Boy starts breathing as he’s prepared for funeral

BOISE, Idaho – A hospital worker preparing a 22-month-old for a funeral home noticed the boy was breathing more than an hour after he had been pronounced dead from drowning.

Yesterday I posted some recent thoughts from Alan Roxburgh. Here is something he said twelve years ago. Via onehouse

We need a movement of God’s people into neighborhoods, to live out and be the new future of Christ. It must be a movement that demonstrates how the people of God have a vision and the power to transform our world. This is not the same as current attempts to grow bigger and bigger churches that act like vacuum cleaners, sucking people out of their neighborhoods into a sort of Christian supermarket. Our culture does not need any more churches run like corporations; it needs local communities empowered by the gospel vision of a transforming Christ who addresses the needs of the context and changes the polis into a place of hope and wholeness. The corporation churches we are cloning across the land cannot birth this transformational vision, because they have no investment in context or place; they are centers of expressive individualism with a truncated gospel of personal salvation and little else.
Our penchant for bigness and numerical success as the sign of God’s blessing ony discourages and deflects attempts to root communities of God’s people deeply into neighborhoods. And until we build transformed communities there is no hope for a broken earth.”

Powerful words from Alan Roxburgh via PoMoMuSiNgS

If we want to discern the emergent work of God, weve got to ask, Where are the most God-forsaken places today? Let me suggest to you, one of the most God-forsaken place for us, is the local congregation. Why? They dont get it. They dont understand any of this stuff. They are so steeped in a commercialized Gospel. They are so busy trying to make life work and trying to keep up and catch up, that they dont get it. Heres what I want to say to you. That is exactly the place where Gods future is going to emerge. Many of us who buy the emergence narrative want to give up on these places. Thats why with so many young leaders today, church planting is the thing. You know why church planting is really the thing? Because they dont want to bother with that stuff. Because you cant change it.

Therefore, being a leader is not having an answer. Being a leader is being one who is shaped and formed in practices of cultivating environments that call forth that people and that future. And the way in which that future gets cultivated and formed, is by re-entering the memory of the story. But, the gift of our moments is that we have a chance of re-entering that story from below, and outside, and no longer from dominion and power and control.

I had an interesting lunchtime conversation with a friend about “The DaVinci Code.” We were kicking around the idea of Jesus being married. Now I know that in the Bible there is no evidence that Jesus was married, but what if he was? What do we lose as followers of Christ if Jesus was married? What, if anything, do we gain?

Church of Fools

Welcome to Church of Fools, the UK’s first web-based, 3D church, which opened as a three-month experiment on May 11th. Church of Fools is an attempt to create holy ground on the net, where people can worship, pray and talk about faith.