Dancing in the Kingdom is aimed at people who want to connect the dots from the beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible through church history until today – to explore how their personal story connects to the big story of God working in the world through his people.
To do that, Dancing will address some of the many questions we have:
• How are we supposed to sort through the confusion of how the Bible gets interpreted?
• How did we get all the different kinds of churches today?
• Can the essence of the Christian faith be actually found?
• Can all of this be done by the average person without reading thousands of pages and learning lots of theological jargon?
• Doesn’t the Bible conflict with science?
• How do we make sense out of all the violence in the Bible?
Dancing attempts to do all that by not using a lot of theological language and by being ecumenical in scope – drawing from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Orthodox traditions . Most of the ideas in the books are not original with me, and therefore Dancing in the Kingdom has more than 500 footnotes to refer to those sources. It is not necessary to refer to those footnotes to understand the book, but they are there for those who wish to further investigate. To that end, I chose to make as many of the footnotes refer to online resources as possible to make that content more accessible. I did start out using footnotes for Biblical references as well but that would have more than doubled the number of footnotes – a bit too much – so in lieu of that, Biblical sources are cited at the top of each section.
The extensive scope of material even includes some scientific content although, what will be surprising to many, not for Genesis 1. The book rather refers to some of the latest anthropological research on the Ancient Near East to see how Genesis 1 is better understood in context of the construction of a liturgical calendar, which begins to be biblically presented in Exodus, and which provides a framework for us to live into the Christian faith.
The Dancing theme is drawn from a concept used in the Orthodox theology to describe the Trinity. The dancing is meant to refer to the ways we can all joyfully participate with God as He builds the Kingdom. Dancing in God’s Kingdom can be simply spontaneous and joyful.
Dancing with others requires planning and coordination. We do not dance alone; we join a long procession of dancers past and present. To help us be thoughtful of how we can enter the Dance, beginning in Chapter 1 there are questions following each section to help think of how we can contribute to the community around us and before us.
Questions labeled as Reflections try to evoke responses to the overall reading of each section. Questions labeled as Observe ask for responses to related Scripture passages. In a few cases, hyperlinks are given to point to additional help. The questions have those labels because they are designed to do as advertised, to evoke reflections and observations . They are not designed to elicit “right” and “wrong” response but rather to engage with the material. And particularly to engage in a group so that participants can learn from one another.
Most questions have no right or wrong answers but are meant to help stimulate imaginations about the awesome and wonderful God and his creation, to think about and articulate our own individual perceptions and then to hear different perspectives as we share answers in a group setting.
The Church was not meant to be a place for people to live in isolation, the best benefit of this book will occur if it is processed in a group setting, knowing that the greatest insight will come from people sharing their thoughts with each other.
Dancing In The Kingdom 