2: A Salad Bowl
The American, the weird, and the right way to prepare and eat a salad.
THE CHURCH IS A SALAD: The early church was like a salad (made the right way). “God has designed the church — and this is the heart of Paul’s mission — to be a fellowship of difference and differents.” The church that Scot grew up in was a church of sameness (and mine as well).
CHURCH LIFE SHOULD MODEL THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. If the church is a mixed salad, then characteristics should be visible. Do we see them? Certainly not all of them. We have turned the salad into the American way—smothering it with salad dressing to make it all be the same. And if you are different, you ignored, or go AWOL. “The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similiarities and identicals. Instead of powering God’s grand social experiment, we’ve cut up God’s plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.”
INVISIBLE PEOPLE. Ralph Ellison’s novel “The Invisible Man” show what is like to be an African-American growing up in a white culture. Our churches are separated by ethnicity.
WHO IS INVISIBLE IN YOUR CHURCH? “...“the success of a church is first determined by how many invisible people become visible to those not like them.” Some examples of sets of people that might be invisible:
- Widows. A huge growing demographic (800,00 /year).
- Children. Young adults. Seniors.
- Races.
- Women.
- Poor.
- Inner city vs suburban.
- Uneducated.
- Gays and lesbians.
- Introverts.
Paul laid it out when he said in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, neither place nor free, … Why? “For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Gal. 3:28 "“There are different cultures, there are different socioeconomic classes, there are different genders, and there are different sexualities. And there are different educations, incomes, kinds of work done, and preferences in music and art, worship style and sermon length. And they are all together at the table, in the salad bowl, thrashing it out with one another. That thrashing it out is what the church is about — and that is what the Christian life is all about: learning to love one another, by the power of God’s grace, so we can flourish as the people of God in this world. The purpose of the church is to be the kingdom in the present world, and the Christian life is all about learning to live into that kingdom reality in the here and now.”
One Big Mosh Pit. A story illustrating how it could be.
The Challenge. If we are be a “fellowship of differents”, how should the church look. Six themes that will be explored.
- Grace
- Love
- Table
- Holiness
- Newness
- Flourishing
Quotes From: Scot McKnight. “A Fellowship of Differents.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/9W9u1.l