Posts Tagged ‘Emergent/Postmodernism’

A Generation Called

// September 25th, 2006 // No Comments » // Commentary

I spent the last weekend cooking for my college choir’s retreat (it’s a way alumni serve the group). I met lots of wonderful new people and had some great conversations with old friends.

While I was there, I got to hear yet again how God is speaking to so many people in our generation. He may call us to different specific things, but it is apparent that God is uniting a generation of believers to seek after Him and inhabit His promises and commands with wreckless abandon. It’s amazing!

Unlike our parents, the people of my generation much more typically are either hot or cold with their faith. Either we desire to give up everything and follow Him or we don’t and realize that it’s not worth going through the motions. That’s an exciting thing for a generation who, more oft than not, grew up in a luke warm American gospel of cheap grace–a faith in which we could have both Christ and all our personal preferences–a gospel without sacrifice and a gospel without love.

We have inhabited a church so long that forgets that Christianity is more about having a relationship with our loving Father and Creator today than about salvation (route by phrase) tomorrow, that Christ calls us to daily take up the cross and follow him, and that our God is worth dying for (and thus worth obeying and worshiping).

It is a time of rebirth in the Church, when the poor, the fatherless, and the stranger will be welcomed into our homes (and more importantly our lives), when we will love the unlovable and heal the broken, when God’s revelation will flow in abundance and we will see Him with new and glorious clarity, when we will be persecuted for living a life in accordance with Him, when we will give up comfort, control, safety, and success to boldly follow after our Father, our Savior, our Creator, our Lover, and our King, and when we will see glimpses of Heaven breaking forth among us!

It is a wonderful and amazing time! Praise the Living God!

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Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

// September 3rd, 2006 // No Comments » // Books

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

Rating: 5 out of 5

Author: Rob Bell

Year: 2005

Publisher: Zondervan

ISBN: 031026345X

I just finished “Velvet Elvis” by Rob Bell on audiobook. It was great! The author has a keen understanding of where God is calling the Church.

Rob Bell is the senior pastor at Mars Hill, a megachurch attended by thousands. Now, I know what many of you are thinking, Matt Pritchard is singing the praises of a megachurch pastor, what’s going on? Well, I’m still firmly in the camp of the importance of reflecting the intimacy of Christ in our fellowships.

That said, it was fun to hear Bell use the exact same language I have been using of late–maybe it’s a Holy Spirit thing. Though Bell is a little too institutional for my taste, he thoroughly comprehends the need for the church to embrace reality instead of religion, love instead of legalism, and a powerful Christ worth living and dying for instead of a palatable, easy god worth only saying a phrase of allegiance to.

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Blue Like Jazz

// March 29th, 2004 // No Comments » // Books

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

Author: Donald Miller

Year: 2003

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

ISBN: 0785263705

Many of my friends really like Blue Like Jazz, I read a few chapters and just didn’t get into it.

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