MatterCon Recap 7: Peter Rollins, “Lessons in Evandelism”

Last week I was at MatterCon ’09: A Theological Creativity Event featuring Pete Rollins and presented by Shechem Ministries at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, TX.  I am recapping the event by publishing my notes for your fondest enjoyment.

In Peter Rollins’ final session he discussed the more practical ways we need to respond to a call theopoetics.

-the church is not about convincing us of something.  The point is we don’t do it even though we know we should.

-irony: you intellectually ridicule something you do in practice.

-some people lose the ability to desire.

-how do we as a community live in a counter-cultural way?

-sometimes the only way to get someone to change is to desire on someone’s behalf, to want someone to belong.

-what you need to take away from someone is the object that is not allowing someone to change.

-when we participate in the life of Christ first at conversion we are born into new life.

-liberal theology goes wrong by finding Jesus’ centrality in morality and not in death and resurrection.

-Paul is always focused on the death and resurrection, the core of Christianity.

-Jesus on the cross is stripped of everything, unplugged from everything—even from God—and becomes completely the Other.

-after conversion our identity becomes contingent because we find our true identity in Christ.

-we are the system.  We are part of the injustice.  We have created it and we re-create it.  We are enslaved to a system that oppresses us, but when we find faith in/of Christ we are stripped away from the system.

-behind the world system is blood spilt and exploitation.

-we as Christians realize the system because we have stepped outside the system in Christ’s crucifixion.

-in Christ’s crucifixion we have the veil torn and are liberated from the system.

-Christ’s death and resurrection sets us free to have a new identity in him.

-there are so many possibilities of being counter-cultural as communities unplugged from the dominant, worldly system.

-the Church is an insurrection, an institution that tries to change the world structure.

-our feeling we can’t change anything can kill us.

-we should not want revolution, hoping for change, but instead be the insurrection, living the change now.

-we show an alternative way of being, a light in the world of freedom and liberation.

-(prohibition generates the desire to transgress)

-being part of the radical contradiction of the church is to be part of the radical unplugging from the world.

-what happens in the Eucharist is not intellectual affirmation but a feeling that you are disconnected by the world.

-don’t make poverty history, make poverty voluntary: we should joyously enter into poverty.

-there is a point in Christianity where your possessions no longer possess you.

-the heart of resurrection is that Jesus leaves the Holy Spirit, that we now find God in each other as a community in action.

-if we want to know Jesus better don’t come forward to the altar, go out and find God.

-Bonhoeffer calls this religionless Christianity: religion grounds human activity while religionless living sees God as the weakness of the world, the weakness that is stronger than the world’s strength, a community that is the weakest yet changes the strongest.

-the Eucharist captures the unplugging of our community that allows us to be transformed and open to new possibilities.

-what makes Christianity so amazing is that we are a community living in the death and resurrection of God.

-in participation with the incarnation we are living the faith of Christ.

-the dichotomy of faith and works should be synthesized between the conservative thinking of conversion and the liberal thinking of the social gospel: the social gospel needs to integrate the necessity of conversion, a faith based in love of doing works without the need of exchange or the law.