Kids in Sunday School?
By Laura
It is interesting to me that family is such a central part of the Church, and yet families often do not go to church together. Well, they go to church together, but once they get there the kids are put in the care of others to have their own time of age-appropriate biblical learning, while the adults attend the main service without ‘distractions.’ As I have grown up, I have seen both positive and negative aspects of this practice in the church. Personally, I went through children’s Sunday school as a child, and later participated in multiple youth groups as a teenager. These were all great places to grow in my faith in fun ways with people my age, while my parents were able to have more in-depth teaching with older adults. This was good.
A multi-faceted Gospel (i.e. the “good news” is not as monolithic as we often make it) « Stirrings
I have been preparing for Christian Associates’ 2nd annual North American conference called “Connect.” On Saturday morning at Connect, our 80 or so participants will wrestle with how we “embody the gospel communally.” The premise is that we default to expressing the good news in quite individualistic fashion, making it harder for normal people to really comprehend the beauty and breadth of God’s message in Christ for the world. The gospel is most clearly understand when embodied by communities that believe it and act as signs, foretastes and instruments of the now-and-not-yet Kingdom of God (as the great missiologist Lesslie Newbigin reminds us).
What is the Gospel? (HT: Out of Ur)
There has been much discussion about the meaning of the Gospel. What is the Gospel? Entrance into to heaven? A list or propositions? In this video, Dallas Willard talks about what the Gospel is and how we live in it.
What do you think about Willard's perspective? Do you think he captures the essence of what the NT calls the Good News?
The Mystery of Good Friday – HT MH
After attending the services at our church last night, I am still speechless. Good Friday commemorates perhaps the greatest mystery in the history of the world. How is it that God Himself—the Creator of the Universe—can suffer death at the hands of His creatures?
via michaelhyatt.com
A Prayer for Those Who Love the Gospel More than Jesus.
Dear Jesus, we tremble at the thought of you speaking these words to us. What could be more sobering and tragic than to hear you say, “You talk about me a whole lot, using plenty of spiritual language and Bible quotes. You’re very quick to recognize and correct false teaching. You’re even quite zealous to apply what you know to others. But your heart is very far from me.”
“Crossing the Line” – An Untamed Example of Missional Engagement In Cape Town
Did you catch the line they shared about how they viewed the poverty and hardship of the township they minister in? They were told to, "Look at the gap – what it is now and what it will be when Jesus returns." I don't think we can do mission adequatley unless we have both a clear Kingdom theology and and a mature eschatology (beliefs about the end times).
After spending time with these two this last summer, I was humbled and inspired to look at and live differnently in the city I reside in.
Contextualize This
Attempting to contextualize the Gospel is a very acute and sensitive endeavor. Push the envelope too far and you will be lost in the ocean of syncretism, or really just pervert the Gospel until it is no longer the good news of Jesus Christ, but the good news of whatever culture or society you are in. On the contrary, if you fail to contextualize at all, or just contextualize too little, evangelism really just becomes assimilation and or socialization unto the church culture – or Christian imperialism. Stanley Hauerwas seems to insinuate in his book Resident Alien that the first apologists in the early church were inadvertently (it should be noted that Constantinian Christendom was also a major contributing factor) laying the groundwork that would perpetuate into modern theologians fruitless attempts to accommodate or make the Gospel – perceived to be ancient and outdated due to its ancient near eastern Hebraic roots – seem relevant and intelligible to the post-modernity, post-enlightenment, and increasingly anti-Christianity intellectual realm of the current times. (There is obviously more to be said and more to explain, but for the sake of the brevity of the blog post, and retaining your interest, I must go on.) This, Hauerwas goes on to argue, “transforms it [the Gospel] into something it never claimed to be – ideas abstracted from Jesus, rather than Jesus with his people.”
So how then do we go forth and contextualize the Gospel? That is of course, if you do not believe that contextualizing is a necessary theological discipline, then you have no horse in this race and should go read a different blog. I am starting with the basic underlying assumption that it is necessary to contextualize the Gospel. After all, God did it – the Word became flesh. Anyways, I am not trying to hint that Hauerwas is suggesting that we give up trying to contextualize the Gospel (Hauerwas is a boss, he would never suggest such a thing), I am merely attempting to intelligently express and publicly vent a frustration that I have over contextualization. I believe it is not just important, but it is absolutely necessary. But I am also very put off by all the implicit dangers that come with, if it is not done properly. Rene Padilla argues and points out that it is not a science, but an art, to which I whole-heartedly agree. Unlike science, Scripture is not to be read, studied or translated with an indifferent disconnect between the object and the subject. There is an undeniable, subjective, and emotive relationship between the two.
Polytheism and Pluralism
There have been many times when I've struggled to figure out what bearing many Old Testament passages have on my life today, in a radically different cultural setting. Israel was born into a nation of many gods, and called to a radical monotheism. Christians in most of the western world today are born into a culture that is largely devoid of a real concept of God. Alan Hirsch, however, points out in his book Forgotten Ways that perhaps this difference is less than we might think. Early Christians, Hirsch writes, proclaimed that Jesus is Lord not only for the sheer truthfulness of the statement, but also in opposition to the desire of the current government to have "lordship" over their lives.
Today, we are not faced with a broad pantheon of actual gods being worshiped, nor are we faced with a singular dominating political power which desires absolute allegiance. But we are faced with a formidable opponent in the pluralism which dominates much of intellectual surroundings. Setting aside the positive elements of pluralism which allow for increased opportunities for dialogue, as Christians we must recognize that our only allegiance must be to Christ. Though perhaps we are not so likely to suddenly become Buddhist-Christian hybrid quasi-religious ascetics, there is still danger present: danger to subtly accept more and more of other religions until our desire to spread the Gospel is seriously diminished. A lack of commitment to the commission of making disciples can easily be connected to a lack of commitment to the bold statement, "The Lord our God is one." In the present buffet style favorite-flavor-of-religion, we must be constantly meditating on the supremacy of Christ and his dominance in our own lives.
The Gathered and the Scattered church
In The Gathered And Scattered Church, Hugh Halter talks about the differences between modalic and sodalic ministry. Modalic ministries would be classic evangelical or mainline churches. Sodalic ministries would be parachurches or other missional agencies. I began wondering as I started this chapter as to why we even need modalic churches. It seems as if today’s churches just are not working. They are not successfully pursuing mission and scattering people from the church to go out and spread the good news. Halter even refers to this type of ministry as nothing more than a “hospital, social/spiritual club, or a teaching center.”
Halter believes that sodalic ministry is the “other arm of the church.” Without this type of ministry, it just can’t work. Why aren’t these churches using both of these arms to effectively carry out missional ministry? I thought it was interesting how he used biblical text, something that we are all familiar with, be associated with these two types of ministries – The Great Commission.
“Gazuntite”
"Gazuntite"
In Alan Hirsch’s book, The Forgotten Ways, he talks about how the Gospel spread so quickly in the early church – in the midst of persecution – by making the Gospel “sneezable.” I’ll be honest; I don’t think the idea of making evangelism or missiology analogous to the action of a bodily discharge has ever crossed my mind. I mean even the phrase bodily discharge sounds really awkward and weird – let alone comparing the apostolic efforts of the early church to something I do when my nose is tickled. But upon further contemplation (and reading a little bit further down the page), I find this analogy to sneezing illuminating just as it is provocative. Hirsch argues that the early church was able to “sneeze” the Gospel, or in other words “distill” the Gospel (Note: look up the definition of distill. It is a verb that essentially means to condense – not to remove or compromise – but to condense down to its purest and simplest form, without changing it.) because of the great persecution they were under. In other words, these early Christians didn’t exactly have months or years to really explain and unpack the contents of Scripture in a 12 sermon series. More often than not, these guys (and gals) probably only had minutes. What they essentially “distilled” it down to is this; Jesus is LORD. Hirsch goes into some detail to set up and explain why the proclamation – Jesus is LORD – was so scandalizing and meaningful. We might look at that and think, eh, no big whoop. But to the early persecuted church, affirming or denying those three words was literally a life or death decision. This and other factors helped make this Gospel message spread like an epidemic or infectious disease. It just so happens that many infectious diseases are spread by sneezes. Interesting. My point in bringing this up isn’t much of a point; it’s more of a question. Maybe two or three questions actually. What if, or what/how would it look like, in a modern post-Christendom culture such as ours, to preach the Gospel in a similar “sneezable” manner, that was so “infectious,” it would cause some freak Jesus epidemic? Is that even plausible in such a comfortable and affluent “Desperate Housewives” suburban society? Something tells me that there is a lot to learn from the early church, and also examining how the Gospel still manages to spread like wildfire throughout persecution to this day. It will obviously look different, but I think there are definite lessons to be learned and extrapolated to our post-Christendom/post-modernity culture in 2011.– jessemac