<Theofragen>

I stuck around for Vincent Miller's breakout session and I pressed him to clarify several things. This is what emerged.

Q: How does one avoid turning ministry into a commodity as well?
A: A community must ask itself, "Does a change in the church help people gather practices and habits into a whole, unified worldview or not?

Q: Is it either/or? Are we a part of a complete, structural, traditional mode or co-opting Christianity to meet the whims of postmodern, consumer culture?
A: It seems like commodities are only commodities in the church if the leaders fail to communicate the story behind the object of use.

My thoughts:
--Organic? Commodities? Newbigin-“community is the hermeneutic of the Gospel”—dreaming as a community, living out those dreams in community.
--Are words like organic, holistic, missional commodities? Perhaps the vital question one must be able to answer is why. We must be able to give an account of the story/philosophy/tradition that underlies the word or act.

Un-commodified Ritual or Practice:

Tradition/context/philosophy [imagine]→ n→ how this speaks into the life of the community itself [actuality]
A community must wrestle with n until it becomes ethological and efficacious
(where n = the practice/object that either could be a commodity or might not)

(Ex: Icons. Only if a community takes the time to understand the background (ex. history of iconoclasts vs. iconodules in 7th eccumencial council), tradition (ex. process of making icons by guilded societies in the East), and context (ex. how icons function within Orthodox communities) of icons and iconography, can that community begin to imagine how the use of icons would help its members to experience God with greater deapth in actual praxis.)

How to Not Comodify the Gospel

0 Comments: