I like turning nouns into adverbs even if there is no such word adverbially speaking. It can often create its own genre of debate, discussionally trying to define what is meant by the speciously new terminology. A new species can become terminal, only if it generates its own life. Like missionally, a word that never before existed until it began to be used. Creative adverbing might be the only proof of evolution, actually. In the case of transformationally, it is an adverb, actually. Culturally, relationally, informally expressing ourselves is not always legitimate. Then again, without some liberty to transform what exists, legitimately, life and language would be communally, impossible.
We have, today, an interesting phenomena known as the emergent church. I would not be surprised to find out that emergent was adapted from evolutionally specific auditory utterances, terminologically. Like audial, no one ever observed the use of the noun form. Well then, see, obviously audios have evolved decendantly (ascendantly?) from some unidentified parental line. Where in the case of missionally we can observe its lineage parentally. Phenomenally, emergent churches have descended from the parent churches who were in the ages past, formally organzied according to the prevailing culture. Call it a mutation or a anti-gen(erational) corrective if you will, what the emergent represents is the rejection, not of formality per se, but the exclusivity of it. But informality breeds its own problems. One of those is the lack of definition.
Transformationally informal churches go along with such deconstruction and reconstruction permeating, culturally, society, subversively reassigning meanings not germane to the subject. Inch by inch, step by step, slowly we have turned in to a grunge culture. Which I have to admit, being a product of the sixties, that I had a part in said transformation. As is the case with most things subject to the laws of nature, I eventually regressed toward the mean. I no longer grungeally approach society, nor do I maintain a flip attitude toward such formal entities as the organized church that I once, pre-emergentally, loathed and distrusted. Grunge, I have had to recognize, is not just a look, or slovenliness, it is a more generally, diffusely, distributed attitude, impacting demeanor, propriety, correct handling, and sober-mindedness.
Continuing from Mr.(note formal address) Machine Gun's post I offer this program from White Horse Inn. You see I agree to great extent to what Rhett was saying about the necessity of reverence and the otherness of the church, at least in corporate worship as a formal gathering to honor and learn of the Lord. And, I didn't mean to sidetrack the discussion. The Hortonites speak to the same issues. Reverence carries certain weight of authority over against the apparent irreverence of informality. There are some things by which we should be identified by the world and by which, we should identify ourselves with one another.
Which is why I wear only clean t-shirts without holes, a fresh pair of pants and my best tennis-shoes ;)
To some this will still not make the grade and with others it will be all formally and stuff, by all means something to be avoided. Both those extremes are, however, one, in a self-richly sorta way.
Wisdom does teach us at least this:
He has told you, O man, what is good;There are some requirements. Spiritually speaking, what is the key to reverence, is it not this last phrase?
and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.
walk humbly with your God.James tells us, also, what can happen when reverence becomes showiness, then formalism and formalism a sacramental expression of spirituality. Let us then keep the focus upon what he then says: the poorly dressed may well be the more highly praised in God's estimation. On the other hand, we should be clothed in humility, no matter what state we find ourselves in, showing the proper deference to the King who has invited us into his banquet.
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