The Church’s struggle to be perceived as countercultural is directly related to it’s political approach. When the Church uses the tools of the State to enforce Christian their ideals on the broader world, it should be no surprise that the result of this approach is a perception of hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is not a Christian problem; it’s a human problem. Continue Reading…
The Despised Ones is a new collective of writers and bloggers trying to describe what it means to follow Christ. The group was inspired by the 1 Corinthians 1:28, “He has chosen the despised ones and those who are not to bring to nothing the things that are.”
The group grew out of the discussions of Zach Hoag, Morgan Guyton (who Zach refers to as “Master Splinter”) and T.C. Moore. Guyton likens the proclamation of being despised to a shift in the life of John Wesley.
When John Wesley decided on April 2, 1739 to preach outside of the official Anglican pulpit in the streets and fields of England, he wrote in his journal: “At four in the afternoon I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation.” Wesley was a despised one; there have been many others.
This week kicked off the first ever Despised One’s Syncroblog. Zach suggested we all respond to Philippians 2:6-11. Check out my response and these others:
The church has the character of a polis (the Greek word from which we get the adjective political), namely, a structured social body. It has its ways of making decisions, defining membership, and carrying out common tasks. That makes the Christian community a political entity in the simplest meaning of the term
…stated very formally, the pattern we shall discover is that the will of God for human socialness as a whole is prefigured by the shape to which the Body of Christ is called. Church and world are not two compartments under separate legislation or two institutions with contradictory assignments, but two levels of the pertinence of the same Lordship. The people of God is called to be today what the world is called to be ultimately.
The New York Times visited my church recently, and captured our story in a fair and touching way.
That Swedish/Chinese mingling is a significant innovation in American church history, but it’s not what brings new worshipers to Space 12 on Sunday mornings. Hannah Perez, 24, works for Cuvee Coffee, the local roaster whose beans she was putting through the Chemex. She grew up in a Methodist church in Indiana, and her husband’s church was Hispanic Pentecostal. But when they moved to Austin, they joined Vox.
“We felt like: ‘Wow, this is awesome. It feels like hanging out in someone’s house,’ ” Ms. Perez said.
Watch the video and then read the entire story here.
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