished.. sincere attitude alone doesn’t do all that much. And for good people who have a quality standard, working in a Christian environ, some semblence of a non-profit organization, their call for higher standards gets chucked aside as “bad attitude” or “contentiousness”, when in fact, the attitude is genuine desire for excellence to the glory of God, and the substance of the matter is terribly mistaken for insincerity.. the tragic end result being, more often than it should, is poor qualityprograms all done in the name of sincere faith.. [cnx courtesy of Panera Bread's free WiFi]
something about faith
came across some (old) poignant reflections about faith from outsiders looking in to the faith community.. I appreciate their honesty.. 1 Peter 3:15 says that normal people will (1) ask about the hope we Christians have (2) then, we are invited to give an answer; instead, people see rules and rituals and anti-intellectualism that stifle + hinder their quest for that intangible something..
www.iraqprayer.com
Dave Lee is abroad in Iraq on a vision trip, October 20th to November 6th. He’s posting real-time updates from Iraq at www.iraqprayer.com . He’d covet your intercessions! And please pass the word along to others.
Churches + Cultures Interconnectivity
Here’s my recurring meta-theme, the intrigue of the interconnectivity and interplay of churches and cultures, and that’s one reason why Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives is a watershed and critical book to me.. I like it that a mainstream conversation is willing now to wrestle with this interplay, rather than to lock it away in academia — where I do not have access b/c I’m not pursuing a Ph.D. and don’t care to.
one thought on the book, then my own rant.. the 2×2 matrix is a stifling grid, and fails to pull in another dimension; we find it more helpful to think of it as a cube, there’s a 3rd axis for “form”, the look & feel of the worship experience and theological ruberic.. for R being the artistic soul, she gets stifled where the message and method aren’t aligned with a form that engages the culture, for her strategically urban + cosmopolitan.. and I’d imagine there are more dimensions (but with this being a blog entry, thoughts are not well-formed nor edited.. they’re just expressed in the moment..)
See, it’s this whole interplay of between churches and cultures that permeate my mind’s backburners.. why is there such a lack of dialogue about this interplay in my contexts (or any context, for that matter), among the Asian American, multiracial, postmodern, and theological diversity of the world.. the world is comprised of many cultures and sub-cultures, and yet most constructs and models of doing church, be it a denominational form (cf. Baptist cookie-cutter units in the Bible belt), liturgical form (cf. Orthodox), a modern boomerish megachurch form, an ethnic form, a demographic form (cf. young adults night worship), segment the body of Christ into small-minded narrowband morsels. We (R & I) want to experience the bigger wholeness of the Body of Christ and its multi-faceted expressions of worship, and in the reality of this world, it looks like multi-churching - on a good weekend, it’s getting in 3 or 4 worship services.. and this is not consumer-mindedness mind you, this is to awaken our souls to the fuller-ness of who God is, and how he is expressed in and through the lives of his peoples!
blog worship #1
in this moment of communion, and reflecting on the spoken word (Brian shared themes from the HBO movie Wit, incredibly powerful). And how death gives us a fresh perspective on life.. I like how he weaved the metaphor of baptism and communion into that story, and how sacred those 2 things are in our story.. And how now we can live.. My heart gravitates back to the fullness of Jesus, full of grace and truth.. And as we have 2 eyes to gain perspective, we need to have more than 1 voice, 1 perspective to grasp the whole truth and grace of God.. It’s not only rational and logical, not only mysterious and beautiful.. Both/and! [either WiFi at church was turned off today, OR my T|C's WiFi is flaky, so while written "in the moment" this was actually uploaded later, and post-dated back to its actual timestamp]
