Well I’m afraid that I’m going to bore most of you who may read my blog with an image of our as yet, unborn baby. This little person is extremely active and we saw him or her at Zoe’s appointment today. The image below is something you can choose to click on, or not, but is as clear a picture of the baby’s face as you could wish to have.
Monthly Archive for January, 2007Page 2 of 3
Last night I started to read Simply Christian by Bishop Tom Wright. So far it has been an excellent and easy read!
In the first chapter he is talking about Justice and how it is an echo of God’s voice showing how some things should be. He mentions some of the great Christian martyrs of the 20th Century as well as Archbishop Desmond Tutu as illustrations of those who have heard this echoed voice.
This whole chapter reminded me of our small group discussion last Thursday night. We had watched Rob Bell’s Nooma “Dust” which talks about Discipleship and our following Jesus. One of the questions in the accompanying study asks “What impact are Christian’s today having on the course of human history?”.
In response people like Tutu, Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa were mentioned as proof that Christian’s do still have an influence today. We also talked about how Christian’s the world over are making a difference. The great martyrs of our age are simply the tip of the iceberg. True Christians the world over are still making an impact on human history in quiet ways that may never be acknowledged by humanity itself. But then we aren’t looking for the acknowledgement of man. I’m not sure that we should even be looking for the acknowledgement of God either, as in reality we should simply be doing.
The majority of us are never going to be world-shakers who are in the public eye. Instead we are called to be more and more like Jesus, striving constantly to live the sort of life that He lived so that His mission is continued until such a time as He chooses to return in glory.
Until 1st January, Zoe & I have woken up almost every morning to the BBC World Service on the Radio. World events have unfolded before our very ‘ears’ through it and then silence! For some totally unexplained reason the World Service vanished from the airwaves here in Riga.
It’s remarkable really as you don’t realise how much you miss something that is part of your life until it is no longer there. It might seem strange that you can miss something like a Radio Station, but as we wake up it’s nice not to have to translate what is being said in your head!
But then joy of joys, I once again fiddled with the radio this morning, moving it from Latvian Christian Radio to where the World Service should be, and suddenly there it was! Pausing for just a moment, hardly daring to believe, it was clear the person was speaking in English! It’s back!
I’ve been thinking a bit about what it means to be a witness of Jesus Christ. This is hardly a surprise as it is the root of the sessional name for next years intake of Salvation Army Cadets. In an earlier post it is mentioned that the idea comes from Acts 1:8
, but I’ve been thinking more about what Jesus meant when He said that.
I’ve noticed that we seem to concentrate on 2 passages when we talk about Jesus’ final words to his disciples. Firstly, there is the most obvious Matthew 28:18-20. We call it the Great Commission and I’m pretty certain that most Christian’s can recite it verbatim from which ever version of the Bible is their favourite. The second is the one I mentioned in Acts. That we should be Jesus’ witnesses.
The problem though is that I’m beginning to wonder whether we have limited the Great Commission. Now I’m not talking about the Baptism bit, although I suppose I could from a Salvationist point of view, but instead I’m talking about the “teaching them all I have commanded you” bit. We seem to concentrate mainly on the passages in Mark 16:15-20 and Luke 24:46-49 when it comes to our actual witnessing. Is it possible that we have fallen into a trap of limiting Jesus’ teaching to the bits that are about individual salvation, and concentrating on this?
Maybe this emphasis is not wrong, but it seems like it fails to communicate the whole of Jesus’ teaching. He didn’t only teach on forgiveness and repentance. The majority of his teaching seems to be more about the way we should live as citizens of the Kingdom of God, than about the way we become citizens.
Inspired by a post over at the Evening Beaches blog I’ve decided that I need to seek out the perfect moments in life, or in other words, those moments that give meaning to the day. I concentrate far too often on the negative things and need to concentrate more on the wonderful! I don’t intend to post about them all but there were at least two yesterday!
First, was a conversation with a colleague about the nature of church and community as we travelled back from a difficult meeting. To see a young person so full of understanding about how the relationships she has in the church are so valuable and authentic was wonderful!
Second, as I walked into the living room in our flat, Sian looked up from where she was playing with her Noah’s Ark and gave me the most beautiful smile, before returning back to playing. No words, no big hugs, simply a smile of pleasure at seeing me.
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PS: Please pray for my mother as she finally has her hip replacement operation today.
Once again the book I am reading triggered some thoughts at the tail-end of last week. This time it is The Out of Bounds Church? by Steve Taylor that has got me thinking.
In Chapter 2 “Edges of Culture” Taylor talks about the way in which, and why, the emerging church is working on the edges/margins of culture. One bit that hit me in particular was this:
[Israel] entered the borderlands. In exile, they experienced life on the edge marked by alienation, by exclusion. The nation of Israel cried: How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? In exile, Israel picked over the fragmented and shattered edges of its understanding of God. The strategies of the temple institution were inaccessible. Yet from this experience on the edge, Jewish faith was revitalized. It moved from temple to synagogue. It tactically initiated patterns that sustained it through centuries of life in the midst of other nations and other faiths.”
Steve Taylor - The Out of Bounds Church? - pg 39
In this post-modern, post-christendom era that we find ourselves in the Church is finding itself pushed, or exiled, to the edges of culture and society. No longer welcomed with open arms and ignored by whole swathes of its former constituency as irrelevant or out of touch, the formerly powerful institution of the Church, now finds itself powerless and in some places is floundering around trying to hold its head about water. In other places it is quietly ignoring the problem hoping it will go away.
Some people are asking why needs to happen as they are quite comfortable doing exactly what they have been doing. Others are saying that everything ‘emerging’ is either folly or heresy, but I can here the Jewish leaders saying the same thing in their own exile. I can hear them say that this exile was the worst thing to happen to the faith and that if people returned to the old ways then they would come through it.
The simple fact is though that there is a place of both the emerging and the traditional within the Church. However, to reach out into the margins of society we need brave missionaries who are willing to learn the language and culture of those they seek to reach. Most accept this need when they think of missionary work overseas, but seem to ignore the same need in trying to meet the cultural needs within their own wider society.
If we are going to reach the masses with the full Gospel in this increasingly fragmented society then we have to mould the Church into communities that meet the needs of individuals, whilst encouraging those same individuals into membership of the unfragmented community of the Church.
I think that there is something to celebrate about the fact that 2007 is the centenary of the formulisation of Women’s ministries in The Salvation Army. 100 years of this incredibly important work has seen countless women saved and only the Lord knows how many families saved from collapse. The work of the Home League and other groups, especially in the developing and transitional parts of our Global Family, meet real human need. They fulfil the function of providing health and child care teaching in remote villages and city slums alike, and without them the world would be a poorer place.
But I wonder why we don’t put so much emphasis on ministry towards men. Across the Western world the church’s dwindling congregations are made up predominately of women. We in The Salvation Army might be better than a lot, I really don’t know the statistics, but if we are it’s probably because of that old male bastion (tongue fully pushed into cheek), the Band!
The simple fact is that many men these days don’t feel comfortable in the type of church that has existed for so many generations. Even those that do are often either involved as leaders or have very little involvement outside of Sunday worship. A lot has been made recently of the very songs that we sing in our churches, that talk a great deal about Jesus being our lover, but little about Jesus being our leader!
Surveys across the board tell us that increasing numbers of me are trapped into addiction to internet porn. This includes those fine, upstanding pillars of our church community, our leaders.
If we’re going to build community we must be aware of men. We must be willing to find ways of communicating the gospel to men, and provide support groups for those already in our churches.
So 100 years on from the launch of formalised women’s ministries, what is The Salvation Army going to do about men? Let’s not forget the importance and necessity of reaching out to men, in our rush to celebrate our work with women.
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