In preparation I have listened to about 5 or 6 sermons on 1 Corinthians 1. These have been from leading evangelical preachers in leading churches from across the world. I have benefited from all of them, and most are no doubt better sermons that the one I’ll be dishing up on Sunday.

And yet…One thing really bugged me. Without exception I think, in all the sermons I listened to, the main application of the passage was to people who weren’t there. And I don’t think that’s particularly helpful or healthy.

The typical application went something like this: “1 Corinthians 1 speaks of the power of the message of the cross. Some demand signs and wonders (like John Wimber and Joel Austin); others look for wisdom (like liberals and tractarians). But we (=evangelicals) preach Christ and him crucified.”

All the sermons I listened to gave the impression (no doubt unwittingly) that the abuses addressed in 1 Corinthians 1 were all ‘out there’. In here, the main application of the passage was “Steady as she goes. Just keep preaching, and avoid the abuses I mentioned earlier.”

Some reflections:

First, the issue in 1 Corinthians 1 is how we line up behind leaders and teachers (1 Cor 1:12). I would have thought that (given our emphasis on teaching) that this was more of a home truth for us evangelicals that almost anyone else, right?Because we love teaching, we love teachers. And because we love teachers, we are at least at risk of lining up behind them in the wrong way. Right? Surely therefore there is a better application to us that “keep it up! You’re doing super.”?

Secondly, even if the main abuses are out there, I don’t think it makes for healthy preaching habitually to apply the Bible to people who are absent at the time of the message. I grant that occassionally some preventative teaching is necessary, or movements come through that are publicly prominent and need to be addressed. But, as someone once told me, as a general rule in preaching ‘never criticise something that isn’t a live option for your hearers.’ It’s just not healthy; it feed arrogance and complacency.

Thirdly, if we want others to repent, surely the best first step is to show them how.

Here endeth the rant.

As semester 2 gets underway, we’re launching a new course: the Unichurch Partnership course. Over 3 weeks we will be looking at God’s word and hearing from Rory, thinking through what we believe as a church, what our mission is and what is actually involved in being a church. We hope to better communicate what we’re on about as a church, and that at the end of the course people will choose to sign up to become a partner, to affirm that Unichurch is your church and that you’re onboard with us in our mission to reach Perth with the gospel.

When: Begins this week at Hub, Tuesday (students), Wednesday (workers) at 7pm

Where: St Matthew’s Anglican Church, 114 Onslow Rd Shenton Park

Who: Everyone at Unichurch, whether you’ve been around for a long time or a short time, whether you’re regularly part of Hub or not.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Well you have a golden opportunity to indulge your curiosity about missions in the fun, interactive and immersive ‘Be A Missionary For A Night’ that will be run bySt Matts as part of our Global Gospel Focus.  You will step into the cultures of Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa and draw from the experiences of missionaries and mission agencies as they share and discuss what both short and long-term missions would be like in those cultures.

If the idea of doing missions seems scary to you, then this will be a chance for you to take away the fear factor by imagioning for a night that you are a missionary, and exploring what it would really be like. If doing missions is something that you’ve never really though about, then here is a chance for you to find out why everyone can get something out of a short-term missions trip, even if you don’t see yourself as ‘missionary’ material.

The ‘Be A Missionary For A Night’ event will run on Saturday 19th June, 7pm – 9:30pm @ St Matts. Internaltional food will be provided. Bring all your tricky questions as if you were actually applying to be a missionary. Entry is by gold coin donation.

So, as we at MIA like to put it, ‘get off the couch, and just do it!’  In the end, missions is about leaving our comfort-zone to go share the gospel with people who need to hear it.  Is your vision big enough for God’s vision for the world?  What’s stopping you from giving missions a try?

“But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.”

:: Malachi 4.2

Imagine you’re a Jew living 400 years BC when this was written. It’s been nearly 200 years since your people had anything like freedom or their own country. You live under the oppressive rule of the Persian empire. They’ve allowed you to rebuild your temple, but it’s a shameful effort, and it’s obvious that God is nowhere to be seen. Not even your people take him seriously any more. He promised peace and prosperity, but it looks like he’s abandoned those promises and abandoned you.

And then Malachi says something like this. Even after all that: stick with God and he will stick with you. Morning will come and everything sad will come untrue and then you will dance.

Like a young calf that’s been cooped up all night in the stalls, you’ll frollick in the field; you’ll strech your legs and jump about and eat the dew-drenched grass and squint in the sunshine as you feel it thaw your legs and warm your back.

I wonder if the pun was intended. It only works in English, of course, but you can imagine the Spirit chuckling to himself as he thought about how it would sound when, eighteen centuries later, it would be translated. “The son of righteousness will rise.” More true than Malachi could have imagined.

Not to mention the sublimely mixed metaphors. So the sun, which make things right, is also a bird, whose wings will heal stuff. Which of course, given the pun, is also a guy in a tomb in 400 years’ time, who will do exactly that.

Mixed metaphors were more acceptable back then, and it’s not that strange, really, that the sun should be a bird. They both rise and soar over the landscape, stretching out their arms to envelop it. Healing wings are like rays of sunshine, washing over the countryside as dawn breaks. Everything the rays touch is renewed, filled with the hope of a new day.

The future looked pretty hopeless in Malachi’s day. Three verses later he says that the prophet Elijah will come, and after that God will act. Yeah, right, Malachi. But Elijah did come, wearing his trademark camel hair, and God did act. The son has risen and the sun has risen. A new day has dawned when God will bring righteousness and healing to the world. The long cold night is over and he’s released us from that stall. It’s time to stretch our legs and skip about.

1/ Make the conversation awkward and rare. My mum never does this, she talks about Jesus and church events naturally and frequently.  It makes it seem normal to be a Christian and that attend the event might actually be okay.  It also shows that Jesus is a part of every day life, not just Sundays.

2/ Be embarrassed about the event.  My mum never learnt that you should apologise for the event and tell them beforehand that it will not be that good, they probably won’t like it and that they probably shouldn’t come.  My mum actually trusts the talk to be good, the event to be well run and the people to be friendly.

3/ Talking to your family is hard.  Jean just doesn’t seem to understand that it should be hard talking to your family about Jesus.  She has no qualms about telling her parents, parents in law, children or more distant relatives about church, what’s happening at church or if the conversation turns that way, Jesus.

4/ You cannot set up your own event.  My mum hasn’t learnt that you have to wait for the church staff team to plan and organise an event, because after all, the staff team will always now what is best for you and your friends.  Instead my crazy mum starts her own event.  She loves sewing and needlework tools, so she started a group at church that makes these pillow/quilt things called quillows (they’re great, a cushion one minute, a blanket the next). Women not normally involved in anything to do with church come and the conversation often turns to Jesus.  Madness – she will never learn.  The last lesson my mum has never learnt is this:

5/ Loving people and inviting them to events are different things.  Surely loving someone means that you do things for them, if you have to, use words.  My mum never fell for this lie.  She loves them enough to actually tell them, often whilst doing something for them.  My mum actually loves her neighbours as herself, she tells them about Jesus, the greatest news ever.

My mum is my evangelistic hero because she has not learnt the lessons we normally learn about evangelism, which means she actually does it.  I suspect she’ll never learn these lessons, because you can’t teach an old dog a new trick.  Not that she’s old…or a dog.  Anyway, my mum is my hero.  Happy Australian Mother’s day mum.

“…my affection for institutional Christianity as a whole is rarely  more than tepid; and there are numerous forms of Christian belief  and practice for which I would be hard pressed to muster a kind  word from the depths of my heart, and the rejection of which by the  atheist or skeptic strikes me as perfectly laudable.” p x.

The purpose of the book, then, is simple to re-tell the story of how  ”…Christendom was born out of the culture of late antiquity.” p x. By why tell this story? And what does it matter to atheists anyway? Hart answers:

“…it is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith…how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity finally constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society…and its elevation of charity above all other virtues.” p xi

Positively, Hart will argue that Christianity’s influence on western culture has been the only thing that in the fullest sense of the term could be called a revolution. It is a movement which (in Hart’s opinion) has been more “ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, aspiration, or accomplishment in the history of the west.” p xi.

The relevance of this to resurgent atheism? According to Hart, modern atheism is built (at least in part) of an alternative, modernist telling of that same story. In its modernist telling, this history is the story of the triumph of critical reason over faith, of freedom over oppression, and of the tolerance of the secular state: the triumph of the “age of reason” over the “age of faith”.

Put simply: the narrative of modern atheism is: (a) there was once a powerful and productive classical culture in the west, (b) Christianity retarded that culture’s progress by leading the west into stagnant superstition and institutional cruelty. (c) Since the Renaissance and (especially) the Enlightenment (or the Age of Reason), we have discovered science and improved our society to the extent that science and reason have advanced and religion (=Christianity) have retreated.

However, contrary to this narrative, Hart will argue so called “Age of Reason” was in fact the beginning of the demise of reason’s place in the culture. And that modernism is in fact notable for its inflexible and unthinking dogmatism. And that it gives birth to religious and secular fundamentalisms. And to superstition. And that it does not deserve any particular credit for the rise of modern science. And that the nation state’s “capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted”. (xii).

So, that’s where he’s going. Stay tunes for the argument itself.

It comes from the Lotus Sutra composed at the end of the 2nd century AD. The setting is similar to Jesus’ parable of the the sons, a son abandons his father and runs away to have fun in foreign lands. But the outcome could not be more different. In that story the son returns to his native land by chance, and the father hides his identity from the returning son and hires him as servant. As the son proves himself competent he works his way up through the family business by his hard work and diligence and advances up through the ranks of employees to a position of seniority. Finally as the father is becoming ill, after 20 years he decides that his son is sufficiently enlightened and worthy to inherit the family estate, and he reveals to the son and to all that he really is his heir…

How good is grace right?

You can see Rory’s talk on the parable of the two sons in Luke here

Until this year. This year I agreed to read four chapters of Bible every day. And it turns out it’s not as scary as I thought. It can even be fun. Here’s five things I’ve found about the Bible:

1. It’s not magic. The Bible is a book just like any other book. It isn’t a magic book that answers every question or makes you more Christian. It’s a normal book; it just happens to be the book about God and what he’s done.

2. It’s not big. The Bible isn’t one big book; it’s lots of little books. Actually, most of them aren’t even books. They’re all sorts of different writing, from letters to poetry, from history to fables.

3. You don’t need to get it. The Bible is more like Lord of the Rings than a maths textbook. You don’t have to puzzle over it until you ‘get it’. You can just read it. Immerse yourself in the story and enjoy watching it unfold.

4. Read it like a novel. You can’t just read a few pages of Lord of the Rings and know what’s going on. The Bible isn’t any different. Don’t just read a few verses. Read a whole book, or at least a few chapters at a time. Then you’ll get what’s going on.

5. It’s not boring. This is the most surprising – sometimes the Bible really is unputdownable. When you read the Bible like a normal book, you can really get into the story. Sometimes I find I’ve read more than my four chapters, and I want to keep reading.

The Bible is a normal book. It’s not magic, it’s not big, it’s not hard to understand. Don’t let your Bible sit on the shelf shouting insults at you. You wouldn’t take it from your flatmate, so don’t take it from a book.

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