In times of trouble, whether relational, financial, serious, even terminal, illness, when it may appear that all the foundations and structures of life, all the things upon which they have relied, all hopes for the future, seem to be in danger of being washed away, people often turn to the Old Testament book of Psalms. The main reason for this is that the Psalms are songs that cry out of the depths of the human heart. cries that express the full range of human emotions from shouts of joy and praise to anguished cries of despair.
‘to rebuild western civilization, we need to go back to what made western civilization such a powerful force for good and prosperity and that is the Judeo-Christian world view.' Karl Faase
'If your God is the all-powerful, all-loving being you claim him to be, why didn’t he intervene to stop this happening? The fact that he didn't means that he is either not all-powerful or all-loving'.
This booklet, seeks to provide some conversation starters that we might be able to use in informal situations with individuals or groups. All the examples included have been and are being used by DiscipleMakers in such informal situations.
Standing in the shopping mall, those tomb-side words on that chill first Easter morning came to me, “They have stolen Him away and we don’t know where they have put Him”, words true for most contemporary Australians. But worse, society’s degraded state of spiritual desiccation is now so far advanced that most don’t even know there has been a theft!
Today there is a widespread embarrassment about confronting the role of the Christian church in the formation of the Western world… Yet there is a strong case to be made that our conception of society and of a just legal system cannot be fully understood apart from that debt. When we ignore it, we fail to understand ourselves’
Early Christianity was a Movement that took on and conquered the all-powerful Roman Empire. Roman society was Pagan, largely amoral and pluralistic, everything the Christian world view was not, as well as being actively hostile to Christianity and Christians who were seen as ‘weird and depraved killjoys’. This hostility resulted in persecution, sometimes severe particularly in the reigns of Emperors Nero and Diocletian
Nevertheless, by the early 4th century AD, Rome was, at least officially, a Christian Empire.
So how did the Roman Empire go from being thoroughly pagan to Christianity becoming the state religion?
