The House of Mercy Story: Let's start our own Church.  Remember when you were 10 years old and you started that after school club in your parents' garage? That's just what we did. Sort of...
It all began in Russell's kitchen in St. Paul, Minnesota on a bitter cold Saturday morning in February of 1996. Debbie, Mark, and Russell–frustrated by contemporary Christian popular culture and saddened that so many of their old friends apparently wanted nothing to do with the Jesus story–asked each other: "What if we started our own church, what would it look like?" Then came the now famous "St. Paul Blessing" of '96. After consuming some extremely hot Thai food and spending some time in their respective isolation tanks, the three young ministers simultaneously presented each other with three identical sketches of Theresa of Avila on a cocktail napkin. In each of the sketches there appeared five glyphs, which, when deciphered, yielded five identical principles that each of the pastors wanted to follow in inventing their own church. The three of them agreed that their new church would have to be - Christian and not religiously generic
- intellectually honest and rigorous
- beyond the bounds of popular free church forms of worship and open to "liturgical eclecticism"
- evangelical in the broad sense of being grounded in the good news of God's grace and not the bad news of shame and religious manipulation
- a stimulus for social justice, consciousness-raising, and acts of mercy.
Our story continues... |
