All Souls Missoula - Fresh Encounter, Ancient Faith

How the Gospel Answers Religion's Challenge (Acts 7:1-60)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:00:55 PST

How the Gospel Answers Religion's Challenge (Acts 7:1-60) - Christian Cryder
(Click here for download instructions)

How the Kingdom Challenges Religion (Acts 6:7 - 7:1)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:42:09 PST

How the Kingdom Challenges Religion (Acts 6:7 - 7:1) - Christian Cryder
(Click here for download instructions)

All Hallows Eve Party!

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:41:15 PDT

"It was a dark and scary night...." - Let's hope so! Join us this Friday, Oct 30 (the night BEFORE Halloween) from 7 PM till midnight for our first ever All Hallows Eve Party! We're making homemade pizzas with 5 gallons of Beau's special "All Missoula Hops Ale." Plus we're doing COSTUMES - so you've got an excuse for dressing up if you want!

WHERE: The Cryder place @ 2307 River Road (look for the mailbox and turn down the alley)

WHAT TO BRING: We always welcome extra wine or beer (or your favorite nonalchoholic beverage) -AND- we need people to bring your best carved pumpkins.

The party will be indoors, but we'll set the pumpkins out on the back deck and light a roaring fire (Christian's famous for roaring fires). So if you want to hang out around the fire, you might want to bring a jacket in case it's chilly!

As always, everyone is welcome - kids, friends, distant relatives, everyone!

Please RSVP if you're coming so we know how much food to prepare. Questions: contact Christian (529-5568) or Ryan (529-2468). Hope to see you on Friday night!

Weekly Update

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:32:00 PDT

Hey folks! Here's what's happening at All Souls Missoula this week (Oct 26)...

On The Radar - Special events and ways to get involved...

All Hallows Eve party! - Come join us this Friday night, Oct 30 we're throwing our first ever costume party at the Cryder house! Think homemade pizza, 5 gallons of Beau's special "All Missoula Hops Ale," and lots of friends, both old and new! Bring some beer or wine, or your very owned carved pumpkin! Kids and friends are welcome! All the details on facebook. Please RSVP so we know how much food to prepare.
All Souls on Facebook - speaking of facebook, we've moved from a group to a page, and we need you to become a fan today! This is a great way to help spread the word without having to say anything!

Weekly Calendar - things we do regularly...

Sunday Worship [details] - Sundays @ 10 AM at MCT [map] in Room 307 (the ballroom) on the 3rd floor. As we move into the fall, we're continuing to look at the book of Acts, with it's audacious claim that the place we experience the Kingdom of God most clearly is in local churches. Whether you are a follower of Jesus or someone who is skeptical, we'd love to have you join us as we worship God together and wrestle with what he tells us. Kid friendly, with a casual yet reverent atmosphere. Hope to see you soon!
Special Groups - short term offerings...

Explorers 3: Freedom! - Tuesdays @ 6:30 PM at Christian & Marilyn's place (2307 River Road, 529-5568). Many people like Jesus, but find Christianity constricting. The Apostle Paul, however, claims that the real message of Jesus is radically liberating. Join us as we study the New Testament book of Galatians and read Eugene Peterson's Traveling Light to explore Paul's claims for ourselves.
Membership Group - Wednesdays @ 6:30 PM at Joe & Nancy's place (7935 Double Tree Lane, 829-6636). Here at All Souls, we think that membership is not only biblical, but that you'll never fully experience Christian community apart from it. We realize that's a big claim. And so we offer membership groups so people can learn more about us - who we are, where we're headed, and why you might want to go there with us.

Groups fostering faith & community...

Northside Community Group [details] - Tuesdays @ 6 PM at the Lewis' & McBryde's house (838 Stoddard, contact Kendall - 274-4602 or Esther - 531-9089)
Wednesday Community Group [details] - [temporarily on hiatus for the membership group]
Men's Samson Group [details] - Thursdays @ 7 AM at Ryan's place (1601 W. Kent, 529-2468). This is a group for guys to share openly about our sexual struggles. Really.
Intentional Women's Group [details] - Thursdays @ 8 PM at Kendall & Esther's place (838 Stoddard, 531-9089). This is a group for women to move deeper relationally and to pray for one another.

Ways to celebrate our city...

Kettlehouse Fridays [details] - **canceled for the party this week!**

If you have questions about All Souls or would just like to get together over coffee, lunch or a beer, please contact Christian (529-5568) or Ryan (529-2468).

Service in the Kingdom (Acts 6:1-8)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:18:55 PDT

Service in the Kingdom (Acts 6:1-8) - Christian Cryder
(Click here for download instructions)

Fear Inside the Kingdom (Acts 5:11-42)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:21:21 PDT

Fear Inside the Kingdom (Acts 5:11-42) - Ryan Sutherland
(Click here for download instructions)

A Death Knell in the Kingdom (Acts 4:32 - 5:11)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:44:00 PDT

Who does God think he is? In Acts chapter 5, we see him striking two of his own people DEAD simply for telling a LIE (one that didn't even hurt anyone, no less)!

How on earth can something like this be in the Bible?
Shouldn't we repudiate this kind of behavior?
And how could Jesus possibly be a "good teacher" if he tells us to worship this God and pray "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven"? Really?!?!
If this is the Christian God, how could he possibly be worth serving?

Those are great questions! Join us as we wrestle with them in today's message...

A Death Knell in the Kingdom (Acts 4:32 - 5:11) - Christian Cryder
(Click here for download instructions)

The Fear of the Lord

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:28:02 PDT

An excerpt, mentioned in a sermon recently, taken from Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places (pgs. 40-44)...

Most of us have a sense that somehow or other we need to get in on what God is doing: we want to be involved. We want to do something. But what, without getting in the way, without gumming up the works?

The biblical word of choice for the term we need is "fear-of-the-Lord." None of the available synonyms in the English language – awe, reverence, worshipful respect – seems quite adequate. They miss the punch delivered by “fear-of-the-Lord.” ...

The primary way in which we cultivate fear-of-the-Lord is in prayer and worship – personal prayer and corporate worship. We deliberately interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to God, place ourselves intentionally in sacred space, in sacred time, in the holy presence – and wait. We become silent and still in order to listen and respond to what is Other than us. Once we get the hang of this we find that this can occur any place and any time. But prayer and worship provide the base.

“Fear-of-the-Lord” is the best term we have to point to this way of life we cultivate as Christians. The Christian life consists mostly of what God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is and does. But we also are part of it. Not the largest part, but still part. A world has been opened up to us by revelation in which we find ourselves walking on holy ground and living in sacred time. The moment we realize this, we feel shy, cautious. We slow down, we look around, ears and eyes alert. Like lost children happening on a clearing in the woods and finding elves and fairies singing and dancing in a circle around a prancing two-foot-high unicorn, we stop in awed silence to accommodate to this wonderful but unguessed-at revelation. But for us, it isn't a unicorn and elves; it it Sinai and Tabor and Golgotha.

The moment we find ourselves unexpectedly in the presence of the sacred, our first response is to stop in silence. We do nothing. We say nothing. We fear to trespass inadvertently; we are afraid of saying something inappropriate. Plunged into mystery we become still, we fall silent, all our senses alert. This is the fear-of-the-Lord.

Or we don't. Uneasy with the unknown, again like children, we run around crazily, yelling and screaming, trying to put our stamp of familiarity on it. We attempt to get rid of the mystery by making our presence large and noisy. There is something about the sacred that makes us uneasy. We don't like being in the dark, not knowing what to do. And so we attempt to domesticate the mystery, explain it, probe it, name and use it. Uncomfortable with the mystery, we try to banish it with cliches. But until we know what is going on, anything we say or do is apt to be wrong, or at least inappropriate.

We all have experiences of finding ourselves in the sacred presence or on holy ground from time to time, however briefly. The most common of such experiences is being in the presence of a newborn child. Most of us are speechless and still. We don't know what to do or say. We are overtaken by the mystery of God-given life. Something deep within us responds to the sacredness of life, of sheer existence; our response becomes worship, adoration, prayer, awe – the fear-of-the-Lord.

But there is also something in the sacred that makes us uneasy. We don't like being in the dark, not knowing what to do. And so we attempt to domesticate the mystery, explain it, probe it, name and use it. “Blasphemy” is the term we use for these verbal transgressions of the sacred, these violations of the holy: taking God's name in vain, dishonoring sacred time and place, reducing God to gossip and chatter. Uncomfortable with the mystery, we try to banish it with cliches.

Every culture has stories and taboos to train and discipline its people in protecting and honoring the sacred mystery. Human beings are not gods; the moment we forget this, we violate the boundaries of our humanity and something is violated in reality itself. The universe suffers damage.

So we set out to cultivate the fear-of-the-Lord, “the quintessential rubric, which expresses in a nutshell the basic grammar that holds the covenant community together,” as Bruce Waltke puts it. Despite its prominence in the Bible, the term does not find wide use among North American Christians. “Fear” apparently gets us off on the wrong foot. Grammarians help us regain our biblical stride by calling our attention to the fact that fear-of-the-Lord is a “bound phrase” (syntagm). The four words in English (two in Hebrew) are bound together, making a single word. Its function as a single word cannot be understood by taking it apart and then adding up the meanings of the parts. Fear-of-the-Lord is a word all its own. So we don't look up “fear” in the dictionary, then “God,” and then proceed to combine the two meanings: “Fear,” a feeling of apprehension, plus “God,” a divine being worthy of worship, is not fear-of-the-Lord. Pursuing that analytical route gets us way off the track.

But when we let the biblical contexts provide the conditions for understanding the word, we find that it means something more like a way of life in which human feelings and behavior are fused with God's being and revelation. There are upward of 138 occurrences of the term in a wide range of Old Testament books but most prominently in Proverbs, Psalms, Isaiah, Chronicles, and Deuteronomy. God is active in the term; the human is active in the term. “Fear-of-the-Lord” designates a way of living that cannot be dissected into two parts, any more than a baby can be dissected into what comes from sperm and what come from egg. “Fear-of-the-Lord” is a new word in our vocabularies; it marks the way of life appropriate to our creation and salvation and blessing by God.

A common and distressingly frequent way of answering the question, "So now, what do we do?" but one that avoids prayerful involvement with God in the presence of God, is to come up with a Code of Conduct. The Ten Commandments is the usual place to start, supplemented by Proverbs, brought to a focus by Jesus' summing up (Love God/Love your neighbor), salted by the Golden Rule, then capped off by the Beatitudes. That might seem the simplest way to go about it, but religious communities that take this route have rarely, if ever, been able to let it go at that. They commonly find that the particular context in which they live requires special handling: rules are added, regulations enforced, and it isn't long before the Code of Conduct grows into a formidable jungle of talmudic regulation.

The other and opposite way of doing the Code of Conduct thing is to make it as simple as possible; get it down to the bare bones of bumper sticker spirituality: “Follow your bliss... Smell the roses... Do no harm...” My favorite is the fragment of a poem sometimes attributed to W. H. Auden:

I love to sin; God loves to forgive.
The world is admirably arranged.

But the fundamental inadequacy of codes of conduct for giving direction in how to live the spiritual life is that they put us in charge (or, which is just as bad, put someone else in charge of us); God is moved off the field of action to the judge's stand where he grades our performance. The moment that we take charge, “knowing good and evil,” we are in trouble and almost immediately start getting other people in trouble too.

No. However useful codes of conduct are in the overall scheme of things, they are not the place to begin answering the question, “Now, what do we do?”

The fact that fear-of-the-Lord cannot be precisely defined is one of its glories – we are dealing with something that we cannot pin down, we inhabit mystery, we can't be cocksure about anything, we cultivate an attentive and reverent expectation before every person, event, rock, and tree. Presumption recedes, attentiveness increases, expectancy heightens.

Fear-of-the-Lord, as we notice the way our biblical writers use it, turns out to be a term that is plain without being reductive, clear without being over-simplified, and accurate without dissolving the mystery inherent in all dealings with God and his world. It also has the considerable advantage of evading the precise definition or "control" that we could use to locate ourselves along a spectrum of piety or goodness that would feed our instincts for coziness with God.

So what do we do, given our launch into this life of following Jesus? “Fear the Lord, you his saints” (Ps 34:9 RSV). Fear-of-the-Lord is not studying about God but living in reverence before God. We don't so much lack knowledge, we lack reverence. Fear-of-the-Lord is not a technique for acquiring spiritual know-how but a willed not-knowing. It is not so much know-how we lack; we lack a simple being-there. Fear-of-the-Lord, nurtured in worship and prayer, silence and quiet, love and sacrifice, turns everything we do into a life of "breathing God."

The Missional Nature of Encounter (Isaiah 6:1-13)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:47:46 PDT

The Missional Nature of Encounter (Isaiah 6:1-13) - Ryan Sutherland
(Click here for download instructions)

The Crux of the Kingdom (Acts 4:1-22)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:35:44 PDT

The Crux of the Kingdom (Acts 4:1-22) - Christian Cryder
(Click here for download instructions)

The Threat of the Kingdom (Acts 3:1-23)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:25:19 PDT

The Threat of the Kingdom (Acts 3:1-23) - Ryan Sutherland
(Click here for download instructions)

The Radical Otherness of the Kingdom (Acts 2:42-47)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:52:21 PDT

The Radical Otherness of the Kingdom (Acts 2:42-47) - Christian Cryder
(Click here for download instructions)

The Four Pillars of the Church (Acts 2:42-47)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:26:46 PDT

The Four Pillars of the Church (Acts 2:42-47) - Christian Cryder
(Click here for download instructions)

All Souls Birthday Service

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:01:12 PDT

Just a quick reminder - we're celebrating our first year as a new church for Missoula, and we'd love to have you come join us for a special worship service this Sunday, September 6 @ 10 AM on the lawn at the Holiday Inn Downtown (if it rains, we'll move inside).

See you tomorrow! (Next week, we'll be back at our regular location in MCT!)

A Simple Solution to a Complicated Problem

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:34:13 PDT

Repentance 1: A Simple Solution to a Complicated Problem (Mark 1:14-15) - Ryan Sutherland
(Click here for download instructions)

The Problem of Evil (Eccl 8:9 - 9:1)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:02:22 PDT

The Problem of Evil (Ecclesiastes 8:9 - 9:1) - Bryan Clark
(Click here for download instructions)

Beat the Heat Party

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:37:04 PDT

It's official! We're throwing a Beat the Heat Party! Scrumptious hawaiian-burgers hot off the grill, plenty of great beer and wine to wash it all down, with live bluegrass-honkytonk courtesy Cash for Junkers. Wow. It should be a fabulous night!

Of course it'll be even better if you join us. Here's the skinny:

WHEN: Friday, July 31, from 7 PM til Midnight (or when everyone leaves)
WHERE: Christian & Marilyn's place (2307 River Road - look for the mailbox and turn down the alley. Parking on River Road or Luella Lane.)
WHAT TO BRING: A six pack of great beer, a bottle of fine wine, or a beverage of your choice! We'll provide the rest!

If you've never been to an All Souls party, here's your chance to see what you've been missing. These are family friendly affairs - and you're welcome to invite your friends!

On this particular occasion, you may want to bring along a couple of lawn chairs as well. Please RSVP if you're in so we can have an idea how much food to prepare!

The Prodigal Sons (Luke 15:11-32) - Part 2

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:36:20 PDT

The Prodigal Sons (Luke 15:11-32) -Part 2 - Christian Cryder
Click here for download instructions)

Too Great to Live Small (Jonah 4)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:06:39 PDT

Too Great to Live Small (Jonah 4) - Jason Barrie
(Click here for download instructions)

The Prodigal Sons (Luke 15:11-32) - Part 1

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:36:40 PDT

The Prodigal Sons (Luke 15:11-32) -Part 1 - Christian Cryder
Click here for download instructions)

A Glimpse of the Kingdom (Acts 2:42-47)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:01:14 PDT

A Glimpse of the Kingdom (Acts 2:42-47) - Christian Cryder
Click here for download instructions)

How to Subscribe to Our Podcast

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:00:49 PDT

There are two ways to subscribe to the All Souls Missoula weekly sermon podcast via iTunes (What’s a podcast?). If you don’t have iTunes, you can download the latest version for free at the apple online store. It works on both a Windows based PC and on Mac.

Once you’ve got iTunes open and running, you can follow these directions to subscribe. There are two ways to subscribe and both are really easy…

The easiest way is to click on the Advanced menu and select “Subscribe to podcast…”

This will open a little box asking you to type in a url. Type in (or copy this and paste it in) http://feeds2.feedburner.com/allsoulsmissoula. The weekly sermon will then be download automatically to your computer each week when you start iTunes.

iTunes will now populate the "Podcasts" screen with information about the podcast. Expanding the field by clicking the small arrow will show all the available audio files. If there are several podcasts available, the latest will be downloaded. Any podcasts that did not automatically download will show a "GET" button next to the filename - click the button to get that particular podcast.

iTunes will check daily (that's the default setting unless you have changed your iTunes podcast settings) for the latest podcast. If a new sermon is posted, it will download this automatically. You can also manually click the "UPDATE" button to check for the latest files if you think something new should be available.

You can also subscribe by clicking on the “iTunes Store” on the right hand menu.

Once the store opens you can search for “All Souls Missoula” in the search bar up in the upper right corner of iTunes.

It should open this page and you just click on the subscribe button.

The Gateway to the Kingdom (Acts 2:22-41)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:36:54 PDT

The Gateway to the Kingdom (Acts 2:22-41) - Christian Cryder
Click here for download instructions)

Masters of Imagination

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:47:41 PDT

When we think of imagination, we often think of what is not real. This is not necessarily correct. Here is a quote from Eugene Peterson's Subversive Spirituality where he suggests that a robust imagination is absolutely essential for anyone who would follow Jesus:

Thirteen four-year-old children sat on carpet of the sanctuary at the chancel steps on a Thursday morning in late February. I sat with them, holding cupped in my hands a last season's birdnest. We talked about the birds on their way back to build nests like this one and the spring that was about to burst in on us. The children were rapt their attention.

I love doing this, meeting with the children, telling them stories, singing songs with them, telling them that God lives them, praying with them. I do it frequently. They attend our church's nursery school and come into the sanctuary with their teachers every couple of weeks to meet with me. They are so alive, their capacity for wonder endless, their imaginations lithe and limber.

Winter was receding and spring was arriving, although not quite arrived. But there were signs. It was the signs that I was talking about. The birdnest to begin with. It was visibly weedy and grey and dirty, but as we looked at it we saw the invisible - warblers on their way north from wintering grounds in South America, pastel and spotted eggs in the nest. We counted the birds in the sky over Florida, over North Carolina, over Virginia.

We looked through the walls of the church to the warming ground. We looked beneath the surface and saw the earthworms turning somersaults. We began to see shoots of color break through the ground, crocus and tulip and grape hyacinth. The buds on the trees and shrubs were swelling and about to burst into flower and we were remembering and anticipating and counting the colors.

I never get used to these Maryland springs and every time am taken by surprise all over again. I grew up in northern Montana where the trees are the same color all year long and spring is mostly mud. The riotous color in blossom and bloom in Maryland's dogwood and forsythia, redbud and shadbush, catches me unprepared. But this year I was getting prepared and getting the children prepared for all the glorious gifts that were going to be showering in on us in a week or so. We were looking at the bare birdnest and seeing the colors, hearing the songs, smelling the blossoms.

There are moments in this kind of work when you know you are doing it right. This was one of those moments. The children's faces were absolutely concentrated. We had slipped through a time warp and were experiencing the full sensuality of the Maryland spring.

They were no longer looking at the birdnest, they were seeing migrating birds and hatching chicks, garlanded trees and dewy blossoms. Then, abruptly, at the center of this moment of high holiness, Bruce said, "Why don't you have any hair on your head?"

Why didn't Bruce see what the rest of us were seeing - the exuberance, the fecundity? Why hadn't he made the transition to "seeing the invisible" that were were engrossed in? All he saw was the visible patch of baldness on my head, a rather uninteresting fact, while the rest of us were seeing multi-dimensioned thruths. Only four years old and already Bruce's imagination was crippled.

Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future. For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we can see reality whole, in context. "What imagination does with reality is the reality we live by," writes David Ignatow in Open Between Us.

When I look at a tree, most of what I "see" I do not see at all. I see a root system beneath the surface, sending tendrils through the soil, sucking up nutrients out of the loam. I see the light pouring energy into the leaves. I see the fruit that will appear in a few months. I stare and stare and see the bare branches austere in next winter's snow and wind. I see all that, I really do - I am not making it up. But I could not photograph it. I see it by means of imagination. If my imagination is stunned or inactive, I will only see what I can use, or something that is in my way.

Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel prize-winning poet, with a passion for Christ supported and deepened by his imagination, said in an interview in The New York Times Review of Books that the minds of Americans have been dangerously diluted by the rationalism of explanation. He is convinced that our imagination-deficient educational process has left us with a naive picture of the world. In this naive view, the universe has space and time - and nothing else. No values. No God. "Functionally speaking, men and women are not that different from a virus or bacteria, a speck in the universe."

Milosz sees the imagination, and especially the religious imagination which is the developed capacity to be in reverence before whatever confronts us, to be the shaping force of the world we really live in. "Imagination" he said, "can fashion the world into a homeland as well as into a prison or a place of battle. Nobody lives in the 'objective' world, only in a world filtered through the imagination."

The imagination is among the chief glories of the human. When it is healthy and energetic, it ushers us into adoration and wonder, into the mysteries of God. When it is neurotic and sluggish, it turns people, millions of them, into parasites, copycats, and couch potatoes. The American imagination today is distressingly sluggish. Most of what is served up to us as the fruits of imagination is, in fact, the debasing of it into soap opera and pornography.

Right now, one of the essential Christian ministries in and to our ruined world is the recovery and exercise of the imagination. Ages of faith have always been ages rich in imagination. It is easy to see why: the materiality of the gospel (the seen, heard, and touched Jesus) is no less impressive than its spirituality (faith, hope, and love). Imagination is the mental tool we have for connecting material and spiritual, visible and invisible, earth and heaven.

We have a pair of mental operations, imagination and explanation, designed to work in tandem. When the gospel is given robust and healthy expression, the two work in graceful synchronicity. Explanation pins things down so that we can handle and use them - obey and teach, help and guide. Imagination opens things up so that we can grown into maturity - worship and adore, exclaim and honor, follow and trust. Explanation restricts and defines and holds down; imagination expands and lets loose. Explanation keeps our feet on the ground; imagination lifts our heads into the clouds. Explanation puts us in harness; imagination catapults us into mystery. Explanation reduces life to what can be used; imagination enlarges life into what can be adored.

But our technological and information-obsessed age has cut imagination from the team. In the life of the gospel, where everything originates and depends upon what we cannot see and is worked out in what we can see, imagination and explanation cannot get along without each other. Is it time to get aggressive? Is it time for the Christian community to recognize and honor and commission masters of the imagination - our poets and singers and storytellers-as partners in evangelical witness?

How else is Bruce going to hear the gospel when he grows up? How will he hear Isaiah's poetry, Jesus' parables, John's visions? It will be sad if, when he is 40 years old and enters a congregation of worshiping Christians and ministering angels, all he sees is a preacher's bald head.

A professor friend of mine summarized it like this: "Imagination is not the ability to conjure up what is unreal - rather, it is the ability to see what is real but unseen."

Christianity insists that the work of God - and thus of Christ, who is making all things new - is spiritual, and what is spiritual is unseen, apprehended only by faith. This does not mean that it's not real; it does mean that we need to learn how to see it.

We need to be masters of imagination, not of our own making, but of God's. We need to learn to imagine reality as he describes it for us.

The Spirit of the Kingdom (Acts 2:1-21)

allsoulsmissoula@gmail.com — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:55:39 PDT

The Spirit of the Kingdom (Acts 2:1-21) - Ryan Sutherland
(Click here for download instructions)