everything conference
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
I mentioned newfrontiers up-coming Everything conference a few posts ago. They’ve now added some interesting articles to the conference website. Also, some great images in the gallery. Looking forward to this…
Tags: church, culture, Everything
students and vocation
Posted by Paul | Filed under work
Recently I’ve been think a lot about how we can help the students in church as they head out into careers. I’m particularly interested in how we can help them integrate the working side of their life with Sunday mornings. (You never know, I may get around to blogging about this more in the future.) One thing at the front of my mind is that they may only ever hear a handful of talks/sermons/etc. on work life. Considering this takes up a significant proportion of life it seems to be a major omission.
With this in mind, I was interested to read this post by Richard Mouw. After reporting on the vitality of Christian colleges in the US, he ends with the following comments:
What I do worry about in all of this is whether the evangelical churches are prepared to receive and nurture the students graduating from these colleges and universities. On many of these campuses, Lilly-funded programs on the importance of seeing one’s daily work as “vocation” have inspired students to see so-called “secular” occupations as Kingdom service. They are looking for the kind of preaching and sacramental life, as well as continuing education, to which they have become accustomed on their undergraduate campuses. If the evangelical churches fail to meet their expectations, they will go elsewhere. It will not likely be in the direction of liberal Protestantism—more likely they will move toward Anglicanism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Or maybe they will contribute to new forms of evangelical church life.
This brings up wider issues: Only a small proportion have even this sort of grounding. How do we serve those who do not so that they enter working life with some sense of “daily work as vocation”? And, equally important, how do we continue this by supporting and educating as part of church life?
Culture and questions (6): Tim Keller
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I found this quote today from Tim Keller, which fits nicely with what we’ve been saying here over the last few posts…
What is contextualization?
…
I propose the following definition: Contextualization is not ‘giving people what they want’ but rather it is giving God’s answers (which they may not want!) to questions they are asking and in forms that they can comprehend. “Contextualization” ‘incarnates’ the Christian faith in a particular culture.
(Taken from this talk & pdf; HT: reformissionary)
Keller makes the interesting addition that not only does the gospel answer a culture’s particular questions, but it also presents particular challenges to each culture.
Culture and questions (5): being relevant
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Growing out of recent posts, here’s my proposal:
True relevance depends on changing the questions we answer,
rather than changing the answers we already have.
It seems that there is an endless debate in the church over whether being relevant is a really bad thing or a absolutely vital thing. I want to suggest that we can attempt relevance in many ways and the consequences depend on the route. Look for relevance by changing the answers and you risk losing what you have without actually addressing the needs of those around. But do the hard work of listening to new questions and broadening the answers to meet the new needs and you will find new depth as well as serving the culture.
Crouch on what’s important
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
This seemed obliquely relevant to recent posts…
We are not devoted to the preservation of a single culture, but to incarnation and transformation within every culture. So we need one another to help determine the “important” and “unimportant” features of any given culture.This will be an inherently multicultural exercise, because sorting out the important from the unimportant cannot happen in isolation or from a distance. … Only together can we discern the deeper significance of any given cultural practice, its redemptive possibilities, and its tempting distortions of the life that really is life.
– Andy Crouch
(from The Importance of Knowing What’s Unimportant)
Culture and questions (4): why and how
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I ended the last post alluding Tim Keller’s emphasis that Christians should be servants within culture and agents for cultural renewal — a ‘faithful presence within’. Perhaps we can link this with asking questions and with previous posts on reading/interpreting culture (which had in view Vanhoozer & co.’s Everyday Theology and Crouch’s Culture Making).
Why do we attempt to interpret culture? Not just for some intellectual rush. We interpret to understand the questions & the plot tensions. And we aim to understand these so that we can serve better, so that we can bring renewal where it is needed. So, that we come with answers to the questions that are being asked, not the questions we think should be asked.
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...