Last week I got to hear Pete Rollins speak at Greenbelt, on the topic of “Changing Everything So Everything Remains The Same”. I thought I’d post up some of my notes for you! I just finished reading his new book, The Fidelity Of Betrayal, which looks at a lot of these comments more in depth. Love to hear your thoughts on it too?

* Deeply suspicious of the popular movement to be like the early church again.
* Not trying to succeed where others failed, but trying to fail in better ways.
* We shouldn’t try to fulfill our dreams, but to find new ones. Our dreams reflect the scope and limitations of our theology.
* We find justification after the fact – retroactive justification.
* If you can reason the revolution, then its not a revolution, its in old wineskins.
* The heretic is the one who steps out of the dominant system to create something new.
* (Usually) The best way to silence someone is to give them a place within the system – eg the Franciscan order in the Catholic church.
* “Transgressions that actually solidify the structures”
* “The God of the gaps” – when we don’t know the answer to something, we pull God in – eg the beginning of the world.
* Humans always want to externalise our actions so that we don’t have to take responsibility for it.
* Gods ‘no place’ becomes ‘every place’ – omnipotence – Bonhoeffer.
* Christian prayer – that you no longer believe in the resurrection, but you become the site of a resurrection. Prayer as a mode of being.
* By renouncing heaven, they find heaven; by renouncing an other-worldly salvation we find our salvation here.
* You can never colonise salvation.
* The new expressions are ways of refusing leadership, ways of forcing the responsibility back on ourselves.
* A form of atheism is essential to our faith.
* Our faith is a meganarrative, not a metanarrative – it is a lived truth.
* Protest becomes the heat valve – we protest so we don’t actually have to change our lives.