My good friend, David Lock, alerted me to this short video on what a missional church is. Nice, simple introduction:
Enjoy.
Category Archives: General
There IS place for rich people in heaven (thank goodness)
The Bible has dire warnings for rich people. More than any other people (including all forms of vile criminals), the Bible warns rich people that their souls are in danger and the eternal destiny put at risk by their riches. Some rich people are told that they should give their money away – not as a form of communism, but rather as a test of their real motivations and allegiances. And yet, throughout the Bible, personal wealth is seen as a gift from God and a blessing. There are many rich people in the Bible, from Abraham to David, and Job to Paul.
In an excellent guest post on Rachel Held Evans’ blog this past weekend, Sara Barton wrote a wonderful piece about Joanna. She was one of Jesus’ female disciples. And she was rich. Her story is superb – and superbly told by Sara. Read it here, or an extract below.
Thank goodness we have models of how rich people should follow Jesus. What a difference the wealthy can make in the world if they develop a Jesus-worldview.
Continue reading There IS place for rich people in heaven (thank goodness)
The failure of the evangelical: mind, heart and spirit (probably in that order)
This blog entry could be a book on its own. I fear I cannot do this thought justice, but I would like to nevertheless put it out there for discussion and your reflection. It might feel overly harsh on “my own” (the evangelicals), but I do sometimes despair at the shallowness of thought and engagement that often accompanies discussions I have with fellow evangelicals. Hopefully my brief thoughts will spur deeper ones from you.
Back in 1995, Mark Noll wrote, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” – it’s a great read, with a central message: the failure of the evangelical mind is that evangelicals tend not to use theirs. Noll was particularly concerned that evangelicals have not produced great scholars who contribute to Christian interaction in science, the arts, politics, or culture in general. Too often evangelicals simply retreat to a “it’s in the Bible, God said it, I believe it, end of discussion” position.
He’s right.
Last year, Rachel Held Evans wrote on her blog about the scandal of the evangelical heart. In a well written piece, she wonders how so many evangelicals (especially Calvinists) do not feel more about the eternal fate of those they believe are destined for hell. She wonders how we can read some of the Old Testament stories about the Israelites wiping out other nations – including women and children – and not feel grief and anguish. Evangelicals are OK with this because “it’s in the Bible, God did it, it must be fine. End of discussion”.
She’s right.
Continue reading The failure of the evangelical: mind, heart and spirit (probably in that order)
How rich do you have to be (in order to help a poor person)?
Contrary to a common misinterpretation, Jesus never said that money was the root of all evil. There is nothing wrong with money, with making money, or with being rich. The Bible does warn rich people that it is dangerous for your spiritual health to be wealthy, but it is the love of money that is the root of all evil. According to the Bible, one of the key uses of personal wealth should be to help others. An abiding principle throughout Scripture is that we are blessed in order to be a blessing to others.
Yet we live in a world that is as inequitable as it has ever been. The rich are so rich, and have skewed the economic systems in their own favour. And the poor continue to remain so. There are currently over 1 billion people who live on less than $2 a day – and most of them will die because of their poverty.
Back in 2000, the world’s governments got together and created a set of eight goals, called the Millennium Development Goals, with a target of halving global extreme poverty by 2015. We’re nearly at that target date now, and we are seeing some successes. The number of extremely poor people has in fact reduced in the last thirteen years. But probably the most important part of the MDGs was that they quantified what is required to end extreme poverty, putting a price tag on it. We know what needs to be done. We know how much it will cost.
And there’s the rub. Who will pay?
Well, Oxfam recently crunched the numbers and showed that the net income of the world’s 100 richest people for 2012 (not their overall wealth: just the $240 billion they earned last year) is enough to end extreme poverty not once, or twice, but four times over. Or, put another way, if the world’s richest 100 people gave just three months earnings to the efforts to end poverty, we’d have all the money we needed to achieve this goal.
By the way, the world’s richest 1% have seen their income grow by more than 20% during the financial crisis.
OK, so that’s quite an eyeopener. But you could easily tut tut at this point and write this off as someone else’s problem.
But what about you?
Well, how rich do you have to be to be one of the “world’s richest”? How rich are you? Go to this wonderful website, http://www.globalrichlist.com/, enter your annual income and it will show you where you stand in the world’s income list (yes, your ranking out of 7 billion people). If you’re in the top 20% (and I promise you that if you’re reading this, then you are), then this is YOUR issue to.
How rich do you have to be in order to have enough to help the poor? So what are you doing about it?
Here’s something you should hear more of in your church: you are richer than many other people, and therefore need to give them some of your money and wealth. God is not a capitalist, and neither should we be.
How popular culture continues to feed incorrect visions of womanhood
Here’s something you should hear about at church: Women are strong, and brave, and leaders and often overlooked in Christian circles. No more!
I recently found two movie reviews very insightful. And, as the father of three daughters, I took them quite seriously, because both of them suggested that young girls were being fed an incorrect view of what it means to be a woman. These were two big movies of 2012: ‘Brave’ introduced Disney’s newest princess, and the ‘Twilight’ saga roared to its conclusion.
Rachel Held Evans wrote about Brave. I really enjoyed the movie, bought the DVD for my youngest daughter for Christmas, and have encouraged her to add Merida to the full set of Disney princesses she already has. I like Merida, and for the same reasons Rachel did: Merida is a flawed princess, with deep complexity, she stands up for herself and her life is not defined by her relationship to men.
But I also agree with Rachel’s main concern about the movie: the men in the story are portrayed as buffoons. It is not necessary that for women to be strong, men must be weak. But this is often how it is portrayed in movies: women only step up when the men fail.
Which leads to the second review that caught my attention. In fact, it was a response to a review. Mark Driscoll is a Christian pastor based in Seattle, Washington who has been making quite a name for himself in his views of men and women. He believes that men must lead, and women be submissive; and he has a vision of Christian marriage that feels a lot more like an idealised American suburb in the 1950s (possibly Stepford?) than the Bible. He spends a lot of time dealing with issues of sexuality, too. And he didn’t like Twilight – he described it as sick, twisted, evil and dangerous and to teenage girls what porn is for teenage boys.
Continue reading How popular culture continues to feed incorrect visions of womanhood
Being a witness to grace: Louie Giglio, homosexuality, a prayer, persecution and a storm of protest
One of the current themes of conservative evangelical Christianity is a persecution complex. They look for opportunities to be offended by popular culture (take the phony ‘war on Christmas’ in America, for example). And when something happens that could in any way be taken as an attack on Christians, they fall over themselves to proclaim how persecuted they are. This happened again this past week, as Louie Giglio, well known pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, was withdrawn from praying the benediction at President Obama’s inauguration. The reason was pressure from LGBT groups because of a sermon Giglio had preached in the 1990s about homosexuality.
The Gospel Coalition immediately jumped on this as a sign of an anti-Christian bias in society, of President Obama’s campaign of religious intolerance and (of course) of the fact that the conservative evangelicals must be right because Jesus said that people would hate them. Read their statement here.
It’s amazing how John 15:19 is taken so out of context it is made to say exactly the opposite of what Jesus intended. Go and read John 15 for yourself quickly. The immediate context is about love. It’s about proving our commitment to God, our devotion to each other and our service to the world by how much we love. And not the “tough love” advocated by James Dobson (so called “love” that would reject a child because of their sexual orientation, or cut off ties with a friend because of their divorce) but the sacrificial love of Jesus, who “while we were yet sinners”, gave up his life for us. Keep reading into John 16. The people that Jesus was warning his disciples about – those that would “hate them” – were the religious leaders. Jesus was hated by Pharisees and Saducees, not by the people. This is the tragic irony of the persecution complex: it’s actually conservative evangelical church leaders that Jesus was warning us about. They are actually the persecutors, not the persecuted.
Anyway, back to Louie Giglio, who I actually believe has done something different. He has provided a wonderful example of the grace and love we are supposed to be showing to the world.
It seems as if he withdrew his acceptance to pray at the inauguration (rather than being “disinvited” as the Gospel Coalition said). Read his statement here, and the Inaugural Committee’s statement here. In the light of a growing backlash to the invitation, Giglio – maybe under pressure from the White House – chose grace and peace and love. Rachel Held Evans has stated beautifully the value of this move by Giglio:
“I applaud Giglio’s decision to do as much as he could to ensure that something as sacred as a prayer did not become overly politicized or divisive. He made grace and peace higher priorities than his own celebrity. To me, that’s the essence of what Paul meant when he said, ‘As much as it depends on you, live peaceably with all people.’ We would do well to follow Giglio’s lead in this regard and discuss this situation with civility, not making more of it than necessary.”
I’d suggest, by the way, we should discuss the whole issue of homosexuality in the same way, too.
By the way, Rachel’s blog post on the issue is masterful. She explains that there is no denial of freedom of speech in Giglio’s removal from the Inauguration, nor are evangelical Christians being persecuted in America. Read her thoughts here.
It’s becoming too predictable, and a bad witness, that every little issue is seen as a storm, a denial of rights and a persecution by evangelical Christians – especially in America.
Thank you, Louie Giglio for your grace and wisdom.
Thank you, Rachel Held Evans for your insights and analysis.
Thank you, LGBT community for your continued concern and advocacy for people broken and wounded by a society and a church that does not know how to engage with you in love.
Thank you, God, for your patience with your creation and for helping us to inch forward – however slowly – towards the type of world that is truly “your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”.
New heights – or depths – in the debate about women leaders
Here’s something some churches really need to hear: there is no male and female in God’s Kingdom; men and women are equal in status, gifting and functioning in the church.
I grew up in churches that demanded that women submit to men, were not able to lead and could not teach men. As a young adult, I felt so strongly about this that I even left a church that changed their view on the issue, allowing men and women to minister as equals. My view has long since changed (that’s another story for another day, but was based on a detailed study of Scripture and personal experience with some of the most gifted and obviously called people I ever met – who happened to be women).
I don’t see this issue is a core theology, and, although I comment on it every now and again on this blog, it is not one that exercises me much. There are many superb thinkers, writers and teachers who are leading the cause of egalitarianism (the view that men and women are equals; as opposed to complementarianism, which argues that men should be in charge, and women should be their “help meets”) around the world, and I am happy to leave it to them. The very few verses in the Bible that deal with different roles of men and women are easily understood and explained in the light of the cultural context of the day, and the literary contexts in which they are found in the Bible itself.
But yesterday, I picked up a video from the Gospel Coalition, with a conversation between three of their top people, Tim Keller, John Piper and Don Carlson. It horrified me. All three are amazing men, great writers and teachers, but in recent days have made some strange statements about the issue of women. Piper in particular. Last year, he stated that the problem with culture and Christianity is that we have lost our understanding that Christianity is at essence a masculine religion.
In this video, the most disturbing thing is that all three men raise the issue of complementarianism to the level of a litmus test for orthodoxy, for ones willingness to take the Bible seriously, and for having a “loose approach to Scripture”. Sadly, this is the age-old conservative, evangelical approach that uses the Bible as a blood-stained baseball bat to beat opponents with, while blindly ignoring accepted hermeneutical principles, and also raising themselves to the level of infallible arbiters of truth.
Scarily, for example in the video, Carson specifically states that doing the work to understand the first century cultural context behind the books of the New Testament is an incorrect way of reading the Bible. I could not believe I had just heard that from such an influential Bible teacher, so I had to rewind and watch it again. But, indeed that’s what he said.
And worse, although they start by saying that in the Gospel Coalition they do not see complementarianism as a core doctrine, the closing comments were: “Let them compromise, we cannot!” They make the headship of men in the leadership of the church a matter of Dogma and not a doctrine or opinion that can have different positions held.
Piper has lost all credibility in my books over the past year, and in this video continued to do so. His views of masculinity are so distorted I really can’t believe what I am hearing. He provides the theological fuel to all the Wild at Heart men trying to find princesses to rescue, and the Mark Driscoll marriages turning women into Stepford wives from the 1950s, that are so dangerous to Christianity at the moment.
But you decide for yourself: watch the video and read the excellent response from Krish Kandiah here.
This scared me.
The best Her.meneutics posts of 2012
I found this blog during 2012, and have enjoyed the insights from their various authors. The blog is run by Christianity Today and aims to deal with issues affecting Christian women.
They recently provided a list of their most read blog posts from the past year, and it’s an excellent reading list (for men and women). You can find it here.
Responding to Tragedy
There have been tragedies to respond to in the year just passing. Unfortunately, a consistent theme coming out of American evangelicalism has been to use these tragedies as a bandstand for the common causes of the day, namely abortion, homosexuality and gun control (sad how conservative American Christians have reduced their religion to these touch stone topics). Once again, after the Newton school shootings, prominent Christian leaders have publicly stated their beliefs that this tragedy is caused by America’s shift to the left on these issues.
Greg Boyd, of ReKnew, responds as follows, and I agree entirely – here’s something you should hear in your church, but probably won’t:
Finger Pointing and the Impulse to Judge
by Greg Boyd, ReKnew
To no one’s surprise, yet to the sadness of many of us, several Christian spokespeople, including James Dobson, Mike Huckabee and Bryan Fischer, are blaming the shootings in Newtown, Conn, on abortion and gay marriage. This is sadly reminiscent of Jerry Falwell’s hurtful response to 9/11 when he divined that “the pagans,” “abortionists,” “feminists,” “gays,” “lesbians,” “ACLU” and “People For the American Way” were to be blamed. It’s reminiscent as well, on a smaller scale, of John Piper’s disturbing public declaration that the collapse of the 35W bridge here in Minneapolis that killed 13 people was God warning us about our sin and the toppling of a church steeple by a tornado was God warning a denomination not to ordain gays.
It seems to have become a staple of American conservative Christianity to respond to tragedy – when people most need to be reminded of God’s comforting and healing love – to grab a megaphone and accuse.
Does Hashim Amla make you want to become a Muslim?
Hashim Amla is a South African cricketer – and fast becoming a legendary one too. He is sublime to watch, and is having the most phenomenal season. He is also universally acclaimed, by teammate and opponent alike, as the nicest, humblest, gentlest guy you’ll ever meet. A real sportsman’s sportsman.
And he is devoutly Muslim. He has the most fantastic beard, and by all accounts, in all ways, he takes his Muslim practices very seriously.
I only mention his religious faith and one of its outward expressions, because he has caused me to think about something that Christians do quite a lot. If, as Christians, we discover that some famous star – be they a sportsperson, singer, actor or celebrity of some kind – is also a Christian, we tend to venerate them a bit. And then we often devise evangelistic campaigns featuring that person.
I lost count as a child how many events I went to that featured some or other Christian sports personality telling me how his or her faith really helped them to become a famous sports star. Since I have two left feet – and that’s just counting my hands – and have never been good at any sport, these talks were never quite as inspiring as they should have been. But I wasn’t the target demographic I suppose. I still don’t think that they were the best approach.
My question is this: does Hashim Amla’s success combined with his most remarkable character and aura of calm, humility, authority, respect, class and confidence (a heady mix of all the things I think are best in humanity) make me want to become a Muslim? If a local mosque had an evening featuring Hashim Amla as guest speaker, I would definitely consider going. I’d sit enthralled, I am sure, as he spoke. And then, I’d politely sit through whatever short Islamic message that followed. I respect Islam, have some Muslim friends, understand the religion, have visited a number of mosques and a holy Islamic shrine, and even own a Koran (which I have read). But I highly doubt whether anything that Hashim Amla did or said would convince me to become a Muslim.
Continue reading Does Hashim Amla make you want to become a Muslim?