The Joshua Tree

[UPDATE] Just went through Google Reader and it turns out Mikey stole my thunder on this post. But Mikey, unless you were thinking about your post while you were going to sleep last night like myself, then technically I got in first.

Mark Dever was asked once if in order to sharpen his thinking, did he surround himself with people who disagree with him. His reply was something along the lines of, 'Life's too short to be constantly butting heads with people, and you generally don't have to seek out people to disagree with you, so no I don't.'

Not being as well thought out nor as intelligent as Mark Dever, I like having people around who have different leanings than myself in order to push me past my assumptions.

My first reaction is to disagree with everything Stuart Heath says. I don't know why I'm like this with Stuart. I've never met him, never spoken to him, never seen him as far as I know, but he's just one of those few guys who my first reaction is to say, 'No, I don't think that's right'. But let me tell you, it's worthwhile to listen. Stuart thinks about church, analyses it, considers things from first principles and has critical thoughts on just about everything that the denominational church structure thinks about 'church'. And he makes me think.

If you haven't found it yet, you might be interested in The Joshua Tree 'Kingdom Community' website/blog. From what I can gather from talking to Danny, a member (is that the right word?) of the JT community who is studying with me at college, much of the theory behind kingdom communities comes from the UK Crowded House model (while maintaining many differences). From what I can gather the Crowded House model doesn't actually have anything to do with the Australian/New Zealand soft rock band. They don't sing their songs, nor worship Neil Finn. It is rather a network of house churches with a focus of building community around the home.

My introduction to these kingdom communities was through a rather laboured discussion with Danny at college the other day. One of our problems was that we were using the same words to describe very different things. When I said church it was not what Danny was thinking when he said church. I wanted to talk to Danny about his role as a student minister - but I prefaced the statement with "For lack of a better word...", and many other things like that.

This has highlighted for me part of the great thing that Stuart, Danny and others involved are trying to do. That is, groups such as these of which they are a part, which seek for radical rethinks of what we are doing, could easily define themselves by what they aren't. Instead they are working hard to define what they are.

One of the things that caught my attention on the website was this post from Danny which looked at the tendency of ministers to speak about people as "resources". I'm not sure if part of the influence behind the post was point 9 from Andrew Nixon's '12 things I learnt from Connect09' on sydneyanglicans.net, which said;

9. Our church members are a wonderful gift from God and the greatest untapped resource we possess.

To be sure, there is an aspect of this way of speaking which is unhelpful. But ignoring the "We" language for a moment (as there is a sense where this article is directed at the ministers), at one level this point is speaking against the clergy/laity divide which Stuart often reacts against. That is, it is another way of saying "The best thing about the church is the church".