"So, I’m not saying that sermons have no value, only that the value is limited. They can provide valuable information and inspiration, but their impact on spiritual transformation is fairly weak, and all the more so as people get used to hearing the same voice each week. They may find it informative, inspirational, even entertaining, but at the end of the day it cannot show them how to live. For that they need a more mature friend with whom they can share their experiences, questions, and even doubts as they explore their own connection to God. Listening to sermons, even taking notes and trying to live out the application, is probably the worst way to discover how to live inside the love of the Father and to follow him. I’m convinced that ninety percent of teaching and preaching occurs in a conversation where questions are being asked, doubts considered, and difficult realities contemplated."
- Wayne Jacobsen. Beyond Sundays
"Kids are different, as I am learning increasingly all the time. Their thoughts are not prepackaged and clean. It takes a while for them to meander through their thinking, the words all bathed in clownish characters and story.....
Our children will learn to submit and even parrot our beliefs soon enough; allow them the gift of their imagination as long as possible...
Also, keep in mind that the more we adults talk in stories, as opposed to ideas, the more children will feel free to tell us their stories as well. We may even discover that stories on lock at all Faith as well."
- Tony Kriz. Aloof
".... by 1525 the protest movement involved much more than the mass, or even believers baptism - it involved the nature of the church. The concept of a church of committed Believers had taken the place of a church made up of the mixed multitude. This new church, like that of the Apostles, was to be made up only of those confessing Christ as Lord followed by Believers baptism, instead of everyone born in a given Parish. The Lord's Supper would then be observed by the baptized in a simple manner, shorn of its medieval trappings, as a pledge of Brotherly Love in remembrance of the one, all sufficient sacrifice of Christ.
Fritz Blanke (1525) has asserted that the characteristics of the church described above "were not to be found anywhere else at that time." Then he asked, "What is the source of this new view of the Christian Church?"
Griebel answers: "We were listeners to Zwingli's sermons and readers of his writings, but one day we took the Bible itself in hand and we were taught better.""
- William Estep. The Anabaptist Story. An Introduction To Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism
I appreciate his words very much. We are too mouthy at times. Not enough stillness or silence. Yet, proclamation, stelling the story, sharing His wonders and deeds is core to our faith as well.
I know what most will say about the need to use our mind. Loo at his cautions below about exalting the mind. The transformed mind is not always the mind that is actually at work.
It is not either or. Rather, it is both.
"Presence is experienced in a participative way, outside the mind. The mind by nature is intent on judging, controlling, and analyzing instead of seeing, tasting, and loving. This is exactly why it cannot be present or live in the naked now. The Mind wants a job and loves to process things. The key to stopping this game is, quite simply, peace, silence, or stillness. I would even say that on the practical level, silence and God will be experienced simultaneously- and even as the same thing. And afterward, you will want to remain even more silent. The overly verbal religion of the last 500 years does not seem to understand this at all and tends to be afraid of any silence whatsoever. It cannot follow Jesus and go into the desert for forty days, where there is nothing to say, to prove, to think, or to defend.
Although we all use the phrase peace of mind, there is really no such thing. When you are in your mind, you are never truly at peace, and when you are truly at peace, you are never in your mind........
Yes, the mind is necessary, but it can't do everything.
Yes, the mind is receptive, but reason is not out only antenna. We also need our bodies, Our emotions, our hearts, our nose, our ears, our eyes, our taste, and our souls.
Yes, the mind can achieve great things, but through Over Control, it can also limit what we can know.
Yes, the mind can think great thoughts, and also bad and limiting ones. The mind can be a gift and a curse.
Yes, the mind can tell left from right, but it cannot perceive invisible things such as love, eternity, fear, wholeness, mystery, or the Divine.
Yes, the mind can discern consistency, logic, and fairness, but it seldom puts these into practice.
Yes the mind and reason are necessary, but they must learn to distinguish between what lies Beyond its reach; the prerational and the transrational.
Yes, the mind is brilliant, but the more we observe it, the more we see it is also obsessive and repetitive.
Yes, the Mind seeks the truth, but it can also create lies.
Yes, the mind can connect us with others, but it can also keep us apart.
Yes, the mind is very useful, but when it does not recognize its own finite Viewpoint, it is also useless.
Yes, the mind can serve the world, but in fact it largely serves itself.
Yes, the mind can make necessary distinctions, but it also divides in thought what is on divided in nature and in the concrete.
Yes, the mind is needed, but we also need other ways of knowing or we will not know well, fully, or freely.
Yes, the mind is good at thinking. But so much so that most humans, like the card, thing they are they're thinking.
Yes, the Mind likes to think, but until it learns to listen to others, to the body, the heart, and all the senses, it also uses itself to block everything it does not like to do or to acknowledge.
Yes, the mind is our friend, but when we are obsessive or compulsive, it can also be our most dangerous foe.
Yes, the mine welcomes education, but it also needs to be on educated, to learn how much of what it "knows" is actually near conditioning and Prejudice.
As a result, the great religions of the world found methods to compartmentalize, but not eliminate, the over control of the thinking, rational mind, through practices such as prayer, meditation, or contemplation this was the "new mind," which allowed
- 1. other parts of us to see
- 2. other things to be seen,
- 3. the rational mind to then be reintegrated, but now as a servant instead of the master.
- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now
This question would come up in a very practical way for some of the ordinands who were dispatched to parishes not terribly interested in what they had to offer. It could be discouraging. Gerhard Vibrans was sent to a tiny village east of Magdeburg that seemed populated almost exclusively by dullards:
"My parish of six hundred souls at Schweinitz is a very poor one; on average only one or two people go to church there every Sunday. . . . [E] very Sunday, wearing my vestments, I make a pilgrimage through the whole village primarily to bring home to the people that it is Sunday. . . . The people try to comfort me by saying that I will get my salary even though no one goes to church."
He said that on Trinity Sunday no one at all showed up, “apart from the woman sexton.”Bonhoeffer’s response to Vibrans was simple, practical, and biblical: “If one village will not listen we go to another. There are limits.”He was echoing Jesus’injunction to the disciples that they shake the dust from their sandals and leave a village where they were not welcomed (Matt. 10: 14). But Bonhoeffer was not cavalier about it, and his heart went out to Vibrans, who had been about as faithful a servant as anyone could have imagined: “Your loyal observance of our advice almost puts me to shame. Don’t take it too literally or one day you might get fed up with it.”
Bonhoeffer visited the village and preached there. He later wrote Vibrans and said that he should write his congregation “telling them that this is possibly the last offer of the Gospel to them, and that there are other communities whose hunger for the Word cannot be satisfied because there are too few workers.”
~ Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
" Who teachers you? Whose disciple are you? Honestly
One thing is sure; you are somebody's disciple. You learn how to live from somebody else. There is no exceptions to this rule, for human beings are just the kind of creatures that have to learn and keep learning from others how to live. Aristotle remark that we owe more to our teachers than to our parents, for those our parents gave us life, our teachers taught us the good life."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy.
