Reimagining Spiritual Formation : A Week in the Life of an Experimental Church

by Doug Pagitt and the Solomon's Porch Community

• ISBN13: 9780310256878
• ISBN10: 0310256879
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Harpercollins Christian Pub

Summary

Reimagining Spiritual Formation isn't about quick-fix methods or bulleted, how-to lists. And it's certainly not a dry lecture about a heady theological topic. Instead this book is about striving, about trying, about experimenting with the idea that the old ways of approaching spiritual formation may not be the only avenues toward living lives in harmony with God in our day. Inside these pages you'll spend a full week with Solomon's Porch-a holistic, missional, Christian community in Minneapolis, Minnesota-and get a front row seat at the gatherings, meetings, and meals. Along the way, you'll also discover what spiritual formation looks like in a church community that's moves beyond education-based practices by including worship, physicality, dialogue, hospitality, belief, creativity, and service as means toward spiritual formation rather than mere appendices to it. Specifically, you'll glimpse into the lives of six people from Solomon's Porch and track their growth through their journals as they wrestle with various approaches to spiritual development. Reimagining Spiritual Formation is ideal for thinkers, pastors, church leaders, and anyone else seeking fresh ways of experiencing life with God.

Author Biography

Doug Pagitt is pastor of Solomon's Porch -- a holistic, missional, Christian community -- in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He's also part of the leadership of Emergent

Table of Contents

Prologue. The Story of the Book	11	(15)
Introduction to the Journals	15	(2)
We Dream of a Church Where...	17	(2)
A New Approach for a New Age	19	(18)
An Uncertain Future	37	(12)
Spiritual Formation Through Worship (Sunday)	49	(18)
Spiritual Formation Through Physicality (Monday)	67	(18)
Spiritual Formation Through Dialogue (Tuesday)	85	(16)
Spiritual Formation Through Hospitality (Wednesday)	101	(12)
Spiritual Formation Through Belief (Thursday)	113	(14)
Spiritual Formation Through Creativity (Friday)	127	(16)
Spiritual Formation Through Service (Saturday)	143	(14)
Experimentation and the Long Haul	157	(6)
Photo Credits	163

Excerpts

Reimagining Spiritual Formation: A Week in the Life of an Experimental Church Copyright © 2004 by emergentYS emergentYS Books, 300 South Pierce Street, El Cajon, CA 92020, are published by Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Avenue SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49530 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pagitt, Doug, 1966- Reimagining spiritual formation : a week in the life of an experimental church / by Doug Pagitt. p. cm. ISBN 0-310-25687-9 (pbk.) 1. Spiritual formation. I. Title. BV4511 .P27 2004 277.76'579--dc22 2003016095 Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version (North American Edition). Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other-except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Web site addresses listed in this book were current at the time of publication. Please contact Youth Specialties via e-mail ([e-mail]) to report URLs that are no longer operational and replacement URLs if available. Edited by Carla Barnhill and Linnea Lagerquist Cover design by Dustin Black Interior design by Burnkit Printed in the United States of America 04 05 06 07 08 09 / DC / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 A NEW APPROACH FOR A NEW AGE Welcome to Solomon's Porch. It is truly an honor to invite you into a week in the life of our community. We hope you will be our guest and find friends and kindred spirits with whom you can journey in the pursuit of life in harmony with God. Let me make a few clarifications from the beginning. The intention of this book is not to tell you how you can have an effective church in the 21st century. I'm not laying out a how-to guide for reaching "target audiences." I won't even try to convince you that you'd be better off having a church with the practices, intentions, and values of Solomon's Porch. My desire in writing this book is to provide a descriptive glimpse at the efforts of our emerging community on the chance that you will find our story useful as you seek dreams of your own. This book is more about our community's honest longings and efforts than our accomplishments and results. It is a collection of the hopes and aspirations of a people trying. Our efforts to arrange our lives around communal spiritual formation are, at times, awkward and pathetic. Yet at other times, they are wonderfully forward-leaning and pull us toward God in ways we never anticipated. They are nearly always sincere attempts toward sustainable Christian spiritual formation utilizing practices that extend beyond the education model of Christian discipleship. Maybe like me you're wondering why I'd write a book when so much of this is in the experimental stage. I've spent many hours struggling with the idea of "selling" what I think of as a vision for Christian community that is God's to give, not mine. What's pulled me through is my belief that there are wonderful people-pastors, teachers, lay leaders, new Christians, lifelong Christians-who are not interested in a model program or approach to spirituality, but are searching the stories of others to find permission to pursue their own deeply held, unspoken intuitions about how faith and church could be. In some ways this book is an act of poetry; it is an attempt to put words around our experiences and desires to allow others to step inside. REIMAGINING SPIRITUAL FORMATION 20 DUSTIN BLACK I think this is where I try to establish my character with some small talk about who