Keith's Journal

From ASBO Jesus

Matt Chandler gives some insight into why some people lose their faith

Next Reformation offers the following tips for changing the mind-set of churches about being christian in a post-Christendom world.

Instilling missional habits..



David Fitch asks how we lead a church community to engage mission as a way of life? How do we train a congregation out of Christendom habits and instil post Christendom virtues? Curiously, I had a conversation a few mornings ago and was reminded of a comment Todd Hunter made some years ago. “Nurture the kind of life and practices you want; starve those you don't want.” Dave advocates the gentle rejection of certain assumptions and practices in favour of a missional imagination and missional practices. He lists nine items, and this is the shorthand..

1.) Kindly Reject doing Outreach Events. Instead direct imagination towards ways of connecting with people where they are.

2.) Kindly Reject evangelism as a one time hit on a target with a preconceived outcome. Kindle imagination toward seeing mission as part of regular daily, weekly and monthly life rhythms.

3.) Kindly reject building multiple use buildings as if by building a gymnasium on the church campus we can bring people into the orbit of the church. We should build less third spaces, and inhabit more the ones already there.

4.) Kindly reject one-on-one evangelism and the techniques associated with such apologetic persuasion. Instead direct imagination for inhabiting places in two’s or three’s or more. Hospitals, the school systems, the park districts … two or three Christians together become an undeniable force for the kingdom under the Lordship of Christ.

5.) Kindly reject the Sunday morning gathering as an evangelistic event for it cannot be that in the new post Christendom cultures. Instead fire up imagination for the formation that comes from a communal encounter with the living God in Jesus Christ.

6.) Kindly reject coercive persuasion and argument in our witness. Instead stoke the imagination of your people for seeking “one person of peace” (Luke 10) among the lost of their neighbourhoods.

7.) Kindly reject presumptuous postures of power as we live our lives among those who do not know Christ yet. Instead direct the imagination towards the way Christ always enters the human situation in humility. Come to your neighbours humbly and in need. Instead of offering them a meal, find ways to participate in a meal with them. If you’re in the suburbs ask them if you can borrow their lawnmower.

8.) Kindly Reject Surveying the neighbourhood - Direct the imagination toward exegeting the neighbourhood. Surveying looks at the neighbourhood as a place to market our church,- Exegeting a neighbourhood requires inhabiting the neighbourhood, discovering where the hurting are and the unjust structures are.

9.) Kindly Reject problem solving - instead direct the imagination towards “appreciative inquiry.” We often approach church through problem solving. What is wrong with our programs? What needs are we not meeting? What needs to be tweaked? What are we not doing right? This is negative, mechanical and lifeless.

I suggest # 10 ..
10. Kindly reject strategic planning in favour of thoughtful preparation. We really don’t know the future… but we know that the Spirit is birthing his kingdom among us as we respond faithfully day by day. We keep our eyes on Jesus. Newbigin warned us that, “the significant advances of the church have not been the result of our own decision about the mobilizing and allocating of “resources” [rather] the significant advances have come through happenings of which the story of Peter and Cornelius is a paradigm, in ways of which we have no advance knowledge.” (The Open Secret)

Don't you just hate religious zealots who go on preaching at people with a complete lack of regard for what it's like to be a human being?

Bob Brown on the awful bushfires today:

Greens leader Bob Brown says bushfires like the ones raging across Victoria and New South Wales this weekend will be more frequent if climate change continues…

“Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25 per cent, 50 per cent more,” he told Sky News.

“It’s a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change.”

He always reminds me of a sour old minister (like the one on the video in the previous post) in his demeanour.

Today is not the day to preach any religious viewpoint- christian, green or other. Today is a day for compassion for people who have lost friends, relatives, homes, whole towns.

John Piper's blog contains the following summary of a sermon by Mark Dever, including these three reasons to talk about Jesus:

1. A Desire to Be Obedient to God's Commands
Jesus commanded his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations. That is exactly what the early disciples did. Paul spoke of a compulsion to share the gospel. To evangelize is to obey.
In Acts 8:4, we see that those who had been scattered preached the gospel wherever they went. One of the clearest examples of evangelism being commanded is in 1 Peter 3, where Peter commands believers to "always be…prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you."
Our silence is not a matter of neutrality. You need to tell yourself that. Our silence is a matter of guilt and sin. Obedience is definitely a biblical reason to evangelize.

2. A Love for the Lost
Preachers, we have got to stop avoiding the topic of lostness— hell. Jesus spoke of God's wrath remaining on those who don't believe on him. God will cause terror in us if we appear before him apart from Christ.
Apart from God's grace, the sinner will never stop sinning. God's judgement will never end. Their rejection of God never ends. God will inflict extreme and unnatural pain on them forever.
As preachers of the gospel, we have no business making God seem more humane to sinners who are in rebellion against him. Think about if hell were unleashed on you forever and tell unbelievers how horrible it is.
Christians are motivated by a love to others. Hudson Taylor said he would have never thought of going to China if he didn't know that they were lost. It's people who are this lost, who have this fate awaiting them, that we are aiming to convert.
We can confidently tell people the basic message of the gospel and trust that God's Spirit will faithfully pick up our message and use it to save people.

3. A Love for God.
We want to see God glorified. We want to see the truth about him told in creation. The desire to see God glorified was the motivation for all Jesus' actions.
Everything exists for God's glory (Romans 11:36). Our salvation is "to the praise of his glorious grace" (Ephesians 1:6). God does everything he does for his own glory, and we should do all we do for the glory of God.
To tell the truth about some people is not to honour them, but to tell the truth about God is to honour him. God is glorified in the gospel.

Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DGBlog/~3/WUAdYUNF16I/

Melanie Phillips writes:

The bus to Planet Hedonism
Sunday, 26th October 2008


Stories mocking the absurd evangelical atheism bus, the stunt dreamed up by the fundamentalist missionaries at the British Humanist Association and the Guardian, prompt another vignette from the Richard Dawkins/John Lennox debate last week reported here.

The bus (pictured above on the BHA website) trumpets on its side the message:

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life

which has provoked a measure of ridicule that supposed atheists don’t even have the courage of their negative convictions. (I’ll wager that Pascal might have agreed). The bus is also being financially backed by Richard Dawkins. But when Lennox asked him about its message, he became visibly uncomfortable. He had wanted it to say

There’s almost certainly no God, so live your life to the full

but he had been overruled by ‘the woman on the Guardian’. Apart from the ‘probably’, it was also the ‘Now stop worrying’ bit that he hadn’t liked. Although he did not share with us why he didn’t like it, it seems to me that the bus message is effectively saying: ‘do whatever you fancy and to hell with the effect on anyone else because Biblical morality is a fairy story’. Which is not terribly good PR for even wobbly atheists.


In the debate, Dawkins got shirty at the suggestion that, without the Bible there could be no justice and no morality. But when it was put to him that atheism leads directly to the brutal anti-humanity of Professor Peter Singer, who has written that

the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee

Dawkins declared:

Peter Singer is the most moral person I know, and that is an entirely rational point of view.

All aboard!

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Melanie Phillips, a commentator with the UK daqily "The Spectator" observes the declining state of freedom in Britain.

There can hardly be a more graphic illustration of Britain’s helter-skelter slide into dhimmitude that this story:

Two Christian preachers were stopped from handing out Bible extracts by police because they were in a Muslim area, it was claimed yesterday. They say they were told by a Muslim police community support officer that they could not preach there and that attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity was a hate crime.

The community officer is also said to have told the two men: 'You have been warned. If you come back here and get beat up, well, you have been warned.' A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district.

The noteworthy point about this incident is that it was a Muslim police ancillary officer who was involved. He did not uphold the law of the land, which gives people the freedom to say in public whatever they want within the law. Instead he upheld the Islamist principle that this particular area of an English city was a Muslim area, within which it was not permissible to do anything contrary to Muslim principles such as preach Christianity.

When the Bishop of Rochester recently warned that Britain was developing Muslim no-go areas, he was denounced the length and breadth of the establishment, with government ministers and bishops falling over each other to declare that they did not recognise the country he was describing. ‘There are no no-go areas in Britain’ they all declared. Well, here it is, in glowing technicolour and flashing lights, in Alum Rock Birmingham. What are they all saying now, those government ministers and bishops of the Church of England, to a situation where in the heart of England a British police support officer, employed by the British state to enforce the law of England, aggressively prevents Christians from preaching the established faith of England on the grounds that this is now a ‘hate crime’?

This is not a one-off. Alert readers will note that it was the West Midlands police force which tried to prosecute the Dispatches TV programme for revealing the true ‘hate crime’ in Britain’s so-called moderate mosques which preach hatred of the west and sedition. This in turn is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Up and down the country, police forces led by politically correct imbeciles are recruiting large numbers of Muslims, mainly as police community support officers like the officer in Alum Rock, in order to ‘build bridges’ with the Muslim community, and with minimal or non-existent security vetting in case they upset or offend the said Muslim community. The result is, among other things, the development of Muslim no-go areas enforced by British police officers.
Welcome once again to Londonistan

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