ethans feet » Conversation http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet Fatherhood, Faith, Leadership(?!?) and whatever else is on my mind Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:05:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 © Jason@collegeparkchurchplant.com () Jason@collegeparkchurchplant.com() Fatherhood, Faith, Leadership(?!?) and whatever else is on my mind Jason@collegeparkchurchplant.com No no http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg ethans feet http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet 144 144 story fatigue http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet/2009/06/story-fatigue/ http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet/2009/06/story-fatigue/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:21:43 +0000 jason http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet/?p=61 Recently i purchased Mark Scandrettes book Soul Graffiti, and surprisingly i ended up having to put it down after a couple of chapters.  It’s not that i thought it was a bad book, or i disagreed with his points.  Its just that i feel like i have “story fatigue” or something.  I mean Mark’s life sounds awesome, and the things he is courageous enough to do, i envy.  But his life is not my life and its not even a realistic ideal for my life — our situations, gifts, and areas of greatest faithfulness are just too different.  And so reading it was just bringing me down.

At another time in my life, i’ll probably pick it back up and hopefully be able to get everything out of it that many of my friends have, but right now i can’t.

I post this not as a critique but because its making me begin to wonder about the limits of testimony, of “hearing each others stories” like we always talk about.  I don’t know, maybe testimonies are a first step and the next steps are process and application?  But whose responsibility is the processing and the applying?  Is it all in the listener or does the teller have some responsibility to bridge that gap as well?

I’m just wondering to myself, that’s all.

]]> http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet/2009/06/story-fatigue/feed/ 1 My trip to London… http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet/2009/03/my-trip-to-london%e2%80%a6/ http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet/2009/03/my-trip-to-london%e2%80%a6/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:48:00 +0000 jason http://www.collegeparkchurchplant.com/ethansfeet/2009/03/my-trip-to-london%e2%80%a6/ Several years back Tara and I took a trip to London. At the time I was much more, “Yay America” than I am now. But I remember thinking, pretty much the moment I got there, that you know maybe other countries know what they’re doing. All of a sudden I began to see the world as a place of dialogue and cooperation where no country, even my own, had all the answers. I know that seems obvious, and had you asked me before I am sure I would have said the right thing, but somehow being there made it true to me in a new way. And it’s not like I had any deep political conversations with any locals. Just being there was enough.

When I first became a Christian I was very much involved in a very unique, successful (and now somewhat notorious) church plant up in Seattle. The attitude there was very much we are starting this church because every other church has it wrong. And that was pretty much my attitude. That was, at least, until I went to seminary. At seminary, studying with folks from all kinds of traditions (Baptist to Unitarian) I realized that though I didn’t agree with all of them on everything, they all had something to contribute.

My view of the church, like my view of the world when I went to London, became a place of dialogue and cooperation where no church, even my own, had all the answers.

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