into the DEEP

...rather than focus on people’s weaknesses, there is the move to explore and develop people’s strengths... your focus stops being ‘what is wrong?’, and becomes ‘what is right?’ ...with that in mind, I often wonder if we have made the mistake in our assessments of church, in becoming almost pathological... [in this]‘sickness’ diagnosis, we measure who we are by what we don’t do, and what we are not.

...the Deep Church focus becomes, not about what is wrong and invalid or that which is authorised by existing or new groups, but about the challenge of the shared context we find ourselves in. There is within Deep Church, a desire to recover a confidence in the gospel and scripture, along with the accessing of the spiritual resources of the historical church in non superficial ways, so that we might align ourselves with the work of the Holy Spirit in forming communities, that are living faithfully in discipleship to Jesus, in our contemporary context.

We are not wanting to re-package the past, or be fashion victims of the emerging culture, but rather aspire to an understanding of church embedded in the past, whilst fully engaged in the present. So that within that we might discover and build on what is ‘well’ with the Church Catholic. (not the same as the Catholic Church)

- Jason Clark

Hey C.S.Lewis fans... Wonderful article on Lewis and his passion for Church Unity here. Lot's of rich fodder today from the Emergent/C newsletter. More later.