Books

I was pointed towards a brilliant site, Library Thing. A great site for book lovers with some cool widgets for blogs.

Audio and Video of Brian McLaren

From the front page of the EA Scotland site you can listen to Brian McLaren speaking at St Paul and St George's on Love Came Boldly (1 John 1:1-4) and view a video of Brian, a podcast recorded during his visit to Scotland in Dec 08.

Both well worth checking out.

Unity2transform

During 2009 EA Scotland in partnership with a number of other groups will be hosting prayer events in 10 towns and cites around Scotland under the banner Unity2transform.

It is always good to encourage prayer and to meet for prayer, there is no other reason needed. However, to unite in prayer with the aim of seeing transformation is exciting.

We are holding one of these events in Stranraer on Sat 30th May - watch out for more details later.

I was reflecting on this banner and the word transform. Our initial thought might be that we are uniting 2 transform someone else, or something else. Our community, our nation, our neighbours, our church and yes, all of these need transforming.

What about ourselves? Don't we need to be transformed? In prayer do we seek to change God, or have God change us? Surely it is the latter. In our uniting for prayer we will be the ones who are transformed. In this we will become agents of transformation in our communities, our nation, our neighbourhoods, our church.

Which culture?

At the CWW re-energise 4 conference a minor theme that came through was the enslavement of the gospel to a modern, rational culture. The challenge was given to free the gospel from this cultural slavery and re-engage with the gospel.

I've only got two problems with this.

1. Even the presentations asking us to free the gospel from a modern culture were at best asking us to locate the gospel in a different cultural expression. We are all creatures of our culture and it is difficult, if not impossible, to wholly step outside our culture. Perhaps the best we can do is be aware of our cultural preferences.

2. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is the theme of the preaching of the Lord Jesus, is counter-cultural. It is not counter one culture, e.g. a modern culture, and at home in another culture, whether ancient or post-modern. The Kingdom of Heaven is counter-every-human-culture. The life of a citizen of this Kingdom, as described in the Sermon on the Mount, cuts across every human cultural pattern and expectation.
The call of the Lord Jesus to live as citizens of his Kingdom is a call to a radical discipleship that will have us live against the grain of our received culture or any new culture we may adopt.

The way is narrow and the road is steep.

Not My BBC

The BBC are refusing to show an appeal from the Disasters Emergency Committee to seek aid to send relief to the suffering people of Gaza.

Read the BBC News report.
Visit the DEC site for information

This isn't about impartiality, it is about suffering and compassion. We all know that the politics of the Gaza/Israel situatin are complex, no one has an easy answer. But we must recognise the needs of the suffering and hear the cry of the needy. The only side such an appeal is asking us to take is the side of the poor.

Visit the DEC web site, watch the appeal on one of the other channels, pray for the poor and needy in Gaza.

Listening to Brian McLaren (3)

This is the last of my posts on my 24 hours with Brian McLaren. Thanks to Keith, Alistair of the New Evangelical Theological Symposium for the opportunity to be with you all.

Brian McLaren on the Big Questions
Speaking to a gathering of over 100 Brian addressed the big questions. He opened with an illustration from his time as a youth leader. He asked the young people what were the questions occupying their church groups, and then he asked what questions they discussed at school with non-Christian friends. The two lists were completely different and there could be no doubt which one was the more significant list. The point is that not only are our ‘church questions’ not relevant to our community beyond the church they are insignificant before a holy God who loves this world.

Brian has been studying the global problems we are all facing and asking what does the message of Jesus say about these problems. You can read of this in Brian’s book Everything Must Change. Brian has identified four global crises:
1) Our prosperity system can’t stop growing beyond the limits of sustainable growth,
2) The growing gap between the rich and the poor is stretching our equity system to breaking point,
3) Our security systems can’t cope with the anger of the poor and the fear of the rich,
4) Our world’s religions are failing to provide a story capable of dealing with the first three crises.

Does our telling and re-telling the story of Jesus and the good news of the Kingdom of God address these pressing crises? If it does not have we misunderstood the message of Jesus? Are we in fact misrepresenting the good news of the Kingdom which Jesus came to announce?
Clearly Brian is not replacing a set of irrelevant questions asked within our churches with a set of culturally relevant but equally irrelevant questions. Every culture does have its own irrelevant questions and the church exists to challenge these with the questions posed by the announcement of the Kingdom. Identifying these crises in this way may well be an example of how God uses such crises to recall his Church to a faithfulness to the good news of the Kingdom from which we have slipped. These are the big questions we must answer, knowing that Jesus and his message of the Kingdom provide the answer for us.

One of Keith Green’s songs had a line about how Jesus rose from the dead but the church is asleep in the light. Brian McLaren should serve as an alarm call to us. If we read or hear what he says we are challenged to reflect upon how we live and tell our Christian story. Even if we do not agree with Brian and find we need to change our thinking about the gospel, our serving of the mission of God in the Kingdom will be more faithful for having reflected upon a challenge offered to us from a brother engaged upon a common quest with us of serving Christ in our generation.

Pray for Zimbabwe

A Day of prayer for Zimbabwe

Tearfund are calling upon Christians to pray for Zimbabwe this Sunday. I know that many of us pray regularly for Zimbabwe and long for the justice and peace of the Kingdom of God to reign there. There is a good report of recent events within Zimbabwe which have prompted this call to prayer on the tearfund website, you can find it here - Pray for Zimbabwe.

I have the tearfund website on my places to visit list in the side bar. Please do look at this site and learn something of the work being done by tearfund, who celebrated their 40 anniversary last year.

Tearfunds ten's year vision is: to see 50 million people released from material and spiritual poverty through a worldwide network of 100,000 local churches.