isnt she beautiful 1.0

so yes it has been an amazing day. and we’ve only heard rob once. ha! we headed over to mars hill for the morning session and dove right in. no music, one opening prayer and we were off. i was hoping to hear the band here…hopefully tonight or tomorrow…anyways…

the first session rob spoke about the whole idea of the Eucharist – where the word comes from and how we embody the Eucharist as pastors/leaders in the church. the Eucharist is Christ’s body broken and blood poured out for us. he was helping us understand that when we feel that deep ache in our bones after preaching, etc it is because we are imitating Christ in our body being broken and blood being poured out. you hear people talk all the time about being ‘fed’ at church – and rob was saying that the feeding comes from something – namely us – we are giving off what we have to the people and they are receiving this.

rob said that he thinks the church only functions when people let their bodies be broken and the blood poured out. paul talks about this in corinthians with the dying and living language – and this starts to make more sense when we read it through the eucharist lense. maybe in 1 cor 11 – the passage we typically read for communion -’everytime to eat the bread and drink this cup’ is more along the lines of being poured out and broken – maybe the ‘do THIS in remembrance of me’ isnt just the literal bread and wine – but it is our embodiment of the eucharist – being like Christ in emptying ourselves.

make sense? hopefully – just trying to communicate some info for the brothas not here hanging with us…

we dove also into this whole idea of church being blessed to be a blessing. here is a great quote from this morning:

the church is the only organization that exists for the benefit of its NON-members

so great!! and also a question he posed was – if your church was taken away from your community/city/etc. who would protest? (a heavy thought none the less)

so we must ask ourselves – ‘how can the church be a eucharist?’ how can we love. period. how can we pour out ourselves to help mend everything back together? and the power of the eucharist is in its weakness (1 cor 9:19ff). it is about the path of descent. dying to our ego. so that we value humanity over perfection. we must reject the cult of cool. and this must be in our own context. we cant commodify the eucharist. it is not a product to be sold. we must dive into this mystery for these people, in this place, at this time – in our context.

so those are some thoughts from the morning session… looking forward for what’s to come!

~ by jda on January 22, 2007.