Clearing the Air

Clearing the Air - Fri 16-Sat 17 July, 2010.

What does the Church have to say to government, society, and itself – if anything – on the topic of climate change? The failure to reach any agreement at the recent Copenhagen conference is regarded as a triumph by some and a tragedy by others.

This forum – convened by Glyn Carpenter, National Director, NZ Christian Network, visionnetwork, and Associate Professor Jonathan Leaver, Unitec Institute of Technology – will bring together both groups, and look to produce a consensus-based position statement.

Topics will include (a) epistemology, (b) creation mandate, (c) what position can be reasonably supported by the science, and (d) what can and should we do? The forum is designed primarily for church and public issues leaders, but places are available for students and others to hear a great line up of speakers.

The forum is designed primarily for church and public issues leaders, but places are available for students and others to hear a great line up of speakers, including:
• Professor Ralph Sims, Director, Centre for Energy Research, Massey University
• Dr James Renwick, Principal climate scientist, NIWA
• Ian Wishart, Editor, Investigate magazine, Author: "Air Con"
• Prof Jonathan Boston, Director of the Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University
• Barry Brills, President, NZ Climate Science Coalition
• Dr Andy Reisinger, Senior Research Fellow, NZ Climate Change Research Institute, Victoria University
• Ken Harrison, Chairman National Church Leaders group, National Superintendant Assemblies of God in New Zealand
• Archbishop David Moxon, Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia
• Stephen Tollestrup, Executive Director, Tear Fund

Though Matt Flanagan's name isn't in the list above, he's the opening speaker of the conference.

Fear.Less

In a recent post Seth Godin points to a new online magazine called Fear.Less. It's well written, has half a dozen interesting contributors from a variety of fields, and can be downloaded, or read on your browser, or printed out. All for free.

The magazine promotes itself this way: fear.less is a free online magazine that empowers people through unique stories of overcoming fear. From entrepreneurs, business leaders, artists and scientists to survivors of extreme experiences, these stories demonstrate the hidden potential we have to confront our fears and come out victorious. Fear.less is our answer to an emergency.

Okay, so why am I mentioning it here, since there's no particular Christian connection in it? Well, firstly in each case the contributors discuss overcoming a fear or failure in their life that could easily have debilitated them for the future. Secondly, it's a biblical principle that fear is something to be overcome, or it will be your master.

Thirdly, it's a prime example of what magazines might look like in the future. I don't think that future is here yet; not quite. Paper magazines are still rampant, even though large numbers of them are losing money, and increasingly they have more ads than content. (fear.less has more content than ads.) Depending on the state of the Internet in the next ten/twenty years, this could be the way magazines go. Far more economical to produce, environmentally more friendly (I think!) and accessible to larger numbers of people - or just to a small group that wants to read about those particular issues.

Check it out. You can read it online in your browser, or download it or.... And it's just as classy-looking as anything you'll find on your newsstands.

The Catholics ask the same questions...

When I worked at OC Books, one of the New Zealand authors we stocked was Neil Darragh, so it was good to come across him again in a different context, this time as the speaker at the Pompallier Lecture for 2009. Neil is a Catholic priest, so his focus is on the Catholic Church in New Zealand. Nevertheless, there's a great deal to be learned from his lecture, whatever denomination you may be in.

The title of his lecture is: Where to from here? A present and future church, and in it Neil asks firstly, What is the church for, and secondly, How should we arrange ourselves so as to achieve this?

He follows these questions by expanding on them: The ordering of these two parts in important. It is based on the principle that missiology comes before ecclesiology. We need to know first what the church is for. On that basis we can work out what kind of church we need to be in order to get there. This principle is particularly important for people in the church whose involvement includes leadership or planning. Leaders run the risk of devising plans for a well-resourced and well-oiled church that isn’t actually doing anything except looking after itself. The dog is chasing its tail.

If this sounds at all familiar...it ought!

New Mission

“The Anabaptist writer and practitioner, Stuart Murray Williams, has been the most trenchant critic of the tendency of older church plants to copy the outward forms and style of their sending church, without asking whether the new mission context was different. This can result in failure to let the shape and form of the new church be determined by the mission context for which it was intended. The call for new kinds of churches can become subverted into the production of MORE churches.”
Pg 20, The Mission Shaped Church (various authors)

Similarly:
In The Open Secret, Lesslie Newbigin said: “the significant advances of the church have not been the result of our own decision about the mobilizing and allocating of “resources” [rather] the significant advances have come through happenings of which the story of Peter and Cornelius is a paradigm, in ways of which we have no advance knowledge.”
(both quotes courtesy of the Next Reformation blog)

Heaven/Earth

We need to do away with any literal picture of eternal life as an irrelevant existence in a remote place. The images of harps and wings may symbolically suggest the happiness of heavenly life, but they do not set the actual scene. Although heaven is currently separated from this world, this arrangement is temporary and we must learn to distinguish between heaven now and heaven forever.... On the new earth, heaven and earth will be knit together again, as they were in the beginning.

Nathan L.K. Bierma
Bringing Heaven Down to Earth

And all I can say to this is, Amen! And check out the positive reviews for this book on Amazon. (This isn't an advertisment by the way...LOL)

Unthinkable Life

Life, Inc. How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back, by Douglas Rushkoff.
Missional guru, Alan Roxburgh, has written a good review of this book on his blog. Here are a couple of paragraphs from it:

“I read it in one sitting. A lot of the material is familiar and, yes, he overstates and exaggerates in places where it isn’t needed. Frankly, it's pretty easy to critique this book at many levels, in part because it tries to tackle a tough piece of social history in a book wanting to communicate with people who don’t have the inside ‘expertise’ of social historians, economists or urban studies. It's a book that over-stretches by oversimplifying economic developments that are more complex than he wishes to own. All of this being the case, Rushkoff has still written a book that deserves our attention. It would seem to be the vocation of church leadership to read with a critical eye and not simply take everything at face value. There is much in this book that will assist us in framing why it is so hard right now to shape local churches and denominational systems in anything that goes much beyond the latest ‘seeker’ techniques or church growth gift-wrapped in glossy missional paper.

“Part of living in an unthinkable world is discovering how to see the ways certain parts of life we simply ‘take for granted’ come out of very specific social histories, now forgotten, that are blinding us not just to the ways we are being shaped but from imagining a different world. In reading Rushkoff we are getting very close to the lived anxieties of the people who come, hungering and thirsting to our churches whom we too often send away empty because we are focused on meeting needs and being seeker friendly. We see how corporatism has framed a way of living in suburban life shaped by the automobile that isolated people from neighbours and makes us frightened of the very strangers the Gospel calls us to embrace.”

The book was published by Random House, June 2, 2009

PS, by 'an unthinkable world' I understand Roxburgh to mean a world we haven't yet envisaged, rather than one that can't be envisaged.

Mission - using Tarot cards

Trinity College, Bristol, recently gave a warm welcome to John Drane, one of Britain's leading mission thinkers and practitioners in relating the gospel to western culture. Drane told a packed hall of students and staff about his creative and inspirational use of Tarot cards in building bridges for the gospel to many in today's world who are fascinated with symbolism and alternative spiritualities. He has been doing this for some years and has built up a great deal of experience.
You can read the rest of this (fairly brief) report here. Drane, along with Ross Clifford and Philip Johnson, wrote a book on the subject of Tarot cards called; Beyond Prediction: The Tarot and Your Spirituality. It was published in 2001.
Part of the blurb notes: ...the Tarot was not originally designed for the art of prediction, argue Drane, Clifford and Johnson. Instead, the cards were packed full of Christian symbolism to help us understand the spiritual backdrop to life. With a revealing look at the history of the different packs, together with illustrations and descriptions of each card's meaning (and suggested examples to try), this book shows that there is far more to be gleaned from shuffling the deck than mere fortune telling.

This is quite an innovative approach to mission - though perhaps not one every mission-minded person will be keen to try...! However, if you want more detail about it, check out this report on the John Mark Ministries website.

Recently, Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine discussed the next 1,000 years of Christianity.
There's a summary by Kent Shaffer of what he said on the neoleader blog.
To give you a taste of what he said here's his list of possible future events...some of which might be tongue-in-cheek

• At the rate that new Christian denominations are growing, there could be 260,000 denominations by 2100.
• Mormons are growing fast. What if they become the world majority?
• The Amish are also growing fast. Could the world become Neo-Amish?
• Around 2050, will be the first time in history where we have doubled the world population but are expectedly to dramatically decrease it.
• What happens when robots with artificial intelligence say, “I too am a child of God?”
• Transhumanity
• With genetic engineering, will we remain one species or many?
• Wikipedia does not work in theory but in practice. What about Wikichurch?
• Christianity becomes hip.
• Purple Christians (a mix of Democrats and Republicans)
• Islam in Europe

You can check out the original half-hour video here.

Randall Prior

The keynote speaker at this year's Presbyterian General Assembly (in Wellington, New Zealand) was Randall Prior. Randall focuses a good deal on Gospel and Culture, on Church and the Future. In his addresses to the PCANZ, he spoke specifically about the Future of the Church. Although his talk had some Australian focuses, it was very applicable to the New Zealand scene (and in fact, to a much wider scene). You can download the talks here, or obtain them as audio files.

In one of the footnotes to his second talk, he notes: In my view there is still some considerable ‘dying’ of the present form of the church yet to take place. It is not a simple matter to anticipate a future shape of the church but the indications are that the church’s place in Australian [for Australian read, New Zealand, USA, UK - anywhere else where institutional churches are struggling] society will be:
as one faith group in a society of several faiths and religions;
the church will be marginal to the main interests and activities of our society;
there will be a diversity of forms and styles of church life;
congregations may be increasingly dependent on lay leadership;
there may be little interest among church people in denominational loyalty; there will be fewer resources to maintain the structures and activities and buildings which we have known in the past; for some church communities, there may be only a loose connection with buildings.

It would probably be unwise to takes these notes alone, without reading the rest of the talk, particularly because Prior is talking of the Future of the Church, not its death.

The best of creation

Here's a quote some might agree with, some might dispute. I don't know that Mr Marshall is saying he's sure of this, or whether it's something he hopes for.

Our works, here and now, are not all transitory. The good that we have done will not simply disappear and be forgotten. This world is not a passing and futile phase; it will be taken up in God's new world. Our good buildings, our great inventions, our acts of healing, our best writings, our creative art, our finest clothes, our greatest treasures will not simply pass away. If they represent the finest works of God's image-bearers, they will adorn the world to come.

Paul Marshall
Heaven is Not My Home

Jurgen Moltmann and the future

There are two ways of talking about the future. One is the method of extrapolation. The other is the method of anticipation. All researchers into the future and all planners for the future extrapolate, inferring the future from data and trends of the past and present. For them the past and the future lie along one and the same straight, temporal line. There is no qualitative difference between past and future. So they are not really investigating the future at all. They are simply prolonging into the future their own present … they repress the future’s new possibilities. The future is what is going to be, not what is going to come.

The method of anticipation works quite differently. Anticipation means expectation and an advance realization of what is coming. Anticipations are advance pictures and pre-conceptions (in the literal sense) of what we are looking for and expect. They are creative imaginations of what is to come … For the method of anticipation there is a qualitative difference between past and future. The past is the reality, the future is possible, and the present is the front at which potentialities can be realized or thwarted.

From Jesus Christ for Today’s World, by Jurgen Moltmann, Pg 138-139

Review: Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright

Tom Wright has several things he wants to put across in this book, but there are two particular ones that stand out for me. Firstly he wants to encourage the church to change its view of what happens to us after death, and secondly, and even more important, he wants us to realise the extent to which we're affected, in every aspect of our lives, by Jesus' resurrection from the dead, and our own future resurrection in the new heavens/new earth.

I must confess I'm a person who likes to read books that speculate as far as possible on where (and what) we'll be in the post-death future. I sometimes feel a little alone in this, as, to my surprise, many Christians don't appear to care overly much. For them vague thoughts of 'heaven' are enough. However, Wright isn't prepared to let us away with any kind of vagueness. He spends a good amount of time dealing to the usual idea of 'heaven,' which he says is not only inaccurate, it's not even Scriptural.

For him the resurrection of Jesus is of utter importance in relation to our future. The resurrection will sweep up everything in this world and recreate it in the new. For Wright, everything that's of value here will have value eternally, and he's not just talking about 'spiritual' things, but about creative things, about work and love and kindness and relationships and all manner of other aspects of our everyday lives. The 'first' resurrection happened here, in this world, and it will ultimately affect everything in this world. The new creation will incorporate the old, making all the old of immense value.

But this is just part of the message in the book. Wright presents a wide-ranging and accessible theology of the resurrection, of Easter itself, of the Christian's hope as it was understood in the early church, of what Jesus' judgment of this world means, of whether Purgatory and Paradise have any relevance to us.

And in his final section, where some of the best material lies (in a book full of good material), he writes of hope in practice: how the resurrection affects the mission of the church.

If you've ever felt that we've lost the point of Easter, that the resurrection was a one-off and rather odd event, and that our deaths are fairly irrelevant in the scheme of things, read this book. Even if you don't agree with all Wright's theology – as some (plainly misguided critics) don't – I'll be surprised if you're not inspired by at least some of what he has to say.

reviewed by Mike Crowl

Tom Sine on planning

Every denomination and religious organization I work with does long range planning. Ironically, they do long range planning as thought the future will simply be an extension of the present. As a result, we are chronically surprised by change. Tom Sine in Wild Hope.

The Shaping of Things to Come

I know that the book, The Shaping of Things to Come, by Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch, has been around for about four years, and most of you will have read it, or come across it.

However, for those who haven't, there's an excellent review and detailed summary of the book and its contents on the John Mark Ministries site, in Australia. It has enough detail in it for you to be able to assess the whole book without having to read it from cover to cover - something the busier ones amongst you might appreciate.

Two recent books on the Future

New Zealand Unleashed: the country, its future and the people who will get it there, by Steve Garden. Looks at the changes, looks at our history and particularly at our ability to innovate – both from a Maori and a Pakeha perspective. Sees creativity as a vital force in taking us forward. Published 2007 Random House.

Futurehype, the myths of technology change, by Bob Seidensticker. Spends a lot of time telling us how the future can’t be predicted, and how previous predictions have often been wrong. Message seems to be to not to take everything as gospel in terms of hype and media promotion. Published Berrett-Koehler, 2006

Richard Watson

Nothing dates as fast as the future. Richard Watson.

Richard Watson, the author of Future Files, has a blog on which he discusses future trends.

He’s currently listing the 2008 Trends as he sees them.

1. Karma Capitalism
2. Rhythm & Balance
3. Making things
4. Something for nothing
5. Industrial provenance
6. Robotics
7. Data visualisation
8. Reality mining
9. Eco-exhaustion
10. Fantasy & escape
Most of these need some explanation to unpack them! The explanation is on the blog.

His 2007 Trends is now available as a pdf file free to copy, and makes interesting reading.