dealing with early church disagreements

The firsts of 4 studies to come out of the PCC awayday.

The group felt that how we reacted to disagreement depended a lot on the context, who we had the disagreement with and what it was about, eg. how important it was to us.

We looked at Romans 14 which is about disagreements about food and holy days. In general Paul seemed to agree that it didn't mater what you ate or what days (if any) you kept as holy, but for they sake of the "weaker" believer he recommended that people give way so as to not offend.

As a principle we felt we should avoid judging others, that we should have a sense of perspective, eg. just how important is this issue?

Then we looked at Acts 15.1-21 which is about tension in the early church around how much (if any) of the Jewish traditions should be adopted by the gentile converts, specifically about circumcision. Paul had a much stronger view about this issue - he was completely against requiring gentile converts to be circumcised. After an argument with the people proposing this he goes to Jerusalem to have a meeting of Church leaders to discuss this. This issue was seen as more important, more fundamental to the faith. It was tackled by having a meeting to hear all sides and then an agreement was reached, although it is interesting to note that only the speeches against the adoption of circumcision are reproduced here. It can also be seen that there was a slight compromise eg. gentile converts were to avoid certain foods and sexual immorality.

As a principle we could see that listening to the other was extremely important. Also to respective the other person and their motives even though we disagree with their position. In the speeches we have in this passage reference is made to what is happening in the world, to what God is doing in the world, ie. that the gentiles have the spirit. Reference is also made to scripture. So another principle would be to look to the bible and also to what is happening in the world for guidance on how to settle disagreements. We also felt we should be open to other opinions.

We have two quite different pictures of how the early church tried to deal with conflict, to apply them today would mean trying to distinguish between what are relatively unimportant issues (even if the people involved see it differently) about which it is ok for people to believe and do different things and those issues that are more important or about which is not possible to have to views/practices happening at the same time. For example I think that the issue of woman becoming Bishops in the Church of England is such an issue. Woman either can be/are Bishops are they cannot be Bishops.

Hope the above is a fair reflection of our discussions. Please add your own comments, especially if you disagree or think I have left anything out :-)

Sister Wendy on prayer

The essential act of prayer is to stand unprotected before God.

happiness

from John Naish's book 'Enough - Breaking free from the world of more'. Writing about the problem of the pressure to be happy...

Part of the problem is that what we call happiness is in fact a 'flow state' of unconsciousness, the sort of thing that happens when you're so engrossed in a hobby... that you just don't notice time passing. You lose yourself as your ego and your preoccupations fall away. You can't force this, but willing it to happen can cause a kind of self-help psychosis - the psychological equivalent of the watched kettle syndrome... [as] John Stuart Mill famously wrote 'Ask yourself if you are happy, and you cease to be so.'

interesting quote...

You can either be a Christian school or a school for Christians. You can't be both.
Steve Chalke.
(Quoted in Third Way - December 2008)

more on creation myths

At our last meeting on 19/11/08 we continued to think about creation myths - looking at creation myths from other faiths and cultures.

An interesting evening both to see how the Jewish/Christian creation myth shares ideas with other myths, but also how it is different.

origional sin

meeting last week - 5/11/08

Following on from the prodigal son we all looked at the doctrine of original sin. an interesting talk followed with no firm conclusions or agreements, so no change there. we did spend a fair bit of time looking at the Genesis creation story and this got us to thinking about how other cultures' creation stories might touch on the subject of sin and the way the world is. So that is going to be our topic next time.

praying the labyrinth

meeting 22/10




for this meeting we went to St John's Epping to learn a bit about the labyrinth and how it has been used in the church at different times, but principally it was an opportunity to walk it and spend some time in meditation/quite.

walking the labyrinth is an ancient practice that has been re-discovered by the modern church. a labyrinth looks like a maze but in fact has only one path.

see grace cathedral for more information.

prodigal son

meeting 8/10/08

we looked at the parable of the prodigal son. before looking at the passage we tried to see how much we could remember of the story, when we checked we were pretty close except a few of us had remembered some things that were not there! this got us thinking about sin/forgiveness and so we decided to look at original sin at our next ordinary meeting.

breathe

meeting on 24/9/08

we watched rob bell's dvd called "breathe" which was a meditation on the breath/spirit of god. the word translated breath can also mean spirit and wind - context is very important here!

Archbishops say extreme capitalism has become a new creed | Ekklesia

Archbishops say extreme capitalism has become a new creed | Ekklesia

Thought this was interesting in light of our discussions at house group last Wednesday.

Huw

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

Well this was quite annoying at times, I think he over writes, it could be much more to the point, also he is unnecessarily rude, in particular the names/labels he uses.

As to the arguments, less to fault him here, most of his arguments against "proofs" of God are fine, but familiar from Christian theologians. His arguments about how awful the church can be are also fine but again Wink, Wallis, Mclaren et al have been there before him.

Where I would take issue is with his selective rating of the bible (we all do this!) he talks about the awfulness of the "Old Testament God" but this is not news, he says Jesus is a little better (but can't resist adding "if he existed at all") but that ultimately the Old Testament and New Testament are exclusive, they are about the Jews only. He quotes some verses to back this up, but ignores? all the passages from the prophets that speak of caring for the alien and stranger, he misses Jesus on loving our neighbour and then defining the neighbour as "the other". He misses so much in the gospels that point to this message being for all people. It is annoying as if this is deliberate it undermines his argument and if it is a mistake then he really hasn't done his research.

His arguments about how natural selection could have caused the rise of religion, ie. mems etc. was, for me, not very convincing. Also his explanation for why we are good still leaves morality as some kind of accident of evolution (not that I have a better explanation).

Overall, not as annoying as I thought it would be.

everything must change - jesus, global crises, and a revolution of hope

Brian d. Mclaren
This is a long a detailed book trying to get a handle on the crises that faces the world and what our understanding of Jesus' teaching/message might be able to say about that. It very clearly gets the issues that face us and in particular looks at things in terms of "framing stories" - the idea that our current framing story is leading to the suicide of our world. Mclaren offers an alternative framing story which is a particular reading/understanding of Jesus' message/kingdom. He is very critical both of the existing story and also the existing understanding of Christianity. Part of the existing story is about growth (for its own sake) and consumption, without reference to what the world can produce (raw materials) and cope with (waste). Also the underlying myth that power and violence solve anything and that at the heart of some understandings of Christianity there is a powerful myth of redemptive violence, ie. God needed Jesus to die for our sins.

To finish he calls for action in four areas:
* personal: everything from how we pray to how we spend our money etc.
* community: new kinds of community, eg. emerging church etc.
* public: social movements that to educate and demand change.
* global: NGO's, governments etc.

fresh expresions

meet yesterday and looked fresh expressions of church, the examples we looked at were from the sacramental/Eucharistic tradition. we talked about what church might/could be and about the relationship between believing, belonging and behaving.

the sign at cana

at the last house group we looked at the wedding of cana where jesus turns water into the very best wine. we were using notes that were written up by the people who wrote the studies for the bishops for the lambeth conference.

we thought a bit about what the disciples might have made of what they saw - if they would have related it to passages in the ot that talk of banquets that are about the redemption of Israel. also the significance of john using the word "sign" rather than "miracle" - a sign points to something and in john this is to jesus' glory.

heaven at last?

Last week we finished our look at heaven and to some extent hell, all stemming from Tom Wright's book Surprised by Hope.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Surprised-Hope-Tom-Wright/dp/028105617X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214143551&sr=8-1

This book proved hard to summarise! so I won't try that here (also I have yet to read it). For me the main thing to come out of this was that creation is basically good, that this world is not going to be swept away and replaced by heaven, rather the image is of this world being redeemed & transformed as will people. So what we do here and now is important here and now, the possibility of heaven does not stop us caring and acting for justice in this world.

My thoughts anyway... please feel free to comment/disagree etc.

Huw

A good excuse to play on your computer

If you are looking for a good excuse to spend idle time on your computer go here:

www.freerice.com

The longer you play, the more rice is donated; self indulgent time wasting made good!

what do we think of heaven?

so far in this series we have looked at paradise/eden and then the fall from that paradise. next time we we look at what tom wright has to say about heaven (and how he thinks the Church has got it wrong), but this week we talked about what we think heaven is/is not and what images of heaven we see in popular culture. in particular we looked at how from very early on christians were influenced by greek philosophy and that this may well have contributed to an other worldly non physical idea of heaven and a tendency to equate the physical world with sin and see the soul as something independent of a body.

The Fall

Last house group we continued to look at the creation stories in Genesis. The second story starts from 2.4b (or there abouts) this is generally considered to be a second creation story. This is one the one that deals with the fall - we were thinking about heaven and this story could be seen as a picture of a perfect world, before the fall. We also wondered if this story might be an attempt by the tellers to explain why the world was as it was for them, eg. hard and harsh. We also thought about the nature of Eve and Adam's sin and what it means to be "like God".

Stillness

Habit Three: Stillness |:| Embody : create : coach : venture:

"The guru of stillness was exasperated with his student. The source of this exasperation was essentially that what he was teaching didn’t exist and the student was having a hard time with that. It was more about what wasn’t there than what was. The student couldn’t really handle that; ‘So. What you’re saying is that it is a bit like this? Or like that?’. ‘No, no, not like that! Or this, for that matter. Even a bit!’ He paused and finding depths of compassion and patience asked his student, ‘Are there spaces between your thoughts?’. ‘Well yes’, the student admitted. ‘Then make them bigger’."

Christian Aid Service 11th May 2008

We had the Peace & Justice Christian service tonight. We finished standing around this table after lighting candles and saying together the prayer for Christian Aid week.

God of the rushing wind,
sweep through my indifference.

God of the fiery flames,
ignite my compassion.

God of the many voices,
open my mouth to speak out against injustice.

That through your Spirit
and my actions
this world may be transformed.
Amen.