Going to Church? Hear All the Voices
did you feel that?
Any pastor who cared would say the same thing: no solitary voice can ever speak for an entity as all-encompassing as the church. And except for the rare despot-in-training or the health/wealth preacher coercing you with anti-Bible blather to line his or her pockets, most leaders will say they want something like laminar flow, not just robotic followers.
Laminar Flow? Back when I wrote about mechanical heart valves we talked about the flow across leaflets and disks and how that flow of blood could have a cleaning effect or a stagnating effect. 
Cleaning was good: it kept the mechanism moving. Stagnating—not so good: clots could form, which could impinge on the movement. The key was to design valves where flow was largely in the same direction. And that sounds like a bunch of conversations sprouting from individuals but moving in the same direction.
All-Encompassing? This notion the Apostle Paul talked about in some of his letters (like here and especially here) is far too large to leave in the hands of pastors and professionals and volunteer leaders. And it wasn’t just Paul: Old Testament dudes were saying the same things in different language and with different emphases. It takes an entire people—across ethnicities and nations and generations—to even begin to grasp the full story. An entire people writing the story with words and deeds and conversations.
This thing is big. Really big.
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Image credit thisisnthappiness, RC Modelers of Laredo
[…] recognize the big church already at work among them. I wrote about a couple of this guy’s quotes here, and I’ve started with all the “this is not’s” because I’m convinced we mostly don’t […]
Big Church « conversation is an engine
June 10, 2012 at 3:15 pm