Churches of reconciliation: the diverse church as good news for the world

Here’s the text version of the paper; the previous post offered a pdf version.
WA TEAR Conference 19 September 2009
As TEAR people, you already know that the good news is more than personal salvation after you die. You know that justice is an essential part of the kingdom of God. But have you ever heard the [...]

Churches of Reconciliation: the Diverse Church as Good News for the World

Here’s the paper I gave at the TEAR conference yesterday:
Churches of reconciliation
I shall tell you more about it later in the week, but I told people it would be up here, so I thought I’d better make good on that.

TNIV

I was just going to get around to finally buying a copy of the Today’s New International Version of the Bible and now I hear that Zondervan is going to discontinue it, after a vitriolic campaign against it by the usual suspects of the American evangelical right. It’s times like these that I despair about [...]

Consuming Jesus : A Review

Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Divisions in a Consumer Church (Eerdmans, 2007) Available from Koorong for about $20
In this book, Metzger argues that evangelical churches are consumer orientated and this perpetuates the race and class divisions of the world. The gospel, he insists, is the good news that these divisions have been broken down [...]

Basics #1: a guide to labels and why they matter – fundamentalist, evangelical and pentecostal

(Here’s a post written for nvc.org.au that you might want to read. I realise I don’t ever write about any of the basics; this might be the first in a series. If you’ve studied theology, all of this will be superfluous and potentially erroneous!)
Last night I was watching a secular documentary called Jesus Camp. It’s [...]

My big brown Strong’s Exhaustative Concordance, or how I think the Bible is being read badly

(I’m going to sound grumpy, but I’m not, I’ve just been thinking a lot about the use of the Bible.)
It concerns me how badly the Bible is used by most evangelicals.  Much of it stems from a failure to understand what sort of book(s) the Bible is.
When I was nine, an elder in my Baptist [...]

Keeping the faith

Two of my friends have lost their faith in the last three years.
‘Lost’ is a curious word to use here. They didn’t misplace it. It didn’t fall behind the couch. They’re not offering any rewards for it to be found.
I think plant metaphors are more apt here – for one of them, faith shrivelled up [...]

I miss the church year

One of the impoverishments of much of the free church and evangelicalism is its neglect of the church year. Last week the universal church started Lent, but if you went to your typical evangelical church, you wouldn’t know about it. Every year I miss out on Lent and tell myself I’m going to try to [...]

Sweet: the novel all Baptists should read

Tracy Ryan, Sweet, Fremantle Press: 2008. RRP: $26.95

Tracy Ryan’s third novel, Sweet, is the story of three women caught in the thrall of a manipulative pastor of a conservative Baptist church in the outer-suburbs of Perth circa 1986. The Reverend William King is a complex figure, genuinely caring but always controlling.
Cody is seventeen and [...]

Banishing art from the church

Reading an English history book, I was disturbed by the account of Puritans smashing statues in the churches and whitewashing paintings of Bible scenes. The book is by Roy Strong, a Catholic, and so he has his bias, but it sounds to me like a terrible thing to do.
It made me wonder if it is [...]