Starting points, we all have starting points. This is one of the many realizations I've had while studying at Fuller. Perhaps this is my simplistic view of postmodernism. Our contexts, experiences, emotions, travels, reading and relationships all shape how we interpret the world, the Scriptures and live as people between "the world" and "the book."

I've started to realize the world and its structures narrate a certain "truth"Â? and yet the Scriptures give us a different and new story. It's a story that invites us to submit and be held by the One who is Truth. Therefore as we follow Jesus, our speech and actions and convictions reflect that the God who holds the world together is also holding us too. We don't hold God. God holds us.

Perhaps our church communities are given the invitation to follow this God and participate in repairing the world. This is a call to centered Jesus' call to follow, not into church buildings, but into existing communities. Our churches can only do this when we ask different and more incisive questions than the world around us.

We can ask: What is God doing in our community? Who is our community? What do we need to rethink to become more and more like the community that reflects the triune God? How do we need to restructure? Do we need to deconstruct anything for restructuring to happen?

We can do this because we believe in the God of which the biblical narratives speak! We believe the Spirit dwells in us and the Scriptures to be living and active. We believe, so that we may know and this knowing is a process, a journey, of recovering the call of Jesus in order to discover what God is doing in the world today. God's actions do not just mimic popular culture, they penetrate in a creative way that goes beyond commodification of a message and instead form a people, communities.

Too often my church experience has been one of accommodation to fads and cultural fixes rather than deep reflection and action that moves whole communities towards a new way of being in the world, together. If we just implement the new"---- driven" program then we'll be successful. I'm convinced God wants local communities to create their own distinctive ways of being church. As the late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin spoke of our congregations needing to be a hermeneutic of the Gospel in a pluralistic society that is full of folk Christianity, asking new questions and creating on a local level invites our communities to both critique and embrace the culture we find ourselves in locally. The question which moves us in this direction is: How, as church, do we offer an alternative vision of life rooted in the story of Israel and brought into fullness in the way of Jesus?

My calling is to participate in forming new church communities. I guess it is commonly called "church planting". Fuller has not given answers on how this is done. It has been a place where I get to think and reflect with fellow travelers, followers of Jesus, who are also looking at and responding to how the church can be made new. Theological study at Fuller has allowed me to muse in a direction of asking better questions and in the process discovering a few answers.

Perhaps these answers (and questions) are the ferment for the prophetic future of the church?

Current Reading: How (Not) to Speak of God (Peter Rollins)