Currently reading: Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear 📚
Finished reading: A Century of Poetry by Rowan Williams 📚
What a marvelous collection of poems. I didn’t quite make it through all of them before it was due back at the library, but wow is this a treat. I will need to acquire this volume at some point. Williams' reflections are often as subtle and profound as the poems themselves. For anyone unskilled in the art of reading poetry like me, the comments are a perfect bit of “hand holding” to inspire some confidence to go and read likewise.
Finished reading: The Insider’s Guide to ADHD by Penny Williams 📚
Disabled email and internet browser on my phone for the new year. Still early (obviously), but initial signs are very promising.
Finished reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚
This book illuminated so much for me about modern evangelicalism. Just the most recent reminder that the past is never past…
Merry Christmas from Lewis and Trooper (photo cred: Kristyn)
Landscape with Snow (1888) by Vincent van Gogh:
Lesslie Newbigin, on keeping the right priorities in evangelism:
The first priority…is the cherishing and nourishing of…a congregation in a life of worship, of teaching and mutual pastoral care so that the new life in Christ becomes more and more for them the great and controlling reality. That life will necessarily be different from the life of the neighbourhood, but the important thing is that it be different in the right way and not in the wrong way. It is different in the wrong way if it reflects cultural norms and assumptions that belong to another time or place; its language and style must be that of the neighbourhood. But yet if it is not different from the life around it, it is salt which has lost the saltness. We ought to recognize, perhaps more sharply than we often do, that there must be a profound difference between a community which adores God as the great reality, and one where it is assumed that he can be ignored.
But here a problem arises which is perhaps specially pressing in deprived areas. It happens over and over again, and it has happened throughout history, that the effect of conversion and Christian nurture is that a man or woman acquires new energies, a new hope and a new sense of dignity. And it can follow that his next step is to leave the area where he sees only depression and despair and seek a better place. He leaves the inner city and moves to the leafy suburb. The congregation which bears the good news is weakened by its very success.
This means, surely, that in all our preaching and teaching about the hope which the gospel makes possible, we have to keep steadily in view the fact that what the gospel offers is not just hope for the individual but hope for the world. Concretely I think this means that the congregation must be so deeply and intimately involved in the secular concerns of the neighbourhood that it becomes clear to everyone that no one and nothing is outside the range of God’s love in Jesus. Christ’s message, the original gospel, was about the coming of the kingdom of God, that is to say God’s kingly rule over the whole of his creation and the whole of human kind. That is the only authentic gospel. And that means that every part of human life is within the range of the gospel message; in respect of everything the gospel brings the necessity for choice between the rule of God and the negation of his rule. If the good news is to be authentically communicated, it must be clear that the church is concerned about the rule of God and not about itself. It must be clear, that is, that the local congregation cares for the well-being of the whole community and not just for itself. This will…lead to much involvement in local issues of all kinds…
How can this strange story of God made man, of a crucified saviour, of resurrection and new creation become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is the world which can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: a congregation which believes it.
Does that sound too simplistic? I don’t believe it is. Evangelism is not some kind of technique by means of which people are persuaded to change their minds and think like us. Evangelism is the telling of good news, but what changes people’s minds and converts their wills is always a mysterious work of the sovereign Holy Spirit and we are not permitted to know more than a little of his secret working. But – and this is the point – the Holy Spirit is present in the believing congregation gathered for praise and the offering up of spiritual sacrifice, scattered throughout the community to bear the love of God into every secular happening and meeting. It is they who scatter the seeds of hope around, and even if the greater part falls on barren ground, there will be a few that begin to germinate, to create at least a questioning and a seeking, and perhaps to lead someone to enquire about the source from which these germs of hope came. Although it may seem simplistic, I most deeply believe that it is fundamental to recognize that what brings men and women and children to know Jesus as Lord and Saviour is always the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, always beyond our understanding or control, always the result of a presence, a reality which both draws and challenges – the reality who is in fact the living God himself. And his presence is promised and granted in the midst of the believing, worshipping, celebrating, caring congregation. There is no hermeneutic for the gospel but that.
Genuine prayer is not a deed, an exercise, a pious attitude. Rather it is the request of the child to the heart of the Father. That is why prayer is never demonstrative, neither before God nor before ourselves, nor before others. If God did not know what I need, then I would have to think about how I should tell God, what I should tell God, whether I should tell God. But the faith out of which I am praying prevents such reflecting or demonstrating.