This past Saturday I was able to attend a one day conference on the church in Cleveland. Called “The Beautiful Mess” and hosted by Willoughby Friends Church, it featured Don Miller, Dan and Annika Ryan, and the Robbie Seay Band.
Don’s talks ranged over a wide range of topics, and he challenged a lot of my thinking and reinforced some of it as well.
Here’s a few of my favorite parts (disclaimer…remember this is what I heard, not necessarily what Don said):
There are two kind of thinkers in the world…those who ask the secondary questions, the “how?” questions and those that ask primary questions, the “why?” questions. Our culture is a “how?” culture, totally skipping the “why?”…we need the “why?”
The Bible answers questions that out culture totally ignores…it is our culture that is irrelevant.
Truth is never as exciting as a lie, it well set you free, but it will be a let down.
The primary cause of the disintegration of the American family was the Industrial Revolution. IT took men away from the home and began to shorten their lifespan.
We have gone so deep into our “community” that we look like idiots…we can’t be so insular in our community….we will become absurd.
We peddle religious techniques to a culture desiring “snake oil spirituality”
We have lost the Father metaphor in our culture…we can’t understand how God revealed Himself.
The family is the living metaphor for who God is.
The Bible is a book for people who do not know God.
We look at Romans as a contract..the transference of information.
We have separated truth from its meaningful context.
We leave Jesus out of the Gospel…we make it a series of ideas we memorize.
The point of the Scripture is narrative and art…to woo and to communicate…not to be a list.
We try to find the moral in a story only in the Scriptures.
Story teaches us good and bad, beautiful and ugly, by creating a map, a framework for us in our minds.
If you think that the Scriptures teach the pursuit of the American dream the you are raping and destroying a beautiful text.
Human history is God writing the story of human redemption.
Editorial tools that work in story work in life. Protagonist, antagonist, conflict and resolution.
In great stories you do not always have to win.
The messed up sinful story that God is writing for us is better than the story we write for ourselves.
If the protagonist of our story dies, what dreams die with them?
I need to want something Good. We need a better story.
While we may not agree with all (or any) of Don’s comments or writings, he is certainly being used to make us think about God and His Kingdom.
