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Thanks to a Christian Trust funding a retreat, I’m off with my wife Bev to Bristol, for three days of spiritual direction with some other church leaders. I’ll be staying away from my blog and email and I hope you enjoy/interact with the guest posts this week on the site.
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CEO model -right or wrong? Team model -right or wrong? Senior pastor – right or wrong? Pope or all popes – right or wrong? Seems to me that there is a lot of thinking going on about leadership in the church and in my sphere of reading/blogs/conversations a lot of thinking in emergent church conversations about how leadership may need to change in order to influence/inspire post-modern people. For me i have had good/bad experiences in a variety of different models and when it comes down to it it seems to have more resonance with the character of leader/followership that i have exhibited/experienced more than the model itself.
I used to walk past this picture [click on it to enlarge] hanging in the channel 4 building in London wth its poignant message – we will not follow we will not lead- having a new route to work I am not sure if it still there but it asks for me a pertinent Q that i want to explore in this post: how much of both those statements is true of me – and how often are both true at the same time in a conflicting sense of apathy/paralysis?
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This course starts at WTC if which some of you may be interested in.
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(text from the WTC site)
We are thrilled to introduce Dr Cherith Fee Nordling, a new lecturer at WTC, who will be teaching the next module, ‘The Trinity’. Cherith is Co-Director of Christian Formation for Campus Life at Calvin College, North America, and will be coming to London in March to deliver this module. Cherith grew up in the world of Biblical Theology, with her father, Prof. Gordon Fee, a New Testament Professor at Regent College, Vancouver. Click here to find out more about Cherith.Cherith will be teaching this 10-credit module over two weekends, March 17/18th & 24/25th (with seminars in between). Please see our website for more detailed information, dates, times, assessment etc. (link below).
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How’s that for a happy title? I’m feeling warm and fuzzy already…fear not, it will get better.
One of the most impacting things I have learned as a mother is related to a theme appropriate for this Lenten season – forgiveness of others and self.
I have two daughters. My oldest, Shayel, is now almost 5 *gasp* and my youngest, Aliyah, is 20 months. They’re beautiful and ‘practically perfect in every way’ (note the nod to my favorite movie, Mary Poppins). Becoming a mother was very good for me in many ways and when Shayel was about 2, I learned something about myself and human nature in general…we are a species hungry for revenge. Instead of taking ownership of our own feelings of hurt, frustration and anger, we force the other to carry the burden. We inflict a debt on the other until our own feelings lessen or disappear.
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I’ve had the idea of “people like Jesus and not the church” as blog post in my ideas box for a while. Seeing that Dan Kimball has his new book out on this topic got me to drag it out and put it here. I’m sure Dan’s book is as great as his previous books, I haven’t read it yet, and what follows it not a critique of his book but a reference to the idea of people being into Jesus and not church.
Since the day I became a christian I have heard people say people like Jesus but not the church. I can remember when I wasn’t a christian and liked the idea of Jesus but not of church for sure. I’ve heard variations of this, along the lines of “if Jesus came back today do you think he would be visiting any of our churches?” with the reponse that of course Jesus wouldn’t be caught dead (excuse the pun) in our churches.
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There has been much in the blog world in response to Richard Dawkins and his book ‘The God Delusion’. Alister McGrath also a professor at Oxford and contemporary of Dawkins has written a new book, ‘The Dawkins Delusion?’. If your looking for a short and comprehensive response to Dawkins, this book seems to do the job (96 pages).
Over the years I’ve interacted with many christians who find that once something is in a popular book (the Davinci Code, the Gospel of Judas) it is something that must be true/taken seriously, and even more so for a book by someone as clever as an Oxford Professor like Dawkins.
You can catch an article by McGrath here in the UK Daily Mail national newspaper (thanks to Sivin Kit for heads up on this).
Richard Dawkins is interviewed by Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central’s ‘The Colbert Report, you can see the entertaining video here.
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Yesterday I got to see with my kids, the Blue Man Group performing in London. They opened here in November 2005, but have been around since 1991 when they launched in the USA.
It seems to be related to performance art, part comedy show through video rock animation and mime, functioning too as a critique of modern art and postmodernism, or at least just enough to be entertaining and make lots of money. I did enjoy most the moments of deliberate 4th wall breaking with the audience (interrupting the show to ridicule latecomers in the audience for instance). Anyone else seen it?
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I’ve been reading some Michael Foucault (or trying to!) and his perspective on how our actions are formed by forces that lie beneath/below the surface of our beliefs. For Foucault we can have conscious beliefs we espouse yet they fail to inform our actions.
Some would say it’s because we have other beliefs that are deeper, less conscious that we really live out of, but writers like Foucault suggest that something else is going on. Our real beliefs are abstracted and disconnected from the world of action*.
For example, ask most christians if care for the poor and social justice are part of the Gospel and most will say yes. But ask the same group of people if and how often they engage in activities that support that belief, the figure will certainly be much lower.
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The Church and Post-modern Culture is a site hosted by Baker Academic, coordinated by Geoff Holsclaw, and series edited by James K.A. Smith. I was asked to post today, so you can find my piece on Baudrillard, re-posted there today.
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Why are you bothered to be a christian (if you are)? Or does evangelism like charity start at home…
17 Feb 2007
The above clip is of English commedian Catherine Tate. The catch phrase of her charecter Lauren, ‘am i bovvered,’ seems to capture ‘the whatever’ spirit of our generation in the same way the Henry Enfield’s character ‘loadsamoney‘ captured the spirit at the end of the 80s.
I have been thinking about this and what it might mean for evangelism/mission in our culture. In a western world which can’t be bothered maybe there is something powerful in knowing why we are bothered to be a christian and being able to demonstrate that by living out what we believe?
So let me explore this Q with you over the rest of this post: why are you bothered being a christian?
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