Our task today

The following extract is from P T Forsyth's The Cruciality of the Cross. It's the second half of a long paragraph covering pages 24/5.  I've posted the earlier part of the paragraph here if you feel this second, longer section is missing anything. However, it's this second section that's pertinent to this blog, with its focus on mission. Forsyth doesn't usually use the word mission much (although it does appear, in a form, towards the end of this extract) but it seems to me that this is precisely what he's talking about here. (I've broken it up slightly to aid reading it online.)

What is our task today? It is to take the mass of men (and not only the masses) – inert and hopeless some, others indifferent, others hostile to God – and to reconcile them with God’s holy will and righteous kingdom; but to reconcile them less with the ideal of a kingdom of God than with His way of it. They are keen enough about a kingdom which glorifies human ideals, but the trouble is about God’s ideal and God’s way, about Christ and His cross as the way as well as the goal. The task is to destroy our national and social dislike of that enthusiasm of the cross, to supplant lust by that higher ardour, to bend the strongest wills to the obedience of the holiest, and by moral regeneration to restore men both physically and socially. 

This is a tremendous task. It is the whole object of history. It is far beyond socialism. And no laws can do it, and no change of circumstances, but only Jesus Christ. It is the fruit of His work, of His holy love, His holy spirit, and His holy Church, all flowing from His holy cross. Let us not mistake the kindly fruits of the cross for the moral principle of it. The fruits will not give the principle, but the principle will give the fruits. 

And the more we are preoccupied with social righteousness so much the more we are driven to that centre where the whole righteousness of God and man found consummation, and adjustment, and a power and a career, in the saving judgement of Christ’s cross. Public liberty rest [sic] on inward freedom; and the cross alone gives moral freedom, and moral independence, to the mass of men, who were left to slavery even by the heroic moral aristocracy of stoicism. It is the cross that makes moral worth an infectious power, keeps character from being self-contained [that is, focused on self], and gives a moral guarantee of a steady social future.  The cross is the spring, not of self-possessed and individualist righteousness, but of that creative and contagious goodness which makes possible the social state. Only at the centre of the cross does the man find himself in his kind [at home amongst his fellow beings], and both in God. A creative, missionary, and social ethic springs only from religion; and it springs most from the religion which is able to clothe us with the power of the creative, loving, outgoing God.

 

Don’t Be an Ekklesaphobe

David Fitch in full flight on getting a proper balance between what's wrong with the church...and what's right with it....

It happens on facebook when I give the slightest indication the church is God’s instrument in the world. It happens frequently when I am speaking and assert that God has empowered the church to extend Christ’s presence in the world. It happens when I coach church planters that are missionally oriented and ask them when they gather for worship. It happens when I engage my missional friends on one of the variants of the formula “missiology precedes ecclesiology.” It happens each time I meet someone who has been abused by the traditional church. Each time there is a out-sized reaction against organizing people into practices traditionally associated with being the church (this is especially true of the public worship gathering, or the ordination of clergy).


See the rest of his blog post here. 

De-conversion

Sociologist, Bradley Wright, has recently published an article on 'de-conversion' - in other words, reasons for why people leave the Christian faith.

This is the abstract. The full article, which appeared in the Journal of Religion and Society, can be found online here.

"This article examines the written narratives from fifty former Christians. In these narratives, drawn from an online community of deconverts, the writers described their experiences with and explanations for leaving the Christian faith. Several themes emerged as to why they left, including: intellectual and theological concerns, a feeling that God had failed them, and various frustrations with Christians. The writers gave little mention to non-Christians as pulling them out of the faith. These narratives emphasized external, rather than internal, attributions for the deconversion. They also identified primarily “push” rather than “pull” factors as the cause of deconversion. While some narratives outlined the costs and benefits of deconversion, others told of seeking moral rightness regardless of the cost."

The reasons boiled down to intellectual and theological concerns, God's failures, interactions with other Christians, and interactions with non-Christians. (Interestingly enough, this last group seems to be the least influential.) Some of this may be already well-known, but it's good to have it available in a relatively succinct form.

Church in the Present Tense

Church in the Present Tense: a candid look at what’s emerging - authors: Scot McKnight, Kevin Corcoran, Peter Rollins, Jason Clark.

The book includes a DVD with interviews with the authors, as well as Rowan Williams, Brian McLaren and Jonny Baker.

Jonny Baker has written a lengthy post/review of this scholarly book in which he discusses many of its features and points out some things that are missing (such as women authors and interviewees). The book offers different stances on theology, mission and church, some of which disagree with each other. There are critiques of the church cultures as well as the cultures churches ‘live’ in, of institutionalism and emergence.

By the look of the reviews this is an important book on the current state of ‘church’ in its various forms (though not all of its forms).

At the end of his review, Baker quotes Rowan Williams: Church is what happens when people encounter the risen Jesus Christ; institution is something that comes much later...
Brazos Press 2011.

Hindrance....

Len Hjalmarson notes six out of seven ways in which growth and expansion in church life can be inhibited. He's taken these from Roland Allen's 1920s book, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, and the causes that hinder it.

1. when the church is dependent on paid leadership;

2. when the spread of the gospel is controlled out of fear of error, and both error and godly zeal are suppressed;

3.when it is believed that the church is to be founded , educated, equipped, and established in the doctrine, ethics and organization before it is to expand;

4. when emerging leaders are restricted from ministering until they are fully trained and so learn the lesson of inactivity and dependency;

5. when conversion is seen as the result of clever argument rather than the power of Christ;

6. when professional clergy control the ministry and discourage the spontaneous zeal of non-professionals. They may protect the new believers from charlatans (Acts 8:9-24) but they also block unconventional leaders like Peter the fisherman.

Allen's views are counter-cultural to the approach still taken by most seminaries and denominations. In other words, this prophetic voice is still not getting through to the majority of church organisations, or, if it's making any impact, it's v....e....r....y slow.

However, in the emerging church scene, this approach is certainly more common.

Stringfellow on Church

Jason Goroncy on the blog, Per Crucem ad Lucem, has been posting quite a bit of material from, or relating to, the theologian, William Stringfellow. In fact he may have posted the following, but I've just come across it on another site altogether. It's a view of church that might help how we view our own particular small piece of the Church Universal...

The Church exists for the sake of the world into which God enters and in which He acts and for which He expends His own life. One who is a participant in the Church, one who is incorporated into this Body, one who is baptised into this company has not only the personal freedom to expend his own life without guile or calculation or fear of death – or any more minor prudence – but also, characteristically, he is indifferent to whether or not the churches maintain an amiable reputation in society, or whether or not the churches have much wealth and a sound investment program, or whether or not the churches, or the ecclesiastical authorities, have much political influence. On the contrary, the Christian is suspicious of respectability and moderation and success and popularity. And this is so because the genius of the Christian life, both for a person and for the company of Christians, is the freedom constantly to be engaged in giving up its own life in order to give the world new life. All the questions of status and power and reputation, and all defensive, conservative and self-serving questions about preserving the institutional existence of the churches are matters of some indifference except insofar as they impede the ministry of the Body of Christ, entice men into false religion and a wrong understanding of what the Christian society is, and lure them into misleading notions of what the Christian life is all about.

William Stringfellow, A Public and Private Faith

Another statistic bites the dust

I'm always interested to see whether stats are as true as they're claimed (see my earlier post on Bradley Wright's book on this topic).   Mike Fleischmann has written an article in the Leadership Journal called How outsiders find faith, which deals to a widely-held statistic, as follows: 

It was something I had heard repeated as long as I had been in ministry: "85 percent of all people who accept Christ do so before the age of 18." I was never exactly clear where that statistic came from, but I had no reason to doubt it either. Everyone I knew considered it an evangelistic axiom.


He goes on to show that there's an element of truth in it: around 85% of those brought up in a Christian home with two Christian parents who are actively involved in their church will become Christians before the age of 18. That doesn't leave just 15% of people who become Christians after this age, even though at first sight it looks as though it should. Fleishmann writes:

Interestingly, what I was seeing in my own ministry didn't match up with that. I was watching unchurched people at every stage of life respond to the gospel. Were these just anomalies to the pattern, or was there something more?

He determined to check the statistic out, and not surprisingly proved it was only partially right. 

What quickly became apparent in the data was that the large percentage of believers from Christian homes skews not only our evangelism statistics but also our understanding of the situation. While many of us say we are determined to reach "the unchurched," many of our assumptions are based on the experiences of those who were raised as Christians—for instance, the assumption of when people come to faith.

I discovered that when someone from an unchurched background makes a lasting decision for Christ, it happens much later than we have often assumed and is spread out across every stage of life. Of those, a majority (57 percent) accept Christ between the ages of 21 and 50.

Another point he makes is that while those brought up in Christian homes tend to become Christians as a result of an 'event' - often the rather inappropriately-named 'outreach'  - those who come to faith later in life (and this can even be well into the sixties or seventies) usually come to faith through a friend - not necessarily a close friend, but someone who cares about them in some way.  

When you ask someone raised Christian, "How did you come to Christ?" they typically answer by telling about an event. They'll describe a time and a place where they made their decision, often mentioning who they were with.

People from unchurched backgrounds, however, answer the same question differently. They typically tell about an extended process, life circumstances, key relationships, and significant issues they were working through.

Often their actual point of decision is less defined. For instance, 11.4 percent of committed Christians from unchurched backgrounds cannot identify a specific time or place where they accepted Christ. For those of us raised as Christians, this can make us a little uncomfortable. Their less defined and sometimes unconventional turning points are not what we're used to.

If you want to read about someone who became a Christian in a stationery cupboard, check out John Shore's (somewhat hilarious) blog post: I, a rabid anti-Christian, suddenly convert.

Two views, one subject

As so often happens two different blogs I read came at the same issue from different perspectives: on Prodigal Kiwi(s), Paul Fromont quotes a writer called Amy Hollywood, who begins an essay called Spiritual but Not Religious: The vital interplay between submission and freedom in this way:

“Most of us who write, think, and talk about religion are by now used to hearing people say that they are spiritual, but not religious. With the phrase generally comes the presumption that religion has to do with doctrines, dogmas, and ritual practices, whereas spirituality has to do with the heart, feeling, and experience. The spiritual person has an immediate and spontaneous experience of the divine or of some higher power. She does not subscribe to beliefs handed to her by existing religious traditions, nor does she engage in the ritual life of any particular institution. At the heart of the distinction between religion and spirituality, then, lies the presumption that to think and act within an existing tradition—to practice religion—risks making one less spiritual. To be religious is to bow to the authority of another, to believe in doctrines determined for one in advance, to read ancient texts only as they are handed down through existing interpretative traditions, and blindly to perform formalized rituals. For the spiritual, religion is inert, arid, and dead; the practitioner of religion, whether consciously or not, is at best without feeling, at worst insincere…

On the Out of Ur blog, Gordon MacDonald writes a gentle post about Anne Rice, her denunciation of 'Christianity', and about other people who have left the faith for various reason.   He begins in this way: 

Best selling author Anne Rice has quit Christianity. She is not quitting on Jesus Christ or the Bible, she says, but she is quitting organized Christianity.  Ms. Rice announced her quit-decision not through a resignation letter (where would one send it?) but through her website and TV interviews.

Anne Rice’s decision to go public with her decision is not the only way people quit Christianity. Some do it quietly, gradually dropping out of the programmatic activities of religious institutions and out of personal contact with people whose devotion to the faith seems solid. One day someone notices an empty seat in the sanctuary and says, “I haven’t seen Bob (or Jennifer) around for a while. Wonder what’s happened to him (or her)?”

He goes on to discuss what's behind people leaving the church, the faith, (and sometimes everything else in their lives too).   He seems to be looking at the same question as Amy Hollywood: can you have faith in Christ apart from His Church?  

In your dreams...!

It's not often that the comments to a blog post are as interesting as the post, or, as in this case, even more interesting.   This comment sparked several other similar ones.  The post appeared on PreacherMike.com    Mike basically told the story of an airline attendant who lost his cool at a difficult passenger and went the whole hog: told everyone about it over the intercom, opened the escape chute (they were on the tarmac) and grabbed a beer as he ran for his car.   This story, the sort of fantasy everyone would like to do once in a while, elicited this response, amongst others. 

I stand up on Sunday morning and say this:

“I know the leaders have been agonizing on the failure of this church to grow for the last few years. You’re wondering what model we need: WillowCreek, Saddleback, Gateway, etc. I have bad news. There is no new model. Changing youth ministers won’t help. Sending everyone on staff to a big event won’t do it. The truth is that we’re unwilling to change while our community has changed dramatically. We’re acting like it’s 1960, except that after our obsessing on worship, that tiny aspect of our lives now looks different. But we’re sitting on our butts wanting to be served, rather than joining God in his mission in our community. It’s not the community we had, and the old community isn’t coming back. We’ve drawn in the bridge and complained about those around us. Meanwhile, Jesus waits for us on the other side of the moat. But, hey, I’ve suggested this before and no one seems interested. It’s much easier to think a new minister, a new worship style will “fix” everything– with the same old worldview, same old threadbare theology, and same old isolation. So, right now I’m saying I love you, God loves you, and good luck.”

Then I walk down the center aisle, set my brand-new-cool wireless mic on the back pew, and head out to the local bar to have a cold one with Jesus.

Not that I’ve thought about it.

Christ and Mission

Christology is not a sufficient foundation for mission. With Jesus alone, we see mission, but not the engaged body; love, but no community, so says Len Hjalmarson in his latest Next Reformation post.

Is he right? He certainly gives plenty of good reasons why he should be right, and brings in various heavyweights such as David Bosch, Lesslie Newbigin, David Fitch, and Charles Ringma to back him up.

Hjalmarson isn't in any way denigrating Christ - he's expanding the limited picture of mission that many of us have, one that focuses all the attention on the minister and makes him the sole 'expert' in ministry/mission; that makes individual ethics more important than communal transformation; that sees a Jesus and Me approach to the Christian life as the norm.

Check out his post for his full argument.

Mission is Messy

In an article entitled Why we must shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’ by Clay Shirky, he notes that when Guttenberg invented the printing press, the results were initially chaotic...
“Only in retrospect were experiments undertaken during the wrenching transition to print revealed to be turning points.....That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent in the moment; big changes stall, small changes spread. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can be neither mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify…
“And so it is today. When people demand to know how we are going to replace [all kinds of things- add your favourite institution here] .. they are demanding to be told that the old systems will not break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
“There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.....The future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.”

Why have I headed this post 'Mission is Messy?' Because what Shirky discusses is very similar to the way mission works, the way the 'emerging' church works (and you can think of 'emerging' in any way you like), and even the way a person converted from the old life into a Christ-life 'works'. Though the article focuses on the on-going crisis seen in the newspaper industry, it has resonances far beyond that.

Thanks to Len Hjalmarson for bringing this to our attention.

Christ in the Workplace Conference

‘Christ in the Workplace’ is a conference where people from all professions and disciplines, at every career stage, can come together to consider the gospel’s impact upon their work and lives.

It will take place from the 3rd to the 5th Sept, 2010 at Laidlaw College in Auckland. Speakers include Nigel Pollock and Andrew Thorburn, and there will be workshops taken by Peter Shaukat, Ben Carswell, Roshan Allpress and Andrew Shamy.

Nigel Pollock is the current National Director of TSCF. Andrew Thorburn is the CEO of the BNZ.

The workshops will include how to Develop a Mission Orientation in Business, and, Growing our Witness in the Workplace.

Check out the promotional brochure for more information on other speakers and 'tracks.'

• Café Connect—offers a great opportunity to foster the formation of groups and networks within your profession.
• Tracks—put you in direct contact with colleagues gathered from around New Zealand.
• Optional workshops—all are intended to invigorate the broader conversation.

You can Register Now.

The Gospel and the Internet

Many organizations are using the reach of the Internet to present the gospel to those around the world. One such ministry, Global Media Outreach, is currently looking for "online missionaries."

"We believe that God has given us the technology and the strategy," says Allan Beeber, the Orlando director of GMO, the media arm of Campus Crusade for Christ. "As more and more believers get involved, we think it's possible to see the Great Commission fulfilled, five to ten times over, in ten years." [ I'm not sure what he means by fulfilling it 'five to ten times over' - I'm merely quoting the original report.]

GMO is currently seeking workers. Last year, 66 million people reportedly visited one or more of GMO's 100-plus Web sites to search for information online about Jesus and the hope He brings. Of those, more than 10 million indicated a decision to follow Christ, and nearly two million initiated discipleship and requested more information about Jesus and Christianity through GMO's 4,000 online missionaries.

As more and more people gain access to the Internet and visit GMO sites requesting information and assistance, more mature believers are needed to respond. GMO says it now needs at least 10,000 online missionaries. These volunteers are asked to devote as little as 15 minutes a day to help respond to the e-mail inquiries that are being received — 80 to 90 percent of which are reportedly sent from outside of the United States.

Since its inception in 2004, GMO has seen the number of people indicating a decision for Christ grow from 21,066 annually to more than 10 million in 2009, twice its original projection for last year. No projection has been announced for 2010, but it could be over 30 million.

Anyone interested in more information or applying to be a volunteer online missionary should visit GMO's Web site at globalmediaoutreach.com. [sourced from ChristianPost.com via the Pastor's Weekly Briefing ezine]

It's worth checking the global media site out; they appear to be a group that's focused on using the power of the Internet with the intention of hooking people up with local congregations. They're an arm of the well-established Campus Crusade for Christ.

The Presbyterian Stats

A report has just been released by The Presbyterian Panel, a research group that serves the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) [PCUSA].

The panel's report is presented as a "Religious and Demographic Profile of Presbyterians, 2008." The report contains relatively few surprises, and is filled with data about the beliefs of Presbyterian laypersons and clergy.

Albert Mohler, who is no doubt regarded as a Conservative in the Christian scene (though with kudos and plenty of insight and wisdom) opens his blog post on the topic with these words:

"Liberal Protestantism, in its determined policy of accommodation with the secular world, has succeeded in making itself dispensable." That was the judgment of Thomas C. Reeves in The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Protestantism, published in 1996. Fast-forward another fourteen years and it becomes increasingly clear that liberal Protestantism continues its suicide -- with even greater theological accommodations to the secular worldview.

His focus is on this point: the most significant theological question concerned the exclusivity of the Gospel and the necessity of belief in Jesus Christ for salvation. On that question there was great division, with over a third (36%) of PCUSA church members indicating that they "disagree" or "strongly disagree" with the statement that "only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved."

A much more detailed look at the stats involved appears on the GA Junkie site (GA for General Assembly, of course, and a site focused on the politics of Presbyterianism in the States). This writer looks at the actual question asked (Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with...the following statement: only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved) and debates the case from there.

I won't go into the details of his arguments here, since they take up a fair amount of space on the original post, and he has a better head for interpreting statistics than I do.

Suffice to say, the two different perspectives expressed are both worth considering, and are perhaps not that far apart. And how does it all apply to the NZ scene?

It's worth noting the following (from Mohler's footnotes): The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was formed in 1983 as the union of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America and is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. It is the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States. More conservative Presbyterian bodies include the Evangelical Presbyterian Church [EPC] and the Presbyterian Church in America [PCA].

Bullying, Abusive Congregations

I was alerted to this blog post on abusive congregations yesterday by a tweet from a friend on Twitter. So I'm passing it along. The post itself is fairly moderate, but the several comments that follow show an appalling problem within the church - an appalling lack of Christian behaviour from people in some congregations towards their ministers. You have to wonder if they ever pray, read their Bibles, think about Christian discipleship.

I've heard of such things with other colleagues, and experienced it myself in a somewhat less severe way when I was filling in as pastor at a former church, so it's by no means an American problem.

The post itself refers to research on the topic from the Clergy Health Initiative, and one of the people commenting adds several useful links which anyone suffering this kind of abuse should follow up.

One of the other awful things from the comments is how many of them talk about the way in which the ministers' spouses were also abused. As Paul says, if I remember rightly, Brothers (Sisters), these things should not be!

Holy Subversion

Colin Hansen asks Trevin Wax, author of Holy Subversion -Allegiance to Christ in an age of rivals: What are the key threats to the church that you believe Christians need to subvert?

Wax lists four in particular (there are some more in his book)

1. A self-centered understanding of salvation that centers solely on personal benefit at the expense of radical grace that transforms our hearts and lives.
2. A church-less gospel that individualizes the Christian life to the point where there is no longer any real reason for a Christian to be part of a church.
3. A worldly understanding of success.
4. A slavish addiction to work, wealth-accumulation, and entertainment.

Wax's book came out in January and there's a very good overview of it on Amazon, by Robert Kellemen.

Jargonese

“We must learn the language of our audience,” [C S] Lewis wrote. “You must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular. I have come to the conclusion that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts are confused.”

On his blog, Mike Wendland quotes Lewis in a post called 'Let's watch our Christianese.' (Blogger's spellchecker doesn't think that's a word - or didn't until I informed it that it was.)

Mike talks about how our Christian jargon/language is often misinterpreted by those outside the church. We may be saying something with good sense - to us - they hear 'born again' as 'fundamentalist/cultist/religious extremist' or 'love offering' as possibly involving an orgy.

Personally I hate being asked to 'please be seated.' Who talks like that in real life? And there are heaps of other jargon phrases that many churches use, perhaps with the intention of sounding more liturgical. Let's move these archaic expressions on - or at the very least explain them to those who might be visiting.

We had one of our leaders 'explain' Communion the weekend before last - I suspect that more than 50% of our congregation had their eyes and ears opened as a result. Regular explanations like that are worth doing, and perhaps more useful than telling the people who've been attending for 20 or 30 years that they need to remember that Christ died for our sins, the sort of thing we actually know - because we've heard it several thousand times....

Tom Wright on Hell

Tom Wright may not be everyone's cup of tea/flavour of the month but for me he often speaks clearly and succinctly on a subject. This three minute video below is one example.



Not everyone will agree with what he has to say (which is something along the lines of the way C S Lewis writes about Hell in the opening chapter of The Great Divorce) and I'm slightly dubious about his view that Jesus didn't say anything much on Hell. I think he's trying to find a way of fitting Hell 'in' to his views on heaven and earth coming together at the end of all things; do people who totally reject God get somehow squeezed out of the Universe (both spiritual and physical?). That's not what he says, by the way!

Whatever Hell literally is, if one can speak about such a thing as being literal, it certainly isn't a place I'd prefer to go...whether it's a case of losing the Presence of God or (merely) having to live with an eternally tedious and irritating self.

And another announcement: Brian McLaren in NZ

World Vision and Laidlaw College Present: Brian McLaren - Where Faith meets the World

Tuesday 13 October, 7.30pm
Laidlaw College, Lincoln Road, Henderson

In a time where everyone is talking about global crisis, Brian McLaren is also talking about Jesus and his message for us and our situation. Brian offers a framework where he explores the societal systems we live in: prosperity, equity and security systems.

Instead of functioning in perfect harmony, guided by God, these systems have become misaligned and no longer function as they should. They have become destructive, and this is the problem Jesus came to address. Brian describes these dysfunctions as:

1. Prosperity Crisis – Our pursuit of prosperity is unsustainable ecologically. We demand more resources and produce more waste than our planet can handle.
2. Equity Crisis – A minority of the world’s population is experiencing great prosperity, while a majority is not. This growing gap between rich and poor adds to the pain of poverty and acute sense of injustice.
3. Security Crisis – As the environment experiences greater stress and puts limits on economic growth, the poor suffer disproportionately. Their suffering in turn fuels mass migration, petty and organised crime, war and terrorism. The rich respond by investing more and more of their income in weapons and armies and police, leaving the poor even more isolated and angry.
4. Spirituality Crisis – Our religious systems fail to provide inspiration and the moral will to address these crises. Too often, they legitimise counterproductive responses, or they distract people from constructive action by preoccupying them with other matters.

Having thought long and hard about the world’s problems, Brian says, “ Our plethora of critical global problems (is real)….(but) the fourth crisis is the lynchpin or leverage point through which we can reverse the first three.”

The message of Jesus offers a revolution of hope for our planet and the poor.

This is where mission meets the reality of the world

"We'd better listen to Brian McLaren if we want to bring the reality of Christ into the world as it is and the church as it now is." Dallas Willard Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California in Los Angeles

More info on Brian at www.brianmclaren.net, or contact mark.pierson@worldvision.org.nz

This will be Brian McLaren's only public meeting in New Zealand.

Madeleine Delbrêl

Lord, let the thick skin that covers me not be a hindrance to you. Pass through it. My eyes, my hands, my mouth are yours. This sad lady in front of me: here is my mouth for you to smile at her ... This smug young man, so dull, so hard: here is my heart, that you may love him, more strongly than he has ever been loved before.

- Madeleine Delbrêl,
Missionary and activist (1904-1964)