Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Guess who's back?

Shedy's back.

Here's the quote I wanted to share so badly that I couldn't resist re-starting the original Shed blog:

"We live in the shadow of the structural distortions in the post-apostolic Church and the subsequent abandonment of such structures in the Reformation. The Reformation led to a healthy reformation of theology but an unwitting, tragic deformation of structure in the biblical model of the Church. In the iconoclasm of the Reformation, the dismantling of monasticism destroyed more than a system, it destroyed the only extant channelling mechanism for initiating and promoting mission. Whatever our misgivings about the monastic system, we must still recognize that for 1,500 years monasticism in its various forms was virtually the only initiator for mission advance."

p154, The Church Is Bigger Than You Think by Patrick Johnstone. Christian Focus Publications 1998 (2005 reprint edition)

Reflections on this and other reading will follow. But, oh my! How much has the blog world changed in three years?

3 comments:

Simon Varwell said...

Welcome back to blogland! Hope all is well with you.

Interesting quote, though from my uneducated perspective I'd be tempted to argue that monasticism in a permanent sense is incompatible with mission. But as I am not very well read in this area, I'll not do!

David Shedden said...

Scary quick response Simon! Hope you are well... my blog design and content remain a work in progress.

Anonymous said...

YO! RETURN OF THE SHED.