Light of the World, a City on A Hill

…thinking out loud about living missionally in the city of Sydney so that the city will come to know Jesus…

Archive for jesus

Christology, Missiology, Ecclesiology

March 7, 2008 at 12:27 pm · Filed under Doctrine, Michael Frost, books, ecclesiology, jesus, missional, scripture

I have been steadily ploughing through my recent Amazon haul of books and am finding them all really helpful.

I will post some more complete thoughts later, but for now I wanted to mention a line of thinking that has come out from a number of authors, and has resonated with me.

The view is that we first and foremost must understand and define our Christology (who Jesus is and what is the Gospel) and this in turn drives and shapes our Missiology (why are we here, what are we here to do) and then against the backdrop of our cultural context we form our Ecclesiology (what we do and how we do it).

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Michael Frost explicitly spells this out in his “Exiles” book.

I think sometimes my faith tribe (and others like it) can be a bit “Pauline”, i.e. skewed toward the NT Epistles, and in turn de-emphaise the Gospels, reducing them to “Jesus died, rose, ascended,believe in him and be saved”.

I am now trying to re-discover the Gospels and perhaps move towards more well rounded view of ‘the’ Gospel.

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Of the Reading of Books, there is no end

January 11, 2008 at 9:29 am · Filed under Michael Frost, books, emerging, evangelism, jesus, missional

I now have another 9 books on the way from Amazon (I love Amazon….really). They are:

  1. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality - Miller
  2. Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens - Cole
  3. Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture - Newbigin
  4. Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples - Rainer
  5. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society - Newbigin
  6. Evangelism Without Additives: What if sharing your faith meant just being yourself? - Henderson
  7. Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture - Frost
  8. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission
  9. They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations - Kimball

I hope Newbigin lives up to the hype…

On mission
Jeff

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It’s worse than you think

December 20, 2007 at 12:50 pm · Filed under jesus, sin

Have you ever thought about how sinful you actually are?

Not a nice topic the week before Christmas, but one that has hit me of late.

Many of us do reflect on our sin from time to time and so we do recognise that we are sinful, but I think what we don’t realise is that it is much, much worse than we imagine.

It seems God spares us from seeing the full extent of our depravity out of kindness to us. If we really knew how bad it is then we would not have the fortitude to walk out our front door.

The upside (phew, there is an upside) is that seeing your wickedness, lust, greed and depravity greatly expands your understanding of the massiveness of God’s grace.

It also prevents you from thinking of yourself too highly and thus recognise that everyone in the world, regardless of race, class, colour and creed is in the same boat as you…in need of an extraordinary saviour.

Jeff

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