Thursday, September 02, 2004

storytelling the kingdom

This is a story I wrote yesterday. It’s a missional reading of Matthew 13:44; The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a person found it, they hid it again, and then in their joy went and sold all they had and brought that field.
It’s called the Brown paper bag.

(more…)

Posted by steve at 08:57 AM

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

God revealed in community

a tangent touched off from here

Modernity sold us a pup. It sold us a belief you needed truth as all-encompassing and systematic. Modernity took truth and wrapped it in culture and then sold it to us as a cultural syncretistic product: truth as pure, abstract, timeless.

Yet, the God of the Bible was a God of community … moulding community in the desert, moulding community in the church … urging community through the broken body of Christ…..telling story after story, narrative after narrative of the actions of the communal God … refusing to sieve narrative into doctrinal purity, God took the risk of letting stories serve as the interpretive vessel for the body of God.

For where 2 or 3 are gathered in my name, there is Christ … he broke bread and gave it to them … then their eyes were opened and they recognized him ….

The God of all, revealed in community…

When moderns encounter postmoderns they sniff for a watering down of truth. What they fail to smell is the decaying odor, the rotting carcase, of their modern, all-encompassing, systematic cultural approach to truth. (Note what I said, the cultural approach is rotting, not the truth.)

Posted by steve at 09:52 PM