Shared Lives

I had a good conversation yesterday about how a large church can facilitate discipleship for young families. From experience I can attest to the challenges young families face. For our family most week nights are out. With both of us working full-time both Kristina and I are usually exhausted by the time we get home. We barely have enough time to feed the kids before they go to bed.

Weekends are a challenge as well. I usually spend most of Saturday studying and our Saturday evenings are one of the few blocks of time we know we can set aside for family time. Sunday mornings we try and get to church bad go to the service and the kids go to Sunday school. We don’t like hanging around for two services because we don’t think its fair for our kids to go through the same lesson twice.

I think many young families are in a similar situation. The thought of making extra time for anything other than family is daunting. So how can the church develop discipleship programs to help young families.

First I think the church needs to create spaces for young families to connect with one another. Particularly I larger larger churches, young families may not know other families, so the thought of entering a small group with strangers may not seem encouraging. By creating spaces for these families to come together they may have the opportunity to cultivate relationships with other young families.

As these families begin to cultivate relationships they may see that they are developing relationships with people they who have a lot in common with them. When given an opportunity by the church they would he more likely to enter into a small group setting with these families.

The church can then provide resources and training for these groups, structuring them in a way that has a lot of flexibility and focuses on building deeper relationships.

As these families learn more about each other they may get to a place where they learn to share their lives with each other. By sharing their lives together these famines may not look at discipleship as another thing to do; instead they can grow together challenging each other to live a life with Christ as their center.

What happened to the Image of God?

Athanasius writes,

“Men having turned from contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death.  Instead of remaining in the state, which God had created them, they were in the process of becoming corrupted entirely and death had them completely under its dominion.”[1]

Since reading On the Incarnation, I understood that traces of the Image of God are in all of humanity.  The image I use to describe it is a mirror, which became tarnished over time.  The dirt and soot cover the mirror distorting the view.  Unless we completely clean the surface, we will not be able to see clearly an image of ourselves.  In a similar way, Adam’s sin tarnished the Image of God within all humanity.  With a remnant of the Image of God within humanity, we are still capable in small ways of reflecting the Image although imperfectly.  This is why we see non-disciples act in positive ways towards others and towards the rest of creation.

Barth’s Church Dogmatics is causing me to rethink this.  He writes,

“The Image of God is not just, as it is said, destroyed apart from a few relics; it is totally annihilated.”[2]

It appears that Barth is more concerned with God’s reconciliation with humanity.  With the Image of God completely annihilated, humanity no longer has a point of contact with God, since Adam’s sin severed that.  Therefore the only possible point of connection now can come from the Word of God, Jesus Christ.  Through Christ death and resurrection, God was able to be reconciled with his creation.  Barth argues that it is only through faith in the Word of God that we have the Image of God restored.

I don’t know if I am ready to commit fully to Barth’s take on it.  I think he makes a good argument concerning the need for reconciliation.  Athanasius does make a strong argument for the need of the Incarnation of Jesus.  His argument centers around the need for humanity to learn how to restore the Image of God.  Jesus becomes the epitome of what it means to be truly human.  Additionally, he argues that Jesus, being God, was the only one able to bring about a sacrifice that was worthy bringing reconciliation between God and humanity.

I need some more time to study this topic.  Maybe my journey through Barth’s Dogmatics will give me more clarity on the subject.  Let me know if you have any thoughts.

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[1] St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation. (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977), 29

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Volume 1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part 1. (Hendrickson: Peabody, MA, 1975), 238.

Welcome to Nasa Community

I am glad that you have found Nasa Community.

Nasa is a Hebrew word for “journey”.  Often it describes the journey of the Israelites as they traveled through the Wilderness, discovering what it meant to be the People of God.

The Israelites, having spent 400 years in Egypt, while demonstrating a fear of the God of their ancestors became immersed in the Egyptian culture.  They may have incorporated the worship of Egyptian gods to their own worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Even though the Egyptians oppressed them, they continually grumbled to Moses asking him why God would take them out of the land they knew to suffer in the Wilderness.

Why did God put them in the Wilderness?  First, it does not appear to be God’s intent to have them suffer in the Wilderness.  Shortly after they set out from Mount Sinai, God has Moses send spies to the land they were promised.  After hearing the report of the spies, the people became afraid.  They worried that the taking of the land may result in their demise.  Second, the Israelites demonstrated they did not trust God.  Even with all the miracles they witnessed, they did not believe that God would be successful in defeating the people of Canaan.  Their distrust in God led to forty years traveling the Wilderness.

During these forty years, the generation that lived in Egypt died off.  As promised by God they were not going to enter the Promised Land.  The Israelites that entered were the Israelites that had spent most of their lives in the Wilderness, learning to trust God.  While in the Wilderness, they learned how to be the People of God.  They would have seen God as the one who provides their food for them in the morning and their water from rocks.  Their elders would have told them stories of how God delivered them from Egyptian slavery.  With the institution of the Law, these Israelites learned to worship God through their obedience to the Law, their observance of the Holy Days and their participation in the sacrificial system.  The Wilderness would serve as a tool to transform them into a people who trusted God.

In a similar way, those who commit their lives to being disciple of Jesus must learn to be the people of God under the New Covenant.  We all carry with us the baggage of our lives before committing to Jesus.  Therefore, we can all expect in this journey to have trials of many kinds.  Through these trials, God works to shape our lives.  Like the Israelites, we need to learn to trust God with our lives, by learning to align our will to His will.

One of the goals of this site is to invite you to journey with me.  I hope to discover others along the way to help contribute to this site on a regular basis.  If you have an interest in writing about the theology, the bible, church history or ethics, please let me know.  For the rest of you, I hope you check back often and dialogue with us.  Maybe through it all we can discover what it means to be the People of God in our world today.