Church

Duke Convocation 2010

/ Martin / 1 Comment

Duke_divinity_school

Audio recordings of the main lectures and worship services from the 2010 Duke Divinity School Convocation Conference are now available.

The conference was entitled ‘The Living Witness: Tradition, Innovation and the Church‘  – the introduction to the conference on the Duke website is as follows:

How do we witness to the timeless truth of the Reign of God in this age of rapid-fire change, an age in which a cell phone is hopelessly out of date before the contract expires?

Such a challenge requires us to take risks, to innovate, and to explore our work across many disciplines – all in ways  that remain grounded in our Christian tradition and are framed by theological reflection.  Explore the future of Christian witness to God’s unfolding reign in the world alongside respected leaders and creative scholars from across the church—including Bishop N.T. Wright, journalist and author Andy Crouch, pastor Rob Bell, and Bishop Vashti McKenzie in addition to Duke Divinity faculty.

Download the various talks for free from here.

Generation Y has a faint cultural memory of Christianity

/ Martin / Leave a comment

There was a very interesting article on the Church of England website yesterday:

“Young people have not inherited the rebellious hostility to the Church of their parents’ generation, although for many of them religion is irrelevant for day-to-day living. These are two of the findings of an informative new book The Faith of Generation Y, authored by Sylvia Collins-Mayo (sociologist of religion), Bob Mayo (parish priest in West London), Sally Nash (Director of the Midlands Centre for Youth Ministry) with the Bishop of Coventry, Rt Revd Christopher Cocksworth (who has five Generation Y children).

Reporting a study of over 300 young people in England aged between 8 and 23 who attended Christian youth and community work projects in England, The Faith of Generation Y (those born from around 1982 onwards) provides an empirically grounded account of the nature of young people’s faith – looking into where they put their hope and trust in order to make life meaningful. The book goes on to consider whether Christianity has any relevance to young people, and asks whether the youth and community projects in which they participate foster an interest in the Christian faith.”

Read the full article here.

Britain still claims to be 71% Christian

/ Martin / Leave a comment

Interesting article in the Daily Mail today about the sexual and religious make up of Great Britain:

More than seven out of ten Britons say they are Christians, according to an official count.  The high figure will be seen as a firm endorsement for those who argue the British public remain wedded to traditional religious values despite the fall in church attendances…..The analysis produced by the Office for National Statistics suggested that a big majority of the population still believe in Christianity.  Based on nearly 450,000 replies to a series of Government-backed surveys, it found that 71.4 per cent of the UK adult population call themselves Christians.  They dwarfed the numbers of atheists and secularists. Just over one in five people, 20.5 per cent, said they had no religion.  The analysis from the new Integrated Household Survey, which is produced from answers to the same questions put in six different established surveys, put the Muslim proportion of the population at 4.2 per cent, just under one in 20.  It said 1.5 per cent are Hindu, 0.7 per cent Sikh, 0.6 per cent Jewish, 0.4 per cent Buddhist, and 1.1 per cent say they follow another religion….

Read the full article here.

Francis Chan – BASIC series

/ Martin / 1 Comment

Francis_chan_basic

A friend drew my attention to the new Francis Chan DVD’s called the ‘BASIC series’ – being produced by Flannel, the same crowd that produced the NOOMA videos with Rob Bell:

Check out the BASIC series website here.

Trends come and go in our culture and the church seems to follow.

Francis Chan asks these questions about the church. Francis puts it this way:

“If I only had this as my guide… if all I had was the Bible…and I was to read this book and then start a ‘church’ what would it look like? Would it look like the thing that we’ve built here and all refer to as church? Or would it look radically different?”

BASIC is a seven part series of short films – from Flannel, the award winning creators of the NOOMA film series – that challenge us to reclaim the church as Scripture describes it to be. This series will speak to those who have questions about the church and to those who may have lost interest in the church.

What is church?
You are church.
I am church.
We are church.

Here is the series trailer:

…and the trailer for the first DVD in the series, Fear God, which is available now here.

I have just bought it and will review it next week once I’ve received it through the post and watched it 🙂

 

 

British church attendance turns a corner

/ Martin / Leave a comment

From an article on the Christian Today website:

For years now, the words ‘church attendance’ have rarely been read apart from the rather gloomy utterance of ‘in decline’.

But it seems there may be more to smile about than any of us realised as the latest figures out from Christian Research show that attendance in the Catholic Church and Church of England have stabilised, while the Baptist Union has seen sizable growth.

Read the full article here.

Mission, ecclesiology and discipleship in our contemporary culture

/ Martin / 4 Comments

It is not very often that I read a blog post that really gets me thinking – but I did today.

I happened to find a link to Jim and Bobbi Hoag’s blog ‘Mission Now‘ and started to read a recent post by Jim entitled ‘21st Century Mission, Ecclesiology and Discipleship‘.

As he explains at the beginning of the post:

“I’m just thinking outloud on this post, nothing chisled in stone here. Put up a Tweet the other morning that went like this: “On being missional: Less trying to be early church “radical”, more room for the marginal (by being relational) without compromising the core”. I think it might be helpful to ask, does the early church and,  say, the contemporary Chinese church provide appropriate (relevant) models for the church in the West in this hour? If we are to emulate the vision and ambition of the early church in this culture, at this time in history, I believe we need to understand in what way that is to be achieved.

I think in some ways we need to appreciate the early church of the first two or three centuries as historically transitional and an example of the effect of God’s love/grace on human hearts. But because we live in a historical continuum (not vacuum), it’s possible we are making a mistake adapting a perceived first century church paradigm as a universal model of mission, ecclesiology and discipleship, without factoring in cultural and historical differences. Dogmatic interpretation often moves from context to the abstract and universal, ignoring historical and contextual contingencies, reducing and limiting Spirit-led creativity. For instance, in 21st century Western culture we are not living in, nor do we have to fear being eradicated by a satanically inspired imperial regime or a hostile persecuting Judaism and thus huddle up in places hidden from view. A narrative theology suggests to us that chunks of biblical truth, wrenched from their historical and eschatalogical setting, can result in serious damage to cultural connection.”

This really got me thinking – and I’ve been mulling it over, on and off, for the last few hours.

There does seem to be a trend at the moment, both in Christian literature and praxis, to move towards a more organic/ simple/ liquid/ incarnational/ missional church paradigm – with so many seemingly rejecting inherited church expressions and traditions as dated and restrictive, or even pagan, in structure and substance.  In parallel with this, so many are looking back to the first century church for inspiration – seeing it as a time when the worship of the risen Lord Jesus was undiluted by culture and the carnal desire for power and influence.

And I must admit, I have done the same.

But is looking backwards to what we think is a golden age in church history the answer to our contemporary church problems?

Well, maybe, in part, it is – but maybe we should also be looking to the future to influence our contemporary church expression – as Jim puts it so eloquently in his post:

“There is an eschatalogical horizon set in the distance for us, meaning that if we take as the final objective the renewal of creation (not escape to the heavens), we have a mission that is creational in scope unique to us. The community that is expansive enough, improvisational enough and imaginative enough to embrace that mission will participate in what the future will be, modeling new creation. And it will do so motivated and compelled by the love of Christ who gave Himself for that community, for His church.”

I think this is brilliant – and spot on!

The final objective of our faith is to be part of the renewal of creation – and that starts now – in Christ – being part of His Kingdom – today.  If our only hope as Christians is heaven when we die then we have sort of missed the point – and missed out on the blessing of day to day transformation in Christ as part of His body – the church.

I love the idea of our mission being ‘creational in scope’ – and that this view of mission is unique to us as disciples of Jesus!

Our purpose – to bring the new creation into reality by the Holy Spirit working through us as salt and light in our tainted world – being a community compelled by the love of Christ, modelling what that new creation will be like through the love and compassion, forgiveness, mercy, and grace that we show to others in response to that which we have found ourselves, hard won by Jesus on the cross at Calvary.

And that is the call to us across the whole age of the Church – until Jesus returns for his Bride, and the new heaven and earth are brought into being.

How we do it needs to be sensitive to the culture in which we find ourselves – but most of all – it needs to be centred on Jesus alone – dependent upon His power and presence through the Holy Spirit – led and sustained by Him – rather than just blindly following the current fashions of men.

As Jim puts it:

“…missional communities will organize themselves according to the conditions of their calling and existence. We are dealing less with religious hostility and imperial oppression and more often with indifference, irrelevance and cynicism. (This is tough enough to deal with in its own right and is not to say the church doesn’t face its own very real persecution and unique difficulties in every generation). It is not only our faith but our imagination and intellect that is being challenged today. So, what does the ecclesia look like in it’s 21st century implementation? It will examine the Great Commission and discipleship in the first century, understanding its origin and form developed under the shadow of suffering and martyrdom, living in the expectation of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. This effected the task of making disciples then, and needs to be adjusted for discipleship in the context of our NOW. Though discipleship is a “given”, it is not (IMHO)  a generic, one size fits all proposition. Its form relates to (among other things) a particular period in the history of a people. This is hard to grasp because we relate so totally to universal timeless truth, not a narrative, not context, not a continuing story. We can think that the Great Commission, being shaped to current culture, is somehow being reduced or diminished in it’s power and purpose. But we have to have faith in God and the leading of His Spirit, not a timeless, context-less program of discipleship.”

So should we reject the current trend towards a more organic/ simple/ liquid/ incarnational/ missional church paradigm?  No, not at all – I think we should embrace it – but not as a replacement for inherited or traditional church – but as a catalyst for renewal, and complementary to it!

We must not throw the baby out with the bath water – but be led by the Holy Spirit to express church in an appropriate way for the time, place, culture and circumstance in which we find ourselves.  That might be organic/ simple/ liquid/ incarnational/ missional or inherited/ traditional in expression – or maybe a hybrid of both.  The point though is that the gospel truth stays the same – but how we express it changes.  The key, I think, is to not be restricted in our way of doing church, but to be open and willing to be led by the Spirit – in prayer together as ‘church’.  This might actually mean that our church community expression is different in different places – as we reject the idea, as Jim says, of discipleship as “a generic, one size fits all proposition”.

Has the time come to put our business model ‘strategic’ thinking back in the box and get back on our knees together – seeking the will and purposes of our Lord for us in our specific time, place, culture and circumstance rather than just adopting the latest fad, trendy programme or worship style that worked for someone else?  I’m not saying we reject business or programme led thinking altogether – just maybe it’s time we put it into its proper place in the church context – subject to the discerned purposes and heart of God!

Our mission, ecclesiology and discipleship must start and end with Jesus – creational in scope – focussed on His life, death and resurrection – bringing the transforming power of the Kingdom of God into reality today – through the work of the Holy Spirit in and through us, His church – reaching the lost and serving the needy in response to the love and grace we have found in Him.

Everything else is peripheral!

(HT: Miguel Labrador)

Anne Rice rejects ‘Churchianity’

/ Martin / 5 Comments

From an article in Christianity Today:

Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice declared Wednesday that she “quit being Christian”.

The long-time “Christ-haunted atheist” wrote in her Facebook fan page that she found it “simply impossible … to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group”.

“For ten …years, I’ve tried,” the 68-year-old author wrote. “I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

….she concluded that she was “out” and announced her refusal to be anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-Democrat, anti-secular humanism, anti-science, and anti-life in the name of Christ.

“In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian,” she concluded Wednesday.

While some viewed Rice’s announcement as an abandonment of her relatively newfound faith, the famed author made clear the following day that her faith in Christ “is central to my life”.

“My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me,” she wrote in her Facebook fan page Thursday.

But to the former Vampire author, “following Christ does not mean following His followers”.

“Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become,” she concluded.

Read the full article in Christianity Today here.

Also, for interest, have a read of the comment about Anne Rice’s decision on the iMonk blog here.

Terry Virgo – ‘apostolic’ versus ‘missional’

/ Martin / Leave a comment

I thought this was an interesting short video – Terry Virgo talking about the difference between being ‘apostolic’ and ‘missional’ – and about misconceptions of what it means to be an Apostle in the contemporary church.

From Jubilee Church on Vimeo.

HT: Adrian Warnock

8 reasons why some churches do not grow….

/ Martin / 1 Comment

Perrynoble

There was an article in the Christian Post last week by Perry Noble which caught my eye – ‘8 reasons why some churches do not grow’.

In summary, the 8 reasons listed are as follows:

Some churches do not grow because…..
#1 – Their vision is not clear;
#2 – Their focus is on trying to please everyone;
#3 – Their leadership lacks passion;
#4 – Too much energy, time and money is wasted on things that no-one cares about;
#5 – There is a lack of prayer;
#6 – There is an unwillingness to take risks;
#7 – There is disobedience with regard to the clear demands of Scripture;
#8 – There is a refusal to embrace the reality that the call to follow Jesus is a call to serve.

This is all well and good – and to a large degree I can understand Noble’s viewpoint.

However, I can’t help but feel it’s all a bit dry – all a bit, well, business like – emphasising moral outcomes rather than personal, radical discipleship!

Bible references are included to support each stated reason – which is great – but I thought it was telling that the name of Jesus wasn’t even mentioned until the last paragraph – and ‘discipleship’ wasn’t mentioned at all!

And where is the cross?  What about repentance – and faith?  How about whether people love Jesus in the first place – and recognise the forgiveness, mercy and grace that they have received as a result of His sinless life and death at Calvary!

It occurred to me that a church could do all eight things in Noble’s list and still not see any ‘growth’ – because they are motivated by religious duty rather than a heart melted by the love and grace of God – getting by with little or no reference to Jesus or the Holy Spirit at all!

I also have a problem with the implied definition of ‘growth’.  It seems to me that ‘growth’ in this article is about growth in numbers – increasing bums on seats – but is this the only definition of growth that should be considered?  What about growing in faith, in compassion, in holiness and ‘Christlikeness’?  Admittedly, Noble does mention ‘disobedience with regard to Scriptural demands’ and ‘refusal to embrace servanthood as the primary call of the Christian life’, but both seem to me to be focussed on moral, outward observance of rules rather than a heart felt, irresistable response to the grace, mercy and forgiveness received ‘in Christ’.

Don’t get me wrong – in principle, I accept and recognise as valid all of the reasons given – but wonder if the emphasis of each should be slightly different.

How about these instead?

Some churches do not grow because….

#1 – Their vision is not Jesus centred, Spirit led and disciple focussed;

#2 – Their focus is on trying to please anyone other than Jesus;

#3 – Their leadership lack a passion to lead by example as disciples who make disciples – in humble response to the grace they have received and God’s call on their lives;

#4 – Too much energy, time and money is wasted on things that Jesus doesn’t care about;

#5 – There is a lack of desire and need for God’s presence which results in a lack of prayer;

#6 – There is an unwillingness to be guided by the Holy Spirit and step out in faith;

#7 – There is a lack of a personal experience of Jesus, leading to disobedience and disregard for the clear demands of Scripture.  We are called to be disciples who make disciples – and live our lives as salt and light for the world – period!;

#8 – They neglect to incarnate the call to follow Jesus as disciples who serve, share and sacrifice in response to the Kingdom of God being a present reality.

I am sure that I am not saying anything that wasn’t in Perry Noble’s heart when he wrote his article – I hope not anyway 🙂

What do you think?  Anything that you would add or take away?

Read more from Perry Noble at this blog here.

 

Â