End Times Series - The Wrap Up

Here lie the last two talks for our end times series, particularly tackling the issues of judgment day and new creation. Plenty to wrestle with and plenty that remains controversial for people. If you've got access to a copy of the church's magazine, 'Lift', its worth checking out Myk Habet's article in the latest edition. He discusses much of this stuff and is another great contribution to the conversation about where history is going ultimately.

Hope the series has been helpful!

Elliot Rice: The End Times

First of our End Times series, courtesy of Elliot Rice.

Elliot is off to Feilding for the Summer, as part of his pastor training. We're already missing him heaps but know that they are really lucky to have him! Above is a shot of him preaching at his first service. Cool! Keep him (and definitely Feilding) in your prayers!

Sarah Davidson - Living Generously

We are so lucky to have someone like Sarah Davidson among us. Sarah is a thoughtful theologian with a heart for connecting with anyone, regardless of their place within society. She really challenges popular thinking but does it in an incredibly gentle manner with an openness that puts everyone around her at ease. I think she's an important voice for us to hear often and it is great to have her as part of the community.

This talk of hers is well worth the time to listen to more than once!

The Mighty Manning and More from our James Series

When the glory of the transcendent God is not addressed, our focus shifts to human behaviour, the cultivation of virtues and the extirpation of vices, the qualities of discipleship, and so on. Personal responsibility replaces personal response to God, and we become engrossed in our efforts to grow in holiness. Our primary concern becomes our spiritual, intellectual, and emotional well-being. When other Christians ask us if we are happy, we automatically respond in the affirmative or brush them off with a benevolent smile even if we are close to tears.

Obviously, there is something pokey and cramping about this inordinate attention devoted to ourselves, the state of our souls, and the presence or absence of happiness in our hearts. As Simon Tugwell notes, “One of the surest ways to avoid being happy is to insist on being happy at all costs. The religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us, is a cruel religion, and maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad.”

Moralising surges to the fore in this unbalanced spirituality. At the very outset, it presents a warped idea of the relationship between God and humans. From her parents a child learns of a deity who strongly disapproves of disobedience, hitting one’s brothers or sisters, and telling lies. When the little one goes to school, she realises that God shares the fussy concerns of her teachers. At church, she learns that God has another set of priorities: she is told that he is displeased that the congregation is not growing numerically, that irregular attendance is the norm, and that his recurring fiscal demands are not being met.

When she reaches high school, she discovers that God’s interests have expanded to an obsession with sex, drinking and drugs. After twelve years of Christian indoctrination at home, school and church, the teenager realises with resentment that God has been used as a sanction by all those who have been responsible for her discipline – as when Mommy and Daddy, at their wits’ end over her mischievous antics as a toddler, alluded to “the eternal spanking”. Through this indoctrination, God is unwittingly associated with fear in most young hearts.

Moralism, and its stepchild, legalism, pervert the character of the Christian life. By the time young people enter college, they have often abandoned God, church, and religion. If they perservere in religious practices, their need to appease an arbitrary God turns Sunday worship into a superstitious insurance policy designed to protect the believer against God’s whims. When wounded people fail, as inevitably they must, they engage in denial to protect themselves from punishment. The perfect image must be protected at all costs.

We work hard to protect our collective image as well. When a youth worker in a Midwestern town dared to confess to the staff one morning that he struggled with pornography, he received his letter of termination that afternoon.

Clearly, the God of our imagination is not worthy of trust, adoration, praise, reverence, or gratitude. And yet, if we are unwilling to address the issue of transcendence, that is the only deity we know.

The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.

- Brennan Manning "Ruthless Trust" p79-81

Sam and Elliot say some stuff about things for you.

These are the messages from the last two weeks.

I hope they enlighten you your soul, enlarge your gaze and enrich your wanderings on this earth.

Chur boi.

Robert Farrar Capon - The Corporate Model of the Church

As the nineteenth century wore on into the twentieth (and the corporate model became increasingly consumer-driven), the local churches became little more than franchises of brand-name businesses vying for market share. Membership statistics and financial viability  were made the measure of every unit’s success or failure. And when you add to that the tendency of American demographics to change more and more with each passing year, you get the whole passel of undesirable results in which we now find ourselves.

For one thing, denominational “brand loyalty” has given way to church-shopping. Born-and-bred Methodists who move to Phoenix, for example, may try a Methodist church there, but if they take exception to the cut of the minister’s jib, or the quality of the choir, or the dowdiness of their child’s Sunday School teacher, they may hie themselves to the Episcopal church – until, of course, they move to Tulsa, where the search for the right religious shop begins all over again.

For another thing, the temptation to make the local franchise bigger and better becomes almost insuperable. The mega-church with four thousand members, a staff of seventy-five, and thirty-six programs turns into the ideal – into the ecclesiastical counterpart of Wal-Mart. For yet another, this supermarket vision is realizable  only in certain circumstances. Depending on which church judicatory you’re talking about, anywhere from one third to two thirds of its local units have already become marginal in terms of the corporate ideal. 

Predictably, the home offices of those “problem churches” can  think of only one thing to do with them: set them a “growth goal” (read an ultimatum of “say, two-hundred-fifty members in five years or less) and revoke the franchise if they don’t come up with the corporate snuff.

For still another thing, all the clergy, mega or mini, who try to turn back the tide of marginality begin to burn out at an alarming rate. And for a last (thought the list could go on and on), the burnout doesn’t usually happen soon enough to prevent such clergy from committing actionable peccadilloes that scare the wits out of ecclesiastical bureaucrats and their ever-watchful  insurance companies. The church becomes prey to product-liability suits over such things as “sexual harassment” and “exploitation”; the offending clergy are run out of their franchises; and the church (which is supposed to open its catholic arms to everyone, sinners included) ends up looking like a condemnatory piece of work that never heard of grace or Gospel. And all for the bottom-line reason of keeping  a corporation from losing its angelic shirt in a lawsuit. My, my. As I said, there may well be some good intentions behind our current alarms and excursions over sexuality. But we’re certainly smashing a lot of Gospel china in the process.

Indeed, far from following the secular lead and paring our corporate structures back to a leaner and less cumbersome condition (“less is more”), we are proceeding full-bore in the direction of involving additional classes of church members in the corporation’s trials and tribulations. The guidelines now being produces by panicky judicatories for dealing with the “clergy misconduct” brouhaha do not stop at clergy misconduct. On the principle that misery must be provided with company even if the proposed company doesn’t appreciate the invitation to misery, the churches are busy manufacturing computer-aimed, armour-piercing artillery, programmed to fire automatically at church-school teachers, organists, choirmasters, parish secretaries, janitors, and anyone else who might get the corporation in financial Dutch by lifting so much as an eyebrow in the service of sexuality.

The sad result of this insistence on taking as much of the church as possible down with the foundering corporate model has been to endanger even further the church’s catholicity. We are supposed to be witnesses to the fact that God in Christ has taken away the sins of the whole world. But by insisting on the moral irreproachability of even minor functionaries in the witnessing community, we are effectively saying that we cannot have in our midst any recognisable representatives of the sinfulness that is so obviously God’s cup of tea. Which is manifest nonsense, of course, because one of the things all Christians are supposed to do ad nauseam is tell God what miserable sinners they are. Quite frankly, it makes the church look a bit like a carpenter who, while he claims to be the best woodworker in town, tells you that unfortunately he can’t repair your house because he’s allergic to wood.

- An excerpt from "The Astonished Heart", a brief overview of the different models of the church throughout history.

Catching up on the James Series

Hey guys!

Here are the last few sermons from Elliot and Amanda in our James series.

Get in ya in a big way.

Patsy Way: Jim Carrey and Me

Ok so he’s a man and I’m a woman;  he’s a movie star and I’m not; he lives in America and I live in New Zealand but really Jim Carrey and I, we’re the same. He plays characters and I do too. Bruce Almighty and I, we both often think we can do one heck of a better job at being God than God can do. We both play Truman Burbank, ( I think my Truman is slightly more feminine!) certain that there is a God way up there controlling and conniving, limiting us and enjoying raining suffering upon us purely for His entertainment. Are you shocked that I, a good Christian girl, can think like that?  Me too! In fact I spent most of my life warily watching the sky for that inevitable lightning to head straight for me and strike me down for having such heathen thoughts. But I’m still standing, I’m still questioning and I’m still searching, still grappling for answers to the question who am I, why am I here and who am I to God?

Jim Carrey and I, our characters are both on a quest to find who God is and hoping to find ourselves along the way. As I go through life trying to find my identity I try on different hats, I do a bit of this and a bit of that, yet I come up empty, unfulfilled. I want to be me, I cry out in frustration to God to give me an easy answer to who I am, a guide book, “Patsy for Dummies” that I can order from Book Depository – free shipping included. And as I’m crying out to God, frustrated and impatient, I hear His whisper, “how can you be you when you don’t like who you are, when you don’t know you like I know you?” And that right there is the crux of it all isn’t it? I don’t like me, I’m unsatisfied with who I am and I constantly compare myself to others, always coming out stone last in the very competition I myself created. Most importantly I don’t know the me God knows.

So how do I go about this terrifying journey of discovering who I am, and then liking, I dare say even loving, what I discover along the way? Could it be that the little cartoon boy on the poster in my Second Grade class room all those years ago, had it right when he proudly proclaimed, “God don’t make no junk!” (I’ll ignore the double negative if you will)? What if I were to start treating myself like I treat those around me, what if I build myself up instead of tearing myself down, what if I could encounter myself with unconditional positive regard, what if I loved myself, flaws and all? What if I could finally take the advice given to me time and again to be kinder to myself? I guess the very wise King Solomon got it right when he said in Proverbs that ‘Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel’. Could it be that finding my identity, loving myself comes down to listening to the words Jesus speaks over me rather than the cruel, harsh words I use? Can I lay aside my fiercely independent self, can this wounded healer find the courage to surrender to the Great Physician and allow Him to bring healing to my image of myself? Will I allow Jesus to show me the me He sees, will I believe that me is the real me?

Dr Suess is a pretty smart guy – he is a doctor after all – and he says, “Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you”. Here, once again, I am confronted with a Jesus who says He created me to be me, who says he loves this me, this me, not the me I strive to be, not the me I see, but the me I am in His eyes, His beloved, worth dying for. As I go out on this journey of self-in-Jesus-discovery I know that E.E Cummings is right in saying that, “to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle and never stop fighting.” I am determined to take off the character masks I wear, I am committing to saying farewell to the cynical Bruce Almighty and the helpless Truman Burbank I have played for too long. I will learn, I will listen, I will make mistakes; and I will change as I grow, as I learn, and as I experience and this is a good thing. I am on a journey to do as Brennan Manning challenges, to reclaim my core identity as Abba’s Child. So whilst I was  Truman, stuck in a false world image of me, created for me and by me, I have come to the end of this world ; I am banging my fist against this ‘self and other’ created boundary and I am breaking out of this limited world. Lisa Bevere reminds me that, the limitless God didn’t create me to be limited. So today I’m going to try be me, to listen to my Jesus when He whispers truth and love to me; and tomorrow I’m going to have to start all over again, then when the next day comes, still I will fight to hear Jesus voiceover my own and I will never stop fighting because, - as L’Oreal and Jesus say “I’m Worth It”.

A. W. Tozer - The Pursuit of God - Preface

In this hour of all but universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: Within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct “interpretations” of truth. They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.

This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been able to detect anywhere on the religious horizon. It may be the cloud the size of a man’s hand for which few saints here and there have been looking. It can result in a resurrection of life for many souls and a recapture of that radiant wonder which should accompany faith in Christ, that wonder which has all but fled the Church of God in our day.

But this hunger must be recognised by our religious leaders. Current evangelism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel. But God be thanked that there are a few who care. They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are yet unable to reconcile themselves the “piercing sweetness” of the love of Christ about whom all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.

There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles and the doctrines of Christ, but too many of them seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.

I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton’s terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table. The truth of Wesley’s words is established before our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.”

Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold “right opinions” probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the “program”. This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of the term. But exposition may be carried on in such a way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatsever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in his presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and centre of their hearts.

This book is a modest attempt to aid God’s hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.

-          A.W. Tozer, Chicago, Illinois, June 16, 1948

The latest in our James series...

Amanda has taken the last couple of weeks and they work together well. The first focuses on our response to trial, the second on the different ways we can take action and from what place we do that.

In reflection, here's a poem written by Koreana.

Soak in and observe,

Notice, 

Be mindful.

What are you seeing?

What is it evoking in you?

What parts is it touching?

Where is it running deep?

Where is it taking you?

Where are you in this moment?

This moment you are witnessing.

This moment you can participate in.

This moment to be present in.

To live in.

To see a new.

To respond to.

To enter into. 

To Soak in and be soaked.

Saturated in His love for us,

Washing over ones soul

Over and Over again.

Enjoy!

Ben Wilson: Swearing in Church

I have a friend who swears the way most people would use a comma. When she's around me and suddenly becomes aware of her swearing she feels the need to apologize. Knowing I'm a Christian she believes it offends me. I actually don't notice her swearing. Nor do I care. It's kinda cute really.

Which begs the question, why do we as a church (especially) generally believe certain words to be bad?
“But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.” - Colossians 3:8 (NIV)

I think it's important we differentiate using a swear word from 'swearing'. There isn't much innately wrong with a swear word. The heart of swearing, the reason it's offensive is because it's been allied to wrath, impatience, frustration and insult. Swear words have become affiliated with these because of how they've been used down the ages. Using one of these words doesn't have to be inherently offensive, but the way you use it might.

If people started saying 'fluffy bunnies' in angry response, maybe it too could become a swear word. If used consistently and adopted by wider culture, perhaps the world at large would know the phrase 'fluffy bunnies' to be offensive.

I should hope nobody thinks I'm implying the liberal use of swearing is a good idea. There are better words to use and it's not particularly articulate. I use to swear at everything. Just for gigs and shiggles. I was pretty good at it too, but I gave up a few years ago - much to the lament of my friends. I found myself an angry person doing it and it wasn't worth the detriment of my character. Which is a shame 'cause swearing can make things funnier. Maybe it's the novelty, or maybe it's how the words sound. Regardless there are more skilful ways to induce comedy.

I've come to learn though that a swear word can be just like any other. A word isn't bad in itself because a 'u', k', 'c' and 'f' are arranged in certain order - rather from the malice they've been abused with, the malice we've connected it to.

I'm not against swear words, what I am against is the legalism that taboos them in absolute. It strikes me as absent from the redemption and freedom that Christ offers to our lives.

So the next time someone drops one from the pulpit, whether it's tacky or warranted, pointless or meaningful - look past the word and rather at the heart of what they're saying.

Suffering, trials and joy. What the...

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

I’m going to have a good hard look here at this particular line in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, three verses that have brought believers a lot of comfort and assurance of God’s love, but have also brought a heck of a lot of debate and controversy. Because of possible significant repercussions for other theology to be built from, this verse should be treated with care and understood in light of what Paul is saying throughout the letter’s argument to avoid nauseating and never ending conversations about predestination and making God sound like a bit of an idiot.

At the centre of all of Paul’s thought is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is mentioned 35 times throughout and is undoubtedly the focus of much of Paul’s attention to God’s working in the world. This is particularly important for interpreting the text in hand with 21 of those appearances in chapter 8 alone. So it would probably be sensible to read this passage with this focus in mind as we try to get into Paul’s head on this one!

It is said that a prominent preacher during the first World War was said to have claimed that Romans 8:28 was “the hardest verse in the Bible to believe.” Paul seems confident that  despite evidence that might suggest otherwise, God is in the midst of the world working for its good. But obviously this raises very difficult questions about the nature of God’s work within the world and the issue of ultimate responsibility of suffering.

It would be a mistake to interpret this in two (perhaps understandable) ways that lead to further problems. The first is to read that Paul is saying ‘It will all come right in the end’ in some sort of universal optimism, and that Paul is simply encouraging people to wait until everything is good at some future moment. The second would be to read that Paul is suggesting that all things, although often negative, are working to achieve a positive goal in a cosmic “the end justifies the means” scenario. But this is not a case of the universe working together for ultimate good in some utilitarian sense, like God is manipulating cosmic events to teach us a lesson or something. We have big problems then when we look at actual (not just theoretical) suffering, events like divorce, death, abuse, genocide and rejection. If we want to argue that God is somehow behind all that then we’ve got a bit of a task on our hands!

In context of the chapter so far with a strong emphasis on God in control of working within creation to bring about His redemptive purposes, and acknowledging very real present sufferings, I would probably suggest that the most coherent way of understanding Paul’s argument would be to read this as “God is working in all things, including seriously crap situations, to bring about good for those who love Him.”

It is to say that God is involved within situations working for good, rather than just using an optimistic and very general bumper-sticker phrase to encourage positivity. Present sufferings are very real for Paul and so he is being very careful to focus on God’s goodness. He continues to do this in the following verses, but as we will see, this ‘goodness’ is really talking about God conforming believers into the image of His Son, not a general remark about having good fortune. Working for good is to made more like Jesus – the trials and sufferings are still just as crappy, but God wastes none of it!

After this, Paul embarks on a description of what God has done for the believer in Christ, reminding us that we lack nothing, we have every spiritual blessing now. Pretty amazing stuff.

I would also suggest that Romans 8:28-30 also helps us to reframe our ideas around suffering. Paul makes it clear in all his letters that real suffering is inevitable, but goes on to explain that although suffering is a very real and serious reality, it is not a hopeless reality. In fact it would seem that it is central to imaging God and being ‘conformed to the image of His Son.’ It is in connection with an acknowledgement of suffering that Paul writes these verses and there it is within suffering that the Holy Spirit is working within these things “for the good of those who love Him.”

Totsengard says it this way: “That is the journey on which the sovereign God is taking us, a cruciform journey for Christ’s sake and in Christ’s image, where the itinerary is by no means only on the heights, but rather in the everyday depths near which we always find ourselves.”

God doesn’t leave us. God turns the crud into gold. We’re made more like Jesus in our sufferings when we allow the Spirit to guide us through it.

Mean.

If anyone wants the full essay hit me up. Here's Sunday's talk on this in engaging with James 1:

Francis Spufford on the mystery of experiencing God

“I’m going to have to generalise freely now from my own experience, because I’m dealing strictly with internal events, and I don’t have direct access to anyone else’s interior. I haven’t been anyone else; only myself. But I’d guess that for most of us who do end up believing, the moment when we asked and nothing happened changes in retrospect. It becomes, afterwards, part of the history of how help did after all arrive, though not in the way we expected it to. We look back on it and we find it altered. Its significance is different now. Literally its significance: its sign-age, the way that it points. 

It isn’t the story that has been rewritten, with a piece of imaginary cause and effect projected back into it from some happier future point, with unreliable memory erasing the disappointments of the past by inserting a phantom helper’s phantom action. That’s not the feeling. It remains perfectly clear that at the moment of asking nothing happened, nothing altered in the world, nothing started up. But we begin to recognise that the moment signifies anyway, because it was then, when we asked and because we asked, that we started, falteringly, tentatively, to be able to notice something was already happening…

…Now I register something that precedes all this manifold immensity that is not me and yet is real; something makes itself felt from beyond or behind or beneath it all. What can ‘beyond or ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ mean, when all possible directions or dimensions are included in the sum of what is so? I don’t know. I’ve only got metaphors to work with, and this is where metaphor, which compares one existing thing to another thing, is being asked to reach beyond its competence. Beyond, again: but I’m not talking about movement through or out of any of the shapes of existing things. I’m talking about a movement through or out of shape altogether, yet not into vacuum, not into emptiness. Into fullness rather. Into an adjacent fullness, no further away than the thickness of everything, which now feels as if, in this direction that can’t be stated, it is no thickness at all…

…I feel what I feel when there’s someone beside me. I am being looked at. I am being known; known in some wholly accurate and complete way that is only possible when the point of view is not another local self in the world that glows in the whole medium in which I live and move. I am being seen from inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of…

…On one level I can feel that this is absolutely safe. A parent’s safe hold is nothing compared to this. I’m being carried on the universe’s shoulder. But on another level, it’s terrifying. Being screened off by my separateness is all I know in my dealings with somebodies who look at me. This is utterly exposed. And while it may be safe, it is not kind in one of the primary ways in which human beings set about being kind to each other…

…I have been shown the authentic bad news about myself, in a perspective which is so different from the tight focus of my desperation that it is good news in itself; I have been shown that though I may see myself in grim optics of sorrow and self-dislike, I am being seen all the while, if I can bring myself to believe it, with a generosity wider than oceans. I’ve been gently and implacably reminded of how little I know a whole truth about myself. I have been made unfamiliar to myself, and therefore hopeful; I’ve had the grip of desperation loosened…

…These are explanations of how my feelings might have arisen, physically, but they don’t explain my feelings away. They don’t prove that my feelings were not really my feelings. They certainly don’t prove that there was nobody there for me to be feeling them about. If God does exist, then from my point of view it’s hard to see how a physical creature like myself could ever register His presence except through some series or other of physically-determined bodily states.”

-  

 Francis Spufford – Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, p62 - 67 - well worth reading!