Putting the cat among the pigeons
Last night at smallgroup we did a quiz on a taboo subject. We went through the Hell quiz Graham posted last week. It was fun. A couple of people reacted quite strongly to it - "This is bothering me..." "This is challenging everything I believe!" A couple of others seemed releaved and thankful - "I've been thinking about hell reciently and it's been bothering me, what I'm 'supposed to believe' didn't seem to tie up with what I've learnt about who God is." It sparked of an excellent discussion. I made the point of not looking at the answers before we did the questions together, but having read the questions through before I could see where they were leading, I have to say I found it really helpful myself.
It also got me thinking about Neo's approach to judgement/'evaluation' in 'A New Kind of Christian' and 'The Story We Find Ourselves In' - which seems to take the line of a form of Purgatory - everyones sinful selves being purged and whats left making it through to new life. Does anyone have any thoughts or comments on that?
Love this:
Unconscious Mutterings: "
Tradition
I was brought up in the Charismatic tradition. Of course there is no way that it would have ever been called a ‘tradition’. It was in fact anti-tradition. Tradition was the thing that had stopped the release of the Spirit and of the Spiritual gifts. Now there was of course an element of truth in that - as demonstrated by the fact that many, my parents included, got thrown out of churches because of it. So the movement defined itself against what it reacted against - tradition was the bad boy. Tradition meant 'wrong'.
Recently I received an e-mail from a friend. A 2nd/3rd generation child of the Charismatic movement like me. He has just decided to embark on the journey becoming an Anglican Priest. He says he has found a home there. I say good on him. I hope he finds a deep spirituality and that he is infectious with it. In a strange way I feel in sympathy with him, there is something of an attraction there for me too.
What then do I do with tradition? It strikes me that tradition is not a problem because you repeat things over and over. That is the classic Charismatic reaction: "the repetition of something is lifeless and dead, nothing to do with the Spirit or Grace, in fact it is 'law'". That idea clearly makes absolutely no sense. If I don't repeat things in a personal sense, I wouldn’t eat, sleep etc; in church sense we couldn't gather, have pray, read the bible - anything.
No, the problem with 'tradition' is not that something is repeated but when that something has lost its meaning. It is the loss of meaning that brings death, is lifeless etc. The ironic thing of course is that many would say that of Charismatic churches now. Things are repeated over an over without the understanding of why things are done this way.
Again there is no problem with repeating things, the challenge is keeping meaning in them. That remains true for all the 'emerging' church way of doing things as well. I think it is fantastic that we can now once again find meaning in all the ancient practices that remain part of our rich church history. Let’s keep working to keep it that way.
Others may even think that too. I friend of mine recently said of [Anglican etc] Churches "I am not interested in going to church, but I am glad that it is there".
Next years Vineyard Leaders' Conference welcomes Gordon Fee!
Gordon Fee is a noted New Testament scholar whose passion for God and knowledge of the biblical text bring his teaching alive. He taught widely before joining Regent, including serving schools in Washington, California, Kentucky, as well as Wheaton College in Illinois (five years) and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts (twelve years). An ordained minister with the Assemblies of God, Gordon is well known for his manifest concern for the renewal of the church, in addition to being highly respected as a New Testament scholar and textual critic.
Go....
"Plan B is this:
"You're to be different now. Your behaviour will be changing. Your thinking is to change. And people will watch these changes in you and they'll come to experience the world in your new manner."... "And in your new lives you'll have to live entirely for that one sensation - that of imminent truth. And you're going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it - and you're never going to stop asking questions about it twenty four hours a day, the rest of your life."
"This is plan B.
"Every day for the rest of your lives, all of your living moments are to be spent making others aware of his need... Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask... You're going to be forever homesick, walking through a cold railway station until the end, whispering strange ideas about existance into the ears of children. Your lives will be tinged with urgency, as though rescuing buried men and lassooing drowning horses. You'll be mistaken for crazies. You may well end up foaming at the mouth... In your old lives you had nothing to live for. Now you do. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Go clear the land for a new culture..." (Dougles Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma)
"Jesus, undeterred, went right ahead and gave his charge: God authorized and commanded me to commision you: Go our and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I'll be with you as you do ths, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age." (Jesus Christ, The Message Matthew 28:18-20)
Well, I am off to a "Church in the Home" discussion with Tony and Felicity Dale for a couple of days. I am not too sure how it will be. Whatever happens I will see a lot of friends, and we will have a lot of fun conversations.
By the way have you got a google toolbar? There is a button on there to do quick blogging with blogger, without have to got to blogger.com. Very nice!
More on Culture
When I was at bible college, one of my fellow students was from Kenya. For him the idea of biblical interpretation theory was a completely new concept. The bible was true and that was it. That is not to say that his reading of stuff was the same as everyone else's, nor that he wasn't a deep thinker, he was. He just wasn't 'scientific' about it. To be honest the rest of us looked down our noses a little at the 'niavity' of this Aftrican. He was a little 'simple' and 'backward'. We would soon sort out his pre-critical point of view and get him through modernism and into post-modernism before he knew it!
I am seeing a little clearer now [and even wishing that I had a little pre-critical thinking]. I am more aware of what was, in effect, forcing my worldview on him ... hmmm ... how 'modern'. Someone commented on the single-cultural nature of the emerging church - white, western, at the New Kind of Church conference. In this multi-cultural day and age you would expect a broader racial grouping to be effected. I think cultural boundaries are drawn in different places these days, maybe not so much along race lines as along 'cultural/generational' lines that transcend race. But you would in fact expect the Emerging Church to be of a certain cultural grouping. Surely that is what it is by definition. To expect all peoples and all races and all cultures to participate in our post-christendom, post-modern journey is wrong if they are not emerging from it. In response to a question about multi-cultural congregations, Brian McLaren answered "It is normally the whites who want a multi-cultural congregation, not the ethnic minorities. They are looking for some people like them". That is a very pragmatic point. It is easy for us in a majority to want the minorities to join us - to make sure they remember that they are a minority!!
In our emerging language we are making culture more of an important issue. We are valuing it and recognising it. In our attitudes I wonder if we have really changed. Read here for other thoughts.
Is the idea of a multi-cultral congregation a Kingdom Ideal or more Cultural Imperialism?
Versus a Conquest Missiology
The memories of the New Kind of Church conference still lingers. Brian McLaren finished with a brain-melting/concept-challenging talk about missiology. He recounted a tale about some Europeans first landing in the America's and a resulting slaughter in the name of God [any further detail escapes me!]. He was talking about getting away from a "conquest" view of missions. I guess the classic example in history is the Crusades, but the theme repeats itself wherever the spread of the gospel proceeds. Although there wasn't much slaughter, even the missionary pushes in the last couple of hundred years reflected this attitude - coming with a Western mindset the wanted to convert and 'bring civilisation' [single package] to the heathens. That attitude still is around today of course. Someone reported seeing a documentary about some American missionaries in American homes with big fridges, intercom systems etc, in a village of mud huts!
Fortunately, most missionary minded bods these days recognise the need to incarnate the gospel into another culture. They realise the need to live in the proverbial mud huts and communicate in a way expected by the people group. It seems that this form of contextualisation of the gospel is not enough for Brian McLaren, though. A contextualised gospel seeks to 'redeem culture', Brian was talking about redeeming their religion. i.e. introduce Jesus into their religion, and allow them to keep 'the good' and chuck 'the bad'. The result could be Muslim followers of Jesus, Hindu Followers of Jesus, Consumerist Followers of Jesus etc etc. As has been said, first then we better have some Christian Jesus followers!!
Getting rid of a conquest missiology is, I think, an absolute requirement. Let's not "Take the world for Jesus" but "Take Jesus to the world". As a certain Middle Eastern Jesus Follower would say "Let Jesus out of the church, he isn't yours". i wonder if our missions thinking is more 'conquest' than we think.
I think the questions that result from this thinking have to be asked the right way to take the thinking forward:
1) In this thinking what would syncretism look like? Does it matter?
2) To what extent can culture be said to be synonymous to religion. There are 'Muslims' who are not especially 'religious', just as there are 'Christians' who are not 'Jesus Followers'. That is important to realise. But is right to say that all aspects and practices of other religions are merely cultural? It makes me think that a right understanding of 1 Cor 8-10 could be crucial in today's world.
Hmmmm.......
Ok, so I'm a little late with this...
Looking through the archives I had a mix of feeling, I found at time it was funny (who could forget the farting preacher), sad and down right inspirational...
Here's a little something I go back to often
Attn: Future Simple Church Planters--Count the Cost:
Expect pain.
Expect to be misunderstood.
Expect to be persecuted and expect it to come first from those who follow Jesus.
Expect to be maligned, attacked and ridiculed from all sides.
Expect to grow tired and weary.
Expect to want to give up.
Expect to lose many old friends.
Expect to lose all of your friends where the "church" is the central reason for your friendship.
Only your deep and Christ-centered friendships will endure.
Expect to be labeled. (a freak, a hippie, a cult leader, a quitter, a fraud, an idealist, a purist, a heretic, a divider, a communist, a jerk, an egomaniac, a devil worshiper)
Yes, I've been called them all to my face.
Expect to weep...deeper and stronger than you ever have.
Expect to doubt your calling, your convictions, your path, your faith, and your life.
Expect to be lonely.
Expect to be seen as utterly unsuccessful.
Expect to die...nothing will be left of you. You will cease to exist. The last things in you to die will be your desire to be great for God and your desire to be happy.
And then, you will finally... Live.
Expect life.
Expect meaning.
Expect to finally understand the prophets and apostles.
Expect to know Jesus and his life...for that is all that you will have...and that is all that you need.
Todd Hunter was asked "Knowing what you know today can you tell me what you would do differently in your "ministry" and your family life" off the top of his head this is what he came up with:
1. Focus on people not effectiveness or numbers
2. By definition this means allowing smallness
3. Keep it personal, i.e. always work on myself; it is the only path to being a good husband, father, friend or pastor, etc.
4. Lose the evangelical reductionisms, recapture the whole biblical Story
5. Create communites of faithful followers of Jesus that embody and act from that Story.
Birthday Greetings!!
A trawl through the archives was fascinating. Sometimes I found it frustrating that the comments no longer exist. Some of our interaction in comments were the most stimulating part of our conversation. To be honest some of what we have written has been complete drivel, some of it funny, some bizarre, some, dare I say it, downright profound [diamonds in the rough]!! What got me though was those where we hit reality. The reality of the struggle of rethinking and the journey of change. That reality is actually what a blog should be all about. The blog I have chosen reflects that reality in all its depth and grit and determination. I think Mark Harris’s entries have often captured the struggle that we have all faced, still face and will face. The following one seems to reach a large crunch point:
Thursday, April 24, 2003
“I now have a problem. I can see that my faith is soooo laden down with lots of thoughts and beliefs that flow more from my modernistic understanding, than from the scripture itself. I also see that some of my modernism is good. As a leader in a 'faith community' how do I now lead? I wanna, plan, stratigize, push forward, evangelise, kick some pagan arse!!
This I am now very suspicious of. I do not trust myself to do it, I do not know how to do it? Steve's stuff on third place is feeding my thinking.
I cannot get any clarity about Gods purpose in the earth, in me, in my friends, in my children, through my work?? I feel adrift, with so many options avalible, hey, I can even listen to a woman speak in a meeting and not brake out in a Reformed Evangelical Rash!!
I think that what I am about to write is begginging to form some kinda base, or values, or anchor points (thanks Steve) from which to lead a faith community forward.
Jesus is going to 'Fill All Things', He is going to SUM every thing up! (col some where).
I gotta seek to be like Him.
We have gotta seek to be like HIm.
We have gotta do stuff collectively and individually that He would do.
Thinking CHURCH:
We exsist to Help each other to become like Jesus.
We exsist to seek lost people.
We exsist to do beautiful things and offer them up to God in worship.
Its a start?
Help me!!”
OK, it Firday 14th Novemebr, which means organicchurch is one year old.
organicchurch bloggers have been trying to find one blog post on organicchurch from the last year that made a profound impact on thier life and/or thinking - and quote it (or part of it if its a long one) in their blog post adding a little thought about it and it's affects on you. I might as well start off.
I don't know weither this one counts cause it's almost a quote of a quote... anyway here it is:
The date was Saturday, July 12, 2003 and Graham quoted this in his blog post:
You are going about your everyday business. It's an ordinary day, just like any other, nothing special. The only difference is that you are alert, open to what might happen, who you might meet, what you might see: open to seeing God in the everyday. And as you go about your ordinary life, you spot something out of the corner of your eye, something that looks different, something that has enough about it to stop you in your tracks. You draw closer to it and suddenly you are aware of God's presence: that you are standing on ground that is holy. And you allow that awareness of God to fill you….I love this quote, basically discribing a similar thoguht to 'provenitent grace'. We don't take God out into the world, He's already there and He's inviting use to join Him in His work. The quote becasue of it's excellent writting really helped me grasp this concept.
And so Moses turns aside 'to see why this bush is not burning up'; he experiences God being present in that place and the rest is history. Moses might not have noticed; he might have carried on his way, his mind full of this, that and the other. Or he might have noticed it and thought 'I haven't got the time: I've got so much to do'. But he didn't. He was alert to the possibility of God in the everyday and experienced God in that ordinary bush that he may well have passed 100 times before, but which for him in that moment became extraordinary.
A Transforming Inclusivity
There is an interesting sermon by Tom Wright here, which I found a link to from here. Obviously very 'occassional' but I particularly found this paragraph interesting:
"It won't come cheap. It has been all too easy - not least for the churches of the reformation with their proper insistence on worshipping in their own languages - to slide into thinking that our sort of people are the real Christians, or even the real evangelicals, to confuse ethnic or geographical or cultural or personality distinctives with theological ones. This doesn't mean that there aren't important theological questions, some of which might necessarily divide the church. There are. It doesn't mean that Paul would have supported a free-for-all 'inclusivity' which ignores the imperatives of holy living in the unspoken name of contemporary culture; read the rest of Ephesians and see. Gospel inclusivity is always a transforming inclusivity. But if there is a danger in a cheapened unity which glosses over real differences, there is just as great a danger in retreating into pre-packaged and culturally conditioned little boxes. Through the church God's wisdom in all its rich variety - the word in Greek is polypoikilos, a word you'd use to describe a flower-bed alive with every colour in the rainbow - God's many-splendoured wisdom is to be made known to the powers of the world."
I particlularly like "Gospel inclusivity is always a transforming inclusivity". Maybe it is even better 'out of context'! What do people think?
The Bible - some thoughts on medium and message
In 1967 Marshall McLuhan, sociologist and 'prophet of the information age' (as touted by Wired magazine), declared that: "The Medium is the Message". His suggestion was that it is not just the contents of a medium that effect us but the medium itself. So, it's not what I what on TV that has the great effect on me but the fact that I watch TV at all.
The Bible only put into mass produced print 500 years ago with the advent of the Gutenburg press. Before that it was hand scribed by monks, each page a work of art. Only the monks, clergy and the very rich could own a copy of the Bible and only the educated could read it. The Bible could only be heard by 'the people' in a church - and even then it would have been in Latin, a language they didn't understand.
With the advent of the printing press more people could get hold of the Bible but still only the rich could afford books and only the educated could read them. With people such as Tyndale and Wycliffe the Bible got translated in to English as religious dogma changed people could hear the Bible in church and learn what it meant in community. The development of the technology of printing lead to books becoming more affordable, this eventually lead to most homes having a 'family Bible' - families could now sit around and learn the Bible together.
Over the last century, with the advent of mass production, individuals in the Western world have been able own there own Bibles and to read their Bible by themselves. This is a unique and new situation profoundly effecting the way we approach the Bible.
In countries where Christianity is outlawed some Christians are forced to share one Bible with their Christian community, in some cases having just one page of the Bible to themselves. In this situation the medium is significantly changed, and if McLuhan is correct will radically affect their approach to it. If your community had to share a Bible, each of you getting a couple of pages how would that effect the way the Bible was taught and learnt?
Organicchurch is one year old on Friday - so if I forget "happy blogday" everyone... here's to another year... :o)
.Posted by: Central Vineyard | 11/10/2003 06:59:00 pm |
The 'New Kind of Church' Conversation last week was great. The funny thing about conversations, though, is that it is hard to say exactly what the conference was 'about' or what you 'learned'. People ask me what it was about and what I got out of it and I am really finding it hard to say in three easy points beginning with 'P'. Actually I mean that I am not really trying. I feel that I and my thinking have changed in a number of ways through the variety of conversations I participated in and eaves dropped on. It sounds about right then that I don't need to 'boil it down' to what he/they said. In that sense I don't think I have been in a conference quite like it. Managing to get conversation between ~200 people [or whatever] I think was quite a feat. All credit to the emergent guys.
Having said all that there were certainly highlights. We all particularly appreciated the attitudes of Brian and Jason. The posture of hope, humility, expectation, and grace in a time when many things are being questioned was a refreshing change. It was not a question of what was wrong with church but what can be learnt and changed. The image of learning not being linear but being maybe more like a tree trunk's rings was helpful, i.e. each new stage having to incorporate all of the previous stages to grow. In answer to the question "We don't want to chuck the baby out with the bath water" Brian said "I don't want to chuck anything out", but learn from it. Many of us are trying to chuck *everything* out, so it is a timely lesson.
Lots of questions I want to raise as a result, so watch out for those. But thanks Jason for a great time!
Does anyone who reads this know where I could get hold of some portable coffee dispenser backpacks? Preferably in the UK? (the image I have in my mind is of a tank that you wear on your back that has a water gun attached, so that you can dispense coffee to people easily)
.Posted by: Jonathan | 11/07/2003 07:11:00 pm |
