If you know me, you know I like a good metaphor. The more this metaphor can show or explain and the more it connects with reality, the more I like it.
One of my favorite metaphor wants is for the church. I'm always looking for new ones, mainly because the ones I have now do an OK job, but I'm still left wanting. With that said, I think this is the closest I'm going to get to perfection, even if it has to go into scandalous territory to get there.
From a man named Dean Sharp:
"It’s all about sex.
Sex is an obsession, a friction, a movement in which lovers both lose and find themselves in one another. The groom initiates, the bride responds and opens herself to him. Sex is complete focus, exposure, and intimacy.
Sex is a metaphor (perhaps the most powerful one in existence) for worship, which is why most love songs are only worship hymns in disguise. And what comes of it? What is the result of the friction and intensity of this symphony? Crescendo. The end result of sexual intimacy is the outflow, the overflow, of the seeds of new life. Sex makes babies. Do we think this is just a coincidence?
Mission is the outflow, the overflow, of becoming infatuated with Him again. I tire of the discussion missing the mark … modern, postmodern, futurist, traditional, emergent … whatever. The ONLY reason the church stops making babies is because we’ve stopped making love to the Bridegroom. That’s the birds and the bees of spiritual reality.
In the ongoing cloning debate, my real question is a completely metaphysical one. I have no doubt that soon we’ll be able to reproduce a human body without sexual biology. I’m just wondering if we’ll discover that we cannot produce a human soul without sexual intimacy. The metaphor is such a primal one, I could be wrong but, I seriously doubt God will be willing to give it up.
Churches also play around with cloning. Despite our new methodologies (spiritual technology, which I love) the church has yet to successfully reproduce the spirit of Christ in bodies that are not born of that intimacy.
And I don’t think we ever will, or should ever want to."
original post: flowerdust via finding Monsuun
After reading this, it left me with a great desire to see Vox Church grow and mature as a church-planting church, "making babies" for the Kingdom. Amen.
scandalous metaphor
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2 comments:
I think that is a truly perfect metaphor. Once it is understood, the scandalous part fades away into something more like guilt mixed with passion to change.
What a wonderful metaphor. I have never heard anything like but, but it is so true. It definately has me thinking...
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