pat loughery

I love the below quote from Brian McLaren’s newest, The Last Word and the Word After That:

If you’re not familiar with this trilogy, it’s a fictional narrative in which the characters together interact about the things of faith and life and culture. No one position is likely Brian’s, but they all serve to continue a dialog about important and interesting issues. I’ll blog more about he trilogy as soon as I finish this book up in the next couple of days and get some time to focus on it.

“I think we’d all say that the purpose of the church – at least, of the post-Protestant church in our way of thinking – is to spiritually form people to love God and others and themselves so that they can live life to the full in God’s kingdom, in the way of Jesus. We want to change the world, but that requires people who learn to be the revolution they want to see in the world.
[…]
“Post-protestant churches see everything as spiritual formation – everything worth doing, that is. Public worship is an exercise in group spiritual formation through rituals like the Eucharist and preaching. Fellowship is an exercise in the spiritual practices of community. The success of a church isn’t measured by the numbers who attend but by the formation of people as agents of the kingdom of God…”

Very interesting book, this one. It fits well into the previous members of the trilogy.