I will start by stating what will be obvious to some: we don’t control the Church. We are co-workers with Christ, but it is not ours, it is God’s. In this way, the 2nd Principle for Co-operatives is not universal for Christian faith communities. But I still believe that these principles are worthy of reflection…
2nd [...]
Category Archives: RE:church
Church As A Co-op: 2nd Principle
October 15, 2008 – 4:24 pm
Manufacture Dissent as Christian Practice
September 16, 2008 – 6:24 pm
Jarrod McKenna in Australia, posted a link to a great article by, C. Wess Daniel. His article deals with the Church’s task to evoke “the desires of people for a world different than the one we inhabit.” Here’s a portion of Wess’s piece:
As I see it, (at least some of) the church can be guilty [...]
Church As A Co-op: 1st Principle
September 10, 2008 – 1:48 pm
A while ago, I wrote about looking at the structure of co-operatives as helpful for understanding church. Back then, I wrote:
I have recently been interested in co-operatives as a model for understanding the Church. More specifically, local, geographic expressions of the Church; a congregation. I’ve been reading through the website of the International Co-operative Alliance. [...]
What Would Ian Do?
July 22, 2008 – 3:05 pm
In late 1980, two young men started a record label in Washington DC called Dischord Records. Since that fateful day Dischord Records has released over 150 albums from a variety of Washington DC-based artists. The label has never entered into an agreement with a major record label and has remained fiercely [...]
Imagine Movements of Missional Communities
July 16, 2008 – 1:45 pm
Imagine.
Imagine what it would would happen if in your community there sprung up 2 or 3 or 6 or 10 or 15 groups of 8 to 15 people who are all committed to being apprentices together of Jesus; to learn what it means to be in accountable community, but saw their roles as representatives of [...]
The Femininity of Mission
July 11, 2008 – 5:23 pm
This last Mother’s Day, I found myself thinking about the profound impact women have had on my life. My mother, my wife, my mother-in-law and my daughter are just some of those that have had the strongest female influence in my life.
While thinking about this, I began to think about something else: we often fail [...]
Hospital Beds
July 5, 2008 – 6:08 pm
“There’s nothing to do here, some just whine and complain, in bed in the hospital.” - Cold War Kids
The analogy of the Church being a Hospital is a tired one. It rarely conjures images of what a hospital is really like, not to mention if it did, why would people be attracted to Church? On [...]
Jesus and the Kids
May 8, 2008 – 9:20 pm
We’ve tossed out several Bible story books in our home. In a Western world painted with pictures of Middle Eastern “terrorists” the last thing we want is for our children to forget that Jesus looked a lot more like bin Laden than their white dad. We realized this one evening when reading out of one [...]
changing clothes
April 14, 2008 – 11:44 am
The church has been an insecure, boastful entity for centuries. She’s comprised of humans and as much as we humans want to see ourselves as noble, confident, sured beings, we are so often scared of what people think, scared to disappoint, scared to be found out. We spend our lives putting on a show for [...]
sore throat and tired eyes
March 24, 2008 – 8:26 am
Editor’s Note: Austin has been hanging out with the Collective for a few months now. He shows up on Sundays at the Hawthorn House from time to time and is incorporating some of the HH people in a short-film series he is working on called, “X”. This article first appeared in a North Carolina church [...]