Monthly Archive for January, 2007

Holy rage

Published
by
Graeme
on January 31, 2007
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What is, therefore, the task of the preacher (or the church) today?
Shall I answer: “Faith, hope and love”?
That sounds beautiful.
But I would say - Courage.
No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth.
Our task today is recklessness.
For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature,
we lack a holy rage.
The recklessness that comes from the knowledge of God and humanity.
The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets …
and when the lie rages across the face of the earth -
a holy anger about things that are wrong in the world.
To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth,and the destruction of God’s world.
To rage when little children must die of hunger, when the tables of the rich are sagging with food.
To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of militaries.
To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction - Peace.
To rage against complacency.
To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it confirms with the norms of the Kingdom of God.
And remember the signs of the Christian Church has always been - the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish …
but never the chameleon.

Kaj Munk (Danish Pastor) in Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture by Michael Frost, pp 20-21

A real church community

Published
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Graeme
on January 28, 2007
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This morning I was preaching over at the Riga 2 corps as their CO was on a weekend’s break. I went there not really knowing what to expect as I’ve never been to one of their meetings before, but I was pleasantly surprised.

The weather kept a number of people away, the temperature has dropped a bit and there is fair amount of snow on the ground, as it is generally an elderly congregation. However, what I discovered was a small group of wonderful Christian people who are clearly sharing each others lives. One elderly lady gave praise to God even though she has to decide whether to pay for dental treatment or getting her washing machine fixed, when she probably only has the extremely small Latvian state pension to survive on.

After the meeting everyone stayed behind for coffee and biscuits and the air was filled with people enjoying each other’s company.

I love the corps I usually worship at, but it was great to see how this corps has progressed from spiritual desert into an oasis of God’s community in the last 2½ years. They have such a strong base with which to reach out into their community, despite lack of numbers, and a real vision to do so!

Disciple Making

Published
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Graeme
on January 26, 2007
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A few weeks ago I wrote about the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20Open Link in New Window) and wondered why it is that we have concentrated on the getting people saved aspect, rather than making disciples. This thought came back to mind twice yesterday so I post about them

The first thing was during an Ethics lecture at the Latvian School for Officer Training. I went along as the class was open to everyone and I was interested to hear about Ethics from another perspective. Major Kjell Karlsten who was giving the lecture made reference to Kingdom values taking precedence in everything and used the illustration of the supposedly Christian country of Rwanda and the genocide.

Now something I knew, which he wasn’t aware of, is that before 1994 Rwanda was seen by missiologists as the most evangelised country in Africa, if not the world. With a very high percentage of its citizens going to church and professing a Christian faith, how is that the genocide could ever have taken place? Now there are many causes and I don’t want to oversimplify the situation, but surely if the Church leaders in that country had been concentrating on making true disciples of Jesus, then this genocide would have been impossible. If 90% of the country had been disciples, rather than simply ‘being saved’ there is no way this could have happened.

The second thing that stirred my thoughts was someone’s off-hand comment that The Salvation Army ignores the baptism bit of the Great Commission. The truth of that is open for discussion and I’m not prepared to go into it at the moment, but my first response was that many local churches fail totally to fulfill the “teaching them to obey everything I commanded you.” In fact this has been going on a lot longer than The Salvation Army has ‘ignored’ baptism.

My ever growing passion is towards discipleship. I cannot get over just how much my views on this have grown over the last few months. I am tired of seeing Christians who go to their local church on a Sunday and yet do not get themselves involved in the work of the Kingdom. I’m fed up of the world as it is and want to see disciples rising up and making a real difference, both within the world at large and within the church. I want to make disciples and teach them to obey the Lord’s commands.

Spiritual tectonics

Published
by
Graeme
on January 25, 2007
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Having been pretty busy lately I’ve still haven’t managed to finish Bishop Tom Wright’s Simply Christian, much to my own disappointment.

However, I have to say that I love this man’s writing. He manages to communicate the reality of the Christian faith in such a simple, yet incredibly deep way. This makes him so easy to read, yet you find yourself wrestling with the enormity of the subjects that he is addressing. Wonderful stuff!

This morning I was on my way across Riga on the tram and read the following:

“We are called to live at the overlap both of heaven and earth - the earth that has yet to be fully redeemed as one day it will be - and of God’s future and this world’s present. We are caught on a small island near the point where these tectonic plates, heaven and earth, future and present, are scrunching themselves together. Be ready for earthquakes.”
Simply Christian - pg 138

The symbolism in this is so strong and I can picture myself in that situation because of it.

I don’t have time …

Published
by
Graeme
on January 23, 2007
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Over the last few weeks I’ve seen quite a few posts on various blogs about the amount of time we should be giving to the Church. Most of the time this really seems to be about how much time we should be spending at organised church activities, whether they be in the building where we worship together, or in our homes or communities. The thing is though that often the question seems to be more about how much time Christians should be giving to their denomination, rather than how much they should give to the work of the Kingdom.

I do feel that we have a sanitised type of church today. As long as we attend the Sunday meetings/services we feel that this is sufficient. We justify our lack of involvement on a day to day basis by saying that times have changed. It’s no longer possible to commit ourselves in the ways our parent’s did, or the early disciples. Life is faster and work commitments make it more difficult.

It reminds me of the stories my father tells of his childhood in The Salvation Army. Back then, we’re talking about the 1940’s and 1950’s. He talks about how he used to walk to the Army every Sunday with his father and how they would walk home between meetings. He talks of 3 indoor meetings on a Sunday, 2 Open-Airs, Sunday School and a march of witness. He’s not the only one I’ve heard either, as many of his generation seem to feel that the Army is weaker because of having moved away from this sort of schedule.

Now I’m not afraid of hard work, but to me it feels as if this sort of schedule is actually detrimental to the work, because the focus is more on organised activities than it is on building community. As I think about it I also have a suspicion this is one reason why our meetings are now restricted in the majority of places to just one hour. If it was longer than an hour we wouldn’t have been able to fit everything into a Sunday. As things have been dropped from the Sunday programme the meetings simply stayed the same length.

We need to find constructive ways of encouraging people into more activity for the Kingdom. If its based solely on our local congregation this is, in my opinion, against Biblical teaching. We might even find we can work together at a deeper level with other branches of the universal church in our city/town/village. You never know we might even become more like the disciples God calls us to be.

How do you see the world?

Published
by
Graeme
on January 19, 2007
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. 1 Comment

The map below is a traditional map of the world, although it looks slightly different to what you are probably used to as it uses a system that shows each country by their actual size relative to each other.

traditional-map.png

We are used to seeing the world like this and consequently we are comfortable with how the world looks, but what if we start looking at things differently? The second map below is based on how Infant Mortality (those children who die in their first year of life) affects how we would see the world.

infant-mortality.png

When we start to look at the world in a different way, it quickly becomes distorted and even uncomfortable to look at. We struggle to understand what it says, yet its so valuable. Surely in a world which was reflecting the Kingdom these two maps would look exactly the same, although instead of many nations there would only be God’s Kingdom. How can we Christians in the countries that are barely visible in the second map, sit comfortably in our homes knowing that this sort of disproportionate injustice is allowed to happen?

—
Hat tip to Gordon for his post about Worldmapper which is the source of both maps.

Fragrance

Published
by
Graeme
on January 18, 2007
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Eleanor over at Evening Beaches posted about fragrance a few days and it instantly reminded me of something from my past.

Back in 1989 I lived in Bristol and for a short time (4 months or so) did temporary work at a manufacturer of food flavourings. The process involved highly concentrated products that mixed together could produce a vastly varied range of flavours. In fact they could make almost anything you could imagine! Depending on what they were making on a given day, you could smell the fragrance of the place for quite a distance around the factory.

One day someone dropped a small vial of highly concentrated garlic oil which shattered all over the floor. The office I worked in was right next door and the odour very quickly worked its way into it. Life for the next week or so became unbearable because the stench was so strong that it permeated everything. I found that I had to go home and wash my clothes every day and take a shower.

As I sat and thought about this I thought about the way our lives must be. I think that one of the reasons that we seem so unable to attract new people into the faith is that we tend to give off a bad smell that is not very attractive to others. Instead of the smell of Christian love permeating itself into the lives of all around us, it is the smell of sin and hypocrisy that turns people away. Internal fighting within denominations or simply failing to forgive our brothers and sisters in Christ, leaves a church that smells bad.

I want my own life to be a sweet smelling fragrance rather than a bad smell and the only way to do this is to become more and more like Christ himself. I want to encourage Christian I come into contact with to be as Christlike as possible so that the Church becomes a place full of the most wonderful smells imaginable!