Left-Handed Toons (by right-handed people)
The cartoon above has been sitting there just waiting for me to put a post with it for quite a while, because I think that as silly as it is, it speaks to the heart of something that is central to talk about deconstructing church. Basically, the parts that are meant to exist in church, the central, key things, will always be there. The chair might look different: it might feel more or less comfortable, look weirder, look cooler, look messier, but it’ll be a chair that works, as long as it’s made from the same materials as we start with.
Put in other words by Christina over at the Ranges blog:
The truth of the matter is that there is good and bad to be found in all forms of church. Ray Anderson writes that the emerging church is reformational, seeking
“to put new wine into new wineskins; they want to renew the church that already exists and translate the older formulas of the faith into new paradigms of contemporary communication”
There are some key verbs here – renew… translate. Not replace, reject.
And having just chatted about some of this stuff with Kevin, (the senior pastor at YVV), it’s also a great reminder to people getting interested in the emerging church stuff. This is not some excuse to reject everything and build furniture that can’t be sat on. There are some really key things that the church exists to do. Deconstruction just means pulling everything peripheral to that off, so that we can understand exactly what that looks like.
On the count of 3, pull my metaphor to pieces.
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