God escapes....again!

A judge has thrown out a Nebraska politician's lawsuit against God, saying the Almighty could not be served because his home address was unlisted.
State senator, Ernie Chambers, filed the lawsuit, stating God had caused “widespread death, destruction and terrorisation of millions up millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.”

However, Judge Marion Polk said “given that…there can never be service effectuated on the name defendant, this action will be dismissed.”

Clearly some people/politicians don't have much to do. For a fictional comedy on similar lines, check out Billy Connelly in The Man Who Sued God.

Church in Decline? Think again!

One key exception, is Samuel P Huntington's book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, one of the most widely read analyses of current global trends, which does pay serious attention to changing religious patterns. Even Huntington, though, understates the rising force of Christianity. He believes that the relative Christian share of global population will fall steeply in the new century, and that this religion will be supplanted by Islam: "In the long run...Muhammad wins out."
But far from Islam being the world's largest religion by 2020 or so, as Huntington suggests, Christianity will still have a massive lead, and will maintain its position into the foreseeable future. By 2050, there should still be about three Christians for every two Muslims worldwide. Some 34% of the world's people will then be Christian, roughly what the figure was at the height of European world hegemony in 1900.
Huntington's analysis of the evidnece is misguided in one crucial respect. While he rightly notes the phenomenal rates of population growth in Muslim countries, he ignores the fact that similar or even higher rates are also found in already populous Christian countries, above all in Africa. Alongside the Muslim efflorescence he rightly foresees, there will also be a Christian population explosion, often in the same or adjacent countries. If we look at the nations with the fastest popoulation growth and the youngest populations, they are evenly distributed between Christian and Muslim dominated societies.

From The Next Christendom; the coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins. age 5. Jenkins has written several books along similar lines, showing that Christianity is in anything but decline, even in Europe, where supposedly it's at death's door.

Making the heart sing

Every so often a concert or musical performance seems to lift off the earth and touch heaven. That's what happened on Sept 19th, 2008 at a concert. Mark Gavreau Judge was there; the following paragraphs are extracts from his longer article.

On Friday, September 19, I witnessed one of the most miraculous things I've ever seen on a stage. I use that adjective with purpose; the only way to describe what happened is with the language of religion.

After almost three hours, it was time for a curtain call—one last bow to end the evening. As Spitzer reintroduced everyone, White's jazz band played "When the Saints Go Marching In." That's when something happened.

The audience at the Strathmore rose to its feet to acknowledge the fellowship winners—it seemed at the time like one last blast of applause before the exit. But as they—we—clapped in time to "When the Saints Go Marching In," the performers onstage began to dance. Together. It started when Jelon Vieira's dancers did cartwheels in front of the jazz band. Suddenly the Oneida Hymn Singers, a group of mostly elderly men and women, were dancing with the capoeiras. Then Sue Parks' backing drummers appeared, dancing with anyone they saw. Mac Wiseman's band played along, as did the Ethiopian choir. The jazz band, sensing something in the air, got louder, and kept playing. And playing. And playing. Onstage, the performers formed a conga line, led by one of the jazz musicians, then a circle, each person taking his or her turn in the center. The invisible line between performers and audience evaporated. It had turned into one big party—or revival meeting.

Read the rest here.

Presbyopia

Presbyopia is a noun, and means the inability of the eye to focus sharply on nearby objects, resulting from loss of elasticity of the crystalline lens with advancing age.
[New Latin : Greek presbus, old man; + -opia.]

What has this got to do with the Presbyterian Mission Resource site? It just struck us as amusing that the word relates to a lessening of our eyesight (insight?) as we get older. It's common to all people, not just those who have trouble with their eyes.

However, Presbyterian as a word doesn't have the same roots. The 'Presby' bit of it isn't derived from 'old man' (as is Presbyopia) but from a Greek word, presbyterion, which was used by the church to mean elders long before the Presbyterians themselves took it up.

In a pamphlet on the subject of Presbyopia put out by the NZ Association of Optometrists, we're told that normal healthy young eyes have a wide range of focus, and the lens are very flexible. As we get older, the lens of the eye thickens and slowly loses its flexibility.

Does this have any connection with Christians (not just Presbyterians) as they get older? Do they lose their focus and their flexibility? It's a question we older Christians need to keep asking: have I lost my focus on Jesus and his mission to the world? Am I no longer as flexible as I was when it comes to doing what He asks?

Photo courtesy of Bex Shaw from her Eyesight series.

The State of the Art

Technorati was one of the early birds in the blogging scene, and they've managed to outstay many other competitors. Their status is such, now, that they were able to produce a major report on blogging globally, based on a substantial survey amongst bloggers in the US, Europe and Asia. If you have time to read the stats, there are some interesting points. Here's the introduction.

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey.

Just a few of the many intriguing stats:

Who are the global bloggers?

• Two-thirds are male
• 50% are 18-34 (so 50% are over 34 - in fact, age isn't necessarily a restriction in the blogging world)
  
• More affluent and educated than the general population
  • 70% have college degrees
  • Four in ten have an annual household income of $75K+
  • One in four have an annual household income of $100K+
• 44% are parents
• The survey was only administered in English, but Technorati heard from bloggers on six continents (although they're sure someone is blogging from Antarctica). They had respondents from 66 countries, who publish blogs in 20 different languages.
• 43% of blogger respondents live in the U.S.
• 72% publish their blog in English (the survey was only provided in English, so it may have excluded a large number of Asian bloggers)

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.”

Couple of quotes

Show me a dreamer and I’ll show you one of God’s heartbeats for the human race.

- Joan Chittister

Teaching a child to care for a goldfish — learning about its needs, respecting its otherness, delighting in its shimmering colors and swimming skills — is a better education in caring than is a lecture on global warming.

Sallie McFague
Super, Natural Christians

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.

More Commandments for Bloggers

Everyone's getting in on the act, it seems. Tall Skinny Kiwi points to an older set of Ten Commandments for Bloggers - they were posted in 2005 - that were written by Phil on A Thinkhammer Blog. These have a less 'religious' approach, though they're still based on blogging with integrity.

Ben at Faith and Theology offers his own set of Commandments. These ones tend to focus on not seeing yourself as more important than you are (you're only a blogger, you know, not God, the Pope, a church service or a variety of authoritative other voices).

The Commandments have made some news: The Times (of London)' religious editor wrote a piece on them, as did The Telegraph.

All these posts seem to be saying: if you're a blogger, be humble!

Afraid of the Holy Spirit?

Mark Driscoll (looking slightly worn out in the photo) spoke to a bunch of Anglicans in Australia recently. He listed 18 obstacles to evangelism in Australia - as he saw it. One of them stood out to me:

8. Many of you are afraid of the Holy Spirit. You don't know what to do with Him, so the trinity is Father, Son and Holy Bible. You are so reactionary to pentecostalism that you do not have a robust theology of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit calls people into ministry. He also empowers people for ministry. You don't have to be charismatic but you should be a little charismatic, enough at least to worship God with more than just all of your mind. The word charismatic here means prosperity, excessive, bizarre. In London, it means you're not a liberal. Don't get hung up on all the terminology. Do you love the Holy Spirit? Jesus says the Holy Spirit is a ‘He' and not an ‘it'." Ministry cannot be done apart from the Holy Spirit - I think that is in part leading to the lack of entrepreneurialism and innovation, because if it's not already done and written down, you're suspicious of it.

I don't think the Aussie Anglicans are alone in being afraid of the Spirit. Even Pentecostal churches in NZ don't seem to have quite the life they had back in the 70s and 80s, when there seemed to be a real Holy Spirit move.

Give up those extra tax dollars

New Zealand's Government tax cuts came into effect October 1st. Most people will see it as a few more dollars in their pocket. Some will be a bit wiser and bank the extra. Even though for many it's not a lot of money per week, the $12 to $28 a week individuals save on their tax bill can make a real difference - especially for those who can get along without it.

A simple suggestion has come from the Anglican Social Justice Committee: - give those extra dollars up!

By giving them up to those who do need it, and to those working to make a real difference, you can take an active part in changing our nation and our world into more of the kind of place we, and our children, might like.

The Give It Up! site has the look of a newspaper about, but there are plenty of links to check out, and plenty of ideas of ways to put that extra cash to good use. (Furthermore, the more you give away the more the Inland Revenue will give you back next year - it's one big merry-go-round!)

Bloggers' Ten Commandments

Godblogs, a gathering held by the Evangelical Alliance on 23 September, was designed to give Christian bloggers an opportunity to network face-to-face and think through a Christian approach to blogging. The group, aged from 18 to 87, reflected on how to honour God with their blogs and in their relationships online.
One thing some of the group produced was an updated (and not particularly tongue-in-cheek) version of the Ten Commandments for bloggers. You can see the full list here.

More about the meeting, and the making of the Commandments, here.

Programs don't work?

Steve Sjogren writes about his view that outreach programs don't work:

Take, for example, the experiment that has been going on across the American Church landscape for the past 20 years or so—the Seeker Sensitive approach. It basically boils down to being a program approach to doing church. No one who has seriously attempted to be a “Seeker Church” hasn’t taken a trek to one or more of the Seeker Meccas in the U.S. to see how they do what they do. When going to those places, there is no shortage of very well-executed, well-marketed, snappy videos, DVDs and a whole array of books that spell out precisely how to “do” the Seeker Sensitive thing.

The only problem is that after 20 years of doing this program—and it’s fair that we start looking at the fruit of this thing now—it hasn’t produced much fruit.

The rest of this article is on the Outreach site. But is what he's proposing just another program?

Wellness and overwork

I was alerted to the following quote by . It comes from an article on the site called RethinkingMission.org. It was written by Neil Richardson.

"Finally, a more personal comment is about re-connecting with our deepest selves. In the first year of my first circuit appointment I had to take some time off through overwork, and I guess most of us battle with diaries which are too crowded for our own good. The New Testament encourages us to distinguish those pressures we are under which come either from inside ourselves or from other people, and those pressures which simply go with the territory of being a disciple and a presbyter or deacon in the Church of God. About those pressures the New Testament is extraordinarily positive; ‘in all these things, we are more than conquerors’ (Romans 8.37). But we need to distinguish the pressures which are inseparable from our vocation from those which are not. So I end with part of a letter written by Bernard of Clairvaux:

‘How long can you be like a spirit that goes out and never comes home again? How long can you give everyone else your attention – but not give yourself any? Yes, if people treat themselves badly, how can they be good for anyone else? So think on this: give yourself some space. I’m not saying, Do that all the time. I’m not saying, Do it often. But I am saying Keep on doing it, again and again. Be there for yourself, in the same way that you are available to everyone else – or at least be there for yourself when everyone else has gone’. (Quoted in Seeing Christ in Others, ed. Geoffrey Duncan, Canterbury Press 2002, p.184).

Incidentally, this blog has suffered a little from lack of posts over the last couple of weeks due to preparations for the Presbyterian General Assembly, which took place from the 2nd Oct till today (the 6th). For those interested in catching up with what's been happening there, you can read the daily reports on the PCANZ Presbyterian website.

What is the Gospel?

Greg Gilbert tells us that there are two different, both equally valid, views of what the Gospel is. Both have their place, but defining which one is the answer to someone's question is another issue.
These are the two 'questions:'

1. What is the gospel? In other words, what is the message a person must believe to be saved? And
2. What is the gospel? In other words, what is the whole good news of Christianity?

Greg's first post on this topic looks at the two 'answers' to these questions. In his second post he looks at the two ways the written Gospels themselves look at what the Gospel is, quoting a number of different passages on the topic, and in his third post he ties the two approaches to the Gospel together.

Three posts that are well worth printing out rather than skimming through online.

Dave Gibbons asks:

In the light of increased costs (as much for New Zealanders as for Americans), are we spending our money on the wrong things? Dave Gibbons looks briefly at the issues in a post on Out of Ur:
Buildings for one...
The largest expenses for most churches are facilities and staff. First, let’s consider the stewardship of our space. Is it really the best to buy as much land as possible and erect large buildings, when the same dollars could be better deployed in other initiatives that prove more impactful? How much of our space is actually utilized during a given week? In expensive urban centers, every square foot comes at a very high purchase price, and we can’t forget about the cost of furnishing and maintaining the space.
Or staff...
How about staffing? As culture moves from a hierarchical model to a more flat, open, or wiki model, how should we staff? When I looked more closely at our budget, I realized that over 55% of our budget was staff related. While our staff is amazing, it had unintentionally created a bottleneck in our mission—it impeded the development of our people because we were “staff-driven.”
Read the rest of his post to see what his thinking is.

Dan Kimball says more on the Emerging Church

There's a new notion floating around: the 'emerging church' concept is dead, it isn't marketable, it's no longer a 'brand.' But what's the reality? One author who has something to say about it is Dan Kimball, who wrote the book, The Emerging Church, several years ago.
In his blog, he's written his first post on the topic. It begins like this:

I am going to write a couple of posts on the book "The Emerging Church" and what has changed or not from my perspective since the 5 years it came out. Each post will address something I have learned or has changed or has stayed the same and has been further affirmed.

The first one I will write about and one big change from 5 years ago (or actually 6 or 7 when I was actually writing the book) is that there is a different context and definition regarding the term the "emerging church" that has developed since then. For some, this may be uninteresting and may not care - but for others it is significant, especially if you have been in the midst of it all and seen the change of definition happen.

Indifference

When we have learned indifference, when we are really skilled and determined at the business of ignoring others, of putting our own well-being, our own options, first--of thrusting our own ego into life, as the ideal form of life itself--we may be quite certain that at that point, life has become hell. We need be no more thoroughly damned.

Daniel Berrigan
Consequences: Truth and...

Is Christianity in NZ changing?

New Zealand blogger, A J Chesswas, has an interesting blog called Put up thy Sword! which I sometimes catch up on. While I was searching for something else today, I came across a fairly lengthy post on his site (it was written back in March) in which he discusses another blogger's post discussing The Changing Face of Christianity in New Zealand. (Unfortunately, the original blog is only accessible if you've got a Wordpress account.)

The post is divided into five sections:
Evangelism becomes a dirty word
Salvation takes on extra dimensions
End-time fever dies down
The extremes become more attractive
New lingo, same deal.

Chesswas looks at each of these areas in turn, asking whether they are just different of another person's growth in Christ, or whether they're actually changes in the way we view Christianity. Worth a look.

Henri Nouwen

Only when we have the courage to cross the road and look in one another's eyes can we see there that we are children of the same God and members of the same human family.

Henri J. M. Nouwen
Bread for the Journey

Mother Teresa

Today, the same Christ is in people who are unwanted, unemployed, uncared for, hungry, naked, and homeless. They seem useless to the state and to society; nobody has time for them. It is you and I as Christians, worthy of the love of Christ if our love is true, who must find them, and help them; they are there for the finding.

- Mother Teresa

Worship and Words

I have often thought that too much of our worship focuses on the speaking of words. The sermon is given pride of place and time, even though it often contains a message we have heard several times before. Would we not do better to stress how the Word daily "becomes flesh" in our neighborhoods and communities, if from time to time we shifted the emphasis from podium speaking to face-to-face fellowship? Gathering around tables to eat, or in gardens to weed and harvest, or on building sites to do repair and construction--and not just on Sundays--we can learn more directly the ministry needs of the communities in which we move.... This more corporate sort of perception not only leads to authentic worship but quite naturally also leads to good work and good relationships.

Norman Wirzba
Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight

Being Innovative 2

After yesterday's post on innovation, I came across an article today that had appeared in the NZ Challenge Weekly. (Unfortunately I can't link to an online version of it as they seem to be rather behind in their archiving. However, there's a slightly shortened version of it here.)

In the article we learn that Papakura East Presbyterian Church gave members of their congregation envelopes containing various amounts: $20, $50 or $100. There were two rules as to what was to be done with the money:
1. People couldn't just give the money back to the church; they had to use it to make a difference in someone else's life.
2. They had to link up with at least one other person in the congregation to combine their envelopes.

Thus the exercise served both the church by increasing community, and served the community by increasing church amongst them - you might say.

Apparently many of the congregation struggled with whether to take an envelope, and with the responsibility in using the money wisely. In the end 191 people took them and found a variety of ways to use the money: hiring a bigger vehicle for a family holidaying with a wheelchair-bound son; paying for a doctor's appointment; buying bike helmets for the children of a refugee family; giving money to a solo parent to buy shoes for their child; giving money to someone who had an unexpected vet's bill.

More than 90% of the recipients had no particular connection with the Church. The minister of the church, Geoff New, said that rather than expecting people to come to a particular church programme, this project met them where they were at. Furthermore, it gave the members of the congregation a sense of mission in ways they hadn't realised previously.

Being innovative

One of the biggest difficulties we face as Western churches is our seeming inability to reach out to the world around us. Calvary Bible Church in Colorado has used five (mostly) innovative ways to reach out over the last few years. These are the first two. You can find the others here.

They gave $100 to 100 people and directed them to use the money to raise more money. This idea was, of course, based on the parable of the talents. Their $10,000 was multiplied into $50,000, which they donated to local charities - it wasn't used to prop up the church.

Using the verse from Luke 12 that a man's life doesn't consist in an abundance of possessions, they challenged people to live radically, stop accumulating possessions, and give to the poor. The project was for 200 people to sell $200 worth of their possessions and give the money to the poor. $84,000 of possessions sold went to local community organizations. The congregation, meanwhile, was encouraged to live with less and be more kingdom minded.

Jordan Redding

Sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, on those occasions when it probably should!

On Saturday the 30th August at the Roslyn Presbyterian Church, there was a concert to celebrate the relaese of Malcolm Gordon's new album, “One Voice” and the comeback of Mephymology. Malcolm's song “Te Whiti” can currently be heard on Radio Rhema and Life FM.

The concert also featured the premiere of the music video for “Child Song”, which was written by the young Dunedin man, Jordan Redding. It's been adopted as the theme song for Global Mission. (That's the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand's office called Global Mission. It's situated in Auckland.)

Interestingly enough, Jordan attended Kavanagh College, the Catholic co-ed school in Dunedin, until last year. The reason I heard about him is that he was one of 2008 Otago Daily Times Class Act finalists. This initiative identifies and celebrates the excellence of young people in the province of Otago.

Perseverance

I’ve lived with a broken back for 40 years, and I never let it stop me. Don’t let what you cannot do stop you from doing what you can do.

New Zealander, Sir Tim Wallis at 70. From a report in the ODT 10.9.08

Sir Tim says his life has been one of perseverance and persistence, two qualities that have always accompanied him. He's had a fair share of setbacks and life-threatening accidents, including breaking his back in a helicopter accident in 1968 and crashing a Spitfire in 1996.

A Gospel Approach for Postmoderns

We hear a lot about postmodern people these days, and how difficult it is to get the message of Jesus across to them.
One worker in college ministry in the States has come up with a simple way of doing this. James Choung believes that young people are well aware of something being wrong with the world. They may not call it sin (at least not before they become Christians), but they know that things are awry.
On one hand we have beauty and perfection and wondrous design; on the other we have ugliness and mess and distortion, things that upset our sense of balance in the world, and make us realise – even if we won’t say it – that things aren’t what they should be.
Choung’s simple way of taking people from that point of dissatisfaction through to belief in Christ can be drawn on a paper serviette.
First he talks about the longing in our hearts for a world that’s free of wrongdoing and evil and other garbage. People have an understanding that things aren’t the way they should be, and can easily agree that the thirst for a more perfect world may well be evidence that such a world has existed, or will exist in the future.
At that point they need to face the fact that in spite of their best intentions they all contribute to the mess in the world; no one is free from guilt in this regard. Their unwillingness to help others, to clean up the problems they create, to refuse to do good when they could - and a host of other things – all show that their failure to love others is also a failure to love God.
Choung says we still need to ask people to “repent” – literally, to change their mind” or to have a new way of thinking. They have to let their selfish lives die with Jesus – so they can have a new life of loving Him and their neighbour. Choung says, ‘That’s a huge call to faith for this generation.’
Jesus often simply said to people, Follow Me. He didn’t require them to be without sin before they did so; he wanted them to be willing to change. That’s the step postmoderns often want to skip: having realised the wrongness of things, they think they can get straight on and make things right on their own – without any help from Jesus.
But Choung tells them that only Jesus can put to death the selfishness of their lives. Without Him, moving onto ‘saving’ the world is just an empty dream.
The fourth step in his diagram is also important: once they accept Jesus, they need to see that He’s sending them on a mission; He’s not just giving them eternal life without any need to call others to Him. And within that call are all the areas of mercy, justice, acting rightly that Micah talks about.
On the surface, Choung’s approach isn’t particularly radical. Helping people face their understanding of a world gone wrong is maybe a slightly different but more ‘user-friendly’ starting point. It obviously works.

An article on Choung and his four circles appears in the July 2008 Christianity Today. It can be found online.

On Abortion

While New Zealanders wait for the outcome of Justice Forrest Miller's criticism of the Abortion Supervisory Committee, a new study commissioned by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good has concluded that government social spending and economic conditions do more to reduce abortions than legal strategies such as parental consent laws. You can read a summary of this here.

Mary Nelson writes:

Joseph Wright (Penn State University) and Michael Bailey's (Georgetown University) examined the dramatic drop in abortions in the 1990s. The results are significant. States that spend more generously on nutritional supplement programs, for example, could see up to 37 percent lower abortion rates. Other factors such as cutting welfare more slowly and higher male employment rates had a 20 to 29 percent reduction rate.

The negative approaches don't seem to work. Welfare caps on children born while on welfare and laws requiring parental consent for minors have only negligible impact. The study concludes that "pro-family policies reduce abortions."

Both Republicans and Democrats should take note. The authors estimate that increased welfare payments and less Medicaid funding for abortions could lower the current abortion rate by 37 percent.

Perhaps the New Zealand Government might take note: not caring for young families and not helping men and fathers in particular to work, is a dangerous social policy.

Innovative Church

Two ways of doing mission that have an air of innovation about them. We were alerted to both of these by Christian World Mission newsletter, dated 4.9.08

1.Church-goers in London's financial district walk up a gangplank for their weekly services in a floating church. A converted freight barge nestled amidst the skyscrapers of London's Docklands, St Peter's Church in Canary Wharf is the only boat-style church in Britain.
The barge was the idea of a handful of Christians working in Canary Wharf, who met at different venues to take part in Bible readings. Following this year's global credit crunch, church ministers have reported a significant rise in attendance amongst bankers, analysts and other financial workers at the lunchtime services.

2. Stressed-out London commuters were offered a moment of quiet reflection when the Church of England published a special prayer in their morning newspapers. The prayer for a "Moody Monday" was included in the free Metro newspaper after a survey by the church revealed September was a particularly stressful time for UK workers.
Of the 1,000 adults questioned, one in three want to make an improvement to their lifestyle and are expected to be "very busy" over the coming months. One in eight said they were "dreading" going back to work.
The prayer, which targeted 1.4 million commuters, asked for God’s help in dealing with everyday life and encouraged people to make the best of every new day. It also encouraged people to take part in Back to Church Sunday on 28 September.
The prayer printed in Monday’s edition of the Metro reads:

Dear God,
You know me. Don't you? I’m not just a person on a bus or a train. I’m not just another face on CCTV; or just another login name. I’m me, and I have stuff going on.
Love life issues; bills to pay. Egos at work to deal with; an overflowing inbox.
So please, give me strength. Guide me to focus on what's really important. And help me make the most of every moment of this new day in this new month.
Thank you.
Amen

Big to small?

David Gibbons was the head of a huge mega-church, NewSong, when he sensed God calling to Bangkok, of all unlikely places. What he learned there showed him that big money and big buildings and all the other stuff that goes with mega-churches isn't necessarily the most effective way of 'doing' church. In Bangkok, there was no room for huge urban churches; instead, small meetings and small churches work far more effectively.

Leadership Magazine has an online interview with Gibbons, in which he explains a number of the things he learned from his experience.

Making It New

In his review of Andy Crouch's new book, Culture Making: recovering our creative calling, Gideon Strauss writes:

[Andy] Crouch argues that American Christians adopted broadly four stances in relation to culture during the course of the 20th century, in each case taking an appropriate gesture toward certain elements of culture and inappropriately expanding it into a comprehensive posture toward the common culture in general. While some cultural products (like sex trafficking) demand outright condemnation from Christians, a posture of condemnation fails to account for the goodness of culture, warps Christian testimony to hope and mercy, facilitates hypocrisy, and—particularly in response to artistic works—comes across as "shrill and silly." Critique, by contrast, is an entirely appropriate response to works of art, the more so the better the art. But a posture of critique diminishes the delight to be taken in many good products of culture, and encourages a certain kind of cultural passivity that overemphasizes analysis and underappreciates participation and production. A pot of tea, a loaf of bread—the best first response to these is savoring consumption. But a posture of consumption limits us to living "unthinkingly within a culture's preexisting horizons of possibility and impossibility." Consumerism is capitulation to the existing culture at a deep level, allowing our very identity to be defined by what we can purchase. Copying from a culture is, at best, a recognition of "the lesson of Pentecost that every human language, every human cultural form, is capable of bearing the good news." But copying as a posture produces inauthentic, dated, and tame results.

Instead, Crouch says, the cultural postures Christians should adopt are those of cultivation and creation. Cultivators are "people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done." And creators are "people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful."

Andy Crouch has a blog site, also called Culture Making

Mad Church Disease

I just came across the Book Blog, Mad Church Disease. It's the preliminary to a book on burnout amongst Church workers/ministers that's due to be published early next year by Zondervan. The author is Anne Jackson, and the following is a bit about her.

In 2005, a few years after she had started her tenure on a church staff, Anne, a twenty-five-year-old wound up hospitalized for gastrointestinal inflammation. She spent a week in severe pain. Every test brought one conclusion: the only thing making her ill was stress. Stress she had brought on herself.

She returned back to work informing her supervisors she wouldn't continue the crazy work schedule. However, even with working fewer hours, Anne realized she could no longer function in a healthy manner in her current environment. A friend and coworker asked her, "Does working at this church interfere with your communion with Christ?" That provocative inquiry wasn't just a question, it was also an answer.

Five months later, she resigned. After leaving, she realized the long-term impact her previous seventy hour weeks had on her marriage, her health, and her relationship with Christ.

Almost twenty years later since Anne has seen many well-known leaders fall victim to ministry burn out, including two who have been mentors in her own life. She realised she she must do whatever she could to help bring God's message of restoration, light and love to those who are pastors, or other church staff, their families, and the volunteers that give so much time on top of their busy schedules.

She began writing her book on burnout and opened up a blog for people to comment on the situation: hundreds responded, and some of their stories will become part of the book.

The book will include questions and a study guide to help the reader walk through their own personal journey of healing from (or preventing) burnout. Several leaders contributed “Second Opinions” to the book (their own thoughts on aspects of burning out and restoration) including Bill Hybels, Wayne Cordeiro, Perry Noble, Mike Foster, Gary Kinnaman, Brandi Wilson, Matt Carter, Shawn Wood, and Craig Groeschel wrote the foreword.

Voices of the Virtual World

Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the Ecclesial Revolution, edited by Len Hjalmarson and John La Grou.

"Uttered like a prayer retrieved from the year 2030, spoken in a new tongue, a new form. Listen!" - Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder / Executive Editor WIRED Magazine.

VOICES explores the growing influence of technology on the global Christian church. We hear from more than forty influential voices, including technologists and theologians, entrepreneurs and pastors... from a progressive Episcopalian techno-monk to a leading Mennonite professor... from a tech-savvy mobile missionary to a corporate anthropologist whom Worth Magazine calls "one of Wall Street's 25 Smartest Players." Voices is a far reaching exploration of spiritual journey within a culture of increasingly immersive technology.

This book was originally released in an e-format, which meant that all the links in the book could be accessed directly. The paperback version has shifted all these links to End Notes. The e-format is still available (click on link above).

You can see the list of contents and authors here (click on the button on the right to see the second page). Not many of these people are known to me, but that may only mean I'm in the wrong circles (!)

I'm a Christian....and I'm a Christ follower

By now this series of videos (six or seven in all, I think) are becoming widely known, but just in case you're one of the people who still hasn't caught up with them, check them out. They parody a series of ads that compared Macs and PCs. (For those who can't get enough of them, you can find more variations on the theme on You Tube.)

The original series shows two guys, one of them a laid-back Christ follower, and the other a rather up-tight Christian with all the latest Christian gear. There's a little animosity between them - more from the Christian - but the playing of the characters is so smooth and gentle that you can only laugh. While many viewers may side with the Christ follower, it's probable that the Christian has plenty of supporters too!

The versions available for viewing on the FaithVisuals site (in the link at the beginning of this post) are a bit small. You Tube's versions are larger, but they're fairly fuzzy when they're enlarged to full screen.

Evangelicals: a dying or changing breed?

An extract from an article by Christine Wicker, formerly a religion writer for The Dallas Morning News , and author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church .
The article is entitled: American evangelicals, once considered monolithic, are fragmenting.

Evangelicals almost never convert a native-born American who wasn’t raised in a church. That most evangelical growth comes from stealing the sheep from other denominations. And that they’ve stolen about all they can.

They’re also admitting that most evangelicals won’t evangelize. And if they did, it wouldn’t get them anywhere because the usual methods don’t work. They don’t work first because they usually rest on the idea that Christians are the only ones saved. In today’s religiously equalitarian culture, that assertion causes evangelicals to seem distastefully holier-than-thou.

Conversion tactics also focus on telling people the Good News as though no one else knows it. But most everyone has heard it. Again and again. The trouble is that they aren’t convinced. They aren’t scared of hell. They aren’t hoping for heaven. And Christians haven’t been good at giving anyone better reasons than that for following Jesus.

Wicker makes a number of other important points; you may agree with them or not. For New Zealanders, the article is of value because it looks at a society that's not too dissimilar to our own.

Robert Jenson on mission

“We … need to face [the] fact often spoken of but rarely acted upon: that the West is now a mission field. We can no longer count on the culture doing half our work for us. On a mission field, the church has to do its own work, and that means first of all that it has to know what is not … in the culture, that it hopes to bring to it. Which is to say: it must know and cultivate its difference from that culture. All that talk a few years ago about the world setting the agenda, about seeing where God was at work in the world and jumping in to help etc, was the last gasp of the church’s establishment in the West, of its erstwhile ability to suppose that what the culture nurtured as good had to be congruent with the good the church had to bring…” (Pp. 29-30).

This quote comes from a chapter, What is a post-Christian?, the book, Strange New Word of the Gospel: RE-Evangelizing in the Postmodern World, edited by Carl Braaton and Robert Jenson, published Eerdmans, 2002.

Paul Fromont writes: it seems to me that Jenson is critiquing a church that has nothing distinctive to say (and embody) in relation to its host culture(s); a church that lacks distinctiveness and thus public prophetic voice. A distinctive church is one that embodies and offers an alternative. Is he, to rework a statement by another contributor to the collection of essays, saying that the gospel only emerges in comparison with what is not the gospel?

In an ealier post, Fromont also quotes David Bosch on a similar topic:
“…Evangelism means enlisting people for the reign of God, liberating them from themselves, their sins, and their entanglements, so that they will be free for God and neighbour…. To win people to Jesus is to win their allegiance to God's priorities. God wills …that within us, and through our ministry also in society around us, the "fullness of Christ" be re-created, the image of God be restored in our lives and relationships…”

Walker Percy

For those who sense that we've moved from modernism to postmodernism - or to something else altogether..!

What does a man do when he finds himself living after an age has ended and he can no longer understand himself because the theories of man of the former age no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known, for not even the name of the new age is known, and so everything is upside down, people feeling bad when they should feel good, good when they should feel bad?
What a man does is start afresh as if he were newly come into a new world, which in fact it is; start with what he knows for sure, look at the birds and beasts, and like a visitor from Mars newly landed on earth notice what is different about man.

From page 7 of The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy

China and the Olympics

Dave Gibbons asks:
Did you see the group of children representing the 51 different cultures of China? China, like so many other places today, is multi-cultural. A group of young people is emerging that some call Third Culture—a wave of people who will lead the missiological movement because of their ability to adapt to different cultures. Being comfortable moving between cultures all of their lives, these people will be more equipped to become all things to all men.

This quote is from a short post talking about the way in which China is changing.

A Multicultural Witness Against the 'homogenous unit principle'

Two quotes from an article by Jin S Kim, on the church, racism and multiculturalism.

The church moves toward reconciliation not because it will lead to numerical success but because the church has been called to faithfulness. As part of this faithfulness, the legitimacy of the "homogenous unit principle" needs to be questioned. I believe this "principle" has given theological justification to ancient tribalism and the idolatry of division. It does not call us to be a new creation but entrenches the old.
Two thousand years ago the church was small, renegade, and countercultural. Local congregations were radical communities of love and compassion. Their very existence as a community defied the claim of imperial sovereignty. These congregations overcame the prevailing social barriers of race, class, and gender and showed compassion to the rejects of society. The early church posed a serious threat to Roman hegemony and social order. It was its witness as a kingdom-oriented community that had a powerful effect on the empire, not the size or political connections of the church. The early church was not so much about church growth as about parabolic witness. How does a band of 10, 20, 50 people demonstrate the power of God's redemptive love by example? How do these individuals live the Christian life together as a living parable? How do they serve as a parabolic witness to the world? That was the fundamental evangelical question.

This is only the first part of Kim's article. But the points he makes about multiculturalism apply just as well to New Zealand as to the United States.

Looking at vision

John Sweetman makes a useful distinction between vision and core values, and the way in which leaders can often mix the two. If the vision becomes a core value, as it often does once it's achieved, then the church may stagnate through having achieved its vision.
John goes on in a later post to discuss the way leaders get vision. He suggests four ways that are just the beginning to finding/creating a vision: prayer (a kind of an of course suggestion); being brutally honest about the strengths and weaknesses of your team; talking to other people; and dreaming. Too many leaders get bogged down in doing, and forget the dreaming. It's an essential part of 'acquiring' vision.

John has a number of other posts on the subject of leadership, under various headings such as character, relationships, teamwork, and equipping. Check them out here.

William Lane Craig on Postmodernism

The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism! That's just old-line verificationism, which held that anything you can't prove with your five senses is a matter of personal taste. We live in a culture that remains deeply modernist.

Otherwise, how do we make sense of the popularity of the New Atheism? Dawkins and his ilk are indelibly modernist and even scientistic in their approach. On the postmodernist reading of contemporary culture, their books should have fallen like water on a stone. Instead, people lap them up eagerly, convinced that religious belief is folly.

Seen in this light, tailoring our gospel to a postmodern culture is self-defeating. By laying aside our best apologetic weapons of logic and evidence, we ensure modernism's triumph over us. If the church adopts this course of action, the consequences in the next generation will be catastrophic. Christianity will be reduced to but another voice in a cacophony of competing voices, each sharing its own narrative and none commending itself as the objective truth about reality. Meanwhile, scientific naturalism will continue to shape our culture's view of how the world really is.

from an article entitled God is Not Dead Yet: how current philosophers argue for his existence, which appeared in the magazine, Christianity Today, July 2008.

Do they understand the Gospel?

Mark Broadbent makes a positive case for checking that young people understand the Gospel, in a recent post on neoleader.
Using eight points, he discusses what he and his church have learned about reaching young people.
1. Make sure you and your leaders understand the Gospel.
2. Emphasize key doctrines
3. Take every opportunity to bring out the Gospel
4. Do 6-8 messages a year specifically on the Gospel
5. Do at least two series in depth on the Gospel each year
6. Stop asking people to make a commitment
7. Don't ask them to become Christians - many think they already are
8. Run a basic Christianity course.

These are just the headings. Check out what he has to say in detail on the post itself.

1500 a month?

The latest post on the Leadership Journal site, Out of Ur, makes for good reading, as do the many comments following, both for and against by Skye Jethani says.

The particular post is called, Great is Thy Effectiveness?, and starts in the following way:
Something’s wrong. We pastors are the stewards, the spokespeople, the advocates of a message of hope, life, and peace. And yet so few of us seem to be experiencing these qualities in our own lives. Something’s wrong. In a world saturated with fear, insecurity, and stress, we are to show a different way. And yet those at the centre of the church are burning out and leaving ministry at a rate of 1,500 per month. If that’s what’s occurring at the heart of the church, why would anyone on the fringe want to move in closer?
I’ve just read an article by two Christian counsellors about the soul-killing impact of church ministry on leaders. (The statistic above comes from them.) They note that the pressure to grow the church is a significant factor leading to pastoral burn out. And some pastors “admitted they promoted growth models that were incongruent with their values because of a desperate need to validate their pastoral leadership.” It seems too many of us have our identities wrapped up in the measurable outcomes of our work rather than in the life-giving love of the Christ we proclaim. Something’s wrong.
The rest of the article makes interesting reading especially for anyone concerned about burnout, whether amongst pastors or in other professions, as do the many comments.

Two books on pastors’ burning out are mentioned in the comments:

Grace Walk, by Steve McVey, and The Bonsai Conspiracy, written by Paul Anderson Walsh, are books by pastors who 'burned out'. What God revealed to them should be part of the foundation of our faith, rather than the truth that we eventually come to. And not just for pastors.

Walsh's book is not generally available in normal outlets such as Amazon. Check the link on the book title for more information.

GloboChrist

GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (The Church and Postmodern Culture) by Carl Rashke.
Here's what the blurb on the book says:

The rise of the Internet and the proliferation of digital technologies have profoundly affected the world; it is not only smaller but also more interconnected. What role does the church play in this multimedia-dominated globe?

In GloboChrist, Carl Raschke tackles the subjects of globalization, postmodernism, and information technology and their impact on missions and evangelism. In addition, he addresses the role that Christianity plays in an increasingly pluralistic world, providing concrete strategies for confronting the challenges. In short, GloboChrist helps Christians respond to the tectonic shifts of the twenty-first century.

"GloboChrist is the unconventional title of an intriguing inquiry into postmodern patterns and ideas and the challenge to mission. The book is a confident statement for these uncertain times, a troubling of the waters that will stir complacent Christians in their assumption."--Lamin Sanneh, Yale University

"For those who have tried to follow the intricacies (and vagaries) of postmodern thought to find out what it can tell us of the night, this vigorously discerning volume offers a glimpse of the global dawn. Drawing on many resources and a focused evangelical faith, Raschke lays out a case for a Christian perspective on globalization as a dynamic development that opens reconstructive (post-deconstructive) possibilities for pursuing the Great Commission. Globalization is not essentially an economic issue. The 'GloboChrist' is sweeping the world in a post-postmodern way in spite of militant Islamism, Christian fundamentalism, modernist liberalism, and secular economism. This is the best book on globalization I have read by an overtly Christian thinker. It complements and challenges my own efforts to discern theologically what is at stake in globalization."--Max L. Stackhouse, Princeton Theological Seminary; author, Globalization and Grace

"I'd hoped to give GloboChrist a quick read, but after picking it up I simply couldn't put it down; it is elegant, clear, and provocative. Raschke not only helps us see Christ and mission afresh in our hi-tech, pluralistic, postmodern, and global context but also equips us with engagement strategies."--Dwight J. Friesen, Mars Hill Graduate School, Seattle

Andrew Jones writes very positively about it on his blog - he's planning on using it at a missional entrepreneurs meeting he's holding in Europe next week.

Still emerging?

The latest Next-Wave Church and Culture has the following article in it. I've included the first paragraph. (It gets clearer!). Anyone who wants a bit more insight into the Emerging/Emergent Church will find it here - Creech is one of the early starters in the movement.

What I am and what I'm not - or a short history and explanation of the wider "emerging church" by Alan Creech.
one - the winds of culture
Interesting times we live in. Christian people are all over the lot. You can't really pin it down can you. Even those within certain sectors are hard to connect. I've seen a couple of things lately about the "emergent church" or "the emerging church" and what it is and isn't, etc., blah blah. It's all a very confusing sort of mess at this point. It wasn't always. When all this business first started "happening," however it was happening, wherever it was happening, it was much simpler. At least it seemed like it was. Perhaps it was just as complex but nobody was paying attention to it and analyzing the hell out of it like they are now. It's actually getting press at this point, weird.

Meanwhile, over on Tall Skinny Kiwi, Alan Jones is asking: Emergent Church; use the word or dump it? He then goes on to say:
I have been asked to help set up an "Emerging Church Fund" that supports the global emerging church movement which is something I and the people asking me to organize it see as a structure that partners with the World Evangelical Alliance and Church Mission Society and helps financially resource new works in the emerging culture that are simple cell based structures. They are a worthy investment, I believe and have been proclaiming for many years, because the money does not go to buildings or to salaries. Because the emerging churches we support do not have paid pastors but function more like the early church, they are a fruitful way to invest money in mission projects because they accomplish a lot with a little. And despite being worthy from a financial perspective, they are also strategic because the emerging culture, although smaller, is often where the culture leaders hang out. Money invested in emerging church movements goes a really long way which is why I have been pointing to so many of these movements around the world for so long.

See the rest of the post here.

Kevin Rudd and Religion in Australia

In a blog post on the 7th August, Jim Wallis (of Sojourners) writes:

One of the stories I first heard on my recent visit to Australia was about what helped swing the vote last November to Kevin Rudd, the new Labor prime minister. I read some new political data by veteran pollster and researcher John Black, who is respected across Australia's political spectrum. Black reported that the pivotal swing vote to Labor this time was among evangelicals and Pentecostals, especially in some key seats in the states of Queensland and South Australia.

Kevin Rudd [is] a new kind of Labor candidate who speaks openly and comfortably about his faith. Rudd is a Catholic, is theologically articulate, and even likes to write articles about German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Though Jim has apparently got it wrong about Rudd being a Catholic - he was brought up as one, but is now a practising Anglican, that doesn't change the point. Here's a practising Christian in Australia's top job, and social justice issues are one of his major concerns.

Read the rest of the article here - it has some other good things to say about Australia (!)

And one other word about social justice:
Social sin is the crystallization ... of individuals’ sins into permanent structures that keeps sin in being and makes its force to be felt by the majority of people.
- Oscar Romero
Salvadoran archbishop, assassinated in 1980

Alltop

Want a way to keep up with various blogs and other sites that relate to (Modern) Church? Find it hard to pick and choose from all the results you get on Google? (Though let's not knock Google!)

Try Alltop.com. This site claims to take the 'nuggets' out of search results (presumably leaving the dross behind), and then it banks them up in a wide variety of categories. The one that might interest most readers of this blog would be Modern Church (Church doesn't exist on its own, interestingly enough, which might say something about the readership of sites on modern church, and the readership on sites related to church and church alone?)

But there are dozens of other categories, and more are being added all the time. The site is updated every ten minutes or so, and they have some complex approach to deciding what should go on there. It might be 'a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford' but it's more likely to be the 'results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop.'

Since Alltop is supposedly run by two guys and a gal in three separate places, their co-ordinating skills are fairly remarkable. The photo is of one of them: Guy Kawasaki.

New take on the Prodigal Son?

Fr. Charles Curran was a moral theologian fired from his position at the Catholic University of America in 1986 for asserting a right of dissent from official church teaching on matters such as birth control.
Summoned to appear in Rome for questioning by Cardinal Ratzinger, he came out of the meeting knowing that he had failed to convince. He would be condemned as a Catholic theologian and fired from his faculty position: a public humiliation, a personal disaster, and also a rejection of theologians as a whole, who by and large agreed with Curran’s position.
The next day was Sunday. Bernard Häring, the influential moral theologian who taught in Rome and was Curran’s old professor and mentor, celebrated Mass in a chapel for Curran and his six university advisers. The Gospel happened to be the Prodigal Son. Häring’s homily went something like this: at this time, the church is the prodigal son. It is taking your treasure — your training, talent, reputation, contribution — and wasting it, feeding it to the pigs. The Spirit of Jesus calls you to be the father in this parable, not rejecting but welcoming back the prodigal. Do you forgive the church?
Häring went from person to person, grabbing them by the necktie or the sweater, and looked them in the eye with this question. The Mass could not continue until they wrestled with their anger and allowed the Spirit to move them to a different place.

From an article in the National Catholic Reporter online: Theologian Elizabeth Johnson: 'Drench anger with forgiveness'

Video-venues

The celebrity church must die. And doing anything—like video venues—that prolongs its life, even in the name of the lost, runs counter to the best interests of the Church in all its expressions, big and small, and its mandate to see more people not only reached, but gifted, trained, and sent.

So says Bob Hyatt, whose church has moved from pub to pub in Southwest Portland as its outgrown each venue. As he writes, We are the church on a pub crawl.

In his article on 'Out of Ur' he speaks against churches that are going multi-site in the sense of having one preacher in one location being videoed to several other locations. Closeness of congregation, and interactivity, are for him the keynotes. Check out the rest of the article here.

Bob Hyatt is a father of three, leading pastor of the Evergreen Community (Portland, Oregon) and a church planter with a passion for helping other planters. He blogs at bobhyatt.typepad.com and runs PastorHacks.com. He also edits the online e-zine, Next-Wave.org.

Solzhenitsyn

"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Albert Mohler writes: He was a man of contradictions or, as Joseph Pearce argues, a man of paradox. In any event, he was a man of great moral vision who revealed the brutality of the Soviet regime and contributed greatly to its collapse. Edward E. Erickson, who wrote two major works on Solzhenitsyn, argues that the key to understanding Solzhenitsyn is Christianity -- the Russian Orthodox faith that framed Solzhenitsyn's worldview. Erickson argued that "in a day when secular humanism flourishes among the cultural and intellectual elite, he holds fast to traditional Christian beliefs."

Being rich

I know how very hard it is to be rich and still keep the mild of human kindness. Money has a dangerous way of putting scales on one’s eyes, a dangerous way of freezing people’s hands, eyes, lips and heart.

- Dom Hélder Câmara
Brazilian archbishop

NZ Diversity Forum 2008 Programme

This year's New Zealand Diversity Forum is on 25-26 August in Auckland. Check out the varied programmes offered by community and professional groups and government agencies here and register here for any of the separate events or the diversity awards and plenary programme. This is New Zealand's premier race relations forum.

For those aiming to reach out to the different ethnic groups in our country, this is a great opportunity to gain insights into the ways different ethnic people live and think, and what their expectations are.

Some of the useful workshops might be:

The Benefits of Diversity
Finding Common Ground: are we more similar than different?
The Religious Diversity Forum
Building Bridges: working with the Muslim community

The problem with institutions

Alan Hirsch has recently written two posts on the subject of the church as an insitution, and how that affects its ability to do mission.
This is a quote from the second post.
Perhaps a further exploration of what is meant by institutionalism is needed here: Institutions are organizations initially set up in order to fill a necessary religious and social function and to provide some sort of structural support for whatever that function requires. In many ways they fulfill the very purpose of structure; organization is needed if we seek to act collectively for common cause. And all movements start this way, but in the initial stages structure exists solely to support the grassroots. The problem happens when the newly instituted structures move beyond being simply structural support and become a governing body of sorts-structure becomes centralized governance. So religious institutionalism happens when in the name of some convenience we set up a system to do what we must do ourselves so that over time the structures we create to do this take on a life of their own...

To read the first post, click here.

Both these posts appear on Alan's blog, The Forgotten Ways: the missional musings of Alan Hirsch (developing apostolic imagination and practice in Western contexts)