Holistic

Excerpts from Haircut and anthropology professor Sunday post by Dan Kimball

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So, the life of mission is an adventure and this teaching series that ends tried to paint a holistic portrait of what that looks like. We used these diagrams [note: see post link above for diagrams] below in the series.

We start with Jesus as He is the head of the church and the reason we are in existence and on mission.

Then we are Worshipers of God foremost. Worship will continue for all eternity. But we worship in Community - we are not meant to be in isolation. However, if we are only remain worshipers in community, we can slowly become inward focused singing-happy-shiny people who exist in our own Christian world. We may escape the happy-shiny-world to go do a service project every so often, but we run back into our happy-shiny worshiping community world.

That is why a worshiping community needs to be in the world on Mission as a lifestyle. But if we are on worshipers on mission who don't have Community nor are growing Theologically - then we can be missionally passionate, but burn out since we have no community to support us or we can be shallow if we aren't growing in Scripture. Another off-balance approach would be if we are in Community and Theologians - but we aren't in the world on mission and in the lives of people. So then we stay inward focused and over time we can become mean Bible-heads.

Now being a Bible-head is a really good thing as we need to saturate our minds with Scripture - so our hearts melt in worship to God and in love for people as Jesus said were the two greatest commands. I absolutely love apologetics too and my largest section of my bookshelf is books on apologetics by great and insightful apologetics writers. But if we only hang with each other that isn't the point of apologetics. And if we only hang out with each other, we slowly can become Christians with a lot of head knowledge but we don't have much love for people. Some of the meanest Christians I have ever met ironically were ones who knew the Bible really well. So knowing the Bible is not about simply gaining knowledge but for transforming our hearts to be worshipers of God whom loves the people He loves.

It needs to be holistic is what we have been trying to teach. Worshiping.. Community... Missional... Theologians... with Jesus as our head of the church and why we are doing what

we do.

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