Isn’t She Beautiful | Session 1 | Rob Bell

I’m posting my notes from the conference. Sorry if they’re disorganized and don’t make any sense, but they’re more for my sake than anything. Hopefully you’ll find a few nuggets of good stuff though. I hope to post more organized thoughts later on.

Isn’t She Beautiful
Monday, January 22, 2007
Rob Bell

Colossians 2
• The word thankful appears multiple times
• eu- well, good
charizomai- to grant. give
charis- grace, gift
• Eucharist- us giving thanks for the good gift that is Christ
• Jesus death- body broken, blood poured
• to be a leader in the church is to let your body be broken and let your blood be spilled so others can be filled. That’s why it can be so exhausting.
• When someone has been fed, someone else has been broken and spilled out
• What does it mean for the church to be a Eucharist for the world?
—–
2 Corinth. 4:7
• our mortal bodies are being given to death
• 1 Corinth. 11:23
- “…do this in remembrance of me…”
- we’ve understood this as a description of the ritual, but maybe Jesus was modeling what it means to be a living Eucharist for the world so that in your death others would have life

Genesis 12
• “all people on earth will be blessed through you…”
• The Church- the only organization that exists for the benefit of its non-members
• that’s why it bothers us when we see a church that focuses on itself
• The church is a gift to the community
• If our church was taken away from our city/town/area, who would protest?
• What are the greatest needs, the places where no one is going?
• Who is most hostile, most cynical, etc? What would would a Eucharist look like for them? What would love without an agenda look like for them?

1 Corinth. 9:19
• Paul becomes a Jew to win Jews, a gentile to win gentile and becomes weak to win the weak
• It never says he became strong to win anyone
• The power of the Eucharist is in its weakness…
• The eucharist is about the path of decent while our culture is about the path of ascent
• Humanity over perfection
• “All we have to give you is ourselves…”

Ephesians 2:11
• The Eucharist is about the new humanity
• The new humanity is when people that wouldn’t be in the same room together are in the same room and the only explanation is Jesus
• We lose something when the church becomes a group of people that have been target marketed
• The new humanity is when “they” gets a name and a face or “that group of people” gets a name and a face.
• When you know someone that is poor, 2,000 verses in the Bible begin to make sense
• rejecting the cult of cool- “we’re hip for the kids…”
• What cool is when people find something that transcends their petty differences
• Suffering unites. If you have cancer, it doesn’t matter if you have millions of dollars or are below poverty- you have something in common
• In the new humanity you start caring about things you didn’t previously care about

2 Corinth 11:28

Acts 8::9-20
• The Eucharist is not a product
• How are we a Eucharist for these people, in this place, at this time?
• There is an illusion that if something is big, that you ought to copy it- but that’s a shortcut for doing the hard work of understanding what your community needs
• Unless that great thing that worked there is filtered through your own flesh and blood it won’t be real
• What is true- period?
• Unless somebody is being broken and poured out, people aren’t going to be fed

Hebrews 12:18
• We’re inviting you to something as old as the world
• The magnetic draw of the tribe- an ancient desire to be part of a tribe
• The Eucharist is ultimately a mystery…
• Management and mystical have to flow together
• The problem is when the church tries to play by the same rules as everyone else.
• 2 Absolutes for the Eucharist
- Who is Christ in you? Your own journey is an absolute.
- The church is a Eucharist because you and I are a Eucharist
- What you need is a day to take care of yourself
- Sometimes the most powerful sermon is two words- “me too.”
- Your own journey, whatever it looks like…
- Luke 5:15- “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed”
- letting the body be put back together and the blood be poured back in
- What is sustainable?

~ by Dave on January 22, 2007.