Bowl Ecclesiology: Essays in Christian Critical Thinking

"It intrigues me to reflect on the reality that my systematic study of the various "ologies" of Christian theology and my hobby of turning bowls from wood scraps have much in common, particularly in the case of the nature and function of the Christian community-both some church somewhere and all Christians everywhere. In many ways the diversity of those wood scraps is similar to the diversity of the people who make up the Christian community. Species of wood are even more diverse than the racial, ethnic, cultural, and ideological diversities of human beings, yet they are all botanical products of the creativity of God as surely as we are all human beings created by that same God. This means that the scraps resulting from the creative endeavors of a woodworker are not automatically useless and worthless simply because they are flawed or oddly sized or hard to work with or damaged in some way. In a similar way, human beings who, by our own collective and individual choices, have fallen from our original relationship to our Creator are not automatically useless and worthless simply because theologically, psychologically, sociologically, and ecologically we are flawed, oddly sized, hard to work with, and damaged by our collective and individual choices to go our own way rather than God's way"--