What my church might learn from this chapter: week 3

Caputo chapter 4.

Is it that impossible to live how Jesus lived? Is it that impossible to have our faith at the tip of our fingers and our testimony in our hands to share? I think that the place of the church is in the streets of our cities, in the parks and hospital before than in the church building on Sunday morning and Wednesday night. We need to study the wor(d)(k) of God and worship together, but if it just stays inside the church walls we just miss the whole point of God's love.

Caputo: Chapter 5

I was really struck during the election by the importance of the issues of abortion and gay marriage. How can those two issues be so important in a debate that people don’t talk about things such as social justice, alternative energies and other things like that? Like Caputo I don’t mean to underestimate their importance, but I think that it is a problem when people, churches and political group take those as their major battle. I really like Caputo’s analysis of the system we live in as western people and the urge to deconstruct it to live the kind of life that Jesus would live today in 2009.

Barker: chapter 3.

If “Meaning is never fixed but always in motion and continually supplemented”, we should be careful as a church with the words we use and the context we use them in. The concept of deconstruction (seems to be all over my readings) is something that we should take into consideration. I think it can be interesting for a church to “deconstruct” its paradigms, language, beliefs,…in order to seek what really form those. This is even more important while approaching another culture.

Barker: chapter 4

Biology and the understanding of the body differ from a culture to another. This is something else that we should keep in mind as we approach different culture. For example, in urban western culture tattoos are totally accepted and even part of the norm, when in some foreign countries it is still really rare and not accepted. Our understanding of what our body and its functionment…will impact the way that we interact with people. It is then important to understand the codes and views of the culture we live/work in.

Caputo: Chapter 6

Those two example of churches or "non -churches" that Caputo gives are really good points. The church of today is, I think at a turning point and enter (or has already entered) when it has to re-think itself (or maybe I should use deconstruct). The danger thaugh is to deconstruct the Church (with capital C) as an institution and human system, to reconstruct an other Church which will become an other institution or human system. Deconstruction has to be a way of life, a daily basis experience and has also to be deconstructed itself at times...