Monthly Archives: November 2009
community confusion
“…so how do we go about creating kingdom communities?”
It’s interesting looking at the history of the church-planting movement over the last couple of decades. It seems that many planters have gone out to build new church communities in order to simply “grow” in numerical terms. This has usually been the result of an unsaid partnership between church-planting and church-growth paradigms. However, such a measurement of growth (numbers) is not necessarily what the Kingdom of God is about (Jesus, after all, said the kingdom looked like daily bread and forgiven debt, not packed out Colosseums).
The question above (italics) was one that I asked a friend of mine in a phone conversation about a week ago. Not happy with the idea of simply starting new churches believing this would not necessarily lead to the kingdom coming to the world, my thinking was that we needed to create kingdom communities. These would look different to “churches” in their lack of institutional structure and more organic organisation, as well as their existence being about God’s mission, not institutional survival.
But in reflecting on that conversation, I’d missed a simple reality. Keep Reading…
creation/destruction?
Why do the people who so passionately uphold a literal view of creation often pair this perspective with the view that God is going to destroy creation at the Parousia?
Am I the only one that sees a problem with this mixture?
MCA
what is the purpose of the bible?
(N.B. This is an updated post which previously asked the question “What is the purpose of Scripture?” as an open discussion, hence the first few comments by others, which were responses to that original discussion question, might seem a bit out of context.)
Many discussions I have with people involve the Bible (not surprisingly). I am always interested to find out how people view Scripture; What is its purpose? What kind of authority does it have, and why? What kind of truth does it tell us? How do we interpret it? For today I am going to restrict my focus to the question of the Bible’s purpose. Keep Reading…
