Community Theology
If you’ve read Pete Rollins‘ latest book, “The Orthodox Heretic, and other impossible tales,” then you’ll know how challenging that book can be mentally. There’s something powerful about Rollins use of parables to really mess with you, and really screw up your day. From the first parable on, there is plenty of challenging material there for you to spend a lifetime mulling over. Instead of a lifetime, I spent about two days on it and then continued on with life as usual.
My cohort recently launched what we’re terming “Pints and Parables, The Orthodox Heretics.” We had our first meeting last Tuesday, where six of us gathered and read through a couple parables then spent some time letting those work around in our minds, and this time instead of spending just a couple days having the parables bother me, they’ve been playing around in my mind since I left that meeting. Something about communal theology (and yes, I would term this theology) changes the game, to use a churchy word, it provides “accountability.”
Beyond just the accountability, community theology brings different perspectives, and very hard hitting points to whatever the group is studying together. One of the most powerful moments of the night came when we were exploring the Parable that says:
Christianity is illegal, is there enough evidence to convict you?
One of the members of the group asked the question “When is the last time you were arrested for your beliefs?” In the vein the Claiborne’s, Paul of Tarsus, and MLK’s, when was the last time you were arrested for your beliefs? When was the last time you stood up to the “empire” for the oppressed?
From my personal reading of the book, I was never hit that hard with such a question, yet the first time I read the book communally, I was hit with one of the most humbling questions I’ve been hit with. Honestly, it’s been bouncing around my mind ever since, almost tauntingly. I’ve never been arrested for my beliefs, the most I’ve done to stand up against the ‘empire’ is sit down when the anthem and “God bless america” are sung at baseball games.
If you’ve never studied a book in community, if you’ve never done community theology, I can’t recommend it enough. We (as Christians) were meant to do theology communally, we were meant to be a communal grouping, and it’s something we’ve lost in Western Christianity.
On this topic, today saw the beginnings of “Emergent Outliers” and online Emergent Cohort. Launched by Blake Huggins and Gideon Addington, it looks to have a few of my favorite online voices gathered together to do communal theology. If you’re interested in that project, head over here and check it out/sign up.
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