'don't bore me with empty songs.' Terry's article
Presence of God gets manifest on planet earth.
Israel isn't the holy land, we're a holy people. Holiness has to do with where God is. When we worship we are gathering into the presence of God. Sinai was a holy mountain, so holy that not even animals were allowed to touch it and live. But what made it holy was that God was there.
"I fear that the sense of wonder in worship has drifted."
What's primary is coming into the presence of God. The church is the dwelling place of God in the Spirit. When we gather in his name our anticipation of an experience ought to be incredibly high.
Worship:
When we started things were very spontaneous, God is here and so there were gifts of the Spirit being used. Part of the concern about worship life is that we often delegate away half of our meeting to people who aren't/wouldn't be elders in the church.
Aspects of worship we ought to pursue:
Liberty - not of self-expression only, but in wonder at God's grace. It was the gospel, it was truth that freed us.
The first worship song in the Bible: Ex. 15, a celebration of the freedom that they now have.
Faith - the possibility of people's faith growing is huge. Creedal faith. Luther taught the gospel through hymns because they were a non literate people. Terry speaking to an African pastor who said: in England they sing about mountains and streams, I want to sing about Jesus! We need songs that inspire strength in the storms. Faith and singing go together. When you believe and you sing it underlines your faith. Unbelief and singing don't go together. We don't want to get into triumphalism or over the top. But is that our danger? Not so much.
If our preoccupation on Sundays is for the sinner, when do we gather to meet with God?
Devotion - We fought for a new kind of church where devotion to Jesus and heartfelt, wholehearted expressions of affection is what we do. It has a sanctifying experience on us. People make big decisions when caught in the throes of devotion: he decided to give away 7 years worth of savings. Do we anticipate wonderful things will happen in the worship? The question isn't 'shall we have gifts of the Spirit in the worship?' but the question ought to be: 'are we going to meet with God?'
Rant over.
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Thursday, 8 November 2018
Research: Impact of social media
From Church and Culture blog:
Instagram is ready to serve by now offering an “academy” designed to “teach teenagers how to become social media stars.” As reported by the Telegraph: “… the photo sharing app is running three days of free workshops to train would-be influencers in how to become an online success. The curriculum covers everything from camera angles to how to make your content ‘relatable.’”
Instagram is ready to serve by now offering an “academy” designed to “teach teenagers how to become social media stars.” As reported by the Telegraph: “… the photo sharing app is running three days of free workshops to train would-be influencers in how to become an online success. The curriculum covers everything from camera angles to how to make your content ‘relatable.’”
Wednesday, 4 July 2018
Think: Future of Complimentarity
Andrew:
All theology is contextual. No theology is done in a vacuum.
Complementarity : a relationship or situation where two or three different things improve or emphasis one another's different qualities. Represents Christian orthodoxy even if we disagree how we can work that in the local church. Complementarity = beautiful difference.
Complementarianism : is different has taken on a narrowerer application of complementarity.
Complementarity is a word that Christians on all sides can use to describe our position on male and female.
Creation. There is a complementarity in everything. Jewish
Abolishing the difference between heaven and earth has led to a society that looks to abolish the difference between male and female. We are not wholly the same and not wholly different.
Camille Paglia on difference and harmony:
Female / male
Earth / sky
Land / Rain
Internal / External
Invisible / Visible
Curves / Lines
Cyclical / Linear
Eastern / Western
Dinoysianan / Apollonian
Chaos / Order
Chtnonian / Structured
Cycilcal / Linear
Body / Head
Nature / Society
Pagan / Judeo-Christian
Camille's understanding is that the Christian vision of difference won and that that was good for women. In the Christian vision of reality, polarities like these are ultimately reconciled within the Godhead.
The Christian vision is of harmony and not conflict.
Jen Wilkins:
Genesis. God declares not good and then, before he creates eve, parades the animals in front of man for naming. For Adam, this is
Before Eve is prepared for Adam, Adam needs to be prepared for Eve. Adam's 'at last, she is bone from my bone', is a statement of declaration that honours the sameness of men and women. The first word in scripture is that we are same. Empathy for one another comes from the starting point of 'this person is just like me.' Focusing so much on our difference leads to an objectification 'mars and venus.'
Let's talk about what's not in this story. God doesn't create a buddy for Adam.
There is no such thing as a church where the men or women thrive and the other doesn't. They may give the appearance of thriving but it doesn't happen.
Root the difference in biology, what's a 'trans-culutral' difference. If we start with biology it stops us saying things that are stupid:
- Men have physical dominance. On the whole they are physically stronger. That's the context of 1 Peter, not emotional or intellectual difference. Men outgrow vulnerability as they age, women do not.
Women / Men difference:
SESSION 2: Hannah Anderson
Society, History & Culture
What do society, history and culture have to do with the discussion on complementarity?
Is gender a social construct?
Genesis: God creates engendered sexes. From a scriptural standpoint there is a deep connection between our creation and our cultural mandate. there is no society without male and females expressing themselves in community together. If we do not have a vision of the complementarity of male and female, we don't even have a society. Our conversations about these things can't be divorced from society.
BOOK: Nate Collins: Almost Invisible.
Part of building society's that are complementarity are building societies where you know who you shouldn't have sex with. We have cut off part of how men and women should relate to one another because we removed those restrictions in our society. Genesis 2 is about sending the man and woman out into the world to form a society where they act and live alongside each other.
Gender cannot be separated from all of the other things that are happening in a society.
One of the main ways that we recognise the influence of new culturally acceptable ideas is through second wave feminism.
Society and gender work together as a puzzle fitting into one another.
A Rubix cube.
A completed cube is society as God intended it to be, it is all the pieces doing what they are supposed to do. But that is how a rubix cube comes when you buy it, but then your children get hold of it and mess it up and you have to try and resolve it. Therein lies the issue for discussions on gender.
There 43 quintillion ways for a rubix cube to be messed up and then solved. Society has that many variations to it as well. We mustn't compare one society with another and think one is better than another, they are just messed up differently and so require a particular and different way of solving them each one. We compare ourselves to the word of God not to each other, the past or other societies.
We cannot neglect the value of our differences. If we do then women are not going to be valued for the vulnerability.
1 Peter 3:7 In the context of roles. Honour them not just because they're human beings but because they're women. Understand that even though you are not like them, I want you to learn to value something that you may not initially value. Honour our differences. Honour women not because they resemble men but because they are women. The same thing is true for men. We must honour men for their manhood not because of the ways they're like a woman.
What does all this mean for our witness in the world?
We see a different vision in the scripture than we see from the world all around us.
What we've done in the church in the wake of the cultural advance on demolishing gender is that we have built a retaining wall and said 'we're going to hold back the flood' (by upholding male only roles.
The sexual revolution is over. When we saw the #metoo movement it was as though the game was over and we saw the reaping of the whirlwind that was sown in the SRev. There is a sense of distrust of male sexuality. Our culture has mishandled our sexuality and now people are in a position of fear about how they relate to one another.
Christianity gives us an ethic and vision for union and community that something is going on that is larger than anything else we're part of. Vulnerability is not a liability. You won't find this communal ethic anywhere else! The gospel gives a vision for how strength and weakness can complement each other.
Alastair Roberts
Shelve questions. The Bible isn't primarily a set of proof texts on which we can build our casess. Once the authority of scripture is so 'atomised' we fid ourselves throwing up our hands and saying 'who can tell what we should believe about these things!'
Our approach to scripture shouldn't be to try and win an argument over our neighbour but instead to pay close attention ourselves. Everything must begin by trying to hear what God is saying to us.
In Medieval commentaries the book Song of Solomon is treated as the Holy of Holies.
Step back and ask questions before stepping forward to specifics. Pay attention however not just to scripture but to the place we're coming from as contemporary society. There is a way that we perceive the world that has been trained by all the things we have and live around, mass produced everythings everywhere that isn't connected to a deep world. The Bible talks about blood, sweat, menstruation, hooves, hair, bodily emissions in the night, specific rivers, memorial stones, wheat and barley harvests. Wombs, foreskins, skin diseases... It is a very different book from the sort of book we're looking for.
The Bible pays a lot of attention to the families people are connected to whereas we see people as interchangeable, individuals. The Bible is concerned with particulars, sons of and daughters of...
We live in a world of abstractions, shallow, airless and relatively weightless world. Detached from the soil of reality.
The contemporary fixation with whether or not men and women are different would have struck the original readers of the Bible as odd. Like asking which is better the cello or the violin, is a strange question. But in a society that values economic value and productivity we approach the Bible with those questions. It might be a valid concern but it isn't the same concern as people had in the past.
Genesis 1: It is a literary account. It is a story that has a rhythm and pattern to it that we need to pay attention to as it's pattern is part of the meaning. It's a dance, it's an orchestra it's an assembling of all the different parts into a whole.
Two sets of three days;
Forming, naming, taming, ruling
Filling, collecting, communion
The whole story begins with time. The light in the first day isn't primarily a division of light and dark, it's a separation of night and day, it's a time based one. Then on to more times, seasons etc. Time isn't just day and night but yearly, seasonal and finally, the rest sabbath day. There are patterns and dynamisms to creation. It isn't just a bare structure of systems but of life. As God fills there are different things he does. Creation partakes then in God's own creation ability it teems it recreates. Forming basic structures and filling.
They are all good in their particular parts and then very good.
We read it from the persepctive of human beings, we're the centre of the universe and everything rotates around us. But, human beings are late on the scene. Almost all the other creatures are well settled in to their places before we turn up. We don't make or pay much attention to the animals but the animals are good, good in themselves, not just because they can be food or pets.
Animals are helpers for us. They are not comparable to us or suited for us but they are helpers for us. Creation is a source of joy and delight to God and we're supposed to share in that. They are given to us that we would share it and care for it.
What does this have to do with us? Humans are created for the good of creation, not to be despots but to be household servants within this realm, those who represent God's presence within this realm. It isn't a picture of the man in the centre and everything else around him, he is there to care for and fulfil the world and creation mandate.
Adam is created from adamah, from mother earth.
Man and woman are intervolved with one another not just involved but intertwined. We are distinguished in a way that means you can never understand one without reference to another. One note on it's own is lacking and means very little but placed alongside and within a symphony it becomes charged.
We tend to think of the standard unit of humanity as being the individual. But the SI unit of humanity in scripture is man and woman made in the image of God. Male and female are akin to to magnetic poles structuring time always in reference to one another.
Humanity is irreducibly two, it cannot be broken down.
We live in a society that tries to have universal principles. Money. We want universally understood terms of meaning.
Two hands of humanity, we feel lacking without both hands
Two eyes of humanity, we lose perspective with only one eye
The Bible doesn't say that the man should be the head... it says he is the head. The question is is the man going to be the head in a way that's good or in a way that beats people down.
Guardian: only 3% of articles and books on subjects of gender mention motherhood.
When we detach ourselves from the physical and gritty reality of life we lose so much of God's good creation.
God is the father, the earth is the mother that Adam has come from.
What do father's do with their sons? They teach them their trade. God teaches Adam the trade of creating, of filling and forming. God makes adam a participant in his creating.
Not good to be alone is not a statement of loneliness, it is that man needs a partner. Adam can form but he can't fill without eve, he can't give life, he can't give the future, he can't bring the perfection that God has planned. In creating the woman he creates her and creates the realm of fellowship and communion, presence.
Man is meant to serve the earth, to be it's servant to care for his mother.
Headship. We see it as being 'when things go wrong, that's when we see headship.' Adam's headship in Genesis however isn't meant o be over the woman but for the woman so that she can go out and fill the world. He is there to empower her. For Christ to be the head of the church, does that mean that he is the 'boss' of the church? Eph. 1 says: 'he put all things under christ;'s feet and gave him to be all things... to the church.' He does that for the benefit and building up of his bride. It isn't about two people loving each other but it's the way that God wants us to participate in his pattern of creation.
The forming and filling pattern is the relationship between christ and spirit. There is a deep parallel in scripture between the Holy Spirit and women. The woman coming out of his side, like a bride being presented to his groom.
Imagine Adam naming the animals and then suddenly breaking out into song.
The Sabbath book of the Bible is the song of songs. Not as two people opposed to one another but as two people joined together in rest.
God's answer to our questions may seem strange but we may need to revisit our question again.
Q&A
Wealth comes from the word 'weal' - it has to do with our well being. Our society has become very good and generating money but not much wealth for our families and households.
500 years ago the home would have been the centre of production, of education. When we talk about returning to the home we're talking about developing the vision of the home as seen in the Scriptures.
If the man is the head, the woman is the heart, the one that everything revolves around.
Christ comes as the second Adam, what is the second Eve, it's the bride.
SESSION 4: Hannah Anderson - Anthropology
What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
Shift identity away from the language of image bearers but instead think of it in terms of our vocation.
Our confusion about our sex/gender is more than that, it reflects a confusion about our humanity. When we look at gender confusion it is a symptom of something larger.
Imago Dei has been used by people to mean different things. By some it's our reasoning capacity, by others it's about our ruling, or by others our social division between male and female. Image also has to do with representations. Pilate was representative of Caesar's rule, or coins and statues.
Jesus re coins: 'who's image is it?'
We bear the image of God.
Acts 17. In his logic Paul is calling them to see God as creator but also as Father. He is calling them to understand that they are his children in ways that the rest of creation is not.
Paul: 'he gives life and breath'
Genesis 2: 'he breathed into the man'
Image bearing is an act of inheritance and begetting.
It is the fact that a woman is a daughter of the creator father and a man the son that forms our bond with one another, that we are each under the authority of our father. In Paul's mind image bearing is linked to having children.
The significance of Jesus' baptism was that the Father stepped up and said 'I'm his dad' like a man does at the birth certification of a child. It is him saying 'he is made in my image.' I'm his dad. That's why after the flood when God reissues the cultural mandate he says 'but you may not shed the blood of man because he is made in my image.' The law of the jungle isn't to apply to humans, because they have a Father who has imaged them.
We need to think of being made in the image of God as a vocation to be his children, a family endeavour. It is a family business. There is unity in our vocation. Humanity and womanhood are not at odds with one another but are bound up holistically with one another.
We do come a certain sexed way. We should validate it and acknowledge it.
SESSION 5: Alastair Roberts
The garden is a kindergarten, it is a preschool. They will need to go out from the garden.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil; rule and wisdom. The knowledge of good and evil in scripture is associated with kings, Solomon requests it to help him rule this great people. In scripture we see a description of the child who has not yet attained this knowledge of good and evil.
Alastair: I believe that they would have one day been given the tree to eat but not yet, they needed to mature toward it. The problem was that they were like teenagers who wanted to steal their father's car keys before they were ready and as a result everything gets broken.
Why is the woman deceived? In part because she hasn't received the prohibition to eat the tree. Only Adam is given that command.
Adam is addressed singularly as 'you' he disobeyed outright whereas she was honestly deceived. God's rebuke 'you listened to your wife' is that he listened to her over God's command.
The women in the story of scripture outwit the serpent by outwitting them. The very person that the serpent deceives will be the one who deceives him.
Significance is redeemed.
Who are the women who make history? Who are the men? They are small people behaving faithfully and doing what God has called them to do. Done in the secret place, often small. Abraham is tied to his home as well, his identity is tied to his home as well.
God's work has long gestation periods.
God's history is not made where we think it would be made. The biblical account of history subverts so many of the ways we think history and power are made.
There is a strategic foregrounding of women to set history right. If we're going to be a society/church that promotes and honours women it isn't that we mustn't just get them up to do the things that men usually do. We mustn't idealise the societies we see in scripture, they are dysfunctional, but grace is at work! The story of the gospels begin with women.
Joseph (Jesus' dad) is a model for masculinity. We see women at key points, associated with Jesus' body, the gospels are teaching us something here not that we must fit everyone into this model of how we value people. Notice, listen, pay attention, where does God place his attention, where does God act? Not where we think he would. Life as it is seen by the eyes of the flesh or faith?
As people of faith we should be people who protect and strengthen seeds of faith.
Application: Church
How can we reorder the church so that it isn't primarily about what's done at the front but about what's being done in the life of the church.
Joseph played the role of a husband in a way that took the spotlight off him.
Our societies values are so mixed up and messed up that until we get our value systems reordered by the Bible we're not able to answer our questions of application.
SESSION 6: Hannah Anderson : Ecclesiology
Selection of quotes from a variety of authors to show the historic nature of the discussion.
The conversation about women's roles is not a new one. The questions and pressures people are articulating are common.
It requires imagination and creativity but we are not without a host of witnesses. We are not grappling with this on our own.
NB: when we say 'gender' we often just mean 'women'.
True complementarity isn't just focused on the role of women. The future of complementarity advances in a setting where churches believe that we're on mission. It's going to be churches that have this drive of mission are going to pick up this conversation with that in mind. Asking: how do I mobilise the differences between men and women to reach that goal.
Bride of Christ - 2 John: the elect lady and her children a term for the church.
Think of ferns: each little leaflet mirrors the pattern of the larger leaf but it'd be silly if a leaflet said of itself 'I'm the real deal!' yet that's what we do about our families within the family.
Household and mission need to be rejoined. Building the estate.
When the household has mission then every member is valuable to it.
If we can begin to understand that the household of God is tasked with mission to make every member of it fruitful, it's going to answer a lot of questions about where men and women fit?
When Paul speaks to what people should do in the household of God whether overseers or leading women they are strikingly similar.
We have different practices based on our 'house rules' of church life. Just like playing cards at a friends house, you play by the house rules there. It will look different depending on the way fathers operate in each house.
If we don't give attention to this conversation we will inevitably just adopt cultural norms. Because, isn't that what happens in our biological family? The outside culture shapes and fills everything unless we stop and critique it. We, in our own contexts, depending on our ecclesiology and systematics need to go through the hard work of capturing a vision of the church as a household that allows for both men and women to be parents of the household.
SESSION 7: Alastair Roberts : How we got here
The principles of the sexual, morality of our culture:
1) Sexual acts do not have intrinsic meanings or purposes. The act has whatever meaning you want to put on it, they need not involve the making of one flesh, meaningless sex is a genuine possibility
2) sexuality is a subjective self and intrinsic in who we are. Christian opposition to non-marital sexual acts push against the prevailing
3) Sexual agents are autonomous, rights bearing individuals. Appropriate sexual relations presuppose equal in their agency and no imbalance of power between them. Polygamy isn't where we'll go but polyamory is. Because polygamy has an inequality of power in it.
4) freely giving consent is the watchword for sexual relationships. When advocates of traditional sexual ethics oppose same-sex relations or others are seen to opposing this deeply held belief. Christians believe in consent but it goes further than just consent. We need to think about whether this is for the best for both parties.
You will never win an argument with your spouse because as you fight you are fighting against your own best interest.
5) Beyond the prevention of harm sex should be beyond the
There are important good principles here. Emphasis on autonomy overrides the possibility of seeing someone as objects.
We are not trying to return the past, rather we should be drawing people toward a vision that is greater than anything we have in the past or present. Companionship in a marriage has never been emphasised as much as it is now. For most marriages in the past that was not a reality. We have something new that we should celebrate.
Marriage creates a space for commitment that isn't just about our autonomous bargaining power, what we can get for ourselves. Every single one of us feels these changes. We have all experienced divorce in our own lives, whether ourselves or friends or as children. Abuse, divorce etc. are very powerful realities. We find ourselevs in this wasteland left by the destruction of sin.
Being sexual individuals is more basic than being male or female, engaged as consumers or self-realisers and radical choosers.
Consider the rise of divorce: the family is no longer something passing on from one generation to another, it is something that might dissolve. The home is gone. That is significant.
We are bound up in time on different axis: inward, outward, backward and forward (where time is concerned), we can be extended on each one of those axis. If you can't keep promises you're not connected ot the future. Ina . society where people are not assisted in keeping their promises we can't build forward and extend who we are to the generation where we won't be.
Abraham is told that for 400 years his people will be in slavery and then they'll be brought back. What does it take for a man to be able to look that far into the future?
Complementarity isn't that women should stay at home and men should go out to work, but rather than both men and women should be rooted in the home.
Pornography. Every woman is now going to be compared to 100 of other women who exist to act out male fantasies and have nothing to do with true womanhood.
Abraham's world is world where people are 'fucked or fucking others' and it's an act of violence, that's all it is. It is an ugly reality. Sex in our society becomes a form of play. Sex is meant to be an act of sacrifice.
Results: loss of any sort of weight where sex and procreation have been detached.
Astronauts: 7 dawns in a single day, muscles weakening.
Modern society is like that. We're having these relationships in zero gravity. It's why we struggle to define masculinity or femininity.
We end up with a pursuit of a superficial manliness or femininity. We construct masks to hide the insecurity. We become actors, constantly representing ourselves. Anything we say on facebook is a form of self-branding that is weightless. Internet: all detached individuals trying to appear in the right way, it changes how we see others and ourselves, how we relate to ourselves. Mirrors in the rainforest for example. On the internet we are constantly preoccupied with the representation of ourselves, it's a deep fragilisation of identity.
Such a society will struggle (and that isn't surprising) to understand many of the things we're talking about.
To be a son: privilege, responsibility, authority, power, family name, honour, duty
In the NT the son: is the adult son, the one who does his father's business, like John from the cross, the son provides for his parents.
In our world is means almost nothing and especially if you're an adult and unmarried. Singleness can be so disorientating for us therefore.
In the church: What it means to be a son of the church is a powerful thing. They do the work of the household and are engaged in its business.
Things become weak when we don't put any weight on them - and that's why marriage has weakened so much, because we don't use it for anything.
It's the same for churches. Get a mission to go for, otherwise you'll just create a drifting community of believers who become consumers.
Family and sex. The family is where the children are raised in the faith.
The family isn't meant to be a private huddle of exclusivity but rivers that extend out to give life to the world around it.
Michel Houellebecq:
https://aviewofthewest.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/4/7/11477003/the_elementary_particles.pdf
Where are the deepest wounds we bear? Born in our bodies and guts, our bodies need God's grace, we feel violated in our bodies. Our bodies are where we feel mortality, death and pain, where we feel the judgement of other people. That is what we feel so deeply.
A long excursion into the significance of our bodies in human relationships and the gospel.
SESSION 8: ANDREW
Complementarity is immensely important in the context of understanding the Christian faith. If you don't hold to complementarity generally then it's going to be very hard to resist anything that the sexual revolution throws at you.
The key is championing complementarity.
The future is beautiful but is also different.
We are going to need different ways of trying to land this.
The acts in a play illustration: we have had Acts 1 & 2 with their various scenes, now we've had Act 3 scene 1. We know how the play will end but how we get from here to there is for us to work out and fill in the gaps between here and there.
The first and best questions aren't always the 'so what does this look like in the church.'
Reflections on how we should land on the practise of how we should apply them:
We ought to see the church more as a household and family rather than a workplace and organisation. God has put us in families (church not just nuclear) and we should work and live mindful of them. This cashes out in seven ways:
All theology is contextual. No theology is done in a vacuum.
Complementarity : a relationship or situation where two or three different things improve or emphasis one another's different qualities. Represents Christian orthodoxy even if we disagree how we can work that in the local church. Complementarity = beautiful difference.
Complementarianism : is different has taken on a narrowerer application of complementarity.
Complementarity is a word that Christians on all sides can use to describe our position on male and female.
Creation. There is a complementarity in everything. Jewish
Abolishing the difference between heaven and earth has led to a society that looks to abolish the difference between male and female. We are not wholly the same and not wholly different.
Camille Paglia on difference and harmony:
Female / male
Earth / sky
Land / Rain
Internal / External
Invisible / Visible
Curves / Lines
Cyclical / Linear
Eastern / Western
Dinoysianan / Apollonian
Chaos / Order
Chtnonian / Structured
Cycilcal / Linear
Body / Head
Nature / Society
Pagan / Judeo-Christian
Camille's understanding is that the Christian vision of difference won and that that was good for women. In the Christian vision of reality, polarities like these are ultimately reconciled within the Godhead.
The Christian vision is of harmony and not conflict.
Jen Wilkins:
Genesis. God declares not good and then, before he creates eve, parades the animals in front of man for naming. For Adam, this is
Before Eve is prepared for Adam, Adam needs to be prepared for Eve. Adam's 'at last, she is bone from my bone', is a statement of declaration that honours the sameness of men and women. The first word in scripture is that we are same. Empathy for one another comes from the starting point of 'this person is just like me.' Focusing so much on our difference leads to an objectification 'mars and venus.'
Let's talk about what's not in this story. God doesn't create a buddy for Adam.
There is no such thing as a church where the men or women thrive and the other doesn't. They may give the appearance of thriving but it doesn't happen.
Root the difference in biology, what's a 'trans-culutral' difference. If we start with biology it stops us saying things that are stupid:
- Men have physical dominance. On the whole they are physically stronger. That's the context of 1 Peter, not emotional or intellectual difference. Men outgrow vulnerability as they age, women do not.
Women / Men difference:
- support - report
- relationship - individuality
- asking questions - avoid question
- cooperation - assert
- holistic - focused
- consensus - orders
- relate - resolve
Think of the difference between men and women as the difference between a lion and an ant. Ants are team and together players, lions may go with others but know they can go alone. At that's why women go to the toilet together! It's how vulnerability affects a woman's psyche.
Moral.
Men and women are both moral but how they process morality is different.
Women tend to base morality on relationship but men focus on outcome.
Emotions.
Use them differently. One is more like the women are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety than men. Most women internalise stress, men find something to hit with a stick, they externalise pressure. Use our emotions in different ways.
Think about the way women understand the gospel in ways that embody the gospel. Men only bleed when something is wrong, but women every 28 days bleed, that has a profound affect on how men and women understand things.
What does the church need from women?
- Their unique perspective. Women got the vote in 1920 but weren't allowed to serve on jury boards until 1960. Since getting the vote we have fairer divorce laws, domestic laws have come to fore, women's health... During WWI more American women died in child birth than American men died on the battlefield. We pass through life as embodied males and embodied females. If all input I'm getting in my church is from men think what gaps I may have! Women are going to have eyes for the powerless. They'll see things that we think are secondarily important but are crucial.
- We need women's relational capital.
- We need their visible leadership. How visible? As visible as your churches complimentarity allows. We need to make participation as easy as possible for women in leadership. It's very important for the next generation of women coming along but also men.
What women need from the church?
- To be shepherded. We disciple them as though they're exactly the same. Women can gather as women. What trends in the marketplace are attracting women? Do you know anything about essential oils? Can you name 10 dominant female voices? Women are looking for mothers in the church and if they don't find them in your church they will look outside your church. Need mothers.
- Need to be leveraged. Our practice on complimentarity is broken and a lot of women assume our theology is broken.
- Actively help them to find their voices. That means, we should hire them. Understand that the barriers for women in the church are many. Women will volunteer and volunteer and volunteer until Jesus comes again. Will you dignify her by commending her publicly?
Physical dominance is a form of privilege. Because men have physical dominanece they have used it to conquer. There's a reason why you see men in power and a reason why 1 in 4 women have been victims of sexual harassment. Just by virtue of being an embody male you have privilege. How will you use it?
Livy:
Complimentarity was best understood by her in thinking through the metaphor of an orchestra. Difference exists and even the potential for bands within the various instruments exists: a string quartet or a brass band. But God's design isn't for strings and brass only but for an orchestra where they work together.
Complimentarity is less about conflict but instead is about the harmony of one piece of music.
SESSION 2: Hannah Anderson
Society, History & Culture
What do society, history and culture have to do with the discussion on complementarity?
Is gender a social construct?
Genesis: God creates engendered sexes. From a scriptural standpoint there is a deep connection between our creation and our cultural mandate. there is no society without male and females expressing themselves in community together. If we do not have a vision of the complementarity of male and female, we don't even have a society. Our conversations about these things can't be divorced from society.
BOOK: Nate Collins: Almost Invisible.
Part of building society's that are complementarity are building societies where you know who you shouldn't have sex with. We have cut off part of how men and women should relate to one another because we removed those restrictions in our society. Genesis 2 is about sending the man and woman out into the world to form a society where they act and live alongside each other.
Gender cannot be separated from all of the other things that are happening in a society.
One of the main ways that we recognise the influence of new culturally acceptable ideas is through second wave feminism.
Society and gender work together as a puzzle fitting into one another.
A Rubix cube.
A completed cube is society as God intended it to be, it is all the pieces doing what they are supposed to do. But that is how a rubix cube comes when you buy it, but then your children get hold of it and mess it up and you have to try and resolve it. Therein lies the issue for discussions on gender.
There 43 quintillion ways for a rubix cube to be messed up and then solved. Society has that many variations to it as well. We mustn't compare one society with another and think one is better than another, they are just messed up differently and so require a particular and different way of solving them each one. We compare ourselves to the word of God not to each other, the past or other societies.
- The first thing that a just society will do is honour both of the genders, with the responsibility and the privileges that come with that. Have a vision and mindset for the vision and maturity of women.
- A just society will honour their authority that comes with that. They're both privileged and responsible for their authority as well. There are many different forms of authority based on our different responsibilities and if we don't have a vision for how a woman can have authority then we are not creating a just society.
- Honour their work as image bearers. Both of their works were also cursed. If we don't have a vision of work for women then they 'become a nuisance'
We cannot neglect the value of our differences. If we do then women are not going to be valued for the vulnerability.
1 Peter 3:7 In the context of roles. Honour them not just because they're human beings but because they're women. Understand that even though you are not like them, I want you to learn to value something that you may not initially value. Honour our differences. Honour women not because they resemble men but because they are women. The same thing is true for men. We must honour men for their manhood not because of the ways they're like a woman.
What does all this mean for our witness in the world?
We see a different vision in the scripture than we see from the world all around us.
What we've done in the church in the wake of the cultural advance on demolishing gender is that we have built a retaining wall and said 'we're going to hold back the flood' (by upholding male only roles.
The sexual revolution is over. When we saw the #metoo movement it was as though the game was over and we saw the reaping of the whirlwind that was sown in the SRev. There is a sense of distrust of male sexuality. Our culture has mishandled our sexuality and now people are in a position of fear about how they relate to one another.
Christianity gives us an ethic and vision for union and community that something is going on that is larger than anything else we're part of. Vulnerability is not a liability. You won't find this communal ethic anywhere else! The gospel gives a vision for how strength and weakness can complement each other.
Alastair Roberts
Shelve questions. The Bible isn't primarily a set of proof texts on which we can build our casess. Once the authority of scripture is so 'atomised' we fid ourselves throwing up our hands and saying 'who can tell what we should believe about these things!'
Our approach to scripture shouldn't be to try and win an argument over our neighbour but instead to pay close attention ourselves. Everything must begin by trying to hear what God is saying to us.
In Medieval commentaries the book Song of Solomon is treated as the Holy of Holies.
Step back and ask questions before stepping forward to specifics. Pay attention however not just to scripture but to the place we're coming from as contemporary society. There is a way that we perceive the world that has been trained by all the things we have and live around, mass produced everythings everywhere that isn't connected to a deep world. The Bible talks about blood, sweat, menstruation, hooves, hair, bodily emissions in the night, specific rivers, memorial stones, wheat and barley harvests. Wombs, foreskins, skin diseases... It is a very different book from the sort of book we're looking for.
The Bible pays a lot of attention to the families people are connected to whereas we see people as interchangeable, individuals. The Bible is concerned with particulars, sons of and daughters of...
We live in a world of abstractions, shallow, airless and relatively weightless world. Detached from the soil of reality.
The contemporary fixation with whether or not men and women are different would have struck the original readers of the Bible as odd. Like asking which is better the cello or the violin, is a strange question. But in a society that values economic value and productivity we approach the Bible with those questions. It might be a valid concern but it isn't the same concern as people had in the past.
Genesis 1: It is a literary account. It is a story that has a rhythm and pattern to it that we need to pay attention to as it's pattern is part of the meaning. It's a dance, it's an orchestra it's an assembling of all the different parts into a whole.
Two sets of three days;
Forming, naming, taming, ruling
Filling, collecting, communion
The whole story begins with time. The light in the first day isn't primarily a division of light and dark, it's a separation of night and day, it's a time based one. Then on to more times, seasons etc. Time isn't just day and night but yearly, seasonal and finally, the rest sabbath day. There are patterns and dynamisms to creation. It isn't just a bare structure of systems but of life. As God fills there are different things he does. Creation partakes then in God's own creation ability it teems it recreates. Forming basic structures and filling.
They are all good in their particular parts and then very good.
We read it from the persepctive of human beings, we're the centre of the universe and everything rotates around us. But, human beings are late on the scene. Almost all the other creatures are well settled in to their places before we turn up. We don't make or pay much attention to the animals but the animals are good, good in themselves, not just because they can be food or pets.
Animals are helpers for us. They are not comparable to us or suited for us but they are helpers for us. Creation is a source of joy and delight to God and we're supposed to share in that. They are given to us that we would share it and care for it.
What does this have to do with us? Humans are created for the good of creation, not to be despots but to be household servants within this realm, those who represent God's presence within this realm. It isn't a picture of the man in the centre and everything else around him, he is there to care for and fulfil the world and creation mandate.
Adam is created from adamah, from mother earth.
Man and woman are intervolved with one another not just involved but intertwined. We are distinguished in a way that means you can never understand one without reference to another. One note on it's own is lacking and means very little but placed alongside and within a symphony it becomes charged.
We tend to think of the standard unit of humanity as being the individual. But the SI unit of humanity in scripture is man and woman made in the image of God. Male and female are akin to to magnetic poles structuring time always in reference to one another.
Humanity is irreducibly two, it cannot be broken down.
We live in a society that tries to have universal principles. Money. We want universally understood terms of meaning.
Two hands of humanity, we feel lacking without both hands
Two eyes of humanity, we lose perspective with only one eye
The Bible doesn't say that the man should be the head... it says he is the head. The question is is the man going to be the head in a way that's good or in a way that beats people down.
Guardian: only 3% of articles and books on subjects of gender mention motherhood.
When we detach ourselves from the physical and gritty reality of life we lose so much of God's good creation.
God is the father, the earth is the mother that Adam has come from.
What do father's do with their sons? They teach them their trade. God teaches Adam the trade of creating, of filling and forming. God makes adam a participant in his creating.
Not good to be alone is not a statement of loneliness, it is that man needs a partner. Adam can form but he can't fill without eve, he can't give life, he can't give the future, he can't bring the perfection that God has planned. In creating the woman he creates her and creates the realm of fellowship and communion, presence.
Man is meant to serve the earth, to be it's servant to care for his mother.
Headship. We see it as being 'when things go wrong, that's when we see headship.' Adam's headship in Genesis however isn't meant o be over the woman but for the woman so that she can go out and fill the world. He is there to empower her. For Christ to be the head of the church, does that mean that he is the 'boss' of the church? Eph. 1 says: 'he put all things under christ;'s feet and gave him to be all things... to the church.' He does that for the benefit and building up of his bride. It isn't about two people loving each other but it's the way that God wants us to participate in his pattern of creation.
The forming and filling pattern is the relationship between christ and spirit. There is a deep parallel in scripture between the Holy Spirit and women. The woman coming out of his side, like a bride being presented to his groom.
Imagine Adam naming the animals and then suddenly breaking out into song.
The Sabbath book of the Bible is the song of songs. Not as two people opposed to one another but as two people joined together in rest.
God's answer to our questions may seem strange but we may need to revisit our question again.
Q&A
Wealth comes from the word 'weal' - it has to do with our well being. Our society has become very good and generating money but not much wealth for our families and households.
500 years ago the home would have been the centre of production, of education. When we talk about returning to the home we're talking about developing the vision of the home as seen in the Scriptures.
If the man is the head, the woman is the heart, the one that everything revolves around.
Christ comes as the second Adam, what is the second Eve, it's the bride.
SESSION 4: Hannah Anderson - Anthropology
What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
Shift identity away from the language of image bearers but instead think of it in terms of our vocation.
Our confusion about our sex/gender is more than that, it reflects a confusion about our humanity. When we look at gender confusion it is a symptom of something larger.
Imago Dei has been used by people to mean different things. By some it's our reasoning capacity, by others it's about our ruling, or by others our social division between male and female. Image also has to do with representations. Pilate was representative of Caesar's rule, or coins and statues.
Jesus re coins: 'who's image is it?'
We bear the image of God.
Acts 17. In his logic Paul is calling them to see God as creator but also as Father. He is calling them to understand that they are his children in ways that the rest of creation is not.
Paul: 'he gives life and breath'
Genesis 2: 'he breathed into the man'
Image bearing is an act of inheritance and begetting.
It is the fact that a woman is a daughter of the creator father and a man the son that forms our bond with one another, that we are each under the authority of our father. In Paul's mind image bearing is linked to having children.
The significance of Jesus' baptism was that the Father stepped up and said 'I'm his dad' like a man does at the birth certification of a child. It is him saying 'he is made in my image.' I'm his dad. That's why after the flood when God reissues the cultural mandate he says 'but you may not shed the blood of man because he is made in my image.' The law of the jungle isn't to apply to humans, because they have a Father who has imaged them.
We need to think of being made in the image of God as a vocation to be his children, a family endeavour. It is a family business. There is unity in our vocation. Humanity and womanhood are not at odds with one another but are bound up holistically with one another.
We do come a certain sexed way. We should validate it and acknowledge it.
SESSION 5: Alastair Roberts
The garden is a kindergarten, it is a preschool. They will need to go out from the garden.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil; rule and wisdom. The knowledge of good and evil in scripture is associated with kings, Solomon requests it to help him rule this great people. In scripture we see a description of the child who has not yet attained this knowledge of good and evil.
Alastair: I believe that they would have one day been given the tree to eat but not yet, they needed to mature toward it. The problem was that they were like teenagers who wanted to steal their father's car keys before they were ready and as a result everything gets broken.
Why is the woman deceived? In part because she hasn't received the prohibition to eat the tree. Only Adam is given that command.
Adam is addressed singularly as 'you' he disobeyed outright whereas she was honestly deceived. God's rebuke 'you listened to your wife' is that he listened to her over God's command.
The women in the story of scripture outwit the serpent by outwitting them. The very person that the serpent deceives will be the one who deceives him.
Significance is redeemed.
Who are the women who make history? Who are the men? They are small people behaving faithfully and doing what God has called them to do. Done in the secret place, often small. Abraham is tied to his home as well, his identity is tied to his home as well.
God's work has long gestation periods.
God's history is not made where we think it would be made. The biblical account of history subverts so many of the ways we think history and power are made.
There is a strategic foregrounding of women to set history right. If we're going to be a society/church that promotes and honours women it isn't that we mustn't just get them up to do the things that men usually do. We mustn't idealise the societies we see in scripture, they are dysfunctional, but grace is at work! The story of the gospels begin with women.
Joseph (Jesus' dad) is a model for masculinity. We see women at key points, associated with Jesus' body, the gospels are teaching us something here not that we must fit everyone into this model of how we value people. Notice, listen, pay attention, where does God place his attention, where does God act? Not where we think he would. Life as it is seen by the eyes of the flesh or faith?
As people of faith we should be people who protect and strengthen seeds of faith.
Application: Church
How can we reorder the church so that it isn't primarily about what's done at the front but about what's being done in the life of the church.
Joseph played the role of a husband in a way that took the spotlight off him.
Our societies values are so mixed up and messed up that until we get our value systems reordered by the Bible we're not able to answer our questions of application.
SESSION 6: Hannah Anderson : Ecclesiology
Selection of quotes from a variety of authors to show the historic nature of the discussion.
The conversation about women's roles is not a new one. The questions and pressures people are articulating are common.
It requires imagination and creativity but we are not without a host of witnesses. We are not grappling with this on our own.
NB: when we say 'gender' we often just mean 'women'.
True complementarity isn't just focused on the role of women. The future of complementarity advances in a setting where churches believe that we're on mission. It's going to be churches that have this drive of mission are going to pick up this conversation with that in mind. Asking: how do I mobilise the differences between men and women to reach that goal.
Bride of Christ - 2 John: the elect lady and her children a term for the church.
Household and mission need to be rejoined. Building the estate.
When the household has mission then every member is valuable to it.
If we can begin to understand that the household of God is tasked with mission to make every member of it fruitful, it's going to answer a lot of questions about where men and women fit?
When Paul speaks to what people should do in the household of God whether overseers or leading women they are strikingly similar.
We have different practices based on our 'house rules' of church life. Just like playing cards at a friends house, you play by the house rules there. It will look different depending on the way fathers operate in each house.
If we don't give attention to this conversation we will inevitably just adopt cultural norms. Because, isn't that what happens in our biological family? The outside culture shapes and fills everything unless we stop and critique it. We, in our own contexts, depending on our ecclesiology and systematics need to go through the hard work of capturing a vision of the church as a household that allows for both men and women to be parents of the household.
SESSION 7: Alastair Roberts : How we got here
The principles of the sexual, morality of our culture:
1) Sexual acts do not have intrinsic meanings or purposes. The act has whatever meaning you want to put on it, they need not involve the making of one flesh, meaningless sex is a genuine possibility
2) sexuality is a subjective self and intrinsic in who we are. Christian opposition to non-marital sexual acts push against the prevailing
3) Sexual agents are autonomous, rights bearing individuals. Appropriate sexual relations presuppose equal in their agency and no imbalance of power between them. Polygamy isn't where we'll go but polyamory is. Because polygamy has an inequality of power in it.
4) freely giving consent is the watchword for sexual relationships. When advocates of traditional sexual ethics oppose same-sex relations or others are seen to opposing this deeply held belief. Christians believe in consent but it goes further than just consent. We need to think about whether this is for the best for both parties.
You will never win an argument with your spouse because as you fight you are fighting against your own best interest.
5) Beyond the prevention of harm sex should be beyond the
There are important good principles here. Emphasis on autonomy overrides the possibility of seeing someone as objects.
We are not trying to return the past, rather we should be drawing people toward a vision that is greater than anything we have in the past or present. Companionship in a marriage has never been emphasised as much as it is now. For most marriages in the past that was not a reality. We have something new that we should celebrate.
Marriage creates a space for commitment that isn't just about our autonomous bargaining power, what we can get for ourselves. Every single one of us feels these changes. We have all experienced divorce in our own lives, whether ourselves or friends or as children. Abuse, divorce etc. are very powerful realities. We find ourselevs in this wasteland left by the destruction of sin.
Being sexual individuals is more basic than being male or female, engaged as consumers or self-realisers and radical choosers.
Consider the rise of divorce: the family is no longer something passing on from one generation to another, it is something that might dissolve. The home is gone. That is significant.
We are bound up in time on different axis: inward, outward, backward and forward (where time is concerned), we can be extended on each one of those axis. If you can't keep promises you're not connected ot the future. Ina . society where people are not assisted in keeping their promises we can't build forward and extend who we are to the generation where we won't be.
Abraham is told that for 400 years his people will be in slavery and then they'll be brought back. What does it take for a man to be able to look that far into the future?
Complementarity isn't that women should stay at home and men should go out to work, but rather than both men and women should be rooted in the home.
Pornography. Every woman is now going to be compared to 100 of other women who exist to act out male fantasies and have nothing to do with true womanhood.
Abraham's world is world where people are 'fucked or fucking others' and it's an act of violence, that's all it is. It is an ugly reality. Sex in our society becomes a form of play. Sex is meant to be an act of sacrifice.
Results: loss of any sort of weight where sex and procreation have been detached.
Astronauts: 7 dawns in a single day, muscles weakening.
Modern society is like that. We're having these relationships in zero gravity. It's why we struggle to define masculinity or femininity.
We end up with a pursuit of a superficial manliness or femininity. We construct masks to hide the insecurity. We become actors, constantly representing ourselves. Anything we say on facebook is a form of self-branding that is weightless. Internet: all detached individuals trying to appear in the right way, it changes how we see others and ourselves, how we relate to ourselves. Mirrors in the rainforest for example. On the internet we are constantly preoccupied with the representation of ourselves, it's a deep fragilisation of identity.
Such a society will struggle (and that isn't surprising) to understand many of the things we're talking about.
To be a son: privilege, responsibility, authority, power, family name, honour, duty
In the NT the son: is the adult son, the one who does his father's business, like John from the cross, the son provides for his parents.
In our world is means almost nothing and especially if you're an adult and unmarried. Singleness can be so disorientating for us therefore.
In the church: What it means to be a son of the church is a powerful thing. They do the work of the household and are engaged in its business.
Things become weak when we don't put any weight on them - and that's why marriage has weakened so much, because we don't use it for anything.
It's the same for churches. Get a mission to go for, otherwise you'll just create a drifting community of believers who become consumers.
Family and sex. The family is where the children are raised in the faith.
The family isn't meant to be a private huddle of exclusivity but rivers that extend out to give life to the world around it.
Michel Houellebecq:
https://aviewofthewest.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/4/7/11477003/the_elementary_particles.pdf
Children existed solely to inherit a man's trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That's all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there's nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven't a clue what he might do when he's older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value -he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That's how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless.Your marriage isn't just something for this age alone, it's bearing a treasure that will last into the future. See our relationships against this horizon. We are 'heirs together' of the grace of life.
Where are the deepest wounds we bear? Born in our bodies and guts, our bodies need God's grace, we feel violated in our bodies. Our bodies are where we feel mortality, death and pain, where we feel the judgement of other people. That is what we feel so deeply.
A long excursion into the significance of our bodies in human relationships and the gospel.
SESSION 8: ANDREW
Complementarity is immensely important in the context of understanding the Christian faith. If you don't hold to complementarity generally then it's going to be very hard to resist anything that the sexual revolution throws at you.
The key is championing complementarity.
The future is beautiful but is also different.
We are going to need different ways of trying to land this.
The acts in a play illustration: we have had Acts 1 & 2 with their various scenes, now we've had Act 3 scene 1. We know how the play will end but how we get from here to there is for us to work out and fill in the gaps between here and there.
The first and best questions aren't always the 'so what does this look like in the church.'
Reflections on how we should land on the practise of how we should apply them:
We ought to see the church more as a household and family rather than a workplace and organisation. God has put us in families (church not just nuclear) and we should work and live mindful of them. This cashes out in seven ways:
- Evangelism means bringing to birth rather than recruitment. That involves mothers and fathers. The natural language in scripture is familial image. We have desexualised the language of 'birth' as though it is a process of recruitment. New life and nurture gets us off on a better starting point. Paul sees himself as a father but also a mother 'I am in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.'
- Discipleship: we need to think of it as parenting and not orientation training. It is a familial image rather than a business one. When you enter an organisation you are oriented for a week or so to 'get you up to speed' and we have tried to map that onto the Christian life too. The process of bringing someone to maturity is part of what it means to be a parent.
- Relationships. We ought to see one another as siblings and not colleagues. We need to be in a setting where we don't lust after one another but where don't avoid one another either. Relate to women with the honour and respect you would with another woman. Men need to ask 'am I erecting needless barriers between me and women?'
- Home lives: our homes are 'households' of production and activity and power and influence. Our homes ought to be treated more like that than as though we are atomised workers, who go out, do a job and consume. It must be a question that we ask: is living in a nuclear setting where it's just our own family always best and right?
- Working: Work for the common good as stewards in the family of God not in the city of men.
- Governing the church. We need to think about this as fathers and mothers and not as managers or just leaders. (David Starling: uncorinthian leadership). Fathers are ones who defend the church and die for the church but don't necessarily need to be the ones who have all the ideas or who communicate all the ideas. 1 Timothy are fathers rather than mothers. Titus 1 he says the same things about eldership to show almost that it isn't just the context of Ephesus that made the difference to what he says. We may have swallowed the assumption that to be a visionary has to be a fathers job, or even that leading has to be a fathers job.
- Church: Being the church ought to be a family on mission and not primarily and organisation. Romans 16 is just as important for understanding what Romans is about. Listen to how he talks about the women. Greet one another with a holy kiss; regard one another as family members.
Sunday, 24 June 2018
Raising Leaders seminar stream
Hezekiah. An outstanding leader in his generation.
Stop trying to be the hero and start trying to release and make other leaders.
BOOK: The Hero Maker. Stop looking at yourself
We need to learn to bring through people to be themselves.
Why don’t I?
1- distraction : remember 2T2:2, consider the difference between football and rugby. Football is all about kicking the ball foward to get the glory. Rugby instead is about passing the ball backward in order that the person behind you can for further and you can add your weight to their advances.
2- the tyranny of the urgent : there’s a difference between delegating and developing leaders.
3- too small a vision : we think ‘I can do it, the vision is small enough for you to do on your own.’ / there’s a part of us that thinks if we’ve grown 10% in a year we’re doing alright, but that’s not the vision.
4- insecurity in a leader : a lot leaders are middle-aged men who find their value and meaning in ministry.
5- sin and self-centredness : we want to get the glory. Of course we want Jesus to get the glory, but with us standing next to him :)
HEADINGS to help us talk around these issues together:
1) Selection : 11 of the disciples came from Galilee. He chooses people who were constantly getting it wrong. Peter is the guy who thinks chopping off someone’s ear was an appropriate part of Christian ministry. Jesus basically saw Christian ministry as ‘hanging out with people’. Have we tipped the balance too far toward task and not enough toward people? Jesus was actually quite picky in ministry but it wasn’t based on gifting it was based on their willingness to learn. Jesus (in John 1), spends a of time telling people what he sees in them. He calls people what he sees in them. He sees the good in them. WE NEED TO GET BETTER at seeing things that aren’t wrong. We sometimes think, and get trained to think, that intelligence is measured in being able to spot what’s wrong. Instead Jesus is good at spotting what’s right. Finding fault is easy but seeing God’s grace is what’s needed and is what’s hard.
It all begins with seeing the good.
Eldership isn’t about monopolising leadership but about mobilising leadership.
Jesus chose. And so we get to choose, and release people into their destiny. Jesus chose 12 and reached the crowds.
WHO are yours?
- Jon, Matt, Ross, Martin, Polly, Shaun, Luke, Alex? Jason? Claire.
2) Association
We’re good at meetings, but Jesus was more committed to meet ups.
Jesus is the only person ever who could have done it all on his own. Jesus, himself, raised up others and spent time with them.
Examples for mistakes: raising up others to do what I want them to do rather than take some time with the people God’s put in front me for them, and to raise them up to do what they want and feel called to do.
Jesus in Matthew’s gospel spends the majority of his time with the few rather than the crowds. Jesus sees his ministry as being pouring himself into the few rather than reaching the mass crowds.
If you’re trying to do the 12 and the crowd, your 12 will get crowded out. Jesus: I’m going to invest my life in the few for the many.
We’re into programmes but Jesus seems to be into picnics. Hang out with people a lot.
3) Consecration
Devoting yourself to Jesus. When you raise up young leaders you realise early on that character is going to be a big issue. The world is fighting for our young guys and we’ve got to teach them that following Jesus requires us to give up everything.
It isn’t about being a perfect leader, it’s about being honest and not wearing any masks.
Challenge: Are we perusing popularity or holiness? Are we willing to address challenging things in people’s lives?
Consider the qualifications for eldership: ‘look at his kids.’ Has he had the courage to confront his own kids?
Jesus led people at their pace. He seems very patient with people.
4) Impartation
It gets a lot easier when people realise that they haven’t joined your club, instead this is about developing them. Jesus challenged them on their sin but then made it clear that he was there to help them. Jesus came to give himself to us as a gift. He came to serve us.
Jesus didn’t feed the 5000, it was the disciples who fed them. The parable should be named: ‘the disciples feed the 5000’ it’s key because it’s what we’re called to do. Jesus has given gifts to the church, why - so that ‘the church will be built up for works of service.’
The word for ‘to prepare the church for works of service’ is the same word as ‘make you fishers of men.’ Prepare men for works of service.
All we need to do is build the people in the church and let Jesus ‘build the church’.
Jesus is forever giving us away.
Consecration: Jesus tells them to give things up, but he’s given it up too. He turns water into wine but he doesn’t get drunk on it.
Christ’s love for the Father won over the disciples. Christ’s love in the disciples for one another, then one the world.
5) Demonstration
Jesus didn’t ask anyone to do something that he hadn’t first done himself.
6) Delegation
Helping others to do the work alongside you.
7) Supervision
John 3:22 ‘Jesus and his disciples went out into the judean countryside where he spent some time with them.’ ‘Spent time’ in Gk. = to rub off on them.
Jesus didn’t dump people in it. He didn’t send the twelve out until after two years. Then when he sends them out he gives them an extensive debrief of teaching. Jesus doesn’t send them out to relieve his own work load.
Jesus isn’t in a hurry to reach the crowds, instead he pours himself into the individual leader.
there is a danger to raise up loads of people and not really supervising any of them.
On-the-job training. Classroom settings aren’t the most effective. You can train someone in the barracks how t clean their rifle, and they’d be interested, but if you train them on the front line how to do it, they’d be really interested.
Succession should be how we live our lives.
Paul Tripp: Gospel-centred discipleship paper on addressing the heart.
8) Reproduction
Many of us might be quite good but if the culture of reproduction is lacking it won’t carry on beyond us.
Key that we’re not just trying to raise up leaders into a role and stop the leadership multiplication in the church if this person hasn’t got what leadership is about.
Fruitfulness is not ‘what can you achieve with your life?’ But what can others achieve through us? This is the Christian task, that’s key.
Someone asked Billy what would do again if you casual start over?
Billy Graham: Get a small group of 8-10-12 people around me and meet for a weeks and then release them...
Where’s our focus? Is it on what we can achieve in 2018 or are we playing a longer term game? How can 2025 can there be more people doing what I’m doing...
Getting people into leadership roles is not the end goal. Getting people into roles to understand that this (see all of the above!) is what we’re doing.
Michael Fletcher: shoulder tapping
‘I don’t want to recruit volunteers I want to recruit leaders.’ Don’t recruit doers, recruit leaders. Recruiting people to vision is what’s needed.
Wednesday, 18 April 2018
Kieren Dunn - Evangelism
How to be friendly:
1) Body language.
Communicating non-verbally:
1) Body language.
Communicating non-verbally:
- bill please
- pint please
- 'what did you say?'
- he's a loser
- I'm bored
- they smell
You can relax. Have relaxed body language.
Smile.
Eye contact.
How close you get to people. In the UK we have an invisible space around us about the length of a handshake.
Beware the zone of: flirty fishing :)
2) Talking and listening
Dale Carnegie: you can make more friends in two months by being interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
Listening is a skill but it also honours other people.
3) Asking open ended question.
4) Manners.
5) Don't be a miserable Christian.
Bear Grylls: Be the most enthusiastic person in the room
6) Don't be a weirdo.
John from unchurched background going to christian bbq and everyone was asked to go into kitchen and hold hands and sing bind us together.
7) Get a life!
Be interested in others but be interesting as well.
8) Always be prepared.
Carry tracts/alpha cards with you. Be prepared to give them out. Like an army soldier always being prepared to fire a rifle so we need to always be prepared to share something about the gospel.
Sharing Jesus' Story
Be away of the strength of the 'bridge' that's been built between you and the person you're speaking to. If your friendship is a '2 tonne' friendship, don't send over a 'gospel lorry' of 10 tonnes. Learn which bits to say and not say depending on who you're speaking to.
Monday, 12 March 2018
Identity notes and research
Identity:
Carl Truman: our cosmetic surgery or gender reassignment surgery displays bids 'for the total sovereignty of the individual with regard to personal identity.' We feel we ought to be able to choose who we are rather than being told who we are.
On identity linked to sexuality Rosaria Butterfield (Po-mo professor at uni and LGBT activist until she got saved) makes a good point:
Paganism and polytheism:
In the 1800s, Shelly averred that 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.'
James Hillman agreed and justified this Jungian restructuring of modern identity saying in effect:
We see the spread of this idea in a very subtle way:
As the Renaissance proceeded, the concern with personal greatness rapidly spread. In the Middle Ages, monks and masons could toil for generations on a single illuminated manuscript or a great cathedral, and no one would ever know of them. the individual author or artist was of no account - Soli Deo Gloria: to God alone belonged the glory.
But in the Renaissance all this changed. Authors and artists began to sign their works; the pride in personal greatness slowly began to displace the greatness and glory of God.
Modern selfhood is: God stripped out of our core that we might seek our identity in self-enthronement.
The resymbolisation of the Western Psyche:
There are other examples of resymbolisation. but this is the father of them all: the psychological transformation of God into self.
Resymbolisation in Jung.
As the Judaeo-Christian tradition has weakened, spiritually-starved people have progressively replaced the very specific symbol system of the Bible, upon which Western civilisation is founded, with various mostly Eastern and pagan imports.
Good & Evil
Eden and the Fall:
The Hebrew is better translated as 'deciding for yourselves what is good and what is evil.'
The displacement of God by self is therefore also the loss of a clear, revealed vision of good and evil. How can a mind ultimately driven by natural, selfish instincts possibly generated, on its own, a vision of perfect goodness?
Thus:
nature, that which simply is (the seen real) may point to but can never replace the revelation of what should be (the unseen real)...
...The vision of the holy is, as it were, the star that we cannot touch but which points the way. To follow this star is to stand firm in the knowledge that God is wholly good.
God's vision of the good is one wherein evil is nothing but God's absence, it is not his coequal. Hell is the total absence of God as heaven is his total presence; earthly hells are his relative absence as earthly heavens are his relative presence.
Rabbit Moshe Chaim Luzzato:
Here's a good quote that could be applied to many things:
Gnosticism. Gnostic thought lies in its claim that salvation may be attained through secret knowledge available only to an initiated elite.
Our word devil is cognate to the German zweifel, meaning doubt, literally 'two-cased'
Gnostic 'Salvation':
On the Bible's stories and against a purely 'psychological' reading:
Paganism and polytheism:
In polytheism, ancient or modern, each group has its own god.
The pagan pschyotheology that lurks behind Jungianism, and that has spread so widely within the church, is simply the psychologised worship of instinct.
Occult and secret-knowledge practices: divination, astrology and 'sorcery'. Originally the drugs used in their practice was to produce a heightened state of 'consciousness'.
Chapter 3: The effect on public morals
An excellent chapter on the psychology of demons, well worth reading again!
The demonic
In his doctoral thesis concerning his cousin, the medium, Jung claimed that the spirit personality which possessed her was actually a dissociated part of herself - indeed, a superior aspect of her personality of which she consciously unaware and which she never accepted as herself.
Jung started by defining 'complexes' as normal sub-personalities within the human psyche. He continued by pointing out how an archetype forms the nucleus, as it were, of every complex. Since each archetype is merely the 'image' (representation in consciousness) of its underlying instince, this is to say that every complex develops around an instinct. The instincts are inherited; the complexes 'flesh out' the instinct with actual experience.
Jung's archetypes are what the ancients referred to as 'gods'.
KEY:
Carl Truman: our cosmetic surgery or gender reassignment surgery displays bids 'for the total sovereignty of the individual with regard to personal identity.' We feel we ought to be able to choose who we are rather than being told who we are.
On identity linked to sexuality Rosaria Butterfield (Po-mo professor at uni and LGBT activist until she got saved) makes a good point:
Sin is our biggest enemy (not the particular ways we're tempted to sin). Original sin distorts us. Actual sin distracts us, and indwelling sin manipulates us. And by us I mean Christians. If we look at sin as merely making a mistake, then we just need a new iPhone app, and we don't need a saviour.Notes from: The Empty Self 'gnostic and Jungian Foundations of Modern Identity'
In keeping with his view that all aspects of human psychology were ultimately traceable to erotic frustrations of various kinds Freud tried to show that Leonardo's (da vinci) immense creativity arose out of an underlying homosexual conflict.However the answer to a lot of back and forth about the source and motive of Leonardo's greatness Jeffery Satinover notes:
In Leonardo we directly witness the only god there really is: human greatnessLeonardo was the very prototype of modern identify formation - identity rooted in personal grandeur
Paganism and polytheism:
In the 1800s, Shelly averred that 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.'
James Hillman agreed and justified this Jungian restructuring of modern identity saying in effect:
'There are many kinds of people and each type is governed by a different god. Each therefore has his own kind of sexuality, his own style of relationship, his own method of gaining fulfilment in work. You cannot judge a man, especially a gifted man, by the standards of one god; certainly not by the bourgeois, patriarchal standards of the so-called 'God of Israel.' Stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel, for we are such men as will burst the bonds of all monotheistic tyranny. Leonardo and we, his many modern simulacra, are an elite, priests of Horus the falcon-god.'In this way the door was opened to a resurgence of pagan ways of assessing and valuing human behaviour. We are not all subject to the same law of God; there are a variety of different moralities to which we may be subject, depending on to which 'god' we belong.
We see the spread of this idea in a very subtle way:
As the Renaissance proceeded, the concern with personal greatness rapidly spread. In the Middle Ages, monks and masons could toil for generations on a single illuminated manuscript or a great cathedral, and no one would ever know of them. the individual author or artist was of no account - Soli Deo Gloria: to God alone belonged the glory.
But in the Renaissance all this changed. Authors and artists began to sign their works; the pride in personal greatness slowly began to displace the greatness and glory of God.
Modern selfhood is: God stripped out of our core that we might seek our identity in self-enthronement.
The resymbolisation of the Western Psyche:
There are other examples of resymbolisation. but this is the father of them all: the psychological transformation of God into self.
Resymbolisation in Jung.
As the Judaeo-Christian tradition has weakened, spiritually-starved people have progressively replaced the very specific symbol system of the Bible, upon which Western civilisation is founded, with various mostly Eastern and pagan imports.
Good & Evil
Eden and the Fall:
The Hebrew is better translated as 'deciding for yourselves what is good and what is evil.'
The displacement of God by self is therefore also the loss of a clear, revealed vision of good and evil. How can a mind ultimately driven by natural, selfish instincts possibly generated, on its own, a vision of perfect goodness?
Thus:
nature, that which simply is (the seen real) may point to but can never replace the revelation of what should be (the unseen real)...
...The vision of the holy is, as it were, the star that we cannot touch but which points the way. To follow this star is to stand firm in the knowledge that God is wholly good.
God's vision of the good is one wherein evil is nothing but God's absence, it is not his coequal. Hell is the total absence of God as heaven is his total presence; earthly hells are his relative absence as earthly heavens are his relative presence.
Rabbit Moshe Chaim Luzzato:
...one must realise that true perfection is God's essence. every fault is merely the absence of his good and the concealment of his presence. The closeness of God and illumination of his presence is therefore the root and cause of every perfection that exists. The concealment of his presence, on the other hand, is the root and cause of every fault, the degree of deficiency depending on the degree of this concealment.Masculine and Feminine
As we have progressively abandoned the eternal, unseen Divine standard in favour of a sequence of transitory, visible, fallen ones, our capacity to discern good from evil, truth from lie, has diminished. In like fashion the discrimination between the true feminine and the true masculine has been lost. Human beings, as individuals or as groups, are inevitably a mixture of masculine and feminine qualities, as of good and evil ones. no one is purely masculine or feminine. But now we have lost the ability to distinguish these qualities and rightly value them. The result has been a widespread disordering of relations between men and women. And because the relationship between man and woman is the basis of the family, the destruction fo the family is progressing rapidly.The ancient Chinese understood this as well:
The Family shows the laws operative within the household that, transferred to outside life, keep the state and the world in order.The traditional family structure is associated with the lowest levels of psychopathology and with the highest levels of human happiness and accomplishment.
A society in which there is a large proportion of stable, traditional families - that is, with a mother who remains permanently married to a father both of whom are their children's first and only parents - will produce the highest percentage of relatively healthy individuals. the smaller the proportion of such families, the higher the rates of alcoholism and drug addiction, suicide, homosexuality, pornography, promiscuity and crime. Even physical health is profoundly affect by the presence or absence of stable family structure.Chapter 2: Gnosticism
Here's a good quote that could be applied to many things:
Heresies perish not with their authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise again in another.
Sit Thomas Browne'Arethusa' is a (mythic) river said to start in Greece and dive under the sea to rise up again in Sicily.
Gnosticism. Gnostic thought lies in its claim that salvation may be attained through secret knowledge available only to an initiated elite.
Our word devil is cognate to the German zweifel, meaning doubt, literally 'two-cased'
Gnostic 'Salvation':
As briefly noted above, the basic principles of Gnosticism is that 'salvation; is achievable through one's own mental activity (often thought of today as higher imagination; recall Blake's comments above). Gnosticism makes a subtler, more mystical, appeal than either 'faith' or 'works'; that ultimate value is itself a mental state, and that mind is capable, on its own, of achieving it ('only eat this... and you shall know...').The reconciliation of Good and Evil:
In the Judaeo-Christian worldview, creation exists primarily as a field in which man lives out a struggle to make good manifest against its absence, in spite of his final inability to do so on his own.Gnosticism begins in ascetic intellectualism. Within a few generations its followers degenerate into licence, since the instincts can never be constrained by mere intellect, let alone by falsehood. Instinctive gratification soon becomes identified with spiritual progress, the whole process of degradation being dressed-up in lofty-sounding rhetoric. when, after the French revolution, the goddess Reason was enthroned in Paris (at Our Lady), it was a prostitue who was paraded through the streets to be crowned.
On the Bible's stories and against a purely 'psychological' reading:
It is their tangible reality that inspires faith; their symbolic reality that engenders meaning.Shocking quote at a 'Re-imagining conference' a prof at Union Theological Seminary said:
I don't think we need a theory of atonement at all. I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff.Jung openly considered depth psychology in general - and his in particular - to be a modern reawakening of Gnosticism which he actively promoted as superior to Christianity.
Paganism and polytheism:
It is polytheism that stands behind the mantras of 'diversity', 'tolerance' and 'inclusivity' now being so widely misused. the modern, psychologised manifestation of polytheism is the plausible idea that since people differ, there must be different standards of behaviour - hence of morality - to apply to each type of person. In polytheism there is no absolute overarching standard toward which all people need aspire. For each type of person, there is a god among the many gods. There is a god for the tribe of women (who is herself a goddess), there is a god for the tribe of warriors (who is himself warlike), there is a god for the tribe of homosexuals (who is himself pansexual), as though we are not all under one God and obliged to one law.Psychology, Polytheism and the Worship of Instinct
In polytheism, ancient or modern, each group has its own god.
The pagan pschyotheology that lurks behind Jungianism, and that has spread so widely within the church, is simply the psychologised worship of instinct.
Pagans make and worship idols that are mere representations of their own impulses - 'gods that are no gods' - gods of power, money, fame, violence, sexuality. In primitive societies, these idols are of wood and silver and stone; in civilised ones they are of words and concepts - an insignificance difference. In paganism, people worship at different altars because each has a different dominating instinct.A morality which attempts to derive itself purely from psyche, with reference to nothing beyond, will end up being either overtly amoral (as with reductionistic psychologies deriving from Freud), or polytheistic (as are those spiritualistic psychologies that derive from Jung).
Occult and secret-knowledge practices: divination, astrology and 'sorcery'. Originally the drugs used in their practice was to produce a heightened state of 'consciousness'.
Chapter 3: The effect on public morals
An excellent chapter on the psychology of demons, well worth reading again!
The demonic
In his doctoral thesis concerning his cousin, the medium, Jung claimed that the spirit personality which possessed her was actually a dissociated part of herself - indeed, a superior aspect of her personality of which she consciously unaware and which she never accepted as herself.
Jung started by defining 'complexes' as normal sub-personalities within the human psyche. He continued by pointing out how an archetype forms the nucleus, as it were, of every complex. Since each archetype is merely the 'image' (representation in consciousness) of its underlying instince, this is to say that every complex develops around an instinct. The instincts are inherited; the complexes 'flesh out' the instinct with actual experience.
Jung's archetypes are what the ancients referred to as 'gods'.
KEY:
Let us examine what followes from Jung's scientific-sounding proposition that 'aciviated archetypes generate parapsychological events ' When an instinct is activated - aggression, r sexuality, or hunger, or the drive for nurturance and so on - one of the basic animal cravings is aroused and we find ourselves driven in accord with its dictates. Associated with the subjective sense of craving (or desire or intent) is a measurable physiological arousal. The 'parapsychological phenomena' somewhat more common in this state of instinctive/archetypal arousal encompass the supernatural moving of objects at a distance without physical force ('telekinesis', and example is Jung's 'catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon') and the supernatural transfer of information ('telepathy', 'precognition'). typically, these evetns occur in fragmentary, unreliable, fashion.
As with 'syncronicity', the terms 'parapsychology', 'telepathy' and 'telekenisis' are but neologisms that relabel a class of events for which there exists no scientific explanation. Parapsychology research, such as it is, merely continues to demonstrate that its subject matter exists.
There is however an older explanation for such events. this older view holds that 'parapsychological' phenomena are not entirely psychological, but at least in part spiritual. The events are ahrd to understand because the spirit(s) stage-managing them are deliberately deceptive - duplicitous - to boot. Of course, this older formulation attributes to the 'managers' of these events deliberation and intentionality and a certain maliciousness, that is, personality.Continued:
Let us restate it without the scientisms. There exist invisible, incorporeal being-like entities with a semi-independent consciousness. Each has its own intentions, attitudes and feelings. Each can, it seems, 'possess' us and make us identify with what it wants. Such beings appear most readily when our instinctive cravings are activated. they seem able to provide us with information in a supernatural but most often in a frustratingly partial, hence useless, fashion. They are capable of moving objects around at a distance, often in a frightening, noisy, mischievous fashion just as if they take special pleasure in practical jokes.
If we de-sanitise the language and restore the orthodox biblical symbol-system, we recognise 'activated archetypes generating parapsychological events' as a description of demons. For that is precisely what demons have always been thought to be: beings with their own intentions, duplicitous, tricky and mercurial, attachable in some way to the hum mind, and appearing to feed upon unconstrained animal arousal; providing us with 'information', that is 'higher knowledge' which is a mixture of truth and falsehood.
Monday, 29 January 2018
Making Sense of God - Tim Keller
Quotes and comments.
Chapter 4: A Satisfaction that is not based on circumstances
Ecclesiastes 2:24 ‘A person can do nothing better than to find satisfaction in their own toil...’ but that is exactly what eludes him. He describes a life of accomplishment that very few achieve. Eccl. 2:4,8,10
Nevertheless he says: ‘I hated life... my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labour under the sun.’ Eccl. 2:17,20
Nothing brings satisfaction: This is an abiding human problem and there is plenty of empirical research that backs it up. Studies find a very weak correlation between wealth and contentment, and the more prosperous. Society grows, the more common is depression. (Quoted from Haidt)
The things that human beings think will bring fulfilment and contentment don’t. Two approaches to happiness then exist. What Haidt calls the ‘early happiness hypothesis of ancient times.’ The principle being: we are unhappy even in success because we seek happiness from success. Buddha and the Chinese sage sand the Greek philosophers in the west saw that wealth, power, achievement, family, security etc. Can lead to only momentary happiness, which fades when taken away leaving you more empty than if you had never never tasted the joy. The answer, they said, was to not seek to change the world but rather to change your attitude toward the world. Epictetus: ‘do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen and your life will go well.’
In short: don’t try to fulfil your desires, rather control and manage them.
However, modern research has shown that some external circumstances do correlate with increased satisfaction. In particular love relationships are important and therefore the advice of emotional detachment may actually undermine happiness.
Haidt describes the ‘modern happiness hypothesis’ as being: whilst warngin against overdoing it, modern culture encourages its members to find satisfaction through active efforts to change our lives, not just accept life as it is.
Keller adds: despite huge social, moral and technological advances ‘no one is arguing that we are significantly happier than our ancestors were.’
Some respond: it doesn’t matter, just carry on without worrying about happiness. Others that according to research we are in fact happier than we used to be. Still others acknowledge that ‘happiness’ is the wrong word and that when asked ‘how are you?’ Most people say ‘I’m fine,’ but the statistics on suicide and depression reveals this may not in fact be the case.
More accurate a gauge than ‘happiness’ we should ask about joy, fulfilment and satisfaction in life.
Our levels of lasting contentment, Keller argues, are actually quite thin. Peggy Lee recorded a song in 1969 that sums up how we often feel: As a 12yr old she was taken to see a circus performance called ‘the greatest show on earth.’ But as she watched she ‘had the feeling that something was missing. I don’t know what, but when it was over I said to myself, ‘Is that all there is to a circus.’ Then she fell in love with a boy who later left her and she thought she’d die. “But I didn’t and when I didn’t I said to myself ‘Is that all there is to love?’ At every turn everything that should have delighted and satisfied her did not - nothing was big enough to fill her expectations or desires. There was always something missing, though she never knew what it was.
Cynthia Hemel a columnist who saw friends go from anonymity to Hollywood stardom saw them discover to their horror that they were no more happy or fulfilled than before. Young people might say ‘It’d be different for me.’ No it wont:
That’s what the wisdom of the ancients and all the anecdotal evidence in the world will tell you.
The two main approaches: Satisfaction (‘it’) is still out there (to come or be sought) vs satisfaction (‘it’) isn’t possible.
It is out there:
The young: ‘it is out there’ We get busy preparing ourselves to be happy.
The resentful: We blame the things that stop us getting ‘it’
The driven: Constant reinvention assuring ourselves that ‘it’ is at the next level.
The despairing: we can never get it.
Francis Spufford: (we’re to blame so we hate ourselves)
But the day comes when you’re lying in the bath and you notice you are thirty-nine and that the way you’re living bears scarcely any resemblance to what you thought you always wanted, and yet, you realise you got there by a long series of choices.
It doesn’t exist:
Altruism then: helping others is the only right path for finding any personal contentment (although this uses the needy to selfishly serve self)
Cynicism: Stop chasing rainbows, stop crying after the moon. Lower your expectations. This makes you condescending toward anyone not as sophisticated or ironic as you, worse it ‘dehumanises you’ Martin Heidegger: what makes us human and not animal is a desire for joy, meaning and fulfilment.
Detachment: Epictetus: ‘what harm is there while you are kissing your child to murmur softly, ‘Tomorrow you will die?’ However modern research supports intuition that diminishing your love others does not increase satisfaction.
Some say this desire for happiness comes from an evolutionary trait carried forward.
Augustine read Cicero who said: every person sets out to be happy but the majority are thoroughly wretched. He then concluded that the extreme scarcity of human contentment might be a judgment of divine providence for our sins.
Augustine saw that it was actually product of our ‘displaced loves’:
We are most fundamentally shaped most by what we believe or think but by what we love. For when we ask whether somebody is a good person we are not asking what he believes or hopes for, but what he loves.
A virtue is nothing more than what we love: Courage is loving your neighbour’s well-being more than your own safety. Honesty is loving your neighbour’s interested more than your own, even when the truth will put you at a disadvantage.
- What you love most at the moment is what controls your action at that moment.
Our loves also have an order to them. A just and good person: is also a person who had rightly ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more).
The reason even the best possible worldly goods will not satisfy is because we were created for a degree of delight and fulfilment that they cannot produce.
...Even goods on this scale cannot fill the vacuum. The cavern in our soul is indeed infinitely deep.
Tuesday, 9 January 2018
Graham & Belinda - Mental Health
Mental Health:
A state of well-being in which every individual realises his of her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully and is able to make a positive contribution to their community.
2014:
A state of well-being in which every individual realises his of her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully and is able to make a positive contribution to their community.
2014:
- Estimated that, 27% of the adult pop. has experienced at leas one mental health disorder in the last year.
- That's 83 million people, with 21m suffering a major depression
- With only 50% of people receiving professional help.
Around 90% of suicide victims suffer from a psychiatric disorder.
Among teenagers rates of anxiety and depression have increased by 70% in the past 25yrs.
26% of young people in UK experience suicidal thoughts.
How do we stop ourselves becoming or feeling overwhelmed when we help people?
- Boundaries: Set up boundaries around your home and family.
- Accountability: You always need someone to speak into your life and situation.
- Team: Be in team at all times.
- Expectations: It's not our responsibility to heal and set people free. We pray.
'Always pray for breakthrough. Always prepare for the long haul.'
Monday, 8 January 2018
Steve Oliver - Center Parcs
Story:
Japeelofeeling called ot bring hope to Africa, to the daisy's of Africa. Felt God speak to him about preaching the gospel to Japeelo. Not being used to this, he was scared, but felt God had called him so he went.
The man was dressed in a blanket and hat, sitting at the edge of the his appartment.
Apartheid had just come to an end.
How are you?
Not good, I am scared. I have a pain in my heart and feel scared since I think I am going to die and I'm not sure what will happen to me.
Steve: [God obviously knows he needed to make it easy for me!] told him about Jesus.
Man replied: but I have been told that Jesus is the God of the white man only.
He then led Japeelo to the Lord, went home and told Heather.
Japeelo led his wife to the Lord.
After a year away Steve returned and Japeelo was waiting for him and said 'come on, they are waiting for you!' his whole family, village and extended family were there. Steve told them about Jesus and led many to the Lord.
Gave up his house and life in Cape Town (businessman with all the toys/car/house) and moved to the country (only house within a mile), and planted a church among the poorest of the poor.Started a church in Clarins, felt God say 'prepare for 500 people for Sunday,' no marketing no plan, bought enough food for 500 people. First baptism in the church 94 people got baptised! that grew and led to seven other church plants. The region later changed it's name (to Dihlabeng) after apartheid to the name of the church since it had been such a blessing to the area and made such an impact.
They were looking after 350 hiv aids sufferers at any one time. Transformed the health care and education system. The church's influence was dramatic all because Jesus isn't the god of the white man only.
Then on to Dubai.
- Jesus is the saviour of the nations.
Position yourself for the purposes of God
CS Lewis, keep nothing back...
Two people from scripture. Abinadab and Obed-EdomThe principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self,
and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
2 Samuel 5. Dagon vs Yahweh. 6 the Ark gets sent back to the Israelites. 7 The men of Kerith Jarim bring the Ark to the house of Abinadab.
- You cannot put God alongside the other gods in your life.
If you want to put God into your life you must get rid of the other gods in your life.
He is Lord and saviour. Come under is rule and reign.
Ease of life is our biggest threat in this nation. What we have is not the norm. We are part of about 2.5% of the world's population.
If we are going to see the gospel take effect in this nation and across the world we are going to need to see a generation of young people live sacrificially.
When pressures come the temptation is to erect more 'dagon' gods in our lives. Let them die.
Abinadab: leaves the Ark alone and is relived when it goes, one of his sons (Uzzah) gets killed as the Ark leaves.
Obed-edom:
Steve's comments as a South African church planter of the UK church:
- Ease. Love of and pursuit of an easy life.
- Refusal to take risks. Obsession with planning everything.
- Lack of expectation.
-
2 Samuel 6. Abinadab had the Ark for twenty years and nothing. Obed-Edom has it for a few months and experiences great blessing.
CT. Studd. Cambridge graduate. Inherited an estate/home house of equiv. £52m. Gave his £52m away, gave his life to the mission field.
Two little lines I heard one day,Traveling along life’s busy way;Bringing conviction to my heart,And from my mind would not depart;Only one life, twill soon be past,Only what’s done for Christ will last.
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