3rdplace 2nd edition

Hi guys, from the beginning of 3rdplace we aimed to remain as liquid as possible. Always flowing with Jesus. This is the draft for the 3rdplace second edition booklet. It contains some old things and some new things.. Things we as a community discovered together. You might recognise your own words in here!

Please have a read through and leave a comment.

3rdplace

The modern world was black and white. Right and wrong was easy and clearly defined. Then we were shot into a postmodern world where suddenly everything became 32 shades of grey; no longer is any one group or person's view absolute.

Everybody is right. Everything is relative

Culture however still has the nerve to keep shifting and today we live in an undefined new world and new culture where we exist no longer in black or white, no longer in a grey abstract without any absolutes. We exist in a place of extremes where our thoughts, lives and beliefs are black and white

at the same time.

3rdplace is not a church.

It is an expression of the church.

It is a catalyst for the church.

It is a place where the church gathers.

Most importantly it is a group of people that simply want to love Jesus and love others within this strange new world.

Everyone frequents a place that exists somewhere between where they live and where they work. It can be a place or a community that each person has in their life that defines them a lot more than their home or office. It could be a bar, a coffee shop, a book club or anything thing really...

We aim to be such a third community, a place where you can come and just be. A place where you can find shelter and maybe relax for a while. It is a place where you can learn, find healing and reconnect. It is place where people group together to help one another and to share each other's lives. Where we journey together to figure out whom Jesus is and who we are in Him.

A place where we can fully engage life.

We have become missionaries to today’s cultures, we live to tell the story of Jesus.

Stories.

Our lives are filled with stories. We live within the beautiful story of South Africa and in this we each have our own story and when we walk together we reshape one another’s stories. As friends of Jesus we let his story rewrite our stories. We are bound together not only because we believe the same things but because we know the same person.

Jesus’ story and so the story of scripture changed us and keeps on changing us. It inspires us to continue God’s mission (his story) to draw the world to himself through Jesus and renew and remake and redeem all of creation. His story incarnates into each of ours and reshapes with us and remoulds our culture or subculture. And so our gathering space we call the Story Space, where we can tell stories of healing, of hurt, of forgiveness, of death and of life.

As the story of South Africa grows and changes so we change and grow. We want to be flexible, to be liquid and continually reshaping ourselves to better engage our culture, our city.

Character traits

In essence this is about 'how' we are. How we operate, how we live our faith as individuals and as a community. This is how we engage life.

Authenticity

To live authentic lives means in part to be real and true in our relationship with Jesus and others. Christianity for us is about having our hope in Christ’ resurrection so that we can make it through the difficult times, knowing that in him we too will be raised and in him we are already part God’s new world and his great story. It is about being truthful, real about your situation and finding true joy in your relationship with God often in spite of the suffering.

Like the Psalms we want to engage God and life fully.

‘Is it truly from the Master craftsman? Is it authentic?’ Living an authentic life also means a return to your true creator and living in the way that he meant for us to live. It is about rediscovering your gifts, strengths, purpose and yourself. We want to be true to our original design and God’s original intent.

Building authentic relationships with others is important to us. Besides love, authentic relationships should have no other agenda.

Creativity

We want to live a life where we take action in loving Jesus and loving others. We want to take action in joining God in re-storing and re-creating this broken world.

We are independent beings that can create and should create. When we partner with God, he redeems our creativity so that with him we can continue the story of scripture.

We want to use this gift to remain liquid and to keep moving with contemporary culture, so within the 3rdplace community we intentionally create space for new ideas and new unexpected incarnations of the gospel story.

We also like to have fun.

Simplicity

‘Simplicity is not always the best, but the best is always simple.’ – anonymous

As an organism we aim to remain a simple structure as possible. So that we can change quickly as the world around us changes.

We aim to live lives as simple as possible so that most of our energy goes into seeking and loving God and loving others.

Simplicity also has to do with becoming more silent. In a world that is filled with so much man-made noise it is difficult (and even irritating) for us to be silent. But we are in desperate need of silence, we need to simply sit down each day and remain quiet so we can reconnect with God in us. Not searching for a result or answer, but merely just resting in the simple silence of his presence. God is a mystery that is to be engaged, not to be conquered.

Love Jesus, Love others

This lies at the very heart of 3rdplace. When you boil everything right down this is what we believe is left. And that if you get this statement, you get everything.

At its centre it has to do with living a connected life. Connected to God, to all those around you and to his creation. Just being true humans.

We believe that Jesus' death and resurrection did not only restore us in right relationship with God but also in right relationship with others (inside and outside the faith) and with creation itself.

Love Jesus: We live in a world drenched in God. He is everywhere. His divine image rests in every person. We are the ones that need to become aware of his ways and presence.

We want to life a contemplative life. To always be searching for the silence inside ourselves so that we can get in touch with God in us. To find our original image-of-God-selves and so learn to love Jesus even more.

We want to allow the story of Scripture to become part of who we are, to influence us, to change us so we can walk with Jesus and get to know him better.

Love others: As a church we do not want to separate ourselves from the world and from culture. We want to be in the midst of it and built our dwellings in the world, as Jesus did.

We want to smell of the world.

We want to love and walk with people, especially those that have been rejected and are often hard to love. For us it takes a village to raise a child, to love people and introduce them to Jesus.

We want to be people that bring justice to the broken, poor and helpless through and with Jesus.

We wrestle with what it means to be in the world but not of it. We want to live in the tension when heaven is brought to earth until Jesus returns and we are raised from the dead to live him forever on the new recreated earth.

Creed

At the end of it all being a Christian is just about a journey of getting to know God through the resurrected Jesus Christ. He loved you first and so you begin to love him.

The creed below is what we as Christians, and those before us, have learned in this relationship with God. They serve the relationship.

We have a relationship with truth, of course, truth is a person.

We believe in one God the Father, the Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being, substance, with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made truly human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified; who spoke through the prophets.

In one holy universal and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Spirituality

At 3rdplace we have a "melk en brood" spirituality. It is something that's familiar, which happens every single day, like going to buy milk and bread. It’s physical, human and connected. We practice daily spiritual disciplines (and practice some of them together at our gatherings) to help us draw close to God so we can be changed by him and his image restored in us. His love in us then draws us toward one another and flows out of us towards those outside our community. We have a vow which can be taken which helps us express these three movements and make them more tangible.

Our goal is always complete union with God, his ways should become our ways, his thoughts our thoughts and his love for the broken world should become ours.

vow

The vow fuses together our understanding of the way of Jesus (loving God and loving others) with our ‘melk & brood’ spirituality, whilst joining us together as a specific community in a specific context and then pushing us towards holiness and union with God.

"Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do"
(St Thomas Aquinas)

Christianity is firstly a way of life, not a system of belief. A system of belief alone will not change you.

Christian life is a life of relationships, so we do not say: I am, rather we are Christians.

Our agenda should always be only faith expressing itself in love

Incarnations

The dream, the beauty that is stirring in your heart is the same that is missing from this world.

When Jesus enters our lives and our communities he plants the seeds of his story. The gospel then begins to take a new shape from deep inside of us. Something new is born, a new expression of The Way, from within our culture and ourselves.

These incarnations are things that have sprouted from the 3rdplace community.

What do you have to bring? What do you need to add?