Allelon Ministries have a great article they have put up by Stanley Grenz on various aspects of the Church and community...I particularly enjoyed this literary/postmodern slant - very reminiscent of Brueggeman and Haurwas...
How do relationships within the community of God differ in reality from relationships within any other shared interest group? Are we fooling ourselves if we think we are in any way different from the numerous tribes‚ that seem to be all around us in our pluralist society?
SG: I would suggest that we can best see the difference, when we introduce several key insights into the nature of communities offered by contemporary communitarian thinkers, coupled with aspects of the narrative understanding of identity formation. In the quest to make sense of our personal lives and the world around us, we are dependent on narratives that provide the “plot” by means of which we tell the story of our lives. The overarching narrative is mediated to the individual person by the community that embodies it. To be a Christian means to tell one's personal story and hence to find one's identity in accordance with a particular narrative, the story that is passed from generation to generation through the Christian community, but which is ultimately found in the Bible, the book of this community. And this story, of course, centers on the narrative of Jesus. This description suggests that we are both similar to and decisively different from the tribes that inhabit the post-modern world. We are similar in that each group, including the Christian church, functions as a community to its adherents. We are different, however, in that we find ourselves we make sense out of our lives and our world by means of our participation in the life of Jesus Christ, who is Immanuel, God with us, and the Word made flesh.
The whole article lacks a bit of a postmodern, emergent twang, but Stanley has some important things to say about the focus of emergent church as past present and future. Community memory is also in there...an absolutely crucial aspect of any postmodern ecclesiology.
Try it and see what you think...a bit longer than some of the Allelon articles!
Pete
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