I just realized that in using Windows Live Writer, and clicking on my “BlogIt” button while viewing the page titled “Becoming the Authentic Church”, LiveWriter creates a new post with the title “[Post Title] at Theoblogical”, thus creating a post with the title of “Becoming the Authentic Church at Theoblogical”, which communicates something I know to be utterly false and misleading. I cannot, no matter how much I “blog” about, however profound, BE THE CHURCH in a blog, or “count it as righteousness” or “faithfulness”. We need, I need, a relationship with a church to do that.
(So now you may see how the above title of this post happened: in posting a blog post with LiveWriter on the previous post, therefore tacking on another “at Theoblogical” to the end of the title). Anyway, back to my point:
The blog CAN be and has been for me, a way to connect with others with whom I can communicate my dreams for the church and what that may or could look like for myself and my family at THIS time. It may even be a means of connecting me to people with whom some specific incarnation of an embodied church might emerge or be revealed to me as a place of possibility; as the chosen “Beloved Community” with whom I can belong. It is even possible to use the blog (and the blogosphere) as a resource for that church, or as a channel of story witnessing to that church. The church does need continued and ongoing story-telling. There is an extreme shortage of story-writing about the life of the church. There is plenty of theologizing about it, but very few accounts of what life in a particular beloved community is like; too few “church biographies” along the lines of the writings of Elizabeth O’Connor, telling the stories of a particular community (The Church of the Saviour in Washington DC), and how the “structures” containing and resourcing and enabling that community are conceived and carried out.
In such a “time between times” as I am in now, where I am somewhere between “church as I grew up in” and “church as it may yet be” , blogging gives me an “outlet” for working toward the next step; to explore the options like where I might pitch my tent in the world “as is” , but with an eye and a vision for how the “what should be” might break in to the “what is”. I am well aware that I have pushed away from the “church that is” (or as it presents itself to me) out of a lack of patience for “how things still are” and a lack of faith in God’s “breaking in” and pulling us out of this cultural prison and into participation with a Kingdom of Reconciliation.
Link to Becoming the Authentic Church at Theoblogical at Theoblogical
