Reading and Gardening

I love veggies

For the unofficial internship I am doing with my pastor steve at Vintage Faith I have been reading How People Change by Timothy S. Lang and Paul David Tripp. Far from being the self-help book it sounds like the idea behind change is our satisfaction and joy in Christ. It focuses on the 'idols' of our hearts like comfort, control, approval and power and how Christ is sufficient to satisfy those desires.

At moody we hear, almost flippantly, 'orthodoxy, orthopraxy'. Right belief leads to right living. We just need to hear a better sermon. As if is just that easy.

Belief is a slippery thing.

We view our life through a layer of beliefs, some deeper than others, some acknowledged some not. Its naive to expect someone to give up their selfishness towards their family or housemates because they heard a really good exposition on the legal terms of Christ's substitutionary atonement used in Romans. How many people really learn this way? Belief can't change anything until it becomes a part of our worldview; until it changes the way we view our experiences, and our experiences reinforce that belief. This is our life as followers of Christ. Its a process of what we believe moving deeper into the way we think until nothing that we can think or do is separated from our life in Christ. Abiding in him. Living in Him. I guess this is the Holy Spirit constantly changing us, because no one is there yet.

We moved onto Total Church by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis. The idea behind the order of these books is that we can not have healthy community until we first deal with our hearts and what we are worshiping. idols are insidious. I quoted a bit of Total Church in a previous blog. Probably more to come.

Meanwhile I am reading My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok and The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg. The Great Good Place is written by a sociologist who has studied communities around the world and writes about shared public life in coffee shops, cafes, sidewalks, parks, taverns ect where we have contact with our community and with strangers. These are the 'Third Places', in-between home and work that we as American society have been trying to move away from. Oldenburg observes the consequences of no shared public life he calls, 'the problem of place in America'.

"We aimed for comfort and well-stocked homes and freedom from uncomfortable interactions and all the obligations of citizenship. We succeeded...In the subdivisions of post-World War II America, there is nothing to walk to and no place to gather. The physical staging virtually ensures immutability from community. The preferred and ubiquitous mode of urban development is hostile to both walking and talking. In walking, people become part of their terrain; they meet others; they become custodians of their neighborhoods. In talking, people get to know one another; they find and create their common interests and realize the collective abilities essential to community and democracy"(preface, xiv).

"Homes alone do not a community make...Though proclaimed as offering the best of both rural and urban life, the auto-mobile suburb had the effect of fragmenting the individual's world. As one observer wrote: "A man works in one place, sleeps in another, shops somewhere else, finds pleasure or companionship where he can, and cares about none of these places" (4).

That said, take a peek at my neighborhood at this perry street blog. Certainly not perfect (what community is?), but we are hopefully working towards healthy informal public life with our tavern, coffee shop, pizza shop, park, bbq's and farmers markets...getting to know your neighbors doesn't have to be scary.