community

I know, I know ... it has been way too long since i have posted. To be honest I go through blog-swings. It is very similar to mood-swings. Just how moods toward poeple, places, experiences, and things change from one extreme to the next. So does my blogging change. I will blog constantly to be in like flyn, but the tides will quickly change.

Anyway, I wanted all those to know that I have been experiencing one of the greatest freedoms... community. My wife and I have some friends now in this place that we live and we get together weekly. It is one of those gatherings that you love, but you think about if you invited someone else... they would think you are weird. I am delusional sometimes b/c I create scenarios in my head. So here is the conversation I imagine when I think about asking people to come to our gathering.

Stranger - what are you doing friday?
Me - well I am hanging with some friends over Steve & Lois'
Stranger - I never heard of that bar?
Me - it is not a bar, they are people, and they have a home.
Stranger - What are you doing at home with friends on a friday?
Me - singing, sharing our life stories and some of our secrets, praying, reading and talking about the bible, being the church...
Stranger - is it a cult?
Me - sort of.... NO!
Stranger - cool, well maybe next week we can do something.

That is my imagined conversation. It is purely fictional, and I am finding that my delusional scenarios in my head are as far from reality as my pet fish Sushi is from real sushi. This small community of riff-raff, is a community of stories that are colliding and resonating with each other. It is not a place where difference is accepted, but it is a place where difference is encouraged, hoped for, and initiated. It is unity in diversity.

This is very exciting. We are committed to being the church and not going to church, and people are coming who do not go to church and they love it. We are not being seeker sensative, we are loving and it is working better than what I have ever experienced and learned. All I can say is that, God's kingdom is backwards. What we think will make it work is often times the thing that makes it fail.