to effective evangelism according to the prayer of Jesus are not so much outdated methods, or inadequate presentations of the gospel, as realities like gossip, insensitivity, negative criticism, jealousy, backbiting, an unforgiving spirit, a 'root of bitterness', failure to appreciate others, self-preoccupation, greed, selfishness and every other form of lovelessness. These are the squalid enemies of effective evangelism which render the gospel fruitless and send countless thousands into eternity without a Saviour. 'The glorious gospel of the blessed God', which is committed to our trust, is being openly contradicted and veiled by the sinful relationships within the community which is commissioned to communicate it. We need look no further to understand why the church's impact on the community is frequently so minimal in spite of the greatness of our message. We are fighting with only one hand!
(Bruce Milne, The Message of John, IVP, pp.250,251)
Wednesday, 25 January 2006
Thursday, 12 January 2006
The Church as Ordinary
Extracts from Against Christianity by Peter J. Leithart (Canon Press, 2003, pp.16-18)
Christian community...is not an extra "religious" layer on social life. The Church is not a club for religious people. The Church is a way of living together before God, a new way of being human together. What Jesus and the apostles proclaimed was not a new ideology or a new religion, in our attenuated modern sense. What they proclaimed was salvation, and that meant a new human world, a new social and political reality.
They proclaimed that God had established the eschatological order of human life in the midst of history, not perfectly but truly. The Church anticipates the form of the human race as it will be when it comes to maturity; she is the "already" of the new humanity that will be perfected in the "not yet" of the last day. Conversion thus means turning from one way of life, one culture, to another. Conversion is the beginning of a "resocialization," induction into an alternative paideia, and "inculturation" into the way of life practiced by the eschatological humanity.
In the New Testament, we do not find an essentially private gospel being applied to the public sphere, as if the public implications of the gospel were a second story built on the private ground floor. The gospel is the announcement of the Father's formation through His Son and the Spirit, of a new city the city of God...
We have made the Church strange and alien to the world, as if she were of a completely different order than the institutions of common social and political life. Paradoxically, the result of this estrangement has been to reshape the Church into the image of the world.
The Church is strange: she is the creation of the Father through Word and Spirit, the community of those who have been united by the Spirit with the Son, and therefore brought into the eternal community of the Trinity. She is a city whose town square is in heaven. She is a city without walls or boundary lines, a polity without sword or shield. Of no other society can that be said.
But she is ordinary: the Church is made up of human beings, with features that identify her as a culture among the cultures of the world. God did not enter a world of books with blurks; He did not intervene in a world of rituals and meals with spatuals and gleals; He did not call His people to live according to specific quormal principles or to promote a particular uphos.
Rather, God created a world of stories, symbols, rituals, and community rules. Into this world of stories, God introduced a rival story; into a world of books, God came with His own library; in a world of symbols and rituals and sacrificial meals, the Church was organized by a ritual bath and a feast of bread and wine; in the midst of cultures with their own ethos and moral atmosphere, God gathered a community to produce the aroma of Christ in their life together.
Only by insisting on the Church's ordinariness can we simultaneously grasp her strangeness.
The Church can cut across the grain of existing human social and cultural life only if she bears some likeness to existing societies. If she is a completely different sort of thing, then societies and nations and empires can go on their merry way ignoring the Church, or, equally deadly, find some murky alleyway to push her into.
But if the Church is God's society among human societies, a heavenly city invading the earthly city, then a territorial conflict is inevitable...
Christian community...is not an extra "religious" layer on social life. The Church is not a club for religious people. The Church is a way of living together before God, a new way of being human together. What Jesus and the apostles proclaimed was not a new ideology or a new religion, in our attenuated modern sense. What they proclaimed was salvation, and that meant a new human world, a new social and political reality.
They proclaimed that God had established the eschatological order of human life in the midst of history, not perfectly but truly. The Church anticipates the form of the human race as it will be when it comes to maturity; she is the "already" of the new humanity that will be perfected in the "not yet" of the last day. Conversion thus means turning from one way of life, one culture, to another. Conversion is the beginning of a "resocialization," induction into an alternative paideia, and "inculturation" into the way of life practiced by the eschatological humanity.
In the New Testament, we do not find an essentially private gospel being applied to the public sphere, as if the public implications of the gospel were a second story built on the private ground floor. The gospel is the announcement of the Father's formation through His Son and the Spirit, of a new city the city of God...
We have made the Church strange and alien to the world, as if she were of a completely different order than the institutions of common social and political life. Paradoxically, the result of this estrangement has been to reshape the Church into the image of the world.
The Church is strange: she is the creation of the Father through Word and Spirit, the community of those who have been united by the Spirit with the Son, and therefore brought into the eternal community of the Trinity. She is a city whose town square is in heaven. She is a city without walls or boundary lines, a polity without sword or shield. Of no other society can that be said.
But she is ordinary: the Church is made up of human beings, with features that identify her as a culture among the cultures of the world. God did not enter a world of books with blurks; He did not intervene in a world of rituals and meals with spatuals and gleals; He did not call His people to live according to specific quormal principles or to promote a particular uphos.
Rather, God created a world of stories, symbols, rituals, and community rules. Into this world of stories, God introduced a rival story; into a world of books, God came with His own library; in a world of symbols and rituals and sacrificial meals, the Church was organized by a ritual bath and a feast of bread and wine; in the midst of cultures with their own ethos and moral atmosphere, God gathered a community to produce the aroma of Christ in their life together.
Only by insisting on the Church's ordinariness can we simultaneously grasp her strangeness.
The Church can cut across the grain of existing human social and cultural life only if she bears some likeness to existing societies. If she is a completely different sort of thing, then societies and nations and empires can go on their merry way ignoring the Church, or, equally deadly, find some murky alleyway to push her into.
But if the Church is God's society among human societies, a heavenly city invading the earthly city, then a territorial conflict is inevitable...
Sunday, 8 January 2006
The Ultimate Detox
Mark 7:14-30
Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside you can defile you by going into you. Rather, it is what comes out of you that defiles you."
After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters you from the outside can defile you? For it doesn't go into your heart but into your stomach, and then out of your body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
He went on: "What comes out of you is what defiles you. For from within, out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile you."
Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
"First let the children eat all they want," he told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs."
"Lord," she replied, "even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."
Then he told her, "For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter."
She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
(TNIV)
Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside you can defile you by going into you. Rather, it is what comes out of you that defiles you."
After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters you from the outside can defile you? For it doesn't go into your heart but into your stomach, and then out of your body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
He went on: "What comes out of you is what defiles you. For from within, out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile you."
Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
"First let the children eat all they want," he told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs."
"Lord," she replied, "even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."
Then he told her, "For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter."
She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
(TNIV)
Friday, 6 January 2006
Why Jesus wants his people to be sanctified
It would seem an obvious point: Jesus wants his people to be sanctified, to be holy. Yes, quite so. In fact, he prays for just that in his great prayer in John 17:
But what does Jesus have in mind?
He links the setting apart (sanctification) of his disciples with his own act of being set apart. So he made himself holy so that we too could be holy? I think the emphasis in these verses is working in a slightly different direction. Jesus set himself apart for the work of God in order to see people redeemed and reconciled to God. And he expressly states here that just as he had been sent into the world by the Father on that mission and responded by sanctifying himself, so too he is sending them into the world.
So why is Jesus praying that his people be set apart for God? In order that they might be enabled and equipped to fulfil their calling to go into all the world with the good news. Set apart and sent out; that's us.
And notice too the crucial role played by God's Word in that whole process. What is the work that scripture is to do in our lives? To make us more like Jesus? Yes, but not simply in terms of moral rectitude, integrity of character and so forth; rather, along with those, to be more like Jesus in our commitment to, and sacrificial outworking of, the great mission of God.
If Jesus prayed for that, it would be good if we did too.
Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. (John 17:17-19;TNIV)
But what does Jesus have in mind?
He links the setting apart (sanctification) of his disciples with his own act of being set apart. So he made himself holy so that we too could be holy? I think the emphasis in these verses is working in a slightly different direction. Jesus set himself apart for the work of God in order to see people redeemed and reconciled to God. And he expressly states here that just as he had been sent into the world by the Father on that mission and responded by sanctifying himself, so too he is sending them into the world.
So why is Jesus praying that his people be set apart for God? In order that they might be enabled and equipped to fulfil their calling to go into all the world with the good news. Set apart and sent out; that's us.
And notice too the crucial role played by God's Word in that whole process. What is the work that scripture is to do in our lives? To make us more like Jesus? Yes, but not simply in terms of moral rectitude, integrity of character and so forth; rather, along with those, to be more like Jesus in our commitment to, and sacrificial outworking of, the great mission of God.
If Jesus prayed for that, it would be good if we did too.
Thursday, 5 January 2006
indeed
if nothing else by Over The Rhine
i'm so tired in the mornings
i try to go back
i try to remember
the light appearing
without warning
tying up my hands
like i'm good for nothing
if nothing else i can dream
i can dream
i'll never tell never tell
all i've seen
right in front of me
like the ghost of every thing that i could be
for the night sky is an ocean
black distant sea
washing up to my window
all the stray dog night owl junkies
orphans vagabonds
angels who lost their halos
if nothing else i can dream
i can dream
i'll never tell never tell
all i've seen
right in front of me,
like the ghost of every thing that i could be
in the cool and callous grip of reality
words in my head
like misfits after midnight
begging for a light
words left unsaid
they may never see the light of day
and that may be okay
if nothing else i can dream
i'm so tired in the mornings
i try to go back
i try to remember
the light appearing
without warning
tying up my hands
like i'm good for nothing
if nothing else i can dream
i can dream
i'll never tell never tell
all i've seen
right in front of me
like the ghost of every thing that i could be
for the night sky is an ocean
black distant sea
washing up to my window
all the stray dog night owl junkies
orphans vagabonds
angels who lost their halos
if nothing else i can dream
i can dream
i'll never tell never tell
all i've seen
right in front of me,
like the ghost of every thing that i could be
in the cool and callous grip of reality
words in my head
like misfits after midnight
begging for a light
words left unsaid
they may never see the light of day
and that may be okay
if nothing else i can dream
There are times
...when time has a way of catching-up on you, dropping hints that cannot aspire to subtlety, affirming what you suspected all along but were too scared to admit and too fragile to admire. Catch your breath, boy, this train is ready to leave.
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