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 Michael Frost
Christology, Missiology, Ecclesiology
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).
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.
A New Appreciation for Chocolate
I just watched Chocolat…and watched with a new appreciation.
I admit…I cried.
Some will know what I mean.
Re-Erecting the Sacred Secular Divide
I have had to put ‘Emerging Churches’ (the book by Bolger/Gibbs) aside for a time as, honestly, the latter chapters around participatory worship were grating on me. The reason is that, in the earlier parts of the book, the various leaders were arguing for a demolition of the sacred/secular divide (to which I say amen), but then go on to argue that every person in the corporate gathering must contribute from their giftedness if it is to be legitimate. But to me this then implies that the use of one’s gifts outside the large(r) gathering somehow don’t count in the scheme of serving the Church body, and so the sacred/secular divide goes up again.
“I want to prepare like an evangelical; preach like a pentecostal; pray like a mystic; do the spiritual disciplines like a desert father; art like a catholic; and social justice like a liberal”.
Of the Reading of Books, there is no end
I now have another 9 books on the way from Amazon (I love Amazon….really). They are:
- Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality - Miller
- Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens - Cole
- Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture - Newbigin
- Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples - Rainer
- The Gospel in a Pluralist Society - Newbigin
- Evangelism Without Additives: What if sharing your faith meant just being yourself? - Henderson
- Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture - Frost
- Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission
- They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations - Kimball
I hope Newbigin lives up to the hype…
On mission
Jeff
