Liturgies and Mean Old People

We spent some time last meeting talking about the question I posed a couple posts ago: should we expect to be able to bring people, especially entrenched fundamentalists in our churches, along with us for this conversation? While most of us would like to believe that we can have an open discussion and a redemptive friendship with these folks, they tend to be the ones who insist we're not "in" despite our best efforts to be generously orthodox. I think the best we can hope for many times is the situation kaleo has: a church who makes room for us even if they don't always understand or agree with us.

We talked about the liturgies in the second section of Rollins's book as well. We'd like to do some locally-written liturgies in our churches that use some of Rollins's method, especially his ability to weave ambiguity into the issues so that caricaturing controversial issues by presenting opposite poles (i.e., gay versus straight, republican versus democrat, etc.) is not possible within the context of the liturgical service. That being said, we asked what the issues were for Oklahoma City. The answers: conservative politics and Christianity sleeping together; gender roles, especially women in leadership; homosexuality (what will the church do?); religiosity that comes from being raised in and around church but never committing to follow Jesus in any meaningful way beyond "I believe Jesus died for my sins..."

Next meeting will be the third Thursday of November to avoid conflict with Thanksgiving. At that meeting we'll talk about what the liturgies might look like.

Next Meeting

We're meeting this Thursday night at Tapwerks in Bricktown. Last meeting we decided to start a half hour later to allow folks time after work to get things done, etc. We'll start dinner and drinks at 6:30, so the meeting will start at 7:30. We're doing our last session on Rollins's book, but we're talking about the liturgies in the second section of the book. Like to consider what liturgies might look like in our context and what issues need to be addressed with locally-written liturgical services.

Open Season on Pete

Peter Rollins has posted a link on his blog to the church and postmodern culture: conversation blog. They are hosting a four part discussion of his book How (Not) to Speak of God. Rollins has been responding to some of the comments made. Just though I'd pass that on for those interested.

Bible Schmible

We spent a good deal of time talking about hermeneutics at the last cohort meeting. Rollins holds a high view of Scripture and that comes through in his book. (I'm aware that "high view" is full of ambiguity, but it appears higher than my own.) After discussing Rollins's view of Scripture as well as N.T. Wright's attempt to negotiate a "third way" to read Scripture between literalism and liberalism, I posed the question: how do we read Scripture in such a way that it provides for the freedom and egalitarianism in which most of us believe? Our group was somewhere between a third and a half female, and I'm really curious to hear from them how they read it in ways that provides for a feminist voice. I'm also curious about how others more conservative than myself but still intrigued by Emergent want to read it. I'll post more about my thoughts concerning Scripture later, but I want to start this conversation before the next cohort meeting.