The "Church"

Tonight I have been thinking about the church. I happened to think about reading my friend Adam’s blog. Here is what I found and I believe it very fitting for the question #2 for Ephesians 3: 1-16. Adam's blog can be found at: http://adammoore.us/

“… The question then is how we can form collectives that seek to invite, recall, and relay this deep truth, not to provide a space where we try to understand it.

“When writing about such spaces I will avoid using the word church, not because churches are excluded in any way from providing this space, but because the word can refer, in many people’s minds, to the acceptance of a variety of doctrinal creeds, sacramental activities, and authority structures that are not necessary in the formation of these spaces. The type of space that I am referring to cannot be described as a new type of church, an alternative to church, an addtition to church, or as a pathway that leads people back to church (although to those who attend it may legitimately act as one or more of these). So I will describe the type of collective that celbrates the miracle as a place of ‘transformance art.’

…

“Here I am referring to the formation of passionate, provocative gatherings, operating on the fringes of religious life, that offer anarchic experiments in theodrama that re-imagine the distinction between Christian and non-Christian, priest and prophet, doubt and certainty, the sacred and the secular—gatherings that employ a rich cocktail of music, poetry, prose, imagery, soundscapes, theatre, ritual, and reflection: gatherings that provide a place that is open to all, is colonized by none, and that celebrates diversity.

“Such an immersive, theodramatic space would aim to affirm the need for (1) collective reflection; (2) a space where individuals can lay aside political, religious, and social identities; and finally (3) offer creative, ritualistic acts that invite, affirm, recall, and relate the event housed within the religion without religion that is Christianity.

…

“The concrete result of such ideas will continue to manifest in the development of subversive collectives that engage in creative acts of dis-course (discourse that send us off course) and that point toward, invite, and celebrate this unspeakable Happening. These temporary spaces will likely appear as much in art galleries, on street corners, in bars and basements, as they will in churches and cathedrals. They may involve rituals and creeds that have survived millennia, or they may have been dreamed up moments before they are acted out. The liturgies may be printed in hymnbooks or scrawled on the back of beer mats. They may be accompanied by angelic choirs or by someone beating out a rhythm on a battered, beer-soaked tabletop. But everything, absolutely everything, will be designed to invite, encourage, solicit, seek out, recall, remember, reach out to, bow down before, and cry out to that unspeakable miracle testified to by faith—that miracle beyond miracle that dwells, quite literally, beyond belief.”

- Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal