No Lightning?

So for the first time in months, I set foot in a church yesterday for a Sunday service. Much to my surprise, I was not struck my lightning immediately upon entering the door. In fact, overall, it was a rather pleasant experience. For those of you regularly following this blog, you'll have probably gathered that me and the Roman Catholic Church are no longer on speaking terms. The pope seems to have lost his marbles and overall I've found the church to be like the brick walls Rob Bell talks about in Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. They spend so much of their time making rules and regulations and dealing with doctrinal things that they build this wall that tends to fall when you remove a brick and is very good at keeping people out. In light of this, but because I do enjoy a combination of more liberal social ideas but more traditional services, I attended a service at an Episcopal church. It was a nice service in a beautiful old Gothic church. It also had a kick-ass organ which always makes me happy. It's someplace I might consider going back to.

In other news, I've finished Dodd's My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion. It was again a good read and draws some of the same conclusions at Bell. Essentially, questions aren't a bad thing. Ending up in the middle is ok. My own conclusion, the journey isn't a waste. Just because you end up somewhere completely different than you intended doesn't mean the time you spent elsewhere along the way wasn't valuable.

Bullet Points

Ok, so I'm not really less tired than my last post, but I'm going to try to do some bullet points from Velvet Elvis of things I really liked. This will probably only be a partial list. Again, if you want to read it, it's...

Bell, Rob. (2005). Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Michigan: Zondervan.

• Atheism is a belief, not a lack of belief. Just as Christianity is a belief in a higher power, atheism is a belief that things got this way by chance. In either case, you still believe something.
• The Bible was written in a time when each town or village had one copy of the Jewish scripture (the Torah) and it was read in group settings. People came together to hear it read and to discuss it. Radical and "innappropriate" interpretations were quickly shot down by having this kind of group discussion. The Bible was written with this in mind (and a long time before the printing press) and so we should read it with this in mind. It really ought to be discussed.
• Faith should be like a trampoline, not a brick wall. The springs of the trampoline are the doctrines that hold up the whole but they are not the whole. They simply are jumping off points. In many Christian churches, there is a brick wall approach where the Bible is used to create bricks of doctrine. When you remove one brick, the whole wall crumbles. In this case, the individual doctrines become the whole and you miss the point. There's no room for discussion or questions. The brick wall shuts people out. The trampoline invites people over to play. And really, who cares who has the better trampoline. They're just fun to jump on.
• Anytime you say anything about the Bible, it's an interpretation. In fact, even the fact that we're reading it in English involves interpretation from the original. Unless you happen to be God, you're interpreting and you really better not claim to have all the answers.
• "Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective (84)." You are a Christian. Do what you do and do it with passion.
• Ask questions. Ask more questions. Keep asking questions.
• Genesis starts with God separating light and dark. The rest of the Bible is God showing people how to distinguish the two (86).