Christy and I went to visit Imago Dei on Sunday morning this week. Neither of us had ever attended Imago so it was a great chance to experience some Imago-ness.
I went to college at Multnomah with Rick McKinley, the pastor and founder of Imago and the XP at Imago was my roommate during my our first year there. It's been so great to see what God has done through these and all the other staff and key people at Imago over the years.
Church didn't seem all that different than many other places I've been. The worship band was good, but not great. Rick is a good preacher and he is very funny -- just like Donald Miller says. I listened to a podcast that Rick did (http://www.catalystspace.com/src/15-RickMcKinleyPodcast.mp3) on Catalyst last year and he said basically the same thing that we experienced, Sundays are not that different from many other churches, but their communities and missional activities are the distinctives of Imago.
From the bulletin this week, here's a sampling of some of the items going on:
- School of Theology: this is a fancy term for their adult education classes. These range from some pretty heady classes like a class in Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy) to a couple recovery/mentoring classes to men's and women's issues to finances. (Link)
- Communities: Imago has several different types of communities with different purposes and flavors: Home ("primary pathways to connect with others and grow"), Missional (groups who center around meeting a need in the community), Recovery (for people struggling with addictions), Mom's (women's ministry).
- Love Portland: This is a series of service ministries that Imago is doing to just serve the people of Portland (gotta watch the short video).
I'm going to do some more writing on Imago in a few weeks after I have a chance to get some more insider info from Eric Brown.
-Derek
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Visit to Imago Dei
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Some sermon notes from Rick's message on Sunday:
2 Objections to Christianity
1. Religion and Violence
Objection: "Since religion has often been accompanied by violence, we need less committed religious people."
Comments:
- Beliefs make people do very or very bad things. -Allison McGrath
- Belief can cause us to believe something so strongly that we will do anything for the belief.
- If religion ended, would violence end?
- When Christians resort to violence (physical, verbal, etc.), the Christian is in sin.
2. Science and Faith
Objection: Faith is no substitute for science.
- Science attempts to answer the questions of "What is the material world?"
- Faith attempts to answer the questions of "What does it all mean?"
- Francis Collins, director of Human Genome Project wrote a book called, "The Language of God" and here's a FREE PDF
- The Darwinist will contend that survival of the fittest is the way that our world has evolved. However, our society's own moral codes suppress Darwinism (murder, stealing, etc are against the law). Darwinist cultures fail miserably (see some parts of Iraq today).
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