Diet Centered on Jesus - Jeff Clarke

On his blog about the church being in the entertainment business, Jeff Clarke (see jeffkclarke.com) makes a few statements we all need to keep in front of us as we are being the Church, including us who have moved to less traditional gatherings.

He writes:

Cultivating a Diet and Culture Centered on Jesus

   Jesus makes faith real and alive. He moves faith beyond the abstract into the realness of flesh and blood. Jesus makes the invisible God human and approachable. Jesus makes the picture of a distant God into a God who is near. Jesus makes God human – someone who can identify with all of our insecurities, pain and loss. God is no longer distant, but close. God is no longer ‘out there’ but ‘right here.’ In Jesus, God became one of us.
   We as the church will always lose our way when anything other than Jesus captures our attention. If anything usurps the central, defining place of Jesus, everything will slowly begin to unravel, sometimes without us even realizing it.
   In a recent interview, Leonard Sweet said it this way, “There is only one singularity that matters and if this singularity is in place everything else coheres. And, that singularity is Christ. In everyone’s life, in the life of the church, when Christ is made the single, supreme focus – when the person of Jesus himself becomes that supreme, singular focus, than everything comes together.”
   What we need in order to maintain a healthy body, individually and collectively, is to feast on a steady diet of Jesus – his body in the bread and his blood in the wine.
   When the sacraments of Jesus, served within community, by community and for community, in the form of prayer, scripture reading, communion, and baptism, become the food that feeds the church, then and only then will “we grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).
   In communion, followers of Jesus partake and share with one another the body and blood of Jesus. They are formed by the sacrament of prayer, baptized into his death – raised in newness of life, and delight in eating the bread of scripture, while serving one other in an attitude of humility.

You can find the full post at:

http://www.jeffkclarke.com/entertainment-fatigue-why-people-are-growing-tired-of-the-churchs-glitzy-stage/

Questions on Unity

I owe the dear “reader of my blog” a wrap up post on what the Lord taught me during my journey as shared in the last four (4) posts. But, I have this burden to share below and then will provide the promised post.

The Lord has been putting the need for unity of believers on my heart lately and I ran into a good definition of the Church while I was reading a blog from a new friend (see PS below).

He wrote: “. . . a community of saints who gather on the ground of fellowship in Christ among all the disciples of Jesus in their locality.” I agree with this and will be sharing on this, but today I want to propose a couple of questions.

In my locality how do we move from “going” to church in division to “being” the church in unity?

How does this work itself out practically?

PS – I have not made it a practice of plugging other blogs here, but I would like to recommend one which I have found to be enlightening. The author, Josh Lawson, wrote a post where he presented, much better than I ever could, the unity of the Body. I will be using portions of it as I present my thoughts on the unity,

It is:     http://www.insearchofthecity.com/

Grace and Peace