I blinked and missed it

Brad told me that he and his friends were all discussing an excellent post by Dan Hughes on TheyBlinked but when I went there, I couldn’t see which one they were talking about.

I like Dan’s blog and his way of thinking. Dan, who I met in person earlier this year in Austin, is another guy wrestling with organic church on the BEING level and what that looks like. But how to communicate it? Defining the stuff that God and his followers are doing is getting harder all the time.

Here is one reason why. I feel that our spirituality is often defined by what we DONT do rather than what we do. Some of us are moving from a highly active Christian life, in which we serve God by our restless activity, to a life characterized by a God-ordained simplicity and sacrifice of idolatrous busy schedules.

Translate that to church: Our parents defined church by what they DID when they got together. But what if emerging church was defined by what people gave up to be together, by the activities that they sacrificed in order to “assemble” and the assembly itself was an act of worship, valuable because these people stopped the machinery of makingmoney/havingfun/cleaninghouse/etc to BE TOGETHER with God and each other. Not what you do, but what you don’t do. The Catholics might do this better than the Protestants – with their discipline of silence, abstenance from foods and things, fastings, etc.

Worth thinking about. But back to Dan. On his old blog last year, Dan asked a question that is worth digging up and repeating along the same lines but regarding Christian living and spending money:

“what if communities regularly practiced protracted periods of living without buying? what would that do to our patterns of life? how would that require new ways of thinking? in what ways would that open us up to being shaken a bit by an intentional return to momentarily living through sharing, barter and giving exclusively? ”