The Revelation

The Revelation took place on a Sunday, the evening of February 28, 1983. The sky was bright and clear that Sabbath night – almost supernaturally clear, as one TV weatherman remarked the following day, with scarcely a cloud in sight anywhere across the vast unbounded skies of the fifty states of America....

So begins Benjamin Myers 'short story', 'The Witness' a recent post on his blog, Faith and Theology.

This is superb and deserves wide reading.

What a Mission Consultant Can do for You

Duncan Macleod wrote the following on his blog back in early April. Much of what he says applies to roles of both the National Mission Enabler, and the Regional Mission Advisor.

Consulting is mostly, I believe, about listening and looking. I like Fuzz and Carolyn Kitto’s suggestion that consulting is lending people your ears and eyes, not the other way around. It’s about finding clues about what’s happening behind the scenes, under the surface, in the past, present and future. Effective consulting in my line of work requires me to develop an intuitive and thorough understanding of human dynamics, sociology and emotional systems. I’ve learned where to find clues about community trends, looking for hard data (facts and figures) as well as soft data (human stories).

Consulting needs to be empowering. It is tempting to just tell people what to do. “Follow these instructions and you’ll be right”. However I’d rather be coaching local leaders to develop their capacity to discern direction and lead a community into the future. This is “power with” rather than “power over”. I’ve found this complicated when I’ve had the capacity to say yes or no to funding. I do come across ministers whose strengths are in pastoral care and conscientious living, but struggle with how to develop fresh thinking (creativity) and action (innovation). Often, not always, there are people around with drive and creativity who can share in the process. I say “not always”, as people with “get up and go” tend to “get up and go” elsewhere when they’re not given room to move and make things happen.
Read the rest on Duncan’s Blog, Postkiwi Duncan Macleod

Skye Jethani's new book, The Divine Commodity, is now out and about (in the States, at least). There's a not-very-long review in a post on the signs of life blog, written by the blog owner, David Swanson.

He makes the following comment at one point, and quotes from the book:

It is the description of an alternative to consumer Christianity that is most commendable. In a chapter about the tendency to place institutions before relationships Skye writes,

What may be needed is a fundamental rethinking of the church within the minds of the members, cultivating the imagination to conceive of the church as a relational community rather than an institutional organization. Beginning on the smallest end of the scale, this means relearning the lost art of friendship.

Swanson notes elsewhere:

The Divine Commodity is organized into nine chapters, each which observe an aspect of consumerism that has infiltrated the church. Filled with stories, cultural artifacts, and Biblical reflection these observations are easily connected to the reader’s own context.

Perseverance

Perseverance is not an issue of talent. It is not an issue of time. It is about finishing. Talent provides hope for accomplishment, but perseverance guarantees it. John Maxwell.

Christmas probably doesn't seem like the time to be talking about perseverance, though perhaps for a number of people, persevering through what is for them a difficult time may be all they can achieve.

Maxwell has a story about Vonetta Flowers, the first African-American woman to win a gold medal in the Winter Olympics. It may make a useful story for a sermon of persevering - if not at Christmas, at least at some other time of the year (!)

Perseverance means succeeding because you are determined to, not destined to.

How do YOU read the Bible?

In a talk at this year's 'Catalyst' Scot McKnight outlined five flawed ways many people read the Bible. I'll only include the headings and a brief note; the fuller version can be read here.

The Morsels of Law Approach: searching the Bible for all the commandments, and then only obeying those that suit.
The Morsels of Blessings Approach: doing the same thing with the blessings - although probably tending to believe more of the blessings than the commandments.
The Rorschach Approach: reading the book from your own political/psychological/whatever perspective.
The Systematic Theology Approach: pulling all the relevant bits together into an organised whole, but leaving out all the 'other' bits.
The Maestro Approach: in which one 'master' book of the Bible is taken as the focus for all other books.

McKnight's says: These five approaches are all very common, and all very flawed. We must read the Bible as a story. But it’s not just a story that we read, it is a story that we live. “We must let the Bible’s story become our story,” he said, “so that it becomes us, and we become it.”

A bunch of various quotes

Sometimes the quotes come thick and fast. Here are two that arrived in my email box this morning, and another that's a quote from an essay I mentioned a day or so ago.

Nothing is so important as human life, as the human person. Above all, the person of the poor and the oppressed... Jesus says that whatever is done to them he takes as done to him. That bloodshed, those deaths are beyond all politics: They touch the very heart of God.

- Oscar Romero
March 16, 1980

Humans possess an innate affinity for narrative. Narrative surrounds us, and something about narrative movement captivates the hearts of human beings. Why is this? Christians can look to scripture to uncover a reason for this affinity: storytelling resides in the heart of God. Genesis 1:26 says that man is created in the image of God, and God has an affinity for storytelling. How are we certain of this? Jesus Christ, God incarnate, presented truth after truth during his earthly ministry in story form. At several points, Jesus’ disciples question this practice. Matthew 13:13 relays Jesus’ answer: “This is why I speak in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing they do not hear or understand.…’” Jesus answers their question with an invitation. He invites the disciples to explore his stories, to question them, to examine them, to break through their blindness and discover the truth.

Bill Boerman-Cornell and Annette Witte
"Neither Minnie Mouse nor Wonder Woman" in catapult magazine

The Bible is not actually older than church tradition. The writings of the first fathers precede the uniting of the biblical books in one volume as we have it today (the first list of the books of the Old and New Testaments that matches our own Bibles comes from St. Athanasius in 367, though the key books were in place long before). St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of "Scripture" simply as what we think of as the Old Testament, which for him demonstrably sets forth Christ without ambiguity! Even after the formation of the biblical canon, tradition still functioned as a hermeneutical rule: "an approach for interpreting the Bible by investigating and following the ancient consensus of the fathers."

Not that that consensus is always clear. In fact, learning to read like the fathers should make our reading of the Bible a good deal more difficult. The fathers often affirm an "infallible Bible," music to the ears of today's evangelicals. But they also celebrated "points of obscurity or even contradiction" in the Bible—the very things many superficial readers today would prefer to ignore or iron out. The letter of Scripture is plain enough for all readers. But God has intentionally placed obscurities in the Bible as opportunities for spiritual growth for its readers: "because he only wants to open [the Scriptures] up to those who are prepared to look" for God's mysteries, as D H Williams quotes St. Augustine.

From Reading with the Saints, The art of biblical interpretation.by Jason Byassee

Reading the Bible

Because [the Bible is] a story, the Spirit who is its presiding author and editor is free to use all the devices available to any storyteller.... The deepest difficulty with literalism is that it fails to see the principal device the Spirit uses to weave all those elements into a single story. All that wildly various wet-wash is hung on a paradoxical clothesline of imagery, not on a string of uniform propositional truths. The Bible is held together by icons, by word-pictures like Light, Word, Water, Marriage, the Garden, the Tree, the Blood of Abel, the Paschal Lamb, the Blood on the Doorposts, the Rock in the Wilderness, the Bread from Heaven, and finally the City, both as the historical Jerusalem in the Old Testament and as the destiny of the world in the book of Revelation. It's these icons, these sacraments of the real presence of the Word himself, that make it a whole.

Robert Farrar Capon
The Fingerprints of God

Plus, for a (reasonably) lengthy essay on the way the early Fathers and later theologians looked at reading the Bible, check out Jason Byassee's essay-review "Reading with the Saints," on the art of biblical interpretation. He not only discusses the issues, but looks at several worthwhile books on the subject.