Introduction
On August 2, 2014, a large semi truck dropped off a gigantic dirt digger at the house across the street. Within fifteen minutes, it was destroying the 1960s ranch house that had most recently been the home of a series of renters. It is a scene familiar in Houston. Old homes, and just about anything that is left standing without purpose, is torn down so that a new something can be put up in its place. There is something that is both exciting and disturbing about this routine demolition. An architect friend once told me that not every house should be saved. Sometimes I think we think it is easier to simply discard the past and build a new thing.
I have discovered there is no real starting over. We are always walking into the future with a key ingredient of the past—ourselves. Lessons learned and lessons unlearned all come with us. The only thing new that is taken into the future is the lie that it is untouched and disconnected from all that comes before it. Bill Bryson, in his book At Home, writes, “Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world—whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over—eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment—they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes.
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The same is true for the Church—God’s house—in which we find ourselves. It is a storehouse of the past. It is filled with artifacts from the theology, liturgy, and Sunday Schools of our past. The culture has deposited here the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the 1950s, and all manner of musical tastes. If we take a walk and make our way through God’s house, we will find some interesting truths about the past Church. If we look closer still, we will see the profound impact the last 200 years have had on who we think we are and how we use the buildings of our faith.
Generous Community Description:
GENEROUS COMMUNITY is a book that invites the reader to wade deeply into the transformative work of being church in a new missionary age. This book is designed for the person in the pew. Not unlike the reformers who hoped to inspire a change within the church of their time, this book is for every one who wishes to take on the work of mission through evangelism and service for the sake of God’s reconciling work and for the hope of community transformation.
Clergy and Thought Leaders: GENEROUS COMMUNITY (Church Publishing) is the partner book to CHURCH (VTS Press) for the building of cadres of leaders to help you transform your mission in the new mission context in which we find ourselves.
