Death

Sorry for the lack of posting lately; I've been doing piles of research work lately logging major hours in study filling up coil ring notebooks and piecing together some thoughts on the early church. That, and I've been sick, we've started a new blog, and their has been 100% growth at our young adults in the last three weeks. Anyhow, that is my excuse for not writing here.

My excuse for writing here is a coincidence. In the last couple of months I have had two different books given to me by two unrelated and non-connected people who told me that I really need to read the particular book they were giving me. So, without knowing the content or themes of each of these books, I cracked them open and read them.

The first book was about death.

The second book was...wait for it...about death.

I've never really experienced death before too closely; my grandpa died when I was six years old and I had some friends die when I was in high school. Reading these books I began to realize that I have no feelings that I can remember that are directly related to death...and I suppose this is good. I don't want to experience death in any close proximity but at the same time I guess I need to realize that there is no life without death. And that's scary. It's scary to think of what life would be like without someone you love, its scary to think of how I might respond, its scary to consider how they might respond if it were me. I don't think that death, when it comes, will in itself be scary - I more afraid of pain and spiders, but what about the people around me? I hope these two books were only a coincidence.

New Entry in the BlogRace

New clcc young adults blog that you can feel free to add to your bloglines and check regularly. It is also a space for sermonizing which, if you don't know, is part of our collaborative sermon building process. Would love to have your thoughts and ideas as we teach about Jesus.
Grace and Peace,
-Jer

Home?

Jesse posts a great post here. If you are somehow involved with ministry to young adults or transient type of people it is definitely worth the read and time given to thinking through its implications for your ministry context. Great stuff Jesse!
-Jer

The Death of Sermons?

Communication, as we in the church know it, is under attack.

As a communicator I am constantly trying to learn how to become more effective in preparation, truth telling, story telling, persuasion, stimulating thought, conversation, and delivering compelling anti-conclusions. I genuinely enjoy studying and looking for seemingly unrelated bits and pieces of truth to link together to shape worldviews, beliefs, and lifestyles and I love the challenge of trying to find the language that speaks most relevantly to the people I am communicating to.

One of the aspects of church liturgy that the emergent church has called into question is how we, as communicators, most effectively communicate this life altering story of Jesus Christ to the emerging generation. On one extreme, there has been an almost violent reaction against the didactic “pastor as authority” teaching that has been so prevalent in churches for centuries in favor of conversation, dialogue, and narrative/experiential learning. On the other extreme, we find young pastors deciding against the 20 minute seeker-friendly sermons in favor of much longer and indepth teaching that moves the listener from theology to doxology to biography.

My personal response to this has been to take a little bit of the good from each of these to create a method of three part preaching that I don’t actually do very well. The upside is that I have the space and time to be constantly experimenting with how it actually could work. I have begun writing my definitions and ideas for these three parts but, before I post it here, I’d love to read your thoughts on this. Following are three numbers, six pieces of punctuation, and six words that make up the calcium malnourished skeleton of this teaching idea.

1) The Prologue.

2) The Dialogue.

3) The Epilogue.

If I had to get an idea across and these three are the variables of how I accomplish this; how should I do this?

-Jer