Westminster Confessions

I’m really not a rebel. But I’m not content to accept the confines of a box either, whatever that box may be. All our married years we’ve characterized our life together as an adventure. That adventure finds its expression as being willing to sell a lot of our belongings to go teach on a small island in the middle of an ocean for a year or re-evaluating from the ground up what a worship service should look like and include. It’s also smaller things like picking up at a moment’s notice to help our daughters with some project (which means packing the car up on a semi-whim and driving anywhere from 4 to 15 hours), picking up the phone at 2 am when a friend calls, or sharing whatever is in the ‘fridge on Sundays with whoever wants to come and have lunch and talk with us (if we were able to fit 25 people in our old apartment ANYONE can do hospitality). It’s not even always for “noble” reasons. For my birthday (years ago), the family would get up and leave at 5 am for a 5 hour drive to the Adirondacks so we could hike up Mt. Jo and have lunch, and then hike back down and drive 5 hours back home. Or the weekend jaunts to be with some of the cc.net crazies (now affectionately known as the rmfo gang). Or the grand “out of the box” experience of quitting our nice and secure jobs, “throwing” the future to the wind, so we can go to seminary. We’ve just never quite figured out the “settle down” part of life. But we wouldn’t want it any other way.

In fact, some of our moving around (19 addresses in 27 years of marriage) has been downright amazing. We have had the opportunity to be part of a beautiful palette of churches. High church, casual church, confessional church, bluejeans church, worship on the beach church. Plugged in, unplugged, no plugs (and dare I say… ear plugs). I am coming to see the value of the gift of perspective that we have been given because we have been part of so many different churches. There are no rose-colored glasses here! But I am not jaded either. In fact, I’m more in love with the body of Christ than ever before. But I’m also more convinced that we (American Evangelicals in particular) may not really have the most accurate picture of what the church really is (or could be). I know many, many friends who have been through difficult situations with their own churches and wonder “Is this the way it’s supposed to be?”

What would Paul say?

Enter a book that has been challenging and refreshing to read: Reframing Paul by Mark Strom. Beginning with a history of philosophy, the book transports you to the time of Paul and to the seeds of our own Western thought. Did we travel on a different trajectory than Paul intended for his fledgling ekklÄ“sia (Strom prefers to use this terminology to avoid pre-conceived notions that surround “church”)? We need to ask ourselves if some of the issues in the Church today are the result of a misunderstanding (or misapplication) of some fundamental principles that Paul was teaching.

Mr. Strom summarizes his intent for the book this way:

This book brings together in conversation two worlds: Paul’s and our own. My aim is to offer a different view of both worlds as a starting point for grace-full conversation around Christ and everyday life. Doing so will inevitably reopen questions about the nature of church and theology… If we understand how contemporary ideas and conventions shaped the ways the message of Jesus Christ influenced Paul and his friends, then we find a vantage point for fresh conversation about its signficance to us. The task before us, then, is (1) to reframe the life and thought of Paul in the light of his Graeco-Roman world; (2) to examine the conventions and systems of evangelicalism in this light; and (3) to reframe church and theolgoy as grace-full conversation.

You can take a look at the contents of the book yourself here. In fact, you can read the first chapter or one of the later chapters in the book to get a taste.

I’m not so aligned with anything (except Scripture and my standing in Christ) that I can’t re-evaluate and re-consider even long-standing traditions and their applications. I value tradition, but I know that we can also become defined by that tradition to the point where we won’t be willing to squarely look at what Scripture demands and be courageous enough to adjust our precious practices and customs.

I hope to find some folks who will be interested in continuing this conversation from outside the box. The view certainly is more expansive.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 11th, 2005 at 10:33 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.