Wednesday, 11 December 2013
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!
Tuesday, 26 November 2013
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!
Wednesday, 30 October 2013
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!
Wednesday, 23 October 2013
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
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
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.
Tuesday, 8 October 2013
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.
Wednesday, 2 October 2013
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.
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