In a meeting a few months ago Jay, Vince and I sat down with our friend Lissa (who is awesome) from Union Theological Seminary and came up with a few questions. We don’t necessarily know the proper answers to these questions, but i though it might be interesting to share them with the online Revolution and get your thoughts.
What does it mean to “LOVE” as a church?
What does it mean as a congregation to love your church?
and for bonus…..
What is the worship of Revolution?
Does Revolution have a Liturgy? What is it?
Remember, these are ideas and opinions. Just curious.
I can’t wait to hear your thoughts.
Viva la Revolution! 
Forgive the early morning nature of these comments, I will try and be coherent.
To me, loving your church means that your church is a place where you want to go every Sunday, where it doesn’t feel like going is some sort of obligation. Loving your church is when you come out of a sermon feeling better or wiser then when you came in.
As a congregation, we can love our church by opening our hearts to the message, and not being quick to judge if there is something you disagree with. It’s about having a community where disagreements don’t break relationships, it makes them stronger.
Loving our church also has to do with being positive examples of our church in the larger community. Not being judgmental, listening, choosing our words carefully, holding out tongues. Generally, we must project the image that we’re cool, easy to get along with people, so we must belong to a cool church. To love our church, we need to be living examples of the good works the church has accomplished.
And money. Pastors have to eat too. And the church does cool outreach programs, so it’s important to support the church whenever you can. Read the section in “Blue Like Jazz” about tithing.
I believe there was another question or two, but I’ve said enough. Orange juice time.
Thanks for the shout out and for coming up to Union last week… was amazing to have Revolution in the house! More on the excellent questions about LOVE later!
A few of my fave quotes to add to the mix:
“Justice is what love looks like in public,” Cornel West.
“Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk.”
-Carter Heyward
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
-Reinhold Niebuhr
Really good questions. And thanks for posting the messages every week and keeping this blog updated, it’s cool to hear the perspectives that Jay and Vince bring when they speak.
What does it mean to “LOVE” as a church?
This is a huge question. Love is what the church is, it’s what the church does, if it doesn’t love it isn’t the church. I think when people come together who have individually experienced the immesne love of God in their life there is great possibility. That love needs to spill over, from one person to another, from one community to another, and from the collective church body to the world.
There is also an important social and political dimension to loving as the church. We are the body of Christ, an extension of his hands and feet, what that means i can’t even fathom, other than to say that we need to love more recklessly. When we begin calling people out of the Kingdoms of the world and into the Kingdom of God, that’s where we become the church persecuted. And that clashing of Kingdoms is part of what the church is supposed to represent. But it all comes from love, it’s important never to deviate from loving people the way that Christ loves us.
What does it mean as a congregation to love your church?
I think this means simply loving God, if the church is the body of Christ and if we are that body it means loving God and loving eachother. Loving eachother is hard for us to grasp sometimes, when we come into true community with one another, everything that we own, becomes everybody’s. These things fly in the face of Western culture. Loving eachother, by extension, means constructing new ways to live in a world gone mad. Presenting an alternative to the Empires of this world.