good news for the ordinary
Posted by Paul | Filed under work
I’m trying to think about how we can better help our finalist students, so today I’ve been listening to a talk on work by Mark Greene (of LICC): Vision for Workplace Ministry. Worth a listen. (It takes him about 20 minutes to get to the substantial bit, so don’t give up too soon.)
Given my last post here, this quote particularly stuck out for me:
[The key problem in discipleship & evangelism] is not that we can’t figure out a way to answer the tough questions. It’s that we can’t demonstrate to a watching world a way to live the gospel in a compelling manner in the ordinary, good news for the ordinary.
worldview and work
Posted by Paul | Filed under work
I think my last post needs a corresponding observation from the other side.
When thinking ‘Christian Worldview’ it is easy to jump straight to the big questions. And this is important: develop a Christian view of politics — I will be grateful; show me how faith and art relate — I will enthusiastically read your book; construct a Christian philosophy of mathematics — my mathematician’s heart will rise up to kiss you. But, hang on, my average day sees only brief flashes of those big questions. What I also want is to know how my faith relates to office work or commuting or washing up or …
Steven Garber put it like this recently:
The [questions] I have spent the most time with over the years have always had something to do with relationships, with the yearning for love, for marriage, and of course with the meaning of sexuality. I have long believed that unless a person has confidence that the Christian vision has honest answers for these questions, these hopes, then it is awfully hard to believe that it is worth working out the meaning of my faith for politics, for economics, for the arts, for globalization (and an honest faith somehow, someday must address them at some point).
He’s probably hit the core, but I think we can expand the point further: we need honest answers to the questions lying around all the details of our lives, as much as the “big questions”. Perhaps more so…
Culture makers without a vision
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve been waiting for the book resulting from last year’s Transforming Culture Symposium. (Peterson, Crouch, Begbie, … how could this not be on my wish list?) It seems I’ll have to be patient a bit longer. But, in the meantime here’s an interesting quote from the introduction posted on David Taylor’s Diary of an Art’s Pastor:
But my point—my confession—is this. As a pastor of an arts ministry, I defaulted to an experientialist and shrunken traditionalistic approach because I lacked a larger vision. Evangelical Protestantism handed me neither a big picture (a theology) nor a sense of how art and the church ought to hold together (a tradition).
…
Many of us, in fact, feel the lack of a comprehensive, systematic, integrating and grounding vision.
It seems to me that this can be a problem in so many areas of cultural interaction — we have neither a sufficiently robust theology nor a guiding tradition. As a result, though we believe our faith should affect every area of life, we are missing a clear understanding of what we are actually supposed to do. Without a guiding vision/story, we end up following the culture around, never really being sure if we are supposed to be transforming or renewing or borrowing or …
Taking this more widely, the same can be true for Christians who are thinking about working life. Without a comprehensive vision of how work fits into the Christian story, we are left following the default models already embedded in the surrounding culture.
There are signs that this is changing. I hope we can begin to draw a more satisfying picture of how our whole lives fit with God’s story.
(more) Culture Making
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
IVP have put another extract from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making on their site. I had a very enjoyable and consciousness-expanding lunchtime in Costa reading this. Came away buzzing (not simply due to the fact that they forgot to put milk in my coffee…)
“Why does the Christian world view remain so disembodied?” Wolterstorff asks. His answer is telling—it remains disembodied because it is insufficiently … perceived. Christianity has not yet reformed and remolded our culture because of a lack of “vision.” But this is a strange turn of thought from Wolterstorff’s acute statement of the core problem, namely that Christianity is “disembodied.” You would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. And indeed every Christian proponent of worldview thinking gestures enthusiastically in this direction. But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.
His conclusion is
The language of worldview tends to imply … that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking “worldviewishly” is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. … [We] will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. … But culture is not changed simply by thinking.
Tags: books, culture, Culture Making (Crouch), worldview
Things I found this week
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
Had a bit of an mp3 binge this week (train delays and long walks at lunch time). Here are the highlights:
Jonny recommended Spirituality of the Cellphone to me. It’s a talk from (Rob Bell’s) Mars Hill. In it Shane Hipps discusses what the church can learn from Marshall McLuhan. The Medium is the Message applied to everything from burning bushes to mobiles. Very interesting.
On the podcast from (Mark Driscoll’s) Mars Hill, a talk from one of their worship pastors — Tim Smith — called Continuous Worship. Not quite what I was expecting from the title — it takes a look who we interact with culture (in fact, it has a reasonable amount in common with the seminar I blogged earlier in the year). Worth a listen if you want an introduction to that whole area.
Seattle Pacific University have loads of really interesting talks available on iTunes U…
Gregory Wolfe (author of the brilliant Intruding on the Timeless) has a talk there Celebrate God with your Imagination. A short discussion of the importance of the imagination in the Christian life. I’m constantly find myself coming back to this so loved this talk.
They also have Darkness on the Edge of Town: The Gospel of Hope according to Bruce Springsteen. I mean, really, what more could you want on your daily commute than an exposition of Springsteen as ‘sonic mystic’, including the influence of Flannery O’Conner on his song writing? (Also with an object lesson on the medium-is-the-message, by way of a discussion on how Springsteen uses the form of the music to reflect the lyrical content.)
Finally, two from Steven Garber. His book Fabric of Faithfulness is a classic on relating belief to life, especially for students. Who Do You Love? and Weaving Together Belief and Behaviour are two talks based on this. Just listen and you too will want to change the world…
Tags: art, culture, mp3s, web sights, worldview
Considering Culture (finale)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
As we finish up this set of posts (at last), I want to use two quotes. The first is from an article by Craig Bartholomew (quoting Tom Wright)
We have to tell the story in our communities and allow it to challenge our traditions, to ‘stretch our reason back into shape, and to reform our world views that are always in danger of becoming like the world’s world views.’ In respect of this last point Wright is clear that we need to allow Scripture to norm our world view:
When we tell the whole story of the Bible, and tell it … by articulating it in a thousand different ways, improvising our own faithful version, we are inevitably challenging more than just one aspect of the world’s way of looking at things … We are articulating a viewpoint according to which there is one God, the creator of all that is, who not only made the world but is living and active within it… who is also transcendent over it and deeply grieved by its fall away from goodness into sin … The story … will function as an invitation to participate in the story oneself, to make it one’s own, and to do so by turning away from the idols which prevent the story becoming one’s own … Evangelism and the summons to justice and mercy in society are thus one and the same, and both are effected by the telling of the story, the authoritative story …
This takes us back to our starting point — the biblical story. However we shouldn’t view this as a staid and static base; we listen to the text, ‘tell the story in our communities and allow it to challenge our traditions’. We have to continual keep in mind that our communities will never completely and faithfully embody the text. We have to make a conscious effort to allow our story to ‘stretch our reason back into shape, and to reform our world views’; otherwise we may find that our worldview starts to blend with the ones around us. If the salt loses its saltiness…
We then allow our re-stretched reason/imagination/worldview to spill out into our cultural life. We must chose to tell and live according to the real story and invite others to participate in that story with us. And it is by living the real story that our cultural activities are transformed to fit with God’s plan for creation.
The second quote is taken completely out of context, but I love it and it sums up for me the motivation behind all of this. It comes from the song ‘So Long Sweet Misery’ by Brett Dennen:
…
if I could I would wash all these wounds away
I would surround your room with sentiments of grace
I would paint your portrait over everything mundane
…
That surely is our goal — to paint the portrait of Jesus over everything, mundane or otherwise, to declare in our actions the beauty, justice and truth of the way God intends the world to be.
Tags: art, culture, Culture Seminar, story, worldview
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...