Chastened "church"?

Hey--you can't read this unless you agree to visit the previous post, "Quo vadis?" and provide your response to the questions there, OK? Please? Now, not later? Please?
So why are we not hearing much anymore from Matthew 16, "I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" or Eph 3:10, "God's purpose was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God would be made plain to the principalities and powers"? The church is not the kingdom, but can we seek the kingdom apart from the church? Not the church as currently constituted and constructed, perhaps, but the church nonetheless. It feels like we're all (sometimes) had-it-up-to-here with church life and hungry to get 'out there' where 'the kingdom is happening.' Kinda like to genuuinely engage the real-deal kingdom, it's best to quit the church, or that the church is the ball-and-chain that keeps serious Christians from kingdom work.

Quo Vadis?

Here are some questions for us to kick around; please let us see your responses!

(1) Should we "open up" our blog a bit by inviting some new members? (It's been good to have Joseph join us!) Would our wives be possible additions (and would they even be interested)? Others who would enjoy and contribute to this sort of undertaking? We may not want it to get too large--depends on your responses to #3 below... so be sure to respond to #3 below, eh?

(2) Do you have specific topics you'd like to see discussed? Would you like to "host a post"--simply means that you would frame a topic via a post and then could do as much moderating of the ensuing discussion as you like. A post generally has an active life of about ten days... perhaps it's better to say that MY posts generally have that kind of shelf life--YOUR posts might well keep us going for weeks!

(3) What would you like this blog to do for you and/or us? My main goal has been to find ways to help us keep in touch/a bit more current with one another, so that when we're actually face-to-face, we don't need to spend an inordinate amount of time "catching up". (I do NOT think that a blog will ever make "catching up" unnecessary!) Thus far, it's primarily been a way to share what participants have been THINKING about (sorry, that's what you tend to get when I'm in charge!). It could also be used to discuss what we're PRAYING about, or DOING... pretty much anything is fair game, as long as there are enough interested participants. And we can vary the format as we wish, trying one thing, than another.

Oh, "quo vadis" is Latin for "Where are you going?"

So, where would YOU like to go with this?

Emergent, see?

Any of you keeping up with the 'emergent church' movement? Brian McLaren (author of "A New Kind of Christian," 'The Story We Find Ourselves In," "A Generous Orthodoxy" and many others) is kind of the public face/primary spokesman for this somewhat nebulous network. In a lot of ways they are 'rediscovering' a number of things that we 'rediscovered' 25 years ago, in reaction against the dominant church sub-culture of the times. I'm interested because I've been fuddy-duddied a couple of times recently--you know, treated by someone younger and more 'on fire' as something of a fuddy-duddy. for example, there is a great deal of interest in and desire for "authenticity"--which kind of implies that I must be into something like...phoniness? Beneath the normal carnal aspects of my response to being fuddy-duddied are two things I'd appreciate some help in thinking through. First, how do we not only protect/preserve what's been deposited in us, but more importantly hand it off to the rising generation? Second, is there any way to avoid/escape from the relentless reduction of everything to demographic groups? You know, I'm a boomer, so I think and feel about things in boomer ways. GenX-ers have a totally different take, and Gen-Nexters their own unique take, etc., etc. Sure, every generation is encountered by God in unique ways--the world really does change!--but it seems like we just get locked into these demographic groups not by the Spirit of God but by the dynamics of the marketplace. In other words, our demographic imprisonment is simply another sign of our worldliness.
Ahh, the solaces of Ecclesiastes...!