Who is God?

Some paragraphs from a nice review article by that much and unjustly
maligned man Rowan Williams:

   Classical theology maintains that God is indeed different from the
    universe. To say this is to suggest a radical difference between one
    agent and another in the world. God is not an object or agent over
    against the world; God is the eternal activity of unconstrained love, an
    activity that activates all that is around God is more intimate to the
    world than we can imagine, as the source of activity or energy itself;
    and God is more different than we can imagine, beyond category and kind
    and definition.
 
   Thus God is never competing for space with agencies
   in the universe. When God acts, this does not mean that a hole is torn in
   the universe by an intervention from outside, but more that the
   immeasurably diverse relations between God's act and created acts and
   processes may be more or less transparent to the presence of the
   unconstrained love that sustains them all.
 
   The doctrine of the incarnation does not claim that the 'theistic'
   God (i.e. a divine individual living outside the universe) turns
   himself into a member of the human race, but that this human
   identity, Jesus of Nazareth, is at every moment, from conception
   onwards, related in such a way to God the Word (God's eternal
   self-bestowing and self-reflecting) that his life is unreservedly and
   uniquely a medium for the unconstrained love that made all things to
   be at work in the world to remake all things. Jesus embodies God the
   Word or God the Son as totally as (more totally than) the musician in
   performance embodies the work performed.

on "doing" church.

One thing that gets on your Black Sheep's goat (n.b. reference to Matthew 25 there!) is talk about "doing" church. It usuall crops in phrases like "in our society we need to find different ways of doing church".

I came across a very nice article about all that this morning ... You can find it here - the Sydney Anglicans site is well worth a visit.

But I add the bulk of the article below for those who don't like to travel ....

Archie Poulos writes:-

During the boom of the Church Growth movement in the 1980s we were called to move our churches from being “modalities” to become “sodalities”. A modality is a collection of people that exist as a mode of being. You belong by just being. Families are modalities. A nation is a modality. Membership requires no or very little commitment, you are part of it just by existing.

Modalities are about “being”.

Sodalities are like partnerships. You have to apply and work hard to join. You join to engage in a task that must be done, and it requires a high level of commitment. Sodalities are about “doing”.

There are huge advantages in being a sodality. Stagnation is overcome. Everyone is involved. All members are working and pulling in the same direction to reach a goal.

The problem in making church a sodality is that the Bible describes church as much more like a modality. The images of church are that of family, where relationships are significant. What matters most for us, as an individual in a church, is that the belong to Christ in a relationship forged by his substitutionary death for us, not what I contribute to the outcome.

I don’t want to say the existence of churches doesn’t achieve anything. Things are achieved by the good functioning of the church family.

As an example take the Chappell family. All three brothers played cricket for Australia. As children they played cricket in the back yard, which is what families do. I am certain their functioning in this way as a family also made them better cricketers. I am also sure part of their success was the athletic DNA they inherited. The modality of their family resulted in them being outstanding sportsman. But they weren’t family in order to become great sportsmen.

The challenge facing us in church is not to do more, or to do it better, but to shape our being a church family together in such a way that we all become white hot in our love and service of Jesus.