Matt Stanford on Amateur Theology
About Matt Stanford
Matt is just a guy who’s passionate about his faith, and the community of church. He’s 32, husband of Jacqui and dad for Toby, and is part of Riverside Church in Montmorency, Melbourne. No formal theological training, but full of opinions/thoughts/feelings. Sadly afflicted with Richmond supportership since 1982. It’s been a long time.
Matt's site: http://polyresin.stanford.id.au/
collective language
Posted on September 21, 2007 by Matt Stanford
Filed Under Church, Emerging Questions | 8 Comments
Prompted by my LifeGroup: what does the language of a corporate experience of God look like?
I think it’s quite a poorly developed area of communication for us.
In my experience, when we talk about what God’s doing, we talk about it from a first-person perspective: “something I’ve learned this week…”, “God told me…”, “my experience this week has shown me…”; I’m really not sure our 3rd-persons language is familiar or well developed: trying to describe what God is doing with the upper or lower case C church seems to result in us pulling specific instances.
At the very least, it’s not something we spend much time talking about.
This, to me, contrasts against the things I read about when God spoke about Israel, his people, as a singular entity: we don’t seem to think of ourselves in the same way today as much, instead focusing on the individual or the intimate church group. Is that a result of post modernism, and is it what God wants from us? If we’re called to be other-centred, doesn’t that mean collective language should be our primary language type?
What’s God doing with us as a people? How does Jesus feel about his bride right now? What’s my role as part of that as an individual, a church member, a Church member? A hand, or a foot? Or a cell IN a hand or foot?
