What are those practices which form and distinguish a Christian faith community?
Here’s the start of a list:

• Daily Prayer
• Regular Meals Together
• Bearing one another’s burdens
• Worship together
• Labor side by side
• Rest together
• Play together
• Study together
• Share generously
• Equip each other for ministry
• Accountability / confession / forgiveness

These, I think, are among the vital life habits of a faith community that both create and define it.

It’s becoming popular to talk about the church today becoming again what the church of The Book of Acts was under the name “Missional Church, or Misional Community”. These are related to, and often used synonymously (incorrectly, I think) with Emergent Church, or Emergent Christianity. For more on all that…
Missional Community Defined – from Jason Zahariades’ blog “The Off Ramp”
Emergent Village.com – Tony Jones hosts this web site, a central, though not The Center, voice in the emergent community, and a good starting place.
Allelon.org – Alan Roxburgh, et.al. are for me great conversation partners in the developing understanding of leadership in the emerging christianities in our post-modernizing world.

Theologians? More on them later….

My point for now, coming back from that side trip, is that we are being called back, again/still, to the core of christian faith, which is the faith and way of Jesus. This is, on the surface, the goal for all Christians. The age inwhich we find ourselves simply challenges us in new ways to understand ourselves, our world, and our God. I put forward this conversation about Holy Habits of a Faith Community as one expression of how we move into God’s emerging kingdom.

Seeking to be…

Ken