If you follow my blog regularly you’ll know that I read an excellent book by Maggi Dawn during Advent last year. Maggi has just posted about it’s availability this year and if you’re looking for something to read in the lead up to Christmas it is well worth getting.
Archive for the 'Reading' Category
This afternoon we did some more of the packing, which means that all but a handful of books are now safely packed away ready for the move. A few had to be left out because I need them for the sermons I’ve got planned for my last two Sundays (17th & 24th August). So for the first time this year I’m virtually bookless! This is not a state that I like to be in as I really do enjoy reading!
On that note, last night around 12:40am I finished reading the latest book, Pete Greig & Dave Roberts Red Moon Rising. Zoe read this before me and really enjoyed it and I finally got round to reading it over the last week or so. It has solidified a few more thoughts in my mind about the need for prayer and in many ways confirms just how poor my own prayer life can be. I’m definitely going to be signing up for regular sessions in the college prayer room (they do have one don’t they?)
It’s also proven to me how easy it is to settle for a mundane type of faith. The only differences between any Christian and the amazing stories in the book is an openness to God’s leading, a willingness to listen and follow, and a belief in a God that is able to do more than all we can ask or imagine.
Well, I finished ‘the uprising’ last night and would again say that it’s the best book I’ve read on the subject, possibly because it is written in a fresh, up-to-date style. It make not be a Brengle or Coutts type tome but it is full of no-nonsense, in your face, holiness teaching. It’s aimed at young people, but this 39 year old felt challenged by its call to holiness. I just wish I’d read something as accessible as it 20 years ago!
Thanks Stephen and Olivia for a great book!
Over the weekend I managed to finish Provocative Church and can honestly say that I have enjoyed it immensely. Not only have I enjoyed it, but it has also given me a real challenge in how to respond, especially in regard to leading my current congregation forward into mission and evangelism.
What’s particularly good is that this book emphasises the need for holy living, both as individuals and as congregations. In this respect Graham Tomlin recognises the need for the church to put the emphasis on discipleship, something that is to me fundamental if we want to see both change socially and within the church. This emphasis on the local congregation becomes even more obvious when the following is taken into account.
God wants to show off his wisdom and craft to the rest of the cosmos. God the divine artist wants to hold an exhibition of such beauty and power and wisdom that anyone who looks on, whether they come from earth or heaven, will be overcome with wonder and awe. It is to be a display of his ‘manifold’ wisdom.
Yesterday, Zoe & I took part in our very first Rogation Sunday procession. This is a traditional part of the church year which is still carried out in many parishes, around the UK at least. We went to support the band who have been processing with the congregation of a tiny Surrey village, called Peper Harow, for the last 40 years. The idea of Rogation processions is that they go round the village and ask for God’s blessing upon it, particularly through the blessing of the land and crops.
What strikes me is that yesterday the procession wasn’t going around the village praying simply that Christians would be blessed, but that the whole community would be regardless of their faith or beliefs. The only agenda was that the earth would blessed and that through this God would be glorified. Surely through this blessing asked for by the church on behalf of its community, the people who were looking on, slightly bemused in many cases, were given the opportunity to see God’s people in Peper Harow reflecting the glory of God. Many in today’s church would probably write off the ritual and ceremony as archaic and irrelevant to our post-modern world, but just for a moment yesterday we were part of God’s manifold wisdom for that small corner of His creation.
I’ve mentioned before that in my Google Reader I get a daily quote/thought from a sight called inward/outward. The quote that is provided is not always great and sometimes I disagree fundamentally with them. However, this morning’s is a Thomas Merton quote, and whilst I’m not in agreement with it, it did make me think. The part I want to share with you is this:
A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It ‘consents’ so to speak, to God’s creative love. … This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do.
Merton goes on to say that every being gives glory to God by being the thing that He created them to be. In my opinion this is definitely a thought that shows Merton’s Zen influences, but I do think he has a point.
The problem though comes with us humans. Do we reflect God’s glory simply by being human? I would say that we don’t because in actual fact the majority of humanity are not ‘consenting’ to God’s creative love. We are not actually being who God created us to be and we’re certainly not obeying God.
As I said in my last post I’m currently enjoying reading Graham Tomlin’s The Provocative Church. There are numerous passages highlighted already, with quite a few scribbles in the margins, but here is one that I feel is pertinent to this post:
[loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength] means a reorientation of our lives towards learning to love God and learning to love other people, rather than the sef-indulgent and self-oriented lives we’re used to.
This is the message that I’m trying to get across in our morning meetings at the corps at the moment. We are working through the various Fruit of the Spirit and I’m trying to explain how these are the real signs of spiritual maturity, rather than what we do in church. For me the real test of an individuals holiness is the manifestation of these fruit. In my mind it doesn’t matter how much an individual expresses their love for God; it doesn’t matter how much they do in church. What matters is whether their lives are increasingly loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self-controlled.
This is how we, as humans, give the glory back to God. As we grow in the fruit of the Spirit, as we allow the Spirit to work within us and convict us of sin and shape us into holy people, then we become more like the people God intended us to be. So Merton has a really good point, but we have to allow the Holy Spirit to shape us in order to really reflect God’s glory.
For the first time in a few months I’ve been reading a novel. I saw the book on the shelves of Waterstones and simply felt that I wanted to have a read. The book is called The Last Gospel by archaeologist turned novelist David Gibbins. The story is actually quite an interesting read, but I suspect that we could be looking at the next Da Vinci Code once some Christians pick up on it.
The idea is that the Roman Emperor Claudius met Jesus before he started his ministry and Jesus gave him the only text he actually wrote. So potentially traumatic was this ‘Last Gospel’ that Claudius hid it from view and the book revolves around an archaeologists attempts to recover the text. As always in this type of book the main protagonist is the Roman Catholic church, some members of which will not hold back from murder to protect it from potential scandal or alleged heresy.
Whilst the book is a good read it must be remembered that this is a work of fiction. Unfortunately, if that group of Christians who seem to be more interested in lambasting anything that remotely threatens the ‘truth’ of the faith pick up on this it is likely to become the latest in a increasingly long line of books, films etc that are deemed to be detrimental to our faith. Personally, I couldn’t see anything remotely threatening in it. It simply attempts to perpetuate some of the ridiculous ideas that have been trumped before, including the one about Jesus & Mary Magdalene having a baby!
One positive note is that the book ends with the alleged last words of Christ himself and actually these have some value:
“The kingdom of heaven is on earth.
Men shall not stand in the way of the word of God.
And the kingdom of heaven shall be the house of the Lord.
There shall be no priests.
And there shall be no temples…”
Maybe if we weren’t so caught up in the structures of church, in perpetuating a temple and priestly order; maybe if we concentrated more on being the kingdom then maybe, just maybe the books and films that threaten the established order wouldn’t offend us in the same way.
Slowly but surely I’m working my way through Restoring the Woven Cord which is about various aspects of Celtic Christianity and how they are relevant to today’s world. Interestingly, I’m noticing that I don’t agree quite so readily with some of the ideas that the author puts forward as I did when I read this through 10 years ago. Shows just how much we change over the years!
Yesterday I read the chapter about Evangelism and how the Celtic Church and of particular interest was the following quote:
…the Celtic church was utterly given to mission. It thought, lived and breathed mission. It could understand no Christianity that did not include mission. It had no interest in bureaucracies and institutions that existed simply to support the church. It had a wild, childlike, simple and overwhelming passion to see me, women and children of these lands and beyond find faith in Jesus Christ and it gave itself utterly to that end.
This reminded me so much of the earliest days of The Salvation Army and I couldn’t help but wonder why we lost this lifestyle. This is a subject that has been covered a great many times and I don’t want to go there fully. However, I think that the book has something to say about one of the reasons why the Celtic church managed to maintain the passion, where the Army fell down.
The church grew so fast because these cells were so wonderfully flexible and unrestrained by any institution, that they could easily multiply.
It is in this area that we got bogged down in my opinion! Now anyone who has studied Army history will acknowledge that William Booth was something of a control freak and that those that crossed him found themselves pushed out. Despite this there was a wonderful freedom in expression in much of what happened in the earliest days. Unfortunately, this wasn’t sustained for a multitude of reasons and we started concentrating on creating a culture. If this had been solely about building a Kingdom culture then that would have been wonderful but we ended concentrating on Salvationist culture which is not the same thing!
Thankfully we are seeing a rediscovery of a focus on mission, that isn’t restricted simply to proclamational evangelism. This again was a hallmark of the Celtic church, although they always made sure that the gospel was presented in some way. The keys to their success though was that they operated according to the Holy Spirit’s leading, were people marked by personal holiness and remarkable humility, and were also adaptive to culture. If we can be people marked by the same traits maybe we could all regain the same focus that the Celtic church did!
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