Sacred Space

Jana(my fiancee) and I visited Stephen's church last night. They are expanding to grow along with the membership and so Stephen is getting a bigger youth room. We talked for awhile about how he'll set up the new room once it's finished. Stephen talked about creating Sacred Space for his youth.

Why am I thinking about this? Meet my youth and you'll understand. They have no concept that Wednesday nights or Sundays at church should be any different from the rest of the time in their lives. They show up, chat, talk on their cell phones, do homework, ect... It's been seven months since they had a youth director and in that time church time became hang out time. So to reintroduce the concept of spiritual formation to them I've got to get them to understand that church is supposed to be a little different from the rest of the week. Part of that is going to be changing the youth room from a comfortable hang out and more of a space for us to meet with God as a community.

So here's my question- What should sacred space for a community look like? What are the theological reasons behind your thoughts on sacred space? Anyone?

Adam

Empire Assimilation?

A big discussion in the past years in many circles including Emergent has been what form of evangelism can be put in the place of an Empire/ Colonial model. Working from models of moving away from Empire and Colonialism, I cannot help but think in opposites, I know that this is not always the best way to formulate thoughts. When I think of the opposite of Empire and Colonialism I move towards the notion of OT assimilation. Relatively recent scholarship in the OT has produced that instead of a conquering nomadic tribe the Jews were found to assimilate into the cultures that they encountered. They wrote, according to recent scholarship, their accounts of their history in a Post Factum form. They embellished their stories and then became the triumphant forces that have funded our Western Colonialism. What if we adopted a form of assimilation?
It could not be a pure form of assimilation it must be an adapted reverse assimilation. Members of the empire will leave the empire embrace the margins and assimilate into the margins. They will go and ask how can we do God? There are examples of this all the way from Joshua to Jesus to Patrick to Francis. If the Emergent culture truly believes that it does not have all or even most of the answers then it will not have to fortify, as it’s forefathers of the empire did, and defend the tenants. Those who journey from the empire, not as ambassadors of the empire but refugees, must not feel that they have to defend that from which they came, if they had to do that they should have stayed within the walls of the fortification.
One of the roles of the traveler is to find their God with in the settings of that context in which they intentionally encounter. Eventually the margins will cease to be the foreign minority and become a member in the salad of a God seeking humanity. (I intentionally do not use a melting pot metaphor because we will fall back into the Empire motif of one majority group) A major question that could arise is one of the integrity of the theology produced by assimilation. If we are united by practices and not theology then I believe that problem will not be avoided but would rather answer itself. Scary, yes. Possible, maybe. Worth trying, I think so.
Stephen