thriving youth ministry in smaller churches.

"the future church will thrive in being small. the mainline, middle, and mainstream are dying and splintering into countless fragments. micro is the new mega. small is big. scripture clearly roots for the underdog. david against goliath. a boy with fish and bread. mustard seeds....being smaller is a huge advantage."

-ap.

questions should lead us - dave gibbons.

"one of the axioms i've come to believe about life and ministry is that questions should lead us. questions, not answers. Jesus showed us this time and again."

"if Jesus doesn't answer a question with a question, he tells a story."

dave gibbons
the monkey and the fish: liquid leadership for a third-culture church

-ap.

mystery: velvet elvis.

"the christian faith is mysterious to the core...if we do put God definitively into words, we have at that very moment made God something that God is not."

"the bible has a different understanding of mystery. true mystery, the kind of mystery rooted in the infinite nature of God, gives us answers that plunge us into even more questions."

"truth always leads to more truth. because truth is insight into God and God is infinite and God has no boundaries or edges."

"one of the great 'theologians' of our time, Sean Penn, put it this way: 'when everything gets answered, it's fake. the mystery is the truth." [entertainment weekly: feb 2004]

"being a christian is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it." "when moses enters the darkness toward the top of the mountain, he has moved beyond knowledge to awe and love and the mystery of God." [exodus 19]

all of these quotes are from rob bell's velvet elvis. i am re-reading it finally. i went through a somewhat intentional rob bell withdrawl phase - there was an uprising over about 6 words that rob spoke that were twisted and morphed into the word "heretic". which is hilarious for so many unrelated reasons. selective hearing and matthew 7:3 come to mind among some others.

but i finally decided to pick up velvet elvis again for the first time in years - and wouldn't you know that the end of the first chapter is ALL about mystery, questions, and it's correlation to truth.

you're speaking my love language, rob. i'm even in the mood for a new flow chart, but i'm also so tired. sounds much more complex than i had intially sketched out. i'll save it for the morning. anyone else want to take a stab at it before i butcher it again?

-ap.