Pickin' and sharin'

The way this blogging thing works for me is, I skim the blogroll, going wherever the hypertext takes me, looking for something that makes me stop skimming and hone in. This is pretty close to the way I used to read the newspaper. [Aside: I wonder if, back in the early days of newspapers--broadsheets and the penny press--there wasn't an article in one of the middle-brow journals of the day lammenting the fact that "Newspapers are making a stupid." Just a thought.]

Anyway, that's one way I blog. It's kind of like wandering around looking for blueberries on a mountainside. When you finally do find them, you fill your bucket, then you share it with your friends.

One of the hillsides I've decided to explore lately is called Mt. Missional. Lots of good pickin' here. This missional thing arose out of a critique of the church in the West. As Alan Hirsch says, the church has developed a fundamentally non-missional self-understanding. Hirsch is author of The Forgotten Ways, a book I'll be picking up soon. In a recent post, Hirsch quotes at length from Stanley Hauerwas' commentary on Matthew 23:29-32. Read the passage, then check this out:

This is a sobering list of failure and judgment, with descriptions of hypocrisy and failure in which we cannot help but see ourselves. It is surely the case, for example, that many are kept from entering the kingdom by the lives we lead as Christians. Our problem is very simple–we simply do not know how to live as a people who believe that Jesus is the resurrected Lord. the joy and freedom that should name the lives of those freed from the demons become lost amid attempts to make our difference depend on matters that do not matter. We become adept at praising the prophets of the past, having lost the ability to discern the prophets among us.

There's lots more where that came from. Go pick some for yourself!