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What Once Was Should Now Be What Is

© Blake Atwood

I've just gotten home from church.

(Check out our website, debuting on February 2, 2002 at 2pm, or so I'm told. Here's the link: tnova.org)

Our pastor did an incredibly cool thing that was somewhat out of the ordinary. After the music and a short clip from the Matthew Video, he walked to the front of the church and simply told us all to follow him. So the entire church (around 150 people) got up and followed him outside where we all sat down in a large semicircle. Here our pastor continued his sermon.

I thought it was great. I felt somewhat like the people that lived during Jesus' time must have felt like. (Our pastor isn't Jesus, and he'd be the first one to tell you that.) But it really felt like the Sermon on the Mount or something of that nature. If you can imagine a scene like that, then you can imagine what our "church service" was like tonight.

I offer this personal example to point to a fact that many "postmodern" Christian thinkers have pointed out before, and that is the notion of an AncientFuture faith.

We "pomos" want something real. Postmodern theory is heavy on deconstruction. I would venture to say that postmodern Christians (or Christians of the postmodern persuasion) don't want to so much deconstruct the church, but to de-emphasize the importance of tradition simply for the sake of tradition. In other words, we want a church like you see in Acts 2 (They had just started up and had no "churchy" traditions, so to speak, to begin with). Yet we still want video presentations, connection to each other through the Internet, and music they couldn't quite make in the days of Jesus. We want the ancient and the future.

We want what was and what will be to meet us at what is.

We want to learn from the past while looking towards the future without forgetting where we are now.

We want to know the God of Abraham, the God of Jesus, the God of us, and the God of our children to come.

We want to know what it must have been like to see and hear Jesus firsthand.

We want to know what it feels like to see and hear Him today.

We want to be prepared for the day that can't come soon enough when we will in fact see and hear Him.

We desire to know the "I AM" of all ages.

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