mdna - conclusion on disciple making
We are exploring the mDNA component -disciple-making or discipleship from Alan Hirsch’s forthcoming book and how it applies to Northern Community. The other posts in the mDNA series are here
This is the final post in this series. I will put the full three essays up in the resources section if anyone is interested as they contain the relevant footnotes and bibliography
Conclusion
We live in a period of history that is experiencing the passing of the Christendom era. This has major ramifications for the way church is perceived in our communities and also ramifications on the way we create and sustain communities of faith. There is much discussion, particularly in the western world, on these themes. Much of this discussion is centered around how to make Christianity more hip and attractive, or how to create worship events that sparkle with technology and utilize ancient rituals. This is an important discussion but equally important is to reflect on how we cultivate environments that allow people to grow to be better and more fulfilled followers of Jesus.
Doug Pagitt (Reimagining spiritual formation, emergent YS, p21-22) puts it well when he says:
It seems to me that our post-industrial times require us to ask new questions, questions that people 100 years ago would have never thought needed asking. Could it be that our answers will move us to re-imagine the way of Christianity in our world? Perhaps we as Christians today are not only to consider what it means to be a 21st century church, but also – and perhaps more importantly – what it means to have a 21st century faith. The answers to these questions will have an impact on how our faith communities are structured, what we do in those communities and the practices we utilize for spiritual formation. They bear on how we experience community in daily life, how we relate to others, our faith and beyond, and even how we understand the gospel itself.
When I have asked people to reflect on how we at Northern do discipleship mostly the response revolves around the issue of training for baptism. This paradigm of understanding discipleship as something that happens to us once, at the time of our baptism is a major stumbling block in terms of cultivating an environment to create better followers of Jesus. Discipleship needs to be considered as an ongoing and environmental issue and our faith community’s structures, culture and priorities need to be impacted. Discipleship cannot be achieved by one program but needs to be seen as the pursuit of the whole faith community.
February 23rd, 2006 at 2:26 pm
I have loved this series. Thanks Phil.
February 24th, 2006 at 7:27 am
As I’m starting to read signposts a bit more these days, I’d love to go and read all the articles in this series, but the link gives me a 404.
February 24th, 2006 at 7:48 am
Works for me, Gareth. Are you still having problems?
February 24th, 2006 at 11:08 am
yeah, but at least now all the links across the top of the page work for me.
The problem seams to be that the URL is including the php page in it: http://www.signposts.org.au/index.php/archives/category/mdna/
If i take out the /index.php portion it works, this is quiet odd
February 24th, 2006 at 11:46 am
what is not working now exactly?
I am unclear if you are saying it wasn’t working but now is, or that the menu at the top is still including the index.php in the url
February 24th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
I agree with Lovetha. When you click on “here” it comes up with the following error message:
Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error.
Error 404
February 24th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
the link in this thread ‘here’ doesn’t work, it points to: http://www.signposts.org.au/index.php/archives/category/mdna/ which shouldn’t have the /index.php section, probably the error is that the html looks like this: here which shouldn’t have a space as the first character between the tags. (or it is some other problem)(notice that I messed up the html slightly so that it shouldn’t display as links in the post)
Untill recently the links across the top of the page also didn’t work, but they work now. Also http://www.live.com still doesn’t like your rss feed either.
February 24th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
Well messing up the tags would either make them show up as text or completely screw the message
February 24th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
actualy let me give one more piece of debugging info, http://www.signposts.org.au/archives/category/mdna/ just gives the normal front page, not some shorterned list of just a few articles in one category
February 24th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
Gareth/Andrew,
I have fixed the “here” link in the mdna last four posts. The problem is that each time I did another a post, I cut and pasted from the previous mdna post and since we swapped over the url needed to be different. I will fix all of them in time.
Gareth,
no idea what this means: “Well messing up the tags would either make them show up as text or completely screw the message ”
As mentioned on msn messenger, live.com will not like our rss feed until Carl upgrades us to wordpress 2.1. Apparently there is a problem with rss feeds in 2.0 and we hope the upgrade will fix them.
“http://www.signposts.org.au/archives/category/mdna/ just gives the normal front page, not some shorterned list of just a few articles in one category”
Why are you using this link? Where did you get it from? a list of mdna posts should be http://www.signposts.org.au/category/mdna/ I don’t know how to do a shorterned list of only a few posts in one category - I don’t think that is possible.
February 24th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Sorry I didn’t read your reply about live.com and wordpress, must have logged off without reading it.
“Well messing up the tags would either make them show up as text or completely screw the message ” was me refering to my attempt to post a comment that included html code without the html code being interpreted as html, but apparantly wordpress/firefox is too smart and just managed to make half the post appear orange and interpret the html decently
the odd url that gave the front page was me trying to guess what the url would be, when I could have just clicked the link to the category in the header of the article
February 25th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
How about a series on scientific theories of religion?
February 25th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Kieren, we could do some science and religion stuff as a series. Give me a week or so and I will dig out some of my articles and readings and will see if I have some stuff worth posting up.
February 25th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
I know some people like to present science and religion as two separate domains of knowledge or “non overlapping magisteria”. But this division seems just a convenient way to shield faith from scientific investigation. I was not referring to the whether science and faith were compatible or not, but what recent progress has been made in providing a scientific explanation for faith and religious experience, and whether this is of interest to those involved in the “emerging church”.
For example a 2004 paper by Steven Reiss of Ohio State University looks at correlations of 15 psychological factors in religious and non-religious motivation: http://nisonger.osu.edu/papers/reiss_2000.pdf
I was interested in whether people involved in the Church have stepped back and taken a disinterested or detached view of what they are involved in. If so, what have they found?
February 27th, 2006 at 8:24 am
This is the final post in this series. I will put the full three essays up in the resources section if anyone is interested as they contain the relevant footnotes and bibliography
So, I looked in the resources section and guess what I found? Nada, Zip, Zero, not a thing. I would love the whole series in one document that I could share with other people. Is this ok to do?
February 27th, 2006 at 9:58 am
Greg, I know that the essays aren’t up in the resources section (they will be soon), but are you saying that when you open the resources there is nothing there at all?
February 27th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Hey Greg,
Sorry, I havent got around to putting them up yet. I will try and get them up tonight.
February 27th, 2006 at 11:48 am
no everythings there, just not the mDna series - on re-reading my comment I sound like a petulent child, sorry - I meant to sound like a self absorbed teenager
February 27th, 2006 at 11:51 am
That’s what I mean - I will put the mdna essays up tonight if possible.
No problems about asking for them - I am glad you found them helpful.
February 27th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
I was not referring to the whether science and faith were compatible or not, but what recent progress has been made in providing a scientific explanation for faith and religious experience, and whether this is of interest to those involved in the “emerging church”.
Kieren, not really a great interest, so doubt you will be seeing too many posts along this line. As I have said before, the endeavour of trying to “prove” religion scientifically seems to me to be a fundamental exercise in missing the point - along the lines of those scientific studies that try and explain scientifically why we think Shakespeare is good writing.
February 27th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
I’ve just copied over my last comments from the Brian McLaren section, because they seem relevant here… “science is very good at timing the arrival of spaceship to Mars to a second, or measuring the vibration of an atom… or all sorts of physical things. It is not equipped to tell us much about love, or art, or meaning, or what God is like, or wonder, or joy… or much at all about the things that make life worth living. Theology, history, philosophy and the arts may be informed by science… but they explore some things which science cannot explore. Science should not be deified as the only source of truth.”
March 1st, 2006 at 8:54 am
Kieran.. where are you? I thought my comments on the limitations of science would be red rag to a bull, inciting comments like: how can you compare a discipline that involves objective measurement with something involving esoteric myths taken by faith, etc. etc. No fun.
Dan is right… no real interest on this topic! Actually, I am interested in just how close science and religion are getting these days… at the frontier of scientific research on the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the nature of matter and energy, the answers of science are starting to sound positively mystical. “The Case for a Creator” by Lee Strobel is a fascinating read (excuse the Christian agenda, Kieran, but the credentials of the scientists interviewed are exemplary, and the science explored is spot on). It has the advantage of being readable by a lay person, whereas most books written by scientists are appalling hard slog. (I once made the mistake of trying to read Stephen Hawking’s “Brief History of Time”… I defy anyone who doesn’t already have a physics major to finish that book!) The DVD “What the bleep do we know?” is a very accessible look at just how wierd quantum physics is…. worth a look for non-readers!
Any interest in this? I guess not. Maybe I should try a geek site! I find it fascinating.