Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Dave Lindrooth: "We need to love the hell out of people."

I highly recommend that you check out Rev. Dave Lindrooth's blog, Dave Lindrooth's Church Growth Blog: A gathering place for support and mentorship in New Church Evangelism (www.newchurchweblog.org). I haven't had a chance to explore everything on his blog so I can't give you lots of recommendations of what to look at but I recommend that you start by watching the 4 minute video on his most recent post, "Let's Ramp Up the Love in this Church".

Monday, October 19, 2009

Perspective on the Proprium

Just recently I was celebrating the fact that I'm not the only New Church blogger who updates regularly and now it's been almost a month since my last post. Sigh...

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that Rev. Clark Echols has recently posted a bunch of new stuff to his blog, Clark Echols' Swedenborgian Opinions (glendalenewchurch.blogspot.com). I've only had the chance to read one his new posts so far so that's the one I'm going to tell you about.

"Gold and Shadow" is a post about making sense of and dealing with what we have from the Lord and our selfish stuff. "Gold" and "shadow" are both terms from men's work and Clark relates them to the New Church concept of the proprium. (Incidentally, in the passage he quotes, he uses a new translation that uses the word autonomy for proprium; what do you think?)

I really appreciated Clark's perspective on how to deal with our darker, proprial stuff. Here's a teaser:
I realized the emptiness produced by a dilemma. On the one hand, if I label my shadow as a worthless piece of "refuse" (trash) I will have to lie to you in order to hide this part of myself because, of course, I want to look good and and I want you to like me (which you wouldn't if you saw what I was REALLY like). On the other, if I don't lie and show you that I am a worthless piece of refuse, again, I have come to believe, you will see me for what I am and will reject me and not like me.

The way out of the dilemma is to....