Category: news and events

Tom Sine stirs things up in Perth

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Anabaptistish-futurologist-populariser of kingdom ideas Tom Sine was in Perth last week, and Chris Summerfield has written a thoughtful and interesting post thinking through the consequences.

In Tom talking up the new conspirators (emerging, missional, multicultural, monastic communities), it brought up for me a struggle over the last few months against feeling left behind. For me, I have fought against a sense of having tried and failed, and fearing I have sold out. Or that’s what I was feeling, but I’ve decided to stop it. I’m content doing unglamorous things for God at the moment. It’s important to give up the need to be on the cutting edge. It’s important to give up the need to feel important. I defy the cult of celebrity and success which infects even Christianity and even ‘new conspirators’.

But I was excited by Tom’s talks in several ways. I like his emphasis on the possibilities for transforming our everyday life in creative ways to make it look more like kingdom life. I like his emphasis on hospitality and celebration, and I need to go watch Babette’s Feast now, which he mentioned several times as an example of what he’s talking about.

I may have a whole mindshift going on at the moment, but I’ll have to wait till I’ve got some time to think it through AND write about it.

AMUC Camp

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Perth people might be interested in going to the AMUC camp (AMong the Urban Community) this month. They have a blog on WordPress – http://amuc.wordpress.com . (My brother is one of the organisers.) The idea is that for a week you live in community with other Christians (sleeping on the floor of a church) and experience urban ministry and life (homelessness drug addicts and all), as well as spiritual disciplines.

But if you live in Perth and you read my blog, you’ve probably know more about AMUC than me anyway.

Mark Strom’s new book

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Back in 2001, Mark Strom’s book Reframing Paul was a hugely influential book on my life. It was the best critique of the current state of evangelical churches I had read and it offered some positive alternatives of ‘grace filled conversations’.

Finally in 2005, I wrote a long email to Mark telling him how much his book had meant to me, how it had got me in trouble with Christian Union, and helped me start dating my future wife. (Ie: I told her to read it and she loved it too.) He didn’t get back to me, and I was scared he’d dropped off the radar altogether.

But just now I got a bulk email from Mark, now in New Zealand, announcing his new book, The Arts of the Wise Leader. It seems a very different sort of book from his previous one:

Arts of the Wise leader contains simple words conveying profound and practical ideas tested and honed in the realities of tough public schools, government infrastructure and major businesses. Perhaps more significantly, the ideas contained in Arts of the Wise Leader have brought hope and heart to families and communities.
– www.artsofthewiseleader.com

I developed an allergic over-reaction to the idea of leadership while being involved in house church, and I’ll be interested to find out Dr Strom’s thoughts.

N.T. Wright on the church

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The Newbigin Group meets at South Perth Church of Christ every couple of months to discuss gospel and culture. This year’s meetings are focused on the work of N.T. Wright. Tonight’s meetings will discuss Wright’s view of the church. The readings come from Scripture and the authority of God, What Paul really said and Simply Christian. As a house-churcher, some things he wrote challenged me:

True, buildings can and do carry memories, and when people have been praying and worshipping and mourning and celebrating in a particular building for many years, the building itself may come to speak powerfully of God’s welcoming presence.
– “Believing and Belonging” from Simply Christian

He’s actually speaking against the building’s importance for church, but his by the way comment reminded me of the good side of having a church building. The downside is the constraint to imagination; the move of church from everyday life to a set-apart realm; the cost of maintenance and loans and labour.

Wright also seems to believe strongly in ‘accredited leaders’; I want to find out more of his opinions on this. Here’s Doug Fletcher’s summary from Scripture and the authority of God:

A reading of scripture taught by the church’s accredited leaders. Such teaching is the primary responsibility of church leadership. It’s not that management skills are unimportant, but they cannot be allowed to supplant the primary apostolic responsibility of proclaiming the word in the power of the Spirit.

I wonder how close this is to What Wright Really Said? I don’t see the teaching gift as something tied up to ordination. If we had spirit filled house church meetings as our understanding of church, we wouldn’t be tempted to see Accredited Leadership and Teaching belonging together.

The extract from What Saint Paul Really Said is on “Justification Then and Now” and it is a hard word to the Sydney Anglicans amongst the Newbigin Group.

If you take the old route of putting justification, in its traditional meaning at the centre of your theology, then you will always be in danger of sustaining some sort of individualism. This wasn’t so much of a problem in Augustine’s or even in Luther’s day when society was much more bound together than it is now. But… in contemporary post-modernism individualism has been all the rage…

Justification is itself the ecumenical doctrine, the doctrine that rebukes all our petty and often culture-bound church groupsings, and which declares that all who believe in Jesus belong together in the one family.

Justification declares that all who believe in Jesus Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their cultural or racial differences.

One is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith. One is justified by faith by believing in Jesus.

I hope Sydney Anglicanism comes under the influence of N.T. Wright’s brand of evangelical Anglicanism. That would be great! It might combine some of the vitality of the Sydney Anglican group with a more corporate, social gospel; a less flat hermeneutic; and a nuanced Bible.

Here’s the email the group’s convenor, Ian Barns,  sent out:

 The next session on ‘Tom Wright for everyone’ will be on Monday August 6, from 7.30 to 9.30 in Meeting Area 3, South Perth Church of Christ. Our topic for discussion will be ‘What about the church?’.

Like Newbigin and many of the other theologians we have talked about in recent times, for Tom Wright, ‘the church’ plays a crucial role in the outworking of the story of God’s kingdom in the renewal of creation. Tom Wright is an Anglican. Indeed, he is the current Bishop of Durham and his recent writings have reflected his engagement with the considerable pastoral challenges and opportunities he faces as a bishop. He also gets asked to speak to ’emerging church conferences’ (see his talks to the Faithworks/Christian Aid conference accessible on the NT Wright web page)Yet we wonder if his account of the shape of the church, as it bears witness to the project of the renewal of creation and Christ’s challenge to Caesar is as clearly developed as, say John Howard Yoder. Is he more interested in giving talks and sermons than developing more ‘organic’ Christian communities? What can we learn from Tom Wright about how God wants the church to be in our present times?Our discussion on August 6 will be introduced by Doug Fletcher. Doug teaches statistics at Murdoch University. He is also completing a PhD in theology, examining the ideas of American theologian George Lindbeck.
 

The Newbigin group homepage is here:

Radio National program on Anabaptism and its expression in Australia

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Back in June, Radio National featured a program on Anabaptism and interviewed several Anabaptists from Australia and New Zealand: 

 Encounter transcript

I think the speakers were eloquent and the presentation was good. I liked the emphasis on radical discipleship and that Jarrod got a chance to mention Peace Tree. I was disappointed, though, that the program didn’t emphasise the Anabaptist vision of church – which is the most important part for me.

I also note Chris Marshall’s comments on scripture, which sound a lot like what Ray Gingerich was saying on his visit – indeed, I wonder if this position is becoming ‘anbaptist orthodoxy’:

As well as the kind of ethical Christocentrism, a feeling that Jesus teaches us how to live, and we must take literally what he says, also there is the kind of hermeneutical Christocentrism which is that when we read the Bible, and we try to work out what in the Bible is still God’s word for today, because the Bible’s a very diverse document and has lots of violent bits in it, how do we decide how the Bible is relevant for today, that one of the key tests is it must be consistent with the way of Christ. So what we read in Scripture that is not consistent with the way of Christ, no longer has authority for today. What we read in any part of Scripture that is consistent with the way of Christ, continues to be God’s word for today.

What Chris says here is not going to win many friends for Anabaptism among Evangelicals. I’m ambivalent. I think he puts the case too strongly.  All scripture should function authoritatively in some way for Christians.  I think we have to wrestle with the parts that don’t seem consistent with Christ; God may still speak to us through them.

Ray Gingerich’s visit: violent God and pacifist Jesus?

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 Over the weekend, me and Nicole went to three meetings where Mennonite scholar Ray Gingerich was speaking. His most interesting and challenging talk for me was the Sunday night one at Scripture Union House, Mt Hawthorn. It was a fundraiser for the Pine Gap 6, who are facing jail for doing a ‘Citizens’ Inspection’ of the Pine Gap (US) military facility in Australia.

 His theme was ‘A violent God and a pacifist Jesus?’. Ray likes to ask a lot of questions and provoke his listeners into thinking. He has a curious mind which tends to go off on tangents he finds interesting.

His basic argument was that if Christ is the fullest revelation of God and he is pacifist, then God is pacifist too. Where the Bible suggests a violent God, we defer to our fuller understanding of God through Christ.

Ray was asked, ‘What about when the Old Testament reports God asking the Israelites to slaughter an entire town? Does that mean the writer had it wrong?’ His answer to this was round-about and a long time coming, but when it did come, it affected me a lot.

Ray referred to Yoder’s posthumous work The Jewish-Christian Schism revisited (which I haven’t read yet). In it (apparently) Yoder talks about how Jesus was in a certain stream of Judaism, one particularly influenced by the post-exilic prophets. It was these books of the OT that were at the centre of Jesus’ Bible. Add to that the fact that the canon was not yet nearly as stable as it is today for the Old Testament.

Ray’s answer presupposes that there is contradiction within the Old Testament and between it and the New Testament. These streams can’t all be right (‘a square circle’) – so we’d better decide which streams are life-giving and fit into the fullest revelation we have of God in Jesus.

 I felt simultaneously suspicious and excited at this idea. It needs a lot more talking about.