Part anthropology, part history, part deconstruction – this is new material that Rob hasn’t taught before, exploring how humans invented religion to make themselves feel better.

My thoughts after the jump:

I’ll preface everything by saying that I love Bell’s teaching style, even going as far as saying he is my favorite teacher. However, I am taken aback (as I’m sure he is) at all the ‘Bell worship’ – whether its blogs I’ve read online or the awkward partial standing ovation at the end of his teaching. As for people who blindly follow his teaching or for those who discount him as a heretic (see Amazon.com reviews) – he is human; he is sharing his views from an admitted flawed human perspective. As he says in the preface of his book, “Just because I’m a Christian and I’m trying to articulate a Christian worldview doesn’t mean I’ve got it nailed. I’m contributing to the discussion.” I do think that he is someone that God speaks through, and he did so last night.

With that caveat, I was overwhelmed at the perspective he took on this teaching, and I’m not going to summarize his hour and a half teaching here – no spoilers! Never before have I heard a Christian teacher take head-on anthropology as the beginning of the teaching. So much of my experience with messages is the avoidance of the Old Testament and its roots/similarities to pagan gods and goddesses of the era. In college, I took a class in Hebrew scripture and the teacher spent most of his time discounting the Torah as stories ’stolen’ from culture of the time. Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice (i.e. Abraham and Isaac), etc all finds roots in pagan culture, yet our modern teaching does all it can to avoid that. When was the last time someone taught Leviticus in church aside from quick quotes or as a joke? How many non-Christians approach the Old Testament and leave the scriptures entirely disturbed? The Old Testament is essentially uprooted from history and interpreted from a modern culture. I realize this is not a new concept to teach rooted in culture – rather, it was used as the foundation of the teaching and ultimately brought so much beauty to Levitical law and the history of encounters with God up to the sacrifice of Jesus. I’m not at all summarizing his teaching either – he really brought it full circle without making the whole discussion analytical or heady. A phenomenal message that I do hope is available on video soon.

If you can catch this series in your city, I would highly recommend it.

Tonight I got a glimpse of OC ideals in action. We discussed a lot of stuff all stemming from the foundation of Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well. We talked about what it means to love people wholly and look past their outward appearances (the Samaritan woman was a complete outcast…it was a huge social “risk” for Jesus to talk to her). We talked about how that relates to our interactions with people today, how we need to meet people where they are, not condemn anyone, and seek to connect with them and share the hope, beauty, and joy of a life led following Christ. We talked about how this challenges us to love everyone; via this we discussed modern day outcasts such as homosexuals, debated the death penalty, etc.
We talked about how dangerous it is to let social constructs and cultural biases influence our reading the bible (i.e. how christians can be wrapped up in politics, capitalism, societal issues such as class, etc) People shared out of their lives, some stuff that might have been uncomfortable, but the environment fostered by our group made it possible. It’s hard to sum up all the things that went on, but hopefully what I’ve said enough to get the idea across.

I’m so excited about the future of these OCs…I can definitely see their potential and what I sampled tonight is very encouraging. Hope everyone else’s OCs went as well as ours.

Oh yeah…Chris and Cindy…thanks for the cookies. They rock. And Jim, I still owe you for the ice. I must now depart, for the Red Vines are calling my name. It’s wrong to eat them outside of the OC, but I must. So good… Hide them, Greg, for the good of us all.

As much as I’d like to write about other things that went on over the weekend, the dominant thing in my mind right now is the first service of oneplace, which, as many know because of my constant raving, was last night. Here’s some general feelings or thoughts that I had throughout yesterday:

I came early to help set things up. After the stream of things I’m qualified to do (heavy lifting) ran dry, I was just sitting in the bleachers and listening to the band. It was one of those moments where the music and the situation that I’m in seemed to perfectly synch up…it was a moment of incredible beauty. It was during this moment, listening to music, surrounded by people that I feel a true sense of community with, that I realized the true wonder of what was going on. God has subtly moved to arrange the lives of all the people in the room toward this moment. What an incredible confluence of circumstances is required even for oneplace to exist; people who, years ago, never would have imagined doing something as crazy as starting a church, meet, do it and do it well.

There are some frustrations that I’ve experienced though. Greg and I were talking about this at length the other day and he said something that really sums up how I feel. He said something along the lines of, “When you have something like oneplace that you feel so strongly about and that you feel really invested in, it’s frustrating when others can’t see what you do.” Here’s an example: after the service, I talked to a few people and asked them what they thought. They tersely replied, “The worship was really good.” What about everything else? If that’s all someone got from oneplace, what an incredible amount has been missed. I hope these people stick around oneplace long enough to be broken away from wanting to be entertained, wanting easily digestible, cliche non-challenging teaching, and settling for cheap superficial facades over difficult, but rewarding realities.

All gripes, worries, and problems aside, I truly felt that the service went really well. I have faith that, through oneplace, God will meet with us. One of the messages that hopefully clearly came across last night, especially in the video, was that that God has gone to incredible lengths to reach us. I was reminded of those lengths by a poem by John Donne that I read today. I’ll leave you with that, his Holy Sonnet #11:

Wilt thou love God, as he thee? Then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting, (for he ne’er begun)
Hath deigned to choose thee by adoption,
Coheir to his glory, and Sabbath’s endless rest;
And as a robbed man, which by search doth find
His stol’n stuff sold, must lose or buy it again:
The Son of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom he had made, and Satan stol’n, to unbind.
‘Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

At the oneplace meeting this morning the topic du jour was faith…something I’ve always struggled with. I was encouraged to see that a lot of people who I look up to have the same problems that I do. Specifically, how do I know when God is “speaking” to me; how do I tell that apart from my conscience or random thoughts that occur to me throughout the day? Along those lines…at times I’ve struggled with the idea of a personal God…what does that mean exactly? It’s one of those things that gets said a lot, but it’s hard to understand. Certainly my relationship with God is a lot different than other personal relationships I have… Today I was able, with the help of some things we discussed at the meeting, to put some of this stuff together. In a nutshell, this is what God pointed out to me: All of my relationships with people are facilitated through imperfect, imprecise, crappy verbal language. I’m reminded of a scene in one of my favorite movies, “Waking Life”, where one of the characters philosophizes that we talk about things like love, but each person has a different idea of love based on life experiences…the word is the same and imprecise with each usage yet what we mean can be different each time. Communicating clearly with another human is hit or miss at best, sometimes. What I have with God is completely different. At times I’ve been bitter because God won’t just speak to me in English with a loud, “God” voice. Today I came to the realization that what I have with God is much better than that… I don’t have to use a frustratingly inadequate mode of communication for God to know what’s up with me…he just knows, and that’s beautiful. As for the other side of conversation, he can just put thoughts into my head, allow me to find relevant passages in the Bible, have others speak to me, and a whole host of other ways…tailored to my situation to be the most effective method of getting through to me. The beauty and the difficulty of all this is that in order to speak with God, I have to have faith…faith to step out and do something I think he’s telling me to do, faith to take what I hear or see around me as a direct communication from the Almighty. I know it’s probably freaky for some people for me or others to say “God told me something, ” but realizing today the way it so flawlessly and subtly integrates into my life and how miraculous it really is, I have newfound vigor in sharing what I have in Christ that is so amazing. I hope all that rambling makes sense.

So, anyway, God showed me all that today. I was feeling pretty good; I felt the sweet feeling of something that was once cloudy becoming clear. I thought things couldn’t get any better, but then it did. I was sitting around, talking with these great people who go to oneplace…people who I respect and care about even though the sum total of time I’ve spent with them isn’t that much. I don’t always feel at home with people. It’s hard for me to genuinely connect and so a lot of times I feel like an outsider peering into a group of people, wanting to open myself up, become vulnerable, and join the group. Today I felt like that was happening and it was truly joyous. I thank God very much for that feeling. After I chatted for a while, I thought it was about time to get my stuff together and head home to see my parents. As I was leaving, Jake and Joel–two of the coolest, sweetest, finest kids you can imagine–came up and gave me a hug. It was so warm, so endearing, and so clearly a sign from God that I’ve found a church home full of warmth and caring. I was truly moved…

If ever I seem like I’m talking about oneplace a lot and getting excited about it, it’s because of stuff like this. It’s God speaking to me in ways only he can…crazy stuff, but very cool and very powerful.