Mission and evangelism
Will Jesus save us from the wrath to come?:
We went to see Surviving Progress last night at the Dubai International Film Festival. Based on Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, this powerful Canadian documentary argues that humanity has got itself stuck in a global “progress trap”. The fundamental problem is that we...
(9 Dec. 2011)
Review of Brian Jones, Hell is Real (But I Hate to Admit It):
I have just received a review copy of a book by Brian Jones called Hell is Real (But I Hate to Admit It), published by David C. Cook—an excellent title, though I hate to admit it. The book also starts with one of the most gripping opening stories that I have come across. I am usually put off...
(3 Aug. 2011)
Norway's day of fire and the challenge of Christian formation:
There was an interview with a Lutheran priest on the radio this morning from the cathedral in Oslo. He spoke of how he had preached the peace of Christ every week… and then described the dreadful shock of learning that the bombing and killings had been carried out not by radical...
(24 Jul. 2011)
The church is dead?:
In a post on Out of Ur Skye Jethani discusses reports of the decline of the Southern Baptist Convention and of the evangelical church in North America more generally: “50 churches are closing every week, church attendance is not keeping pace with population growth, and the average age of...
(22 Jun. 2011)
From New Perspective to missional praxis: plotting the tensions:
I have come across a number of people recently who, in their different ways, appear to agree that the future of evangelicalism lies ideally in a convergence of the New Perspective and emerging-missional forms of church. The question has been, though, whether such a convergence has any chance of...
(25 Mar. 2011)
Where is the gospel that will drive the missional movement?:
Alan Hirsch argues in Right Here, Right Now (written with Lance Ford) that the future of Christianity in the West depends on the church becoming a people movement again: “Somehow and in some way, we need to loosen up and learn how to reactivate the massive potentials that lie rather dormant...
(25 Feb. 2011)
“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 1:
The idea that the mission of the church is in the first place the mission of God or missio Dei has its origins in the thought of Karl Barth. A good summary of its development can be found in David Bosch’s Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (389-93).1 Barth’s...
(10 Jan. 2011)
Salvation comes a close second:
In a chapter in The Deliverance of God exploring the ‘yawning gap between Justification theory’s description of Judaism and the actual nature of of surrounding Judaism’ (124) Douglas Campbell makes the point that by no means all forms of Judaism were preoccupied with matters of...
(4 Nov. 2010)
Church-planting and a gospel of justice:
The aim behind church-planting traditionally has been to bring into existence new worshipping communities of people who believe in Jesus. Many of those people will already identify themselves as Christian; probably a much smaller number, if any, will be new converts; some will be seekers, by-...
(29 Sep. 2010)
Pyromaniacs and the debate over cultural engagement:
I have always been somewhat in awe of the feisty visual and verbal rhetoric of the Pyromaniacs blog. I don’t go there very often – it’s the other side of town, it’s unfamiliar territory, I sense that I don’t belong there, I don’t understand the language, and frankly I...
(26 Sep. 2010)
