Church as Gospel Community

Steve Timmis and Tim Chester have helped evangelicals to recover the sense of church as gospel community, not least through their Crowded House initiative. In Total Church (IVP, 2007), they challenge today's prevailing view of life, of us standing on our own 'juggling' our various domestic, work, and social responsibilities.

All too often church becomes one of the balls. We juggle responsibilities for church (measured predominately by attendance at meetings) just as we juggle our responsibilities for work or leisure. An alternative model is to view our various activities and responsibilities as spokes of a wheel. At the centre or hub of life is not me as an individual, but us as members of the Christian community. Church is not another ball to juggle, but that which defines who I am and gives Christlike shape to my life.(pp.42-43)

Interestingly, this works out, among other ways, as church members (including church leaders) 'make decision with regard to the implications for the church and to make significant decisions in consultation with the church.' (p.45)
Such a gospel community is profoundly mission-minded. Although mission develops from being centripetal (moving towards the centre) in the OT to centrifugal (moving away from the centre) in the NT, Timmis & Chester argue that 'mission does not cease to be centripetal.'

The attractive covenant community continues to be the means by which Godfulfils his promise to Abraham. What has changed is the centre! The centre is no longer geographic Jerusalem. Now it is the community itself among whom Christ promises to be present (Matthew 28:20). The community moves out across the globe (a centrifugal movement), all the time drawing people to its Lord through its common life ( a centripetal movement).(p.47)

Are Richard Dawkins' views evolving with time?

Melanie Phillips has written a cracking review of the second debate between Richard Dawkins and Oxford mathematician, John Lennox. Apparently, Dawkins began the debate in Oxford by saying:

'a serious case could be made for a deistic God.'

Now that sounds less like his militant atheism of old, and more like the posters now ubiquitous around London that declare: 'There's Probably No God'. As Phillips comments:

'This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator.'

Indeed, as Phillips notes, it undermines Dawkins' previous assertion that:

...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

But then, why should we expect logical consistency and rational argument from an Oxford atheist?

Who is worthy for gospel ministry?

John Newton's famous encounter with God during a great storm at sea occurred in March 1748, but within a decade, the young disciple was already considering whether the Lord was calling him into full-time gospel ministry. In 1758, he wrote down a serious of 'miscellaneous thoughts' for his own private reflection. These have now been published by The John Newton Project.

Meditating on 2 Cor 2:16, he asks who is worthy for gospel ministry?

Who is worthy thus to stand between the Lord and sinful man? Who is worthy to be the Lord's prophet - to approach the fountain of light and purity, to receive those communications which an unholy heart can neither receive or retain?

... Who is worthy to be a priest of the Most High God - to present the offerings of a whole people - to intercede for them - to be the mouth, the hands, and the eyes of a congregation? If the Lord is to be sanctified by all that come near him - what clean hands, how pure a heart should he have who leads the way to others?

To bring the first news of the Redeemer's entrance into a lost wold, was the employment and the joy of the angels. Who of all the sons of dust and ashes is worthy to complete their message? Alas! are sinners worthy to show forth the spotless Lamb of God? Are the labours of his life, the wonders of his love, the greatness of his sufferings, and the glories of his exaltation suitable subjects for such cold hearts and stammering tongues as mine? O Lord I am unworthy, utterly unworthy of the meanest station in thy house, or the smallest service to thy people.

How can we reach the UK?

In March 2003, after a major research project in association with the Evangelical Alliance, the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity published a report entitled 'Imagine How We Can Reach the UK'. The report concluded: "The reason the UK church is not effective in mission is because we are not making disciples who can live well for Christ in today's culture and engage compellingly with the people they meet ... Jesus has a 'train and release' strategy, while overall we have a 'convert and retain' strategy."
Although there are many evangelistic resources currently available, many Christians do not know how to live out their faith, due to "the pervasive belief that some things are important to God - such as church, prayer meetings, social action, Alpha - but that other human activities are at best neutral - work, school, college, sports, the arts, leisure, rest, sleep."
Mark Greene & Tracy Cotterell, Let My People Grow (LICC, 2005), pp.3-4

A gospel-centred church?

'The church exists both through the gospel and for the gospel. At one level this is a motherhood-and-apple-pie declaration. Few Christians are going to object to being gospel-centred just as no-one is against mothers or apple pie. The problem is the gap between our rhetoric and the reality of our practice. The continual challenge for us is to apply this principle to church life and ministry without compromise.'
Tim Chester & Steve Timmis, Total Church (IVP, 2007), p.32

"Heretical" church structures?

The theology that matters is not the theology we profess, but the theology we practise. As John Stott says: "Our static, inflexible, self-centred structures are 'heretical structures' because they embody a heretical doctrine of the church." If "our structure has become an end in itself, not a means of saving the world" it is "a heretical structure". John Stott, The Living Church (IVP, 2007), p.58

Mao Tse-Tung - What a worldview!

'Mao's attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, 'I', above everything else: "I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others ... People like me want to ... satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me."
Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. "People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people." "I am responsible only for the reality that I know," he wrote, "and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don't know about the past, I don't know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self ... I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one."' (Jung Chang & Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story , p.13)

1 Samuel 1 - Walter Brueggemann

"Every assertion of chs 1-3 ... witnesses to the decisive role of Yahweh in Israel's new beginning. Every actor in the entire Samuel narrative ... are all creatures of God's sovereignty and agents of God's intended future." (p.10)

As 1 Samuel begins, Israel is a "troubled ... waiting ... marginal community", facing the external threat from the Philistines, but "politically weak and economically disadvantaged ... a community in moral chaos, engaged in brutality (Judges 19-21) and betrayed by undisciplined religion (chs. 17-18). Israel does not seem to have the capacity or the will to extricate itself from its troubles." (p.10)

And yet, the narrative doesn't rush to David: "There is a long waiting", which is bitter bcs of Israel's "troubled social, political, and economic situation" and confused bcs Israel doesn't know where future lies, how to get there, or "how to wait faithfully for it... As in every good story, we are not told too much too soon." (p.11)

The story doesn't begin with David, Saul, or even with Samuel. "The origin of Israel's future" is located "in the story of a bereft, barren woman named Hannah ... The story of Israel's waiting ... begins neither in grand theory nor in palace splendour nor in doxological celebration. It begins, rather, in a single Ephraimite family, whose father has a solid family pedigee (1:1) but whose mother is barren - without children and without prospect of children. Our story of waiting begins in barrenness wherein there is no hint of a future. Israel's waiting ... begins as Hannah's waiting begins, in hopelessness." (p.11)

The narrative of Elkanah-Hannah-Samuel of ch.1 "functions as a paradigm for the entire drama of Israel's faithful waiting... The problem is barrenness: no child, no son, no heir, no future, no historical possibility. The resolution is worship, with a son given and a future opened... The first chapter is a narrative of Yahweh's power and will to begin again, to create a newness in history precisely out of despair." (p.12)