No one should get puffed up but all should go -Jesus said so, argue with Him.

You just give people excuses to sit on the butts while the world never gets to see Jesus through our going. And, please don’t tell me about your church outreach program. That isn’t what we mean nor what Jesus meant by living incarnationally in the world.

You are right -we all know the purposes of the Great Commission and God’s Manifold purpose throught the entirety of Scripture to “Be fruitful and multiply” are most important! Jesus is most important and for us His purposes must be most important in all we do.

Hope you enjoyed your locusts and honey. Now tell me who you touched this week when you went “going” to show the world who Jesus is. Can you please tell me? The important thing is doing the important thing – “Be fruitful and multiply.”

Too direct or pointed, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

Besides, everybody knows who’s the most important. Now where did I put my locusts and honey? It’s lunch time.

Art and the act of creative expression is as much a part of Christ-like-ness as love or faith.

Without Christ-like creative, artistic expression – the church has not fully embodied its’ mission, nor will it fully realize its’ potential to share the Message.

Jason

Keep plowing ahead but don’t forget to take us with you.

Blessings .. hope to meet along the way
David Fitch

I noticed a stream in the comments here and I know I’m stuck on a few notes like a broken record. But why does it always happen, I mean we seem to gravitate back to the place of the “event” or “come and see gathering” or “church” in the institutional location sense. The post is great but our dialogue always seems to go back to how we can make “the church” better and better. Nothing wrong with making it better. Something is wrong if “the church thing” is more important than “being the Church” as missionaries in our own communities. Can we ever be missional and ever hope to fulfill the purposes of the Great Commission if the main thing isn’t being missionaries in the world? We say we are missional but I am still looking for it. Do we really need more for us in the “artistic expression” or does the world need more of us as “artistic expressions” of lives changed by Jesus. I long for Christ followers to use expressions of artistic beauty to show the world who Jesus is and what He can mean to them.

Having said that (please don’t throw me in the barrel of negativity) can some of you help me figure out how we can use this tool “artistic beauty” in a missional “missionary” way in the world.

Thant’s funny. It sounds like you and I had a very similar miscommunication as Gordon and I. I had simply commented further in agreement with Gordon on what he had already said, but in a bit of a different way, and it sounds like you were doing something ver similar in relation to my comment…So I guess I’m with you. You know the work of lots of folks about whom I know either nothing or very little however…and it interests me…

Jason

I have a friend who is deeply found of concretus, as opposed to abstract, which is to remove from context and “objectify” as if that were possible. In that sense I think the sermon has largely become dysfunctional, and the things that Raschke or Clapp say about our overdependence on words and propositions then apply.

I don’t know if Descartes had an aesthetic theory, but I doubt that he did. But my thought is that we all inherit this world view that is centered on the Cartesian self, and in order to move beyond it we have to talk about rootedness, incarnation, context, wholeness, integration, and beauty. I’m with Ellul in that sense, that there can be no real separation between means and ends.

David, Dorothy Sayers work on the arts is “The Mind of the Maker,” a great read, and possibly the earliest argument in the last century for recovering story as a vehicle for truthy.