Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Trinitarian Ecclesiology (?!)

Here is a diagram from Joel Hunter's book "Church Distributed". The "I am - there - us for them" idea is a bit abstract (it's supposed to reflect the Trinity). I should offer a prize for anyone who can figure it out! (click for larger image)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it's more "hey, we thought up these three areas we need to work on," and then to make it sound a lot cooler they started calling it Trinitarian to make it gain a lot more respect with the theologians. I don't really understand what the graph is trying to say, but from what I do understand there could be more added to it. Where's evangelism? Does that fall into service? Is preaching the word to unbelievers service, or is that just feeding the hungry type stuff?

On the other hand, we get from scripture three main focuses to a worship service: prayer, proclamation of the word, and eucharist/communion. Maybe I'm biased, but I don't see that as a stretch. Liturgy should be/is biblically trinitarian.

So maybe I'm blind to my own faults, but what Dr. Hunter's talking about seems a bit more like tomfoolery (I couldn't resist using that word on this blog, PT).

sukeerthy said...

Hello Pastor Tom Welch,

Greetings in Jesus name. My name is Sukeerthy doing M.Th in Theology at SAIACS, Bangalore, India. I am doing a thesis on 'Trinitarian Ecclesiology.' While going through the sites on that topic, i came across your blog, an interesting one. I do not want to make a critique on the figure that (probably) reflecting Trinity, though i do not see that, however, definitely the Church is been distributed or in other words divided into pieces which is quite contrary to the Trinity paradigm. I like to request you for contribution on this topic, if you have something, so that i can do my thesis well. Of course, I am working on Zizioulas ans Torrance to bring come implications to Indian Trinitarian ecclesiology. Any kind of help is very much appreciated with lot of thanks.

Thanks ...
Sukeerthy
voolas@yahoo.co.uk