Fight Club goes well as usual last night. Great dinner time with Rains and Chad then to some Starbucks. Followed by some time back at the Brownhouse with Rains and Glenn. I really love these guys. In my lifetime, I have never been so rich in "guy" friends like I am now. I am filthy rich in social captial. God is good.

We spoke of many issues but the one that resonated with me was the idea that postmodernism is really just hyper-modernism. Waxing eloquently about postmodernism and its effects on church used to be my forte about 4 years ago. I'm stupid enough now to think that church is really just about loving God and neighbor. However, at a worldview level, I recognize that I think and respond to the world as a native to postmodernity. But my flavor of it is still in submission to some absolutes from Scripture, Church Tradition and Rational Thinking before it finds its truth in only personal experience. (Rains and I find ourselves going back to Wesley's Quadralateral often for wisdom). I see a real danger in the future that as missional communities can function well in the prevalent worldview of postmodernism, ulitmately postmodernism says that truth is relative to the individual. The moral absolute is what the individual wants it to be. This destroys the authority of Scripture, the ancient and rich history of the Church and our ability to think rationally about moral issues. Kingdom Community as communicated in Scripture is not about individual wants and fancies. Here's me dropping a bomb, "if one does not believe in objective truth outside of themselves, they are not a part of Biblical Christianity". There you go, the Baptist has spoken with his true intolerant colors. So in the end, postmodernism is just the product of true modernism, its hyper-modernism. That is that you hold to a staunch view of absolute, and that absolute is your own whim without submission to the community and its discernment of truth through the Scriptures, rational thought and Ancient tradition. So if you are fond of referring yourself as "pomo", you may just be a "hy-mo" instead :)

And so I am also revisiting my idea of leadership in missional communities. Flat? kind of, but not exactly. Top-down administration? hecky naw. But there is a role for teacher, theological thinker, giver of godly wisdom . . . a true chieftain of the clan. Hmmm, I see this role as really needed. More later.

Stop and notice the Kingdom today.

peace,