Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Monday with…Mike Tyson
Grace in the 21st Century
The church has a substantial problem at present in the institutions of Churches in the 21st century. The Christendom toolbox that the church has been left with is not going to suffice in this age called post-Christendom. Christians are left with a church that is rapidly declining and the church structure that has been left is simply not going to work.[1] In the struggle to grasp the new realities of concepts, the church feels lost and unsure of itself. Some churches have retreated into the safety of its building. Some of these churches have huddled together reminiscing about the days gone by and grieving over the days when the church was in a stronger position.
Christianity in the words of Leonard Sweet in his forward to the Forgotten Ways says, ‘the Christianity has undergone untold crashes and clashes in the past two thousand years.’[2] Sometimes our hard drives need defragmenting. Data entered onto hard drive is not always entered cleanly and then more files have to be added to keep computers up to date. The more files added the more the hard dive gets scrambled and confused. It therefore slows right down. Many people procrastinate over the defragging process and leave this until the computer is basically ground to halt and crashes, stalled programs and power outages are happening all to often to complete this process. Once complete however the computer is back up to speed and becomes a full speed processor again. The church is at a point in time where the defragging process is taking place in its understanding and dispensing of grace.
While I spent a year in a church in Columbia, Maryland, I was struck by a certain instance that enlightened me to a major flaw in the church’s 21st century understanding of grace. In our youth group there was one child who was so full life and energy, but he was so full of energy and life that he was sometimes too much for people and annoyed and upset certain members of the Church. I heard one of the more elderly members of our church telling the young boy, “God only likes good little boys.” Although this evidence is anecdotal it points us to the truth that we as a church in the 21st century are unsure of how to dispense God’s grace because we do not fully understand it.
[1] A Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006) p.17
[2] A Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, p.11
[3] M Lucado, In the Grip of God’s Grace: You Can’t Fall Beyond His Love (London: Word Press, 1996) p.19-20
[4] C Swindoll, The Grace Awakening (Milton Keynes: Word Publishing, 1990) p.8
[5] C Swindoll, The Grace Awakening, p.9
Grace in the 21st Century
Over the coming weeks I will post up a paper I am wrote on the understanding and dispensation of grace in the 21st century post-Christendom world. Hope it helps us to see the import
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. 
This quote inspires me to look out of the confines of myself and into a much larger world of injustice and need.
Martin Luter King Jr said “When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love. Where evil men would seek to perpetuate an unjust status quo, good men must seek to bring into being a real order of justice”. He really lived this out in his life, he took action when he saw injustice and look what happened literally off his back?
Moses in Exodus 3 and 4 has intrigued me for sometime now. You know I wonder what it really must have been to see a bush burning and yet not really burning….Am I going insane? Must have been high on his list of thoughts. This guy who is a fugitive because he killed a man is called to go back to the Pharaoh. This guy has massive credibility issues, its not like he is this all perfect man of God, he is a ragmuffin like me and you. You know I think Moses gets a really bad wrap at times for the question in verse ”Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” To be fair on the guy he has a point, he isn’t exactly going to get the best reaction when he asks Pharaoh do you mind letting go of well roughly about 1 million people because well God told me to tell you and of yeah can we just forget that you want to to kill me cause I killed a man. I love what God tells his to use to complete this task when he asks him the question “What is that in your hand?”A staff.” This staff that became the most famous stick in the bible, that parted oceans, became a snake, and did many other things.
God asks us the same question as Prophetic Communities what is in your hand? Is it your money? Is it your church building? Is it your homes? Is it your car?
You know God did some mighty things with that stick imagine what he can do with a Blackberry or an I Phone.
What is in your hand? And what will God with it?
A quick apology
I am a little crazy with my huge task of finishing a paper that has been little baby for about 18months now so hope it will appear on my blog o so soon!
Monday with….Shane Claibourne
“I asked participants who claimed to be “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time wit the poor, and less than 2 percent sai
d they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”
— Shane Claiborne (The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical)
I love this challenge to the understanding and depth of relationship between poor and rich…great book too.
“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world” K Barth
It was the prominent theologian Karl Barth who said “to clasp the hands in prayer is beginning of an uprising” against the disorder of the world”. This morning and afternoon we looked at the role of prophetic prayer in the inspiration of prophetic communities. I guess the very first thing we need to asses is what does it mean to prophetic…when we asked the crowd we got the usual series of answers; predicting the future, proclaiming the good news, speaking gods favour and many others but have we not limited our view of prophecies, have we not filtered it down to less than it is…I believe prophecy was all this things and so much more. Paul in say of prophecy when in 1 Corinthians 14: 3-4 he says to us “But someone prophesying is speaking to people, edifying, encouraging and comforting them. A person speaking in a tongue does edify himself, but a person prophesying edifies the congregation.” (Jewish New Testament)
So we have to wise up an say that when prophecy is biased like the KKK did against the blacks and the Dutch Reformed Church did in South Africa. I think that a good rule as borrowed from Ron Willoughby that if its biased then we should consider the implications of that message. Prophecy should bring the good news of God’s hope.
Prayer is one of the most well written, well studied aspects of Christian life and so to gain a fuller understating I think we have to come to easy, loose understanding of the prayer…so lets say prayer it is CONVERSATION with God. Its is from here that we will draw on one the most famous lessons on prayer to gain out understanding of what it means to be a prophetic praying community.
You know the Lords Prayer have you ever really paid attention to it…I know for most of walk I have just seen it as a prayer that we all pray one that I guess I only pay lip service to it and never really considered it important to really understanding what it means to pray. I think in my reflection that we are great at praying the second half of the Lords Prayer “Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” But when it comes to the second part we really struggle, when it comes to “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We really struggle because we all struggle with God’s will…knowing it, living it and being it.
I think it important to understand the nature of those two great challenges if we are to fully understand the role of prayer in our life as prophetic community who want to build a better world we need to grapple with these two great truths.
The next few of my post will be on the seminars that I am doing at ECG with Ron Willoughby and Roy Crowne. This seminar stream is all about the call of the church to be communities that speak God’s justice, mercy and humility to this broken world. The programme describes it as:
Justice. Mercy. Humilty. The challenge of God through Micah is for us to embody these three character traits. How can we love mercy if we aren’t intentional about practicing it beyond our own level of comfort and convenience? How do we walk humbly with God and not be salt and light in an often tasteless and dark world?
The first session today was on Awareness. It was Van Goethe who said ‘“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight”. Brain McLaren in his book everything must change identifies 3 important categories for answering the first of two question, the first question is what are the biggest problems in the world? Brian says all problems are at the very basis spiritual in some form or fashion. So lets just for the sake of this post agree that, the three categories are firstly it must cause the most suffering in the present, secondly pose the greatest threat to the future, thirdly it is the root cause to the other problems. These 3 observations form the basis for my reflection on the major role of awareness in inspiring a prophetic community.
In 2000 the UN complied a report to develop 8 goals to challenge the biggest problems in the world, the were
1. Educate extreme poverty
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empowerment of women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development
What we see in the world at the moment is 1 death from poverty every 4 seconds…the make poverty history campaign is long gone but why does our thoughts change so quickly back to our greed and forget the plight of our world.
Awareness of the poor is what led Mother Teresa into the ministry that shaped her as one of the most influential people of the past century. Her words were listened too by many political leaders and revolutionaries. But what drove her was a an awareness of what was going on right outside her door. An awareness that outside of herself and her own four walls there was a much greater need and that the Jesus really meant when he said love my neighbor. Mother Theresa once said “In the poor we meet Jesus in the most distressing disguises.” She tried to treat every person she met as if they were Jesus. I am challenged to consider the thought of everyone being Jesus…There is another challenge this morning….Mother Theresa always said “ Calcutta’s are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta? So this morning I challenged to consider after all we have heard what is your Calcutta?
What is the prophetic church going to do??
There is some brief thoughts!!!
Hey all my wonderful readers I am off for a week to do seminars with Ron Willoughby (Cliff College) and Roy Crowne (YFC) on Inspiring a Prophetic Community. Will blog on how it goes and some thoughts on the seminars throughout the week…If any of you are around Llandudno come and join in the fun its called ECG and it should be fun.
