This week's CWC email had a great quoted passage from the Church of God hymnal and a catchy image to reiterate the message.  Here they are:

I suppose if I was the editor for the song, I would have suggested that the words be changed from "Called from Worship unto Service" to "Called in Worship unto Service" or "Called to Worship through Service." We should view the totality of our lives as worship. And that's not to minimize the worship that happens in church buildings on Sunday mornings which is also crucial worship that forms our lives around embodied relationships with each other and sets a rhythm of time to our lives while also creating space for God to speak through songs, prayers, scriptures, ordinances, and the preached word.

For this blog offering, I thought I would share a few annotated quotations from some of my recent reading.  These get at some of the challenges facing all of us who live in the 21st century, because we often fail to spend the time in honest reflection of who we are and where we are going. You'll note from the page numbers that I'm perusing several book introductions lately.

“Without some sense of the whole, the telos, there is no way of knowing when we are improving at being human.” Anthony D. Baker p. 1 in Diagonal Advance

“Decisions in any community—such as how much space for parks should be protected, or if it is right to go to war in a particular situation—depend upon a prior vision of what constitutes that community, and what goods it believes it should be pursuing.” p. xx in An Eerdmans Reader in Contemporary Political Theology

These two quotations remind us of the importance of pursuing discipleship with both an understanding of who we are and where we are going.  The emphasis in brief for the walk of a Christian disciple must begin with the understanding that we are God's creation who are called to a life in relationship with our creator. The end comes in the kingdom Christ proclaimed and announced. The goal of our worship and life together is that our weekly corporate worship, bible study, and fellowship would hold our identity and our goal together.

The Church of God's Christian Women's Connection sends out a weekly email and this week it included this reflection.

This week we looked at Mark 7 and the questions Jesus faced regarding the tradition of ritual washings.  I raised the experience in the Church of God of our evaluation of our practice and traditions regarding Christian Unity.  I drew from a paper presented at the doctrinal dialogue at the North American Convention in 2006.  I thought it would be good to share a link to the other papers.  You can check them out at the Anderson School of Theology web page.