Tag Archives: frank viola

Ironic?

I save alot of articles that various people have wrote about in the last 10 years, and I came across one that was 9 years ago. It was a review by Frank Viola, on a article of Michael Spencer’s article named “The coming Evangelical collapse”.

Just the title of the blog, was intriguing to me when I first saw it from Spencer, even before Viola’s review was published. It a very good piece of seeing that things were going to change down the road, for the ‘church’. I too seen it coming maybe thru different lenses, than Spencer noted in his piece but it was that thing were going to change was the main issue that I saw.

One of the four points that Spencer noted that in the changes that were to come was the influx of people to two different groups, one being the house church, and the other being the influx of high church denominations(Catholic,Orthodox,Anglican). This is exactly what has happened in the current state of affairs of the church activity. Without going to deep into the ‘why’ this has happened, it has been a fallout from all the ‘institutional denominations’ trying to ‘please’ the worshiper in any way shape and form. We all know what that means! People have just left those kinds of shows to the more intimate ones of ‘house church’s’, that were more real in the fellowship.

One should just sit and think what this is really telling us about what God’s people are searching for in this intimate bond with God. People are truly looking for and finding a ideal of what it is in being ‘with’ God and He with us. It is not the place that I am talking about tho, it is the concept of God and us walking and talking in the world(garden of Eden) as was defined many centuries ago.

One other point that was brought out in the article was about “Evangelical” itself, and it was said by Viola’s friend- “George Barna and I have tried to challenge evangelical Christians with the idea that one of the systemic problems is the very system of organized Christianity – particularly as it relates to the expression of the local church.”

The ‘local church’ has to be redefined, it’s not by the hundreds of the local church’s but by the out flowing of love from the people of God (God’s image)that is seen by other people!

This was and is still today a focus of banter back and forth between the sides, but it seems to to be changing from the norm to a new maybe old way of doing things as we ‘see’ that things of the first century christians were believing that we they stood for was thru their living the way of the Messiah. As they say, time will tell but I believe that just maybe this could be the start of something big, like maybe the “Kingdom of God”!

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Our foundation of faith

Where did it start? Was it thru your parents? Your grandparents? Was it thru the denomination you attended on sundays? Was it even questioned, like this is the only way?

My guess to how most christian’s faith evolved was thru their parents and their parents thru the same denomination over many generations without question to the authentication of what was being told to them.

When does usual become unusual to you? How does it evolve? Does a irrational statement begin to dig into your thought process of something specific, and then expand our other irrational statements from the past? When do you question your norm?

Let me digress by telling my questioning my norm moment! It was when It was when after a lifetime of going to church(I had too, I was a preachers kid,lol,but many years after being a kid,too.) I felt the need to see what the major issues of why church’s were having problems with everything that they came across in just being the ‘church’. It just so happens that at this time I was working at Focus on the Family, I was getting interested in the FOF’s work with the local church in the community, so I was digging into the avenue’s I could go. It was at this time that I accidentally came across a organization that my uncle was getting interest in to be an ambassador to church’s to go to individual church’s and see what specifically they were doing and what worked and what didn’t.

It was at this point when I understood what this organization(the name of it, I don’t recall) did and how it did it, began to ask why and what were the motives and goals of the said church. It seemed to me that maybe we were asking the wrong question! Is the Foundation even right to even start asking questions to build up a church. What was the foundation? What was the foundation are the ‘churches’ using? Are they the same? What was their purpose? Was man involved, was God, a mediator?

I had to start from scratch.

So, I went from totally being involved in the ‘fixing up’ churches to questioning what the ‘church’ was, from the foundation up.

This was my foot in the door of my journey which to this date is around 10 years. This has taken me to many places and people which I would never had gone had I not decided to take this route.

What I have found out in my observances of where I was ‘in the church’ and my environment and everyone else was very limited in the knowledge of the accessibility of any avenues of looking outside the walls of the church or denomination’s. The concern was of the interior of the walls of the ‘church’. The Corporate(all) body of Christ is never mentioned or understood as what the model of the ‘church’ is to be and how. This, I think is what in the end is what took me to the re-looking at the foundation of what the body was or is.

My curiosity of God’s plan, or as I have penned in my blog is God’s “Eternal Purpose” is where I started my journey. My blog “Eternal Purpose” has journal-led me to alot of various startling “AHA” moments in my studies. My studies led me to a author that I think was going thru something like I was, and penned a book that led me in the right direction of finding my path. “From Eternity to Here” by Frank Viola tells the ‘Rediscovering the ageless purpose of God’, this led me to the fact that their was a purpose all along from the beginning of time. But it was a little different than what the usual conversation was of the church’s.

It was that God’s design of His creation was ‘good’, and that his creation had rebuffed their creator, to be the King of their own domain to design and make it what it wanted to. God being the ultimate and and just God that he is, let the cards play out and let man create ‘his own world’. But it is God who come out victoriously when He confronts the evil in mankind, and destroys it in death in man, by sending his son,Jesus, to take this action to the grave, but arise on the third day to create the perfect man and kingdom for his creation to enjoy with His creation, as it was in the Garden of Eden.

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