Welcome to 100 Cups of Coffee, a collection of profiles of people who are active or interested in the house church movement in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul Area.
Even in the short few months that I've been meandering along my new path, I've accumulated a good batch of contacts of people to be in conversation with. Many of them I haven't even called yet or sent my first e-mail. Even so, I've noticed that among the people I have met, most of them are not aware of each other. So I hit on the idea of collecting and posting these little profiles as a way for me to keep all these folks straight, and to help them learn about each other.
I'm hopeful that my blog can also serve as a place for conversation. I'll be asking the questions that I'm interested in of course, but I encourage you to be a part of the conversation as well. If you prefer, you can e-mail me directly and give me suggestions for improving the profiles. That would be great. In fact, just the other night I got some helpful guidance from my wife Kisten. It was about how to make my writing more, um, well... interesting. I forget exactly how she put it. It was very helpful, though! No, seriously. You have no idea. And she was very tactful, too. What a good wife! How am I doin' hon? Are you still reading?? Whew! ;)
Anyway, coffee's ready. Cream or sugar?
Tim
Even in the short few months that I've been meandering along my new path, I've accumulated a good batch of contacts of people to be in conversation with. Many of them I haven't even called yet or sent my first e-mail. Even so, I've noticed that among the people I have met, most of them are not aware of each other. So I hit on the idea of collecting and posting these little profiles as a way for me to keep all these folks straight, and to help them learn about each other.
I'm hopeful that my blog can also serve as a place for conversation. I'll be asking the questions that I'm interested in of course, but I encourage you to be a part of the conversation as well. If you prefer, you can e-mail me directly and give me suggestions for improving the profiles. That would be great. In fact, just the other night I got some helpful guidance from my wife Kisten. It was about how to make my writing more, um, well... interesting. I forget exactly how she put it. It was very helpful, though! No, seriously. You have no idea. And she was very tactful, too. What a good wife! How am I doin' hon? Are you still reading?? Whew! ;)
Anyway, coffee's ready. Cream or sugar?
Tim
2 comments:
Wow, thanks for the kind comments about my "help"! I'm pleased that the blog is launched and that the coffee conversations are happening. This is a journey for both of us in learning how to negotiate our lives together when one of us leading a traditional church and the other is charting newer waters.
Kisten
Hi Tim,
I am Joseph from Faith Chinese / Luther Seminary. Working with youths in the Chinese church compelled me to think about a lot of things. They ask very basic questions like "why do we have to go to church regularly?", "why do we have to sing during worship?", "what is the point of worship? and what does God want from us?" They kept me on the toes and I can't give cheap answers because kids are great B.S. detectors.
I became aware that conventional churches have problems when I started dealing with young adults. It's unrealistic that you can integrate young adults into your existing community if such thing actually exists. Some people have asked me "What can we do to accomodate young adults?" It's a touch question. If things work well, why change anything that risks alienating our existing members? After thinking about it longer, I realized that wasn't even the right quesiton to ask. A better question is how do people with families create life influencing relationships with people who are much younger and single? It just seems difficult if not impossible. It is much easier for young adults to create relationships with other young adults. That's when I was convinced that maybe there needs to be some unconventional ways of doing church. But I think it is also a mistake to just have a young people's church. Spiritually young adults will grow out of pre-critical naivete into the stage of critical thinking and then hopefully at some point of their lives they become post-critical. So young adults really need a lot of guidance as most people will fall away if they think completely on their own. The Conservative Evangelical churches don't have the problem of missing young adults because they keep them at pre-critical thinking stage by short circuiting their cognative process. This strategy can backfire especially when one becomes the president. But anyways, I am very interested in what you have to say, and I'll keep reading this blog.
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