The start of a new year is traditionally a time to reflect on the year ahead. To ask the question, what picture will we paint on this blank canvas of time that God has given us in the year of 2024? How does God want us to use the resources (paints) that he has given … Continue reading The ‘Good Thing’ or the ‘God Thing’ – That is the Question?
As we embrace the new year of 2024, we are reminded of the timeless wisdom in the poem "The Gate of the Year" by Minnie Louise Haskins. Just as King George VI sought solace in its words during troubled times, we too can find hope and guidance by placing our trust in God as we navigate the uncertainties ahead.
We live in rapidly changing times. A characteristic of this is western society's rejection of its moral operating system i.e. Biblical Christianity. This has allowed the return of what those who fought against Hitler's Nazis in WW2 thought they had defeated in western countries. i.e. antisemitism. Tragically this seems not to be the case.
For a quarter of a century at least, survey after survey, data release after data release, census after census, have shouted out the developing crisis in terms of the Church’s dismal missional effectiveness. Yet with a deafness (deliberate or otherwise) to the few voices calling out the nakedness of the missional Emperor, and a blindness to the reality of an ever-rotating kaleidoscope of cultural tribes undergoing tectonic change, we have continued along the same now decades-long road, strewn with ‘Square Wheel’ missional failures.
Even in the face of the well-documented chronic, decades long, serious decline of Christianity in Australia (the West) the experience has been that only a miniscule number of church members will take up opportunities for 'coal face'. local mission.
Although not all, the vast majority of western Christians today have the cemented-in mindset that ‘church’ is largely what happens in certain, mostly bespoke, buildings, generally on Sundays. Further, the main Christian activity of most (when measured by time) is something called ‘going to church’, again generally on Sunday. This is because centuries of living … Continue reading The Future Lies in Going Back to It!
The phenomenon of the ‘Embarrassed-Christian’ syndrome, is in line with recent congregational surveys that show that when asked to select from a list of 14 priorities that they thought their congregation should invest in, ’starting a new missional venture’ came in a dismal 13th, or 2 percent of those surveyed.
‘Christian beliefs provided the rationale, and faith the motive energy, for western technology’
For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately, there had been a little mistake: The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all; it was a cesspool full of barbed wire . . .It appears that an amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.’
‘The fount of beauty, peace, and love, from God’s heart flowing, The Shaper of a World for us. Life-giving, from Death arising, Tho rejected, despised, mocked. Beauty’s fragrance by Degradation consumed, Dystopia dawns, Hell’s Abyss Gapes Insane ‘truths’ abound, Yes. But, in Nietzschean parallel Truth is Dead, and We have Killed Him’.
