I just read Jim Collin's article on Rock Climbing in Fast Company. He quotes Daniel Boorsin, author of The Discoverers.
According to Boorstin, "The primary barrier to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge and expertise. Discoverers see more clearly what can be done because they have less knowledge about the way things are supposed to work and are not trapped by the limits of their times."

I met today with the new pastor of Washington Community Fellowship (WCF). What a great guy. I think the only way to have a kingdom mindset is to see other churches as teammates. We each play a unique role in the kingdom of God. We don't compete. We complement each other--literally and figuratively.
Scott shared a couple of great thoughts. He said change happens best when its by evolution not revolution. There are some exceptions to that rule, but I felt like that one thought was instrumental in the way I'm viewing the changes we need to make at NCC in 2004. By personality, I think I'm an "all or none" kind of person. I want it to happen and I want it to happen now! But I think we need to focus on evolution in 2004.
He also made a comment about people worshipping from the shoulders up. I'd never heard it put that way, but what a great description of worship that only goes to the intellectual level. We certainly don't want people to worship from the shoulders down, but we want people to engage in worship body, mind, spirit and heart. Worship should be a physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experience.

Brian McLaren makes a great observation in The Church in the Emerging Culture. He said for years he believed and taught that the essential purpose of the gospel was to answer this question: How can an individual's soul be forgiven of its sins so it will go to Heaven after death? "But now I wonder if this gospel about how to get your soul into Heaven after death is really only a ghost of the real gospel." Dallas Willard calls it the "gospel of sin management."
The gospels have a broader scope than that. The gospel is kaleidscopic. It can't be reduced to one thing. Jesus used different metaphors to describe salvation depending on the uniqueness of the individual he was talking with.
We need new wineskins, new songs, new metaphors.

I continue to try to get my arms around postmodernity--what does it really mean? I think Michael Horton is right. "Most of postmodernism is simply a code word for something new." I do think that regardless of what postmodernism is or isn't, it is the job of generational prophets to redefine the language of Scripture in a way that makes sense to the cultural context.
In The Church in the Emerging Culture, Frederica Mathewes redefines sin and salvation in ways that I think are biblically true and culturally relevant. I wonder if the dominant metaphor of the gospel needs to transition from legal language to medical language.
Maybe we need to see Jesus as The Great Physician. He defined his mission in medical terms--"It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." Sin is a sickness. Mathewes says, "Sins are akin to drops of poison." She says, "Sin is infection, not infraction." I think sin is both/and.
Holiness is wholeness. Holiness is perfect health in every dimension of the word--emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and relational.

I read today that the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy only weighed 126 pounds. The Soviet edition of his works, published over a period of 30 years, came to 90 volumes. Tolstoy's words out-weighed his body! As a preacher and writer, I sure hope my words out-weigh my body when everything is said and done. I've got a little more work to do than Tolstoy, however, because I weigh alot more than he did--at least my body does.
When everything is said and done, I think that I will leave some good memories and good deeds. I'll leave an example to follow, and hopefully a spiritual and financial inheritance for my kids. But I'd also like to leave words. I'm so inspired by previous generations of writers. I hope to inspire future generations of thinkers.
I think Thomas Jefferson wrote something on the order of 22,000 letters with a quill pen. That doesn't leave much of an excuse for those of us with computers and printers.