Thursday, November 18, 2004

Twice in a day

Normally I don't post other peoples words on this blog, but today I'm gonna do it twice. Below is a response to a question a church planter received when he stated his church wasn't a postmodern church and was basically asked, "well your church sounds like one, how is different from one?"

Good question. Generally speaking, a postmodern church is one that has structured the way that they "do" church in response to the cultural shift happening around them (i.e. from modernity to postmodernity), usually for the purpose of "reaching" the postmodern people in that culture.At LP, we have not structured ourselves in response to a cultural shift, or for the purpose of reaching people. We believe that the church has been called to be the people of God in the world; it is a culture itself, a culture dictated by the Kingdom of God. our goal is not to reach people, our goal is to be the people that God has called us to be. In other words, we don't do decentralized, relationship-based church because we feel it gives us the best shot at reaching people, we do it because we think it gives us the best shot at being the people of God, people of the Kingdom, the "new humanity" that Paul talks about.That would be why I wouldn't put us in the category of "postmodern church". I think that if anyone who was looking for a "postmodern ministry" spent any time with our community, they would probably be pretty disappointed.Is that helpful?

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