Part of our experience is this shaky, vaporous sense of self that we have that collapses all of life into the experiences of relationship. Obviously, life is composed of relationships; life is relational (none of us gave birth to ourselves!). Yet this preoccupation with relationship,with experience, seems something very new. I'm not sure overall that the Church at large is responding well -- we tend to ignore this "relational focus" or we collapse all of our Christian language and experience within it.

I've started reading several books (probably a bad sign). One is Philip Cushman's "Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy" recommended to me by my colleague at PLNU Brad Strawn. I've also picked up a new book by Vincent J. Miller, "Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture." Yet with these in mind, I'm also reading in the nineteenth century British Christian, Cardinal John Henry Newman. I'm reading Newman because it seems to me that he was ahead of our times in noticing the dangers already facing the church at that time, and advocating returning to the first five centuries of Christian history to develop a means of resistance against this encroaching modernity/consumerism -- of which it had not yet blossomed in its most pernicious form for the life of the church.

Hopefully over the next few weeks I can help weave my thoughts and reflections through these works, and share them with the blogosphere. I really think that for concrete, congregational life, we are here at one of the most crucial issues for witnessing to God's kingdom together by being made a holy people, a kingdom of priests through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Spirit.