Thursday, August 13, 2009

Looking Back

This passage, from Marcia Ford's Traditions of the Ancients, resonates strongly with me in terms of my interest in the Ancient/Future practices of the church.
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"We're so sure of what it means to be Christian - how we're supposed to behave and how we're supposed to worship - that we rarely venture out of our spiritual comfort zones. The beauty of the early church, by contrast, lies in the very fact that there was no comfort zone, no carefully crafted formula for living out the Christian life.

No one had come along yet to tell believers that they should "dress nice" for the 11:00 a.m. service on Sunday. In fact, no one bothered to tell the desert dwellers that they should bathe once in a while; it would have done no good, because they considered bathing to be sinfully self-centered.

No one had told them yet that they needed to schedule a daily quiet time and spend fifteen minutes each morning at their devotions, nor had they been told that they should create an ongoing praryer list. For many, the whole of their interior life was their "quiet time," and they saw every moment of their lives as their devotional time as unceasing praryer to God."

3 comments:

Alan said...

yeah, I'm not really a fan of "status quo" -- in most things, actually.

Lisa Biggs Crum said...

I like this post. Wouldn't it be nice if we just lived in the power of the Holy Spirit instead of sitting around trying to agree on what it means to live in community, or as "Christians" or whatever?

lorie said...

Great quote. Trying to "do Christianity" from a cultural perspectve messes up so many people, myself included.