Category Archives: Mission
the deradicalisation of christianity?
A conversation with a friend today led to us asking the question – how did Christianity become so de-radicalised?
After all the story of the early Church, both in Acts and as implied in the Epistles and Revelation, seems to reflect a community that was at odds in almost every way with the surrounding culture.
(By being at odds with the dominant culture I do not mean abusing gays, doing apologetics or marginalising sex…)
How did we become so at home in the dominant culture? When did “taking up our crosses” come to refer to something other than directly confronting the dominant culture of idolatry and systems of injustice?[1]
Can we really say we are Christians, meaning “little Christs” or “followers of Christ”, when Jesus posed a real threat to the way of life represented by the dominant culture (enough to be liquidated) but most of us revel in it? Read the rest of this entry
confessions of a “worship” leader
For years I have been involved in playing music to help lead Christians in worship.
Music leader, song leader, worship leader; call it whatever you want. Without wanting to sound in any way conceited (I assure you, about this I am not), I earned a fair amount of praise and encouragement from people who claimed my leading helped them in some way.
In my late teenage years (I have now just turned 26) so-called “worship” and music was central to my faith journey. My identity was largely derived from my music leading, and there was a lot of pressure to conform to the image of other well-known worship leaders. I truly believed that my calling, that my purpose, was to be found in leading people in worship by way of music.
I sang a lot of songs. A lot of words. But eventually something dawned on me – all that music, all that so-called “worship,” wasn’t necessarily changing me or anyone else I was leading. Read the rest of this entry
Like this:
bringing them home: saying sorry to the aboriginal people
Today (May 26th) is National Sorry Day, and it will be followed by National Reconciliation Week from May 27-June 3.
National Sorry Day was first observed in 1998, one year after a report was tabled concerning the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The report, entitled as Bringing Them Home, acknowledged that these children were forcibly removed from their families and communities beginning in the early days of British occupation of the land, and that the government and missionaries were most directly responsible.
Reconciliation Week begins on May 27 with the anniversary of a Referendum in 1967 which removed clauses from the Australian Constitution that were discriminatory to Aboriginal Australians.
The week ends on June 3, the anniversary of the infamous Mabo case of 1992 in which the High Court of Australia recognised Native Title rights and overturned ‘terra nullius’ (the myth that prior to European settlement the land was empty of people and was unowned.)
Clearly this is a significant time for the Aboriginal people and for all Australians. Read the rest of this entry
what is a “fisher of men”?
Mark 1:17 and Matthew 4:19, in which Jesus calls Andrew and Peter to be “fishers of men”, is a well-trodden piece of biblical narrative, at least as heard from the pulpit.
Many a preacher has exhorted their church or audience to be “fishers of men”. This normally refers to their evangelistic efforts, whereby fishing for men means something like bringing them in to the faith, in the same way you might land a swordfish on a 30-footer (fisherman may correct my ignorance at this point…)
But let me cut to the chase – is that what Jesus meant? Read the rest of this entry
why i support micah challenge
Here is a blog that I wrote for Micah Challenge Australia‘s new blog site talking about why I support them, and why advocacy for the poor is an important part of being a Christian.
http://www.micahchallengeblog.org.au/blog/n/matt-anslow-why-i-support-micah-challenge-110311
MCA
Micah Challenge is a global movement of Christian agencies, churches, groups and individuals which aim to deepen people’s engagement with the poor and to help reduce poverty as an integral part of our Christian faith.
holistic community engagement
The following is a post I wrote for The Greenhouse Effect, a church-planting blog run by Churches of Christ in NSW. It’s fairly general compared to my regular posts, but hopefully you get something meaningful out of it.
The Church is meant to engage with the community that it finds itself in – most would not doubt such a statement. But how are we meant to go about such engagement?
Many church planters begin with a desire to ‘grow’ a church. Such church’s community engagement becomes necessarily characterised by a need to convince people to attend a program. Not only do people in a community tend to see through such shallow motives and relationships, but also this is not how God calls the Church to engage culture. Keep Reading
citizens or disciples?
The following is a post I wrote for The Greenhouse Effect, a church-planting blog run by Churches of Christ in NSW. It is pretty concise, but I hope you get something meaningful out of it.
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The relationship between a local church and the community within which it is located is no simple matter.
There are, after all, two extremes to which a local church can potentially slide, as described in Graham & Lowe’s What Makes a Good City? The first is that the church can become so defined by engaging a pluralist culture that it becomes indistinguishable from that culture. Alternatively a church can become so exclusivist, desiring to protect its ‘distinctives,’ that it never meaningfully engages the culture of its community.
We could broadly call these approaches a concern for ‘citizenship’ and ‘discipleship.’
I am sure that most church planters want to find a balance within this tension. But this balance can be difficult to find, as evidenced by the many churches that have ended up being pulled towards one end of the spectrum.
What should be clear is that the church is called by God to be both good citizens and good disciples. We should no doubt hold fast to our distinctive way of life as instructed by Jesus in his call for people to be radically different to the dominant ways of culture (representing the reality of God’s kingdom on earth).
At the same time we should also be committed to seeing God’s kingdom manifested amongst this culture, which Jesus also modelled in his redemption of society through healings, forgiveness and standing against evil social structures.
Jesus was both prophet and servant. He was separate enough from his culture to be able to critique it and offer an imaginative alternative (proclaiming the kingdom), but was also engaged enough with the culture bring some level of redemption to it (manifesting the kingdom).
This is at the very least a call to something much larger than simply ‘building a church.’ God’s plans extend beyond the ambitions of church leaders, and the church is meant for more than growing its Sunday services. Jesus calls us into the divine task of redeeming our world and its systems through the alternative reality called the kingdom.
This means the church needs to be different from the culture around it. It also means the church must be actively engaged in this culture, and so every member of a church, no matter what their vocation, is modelling the kingdom and bringing redemption to the community wherever they are.
A local church must produce disciple-citizens. Is yours geared towards that task?
MCA
matt’s useful gift shop
I’ve gone and set up a shop over at Usefulgifts.org. You can visit it here.
Every Useful Gift in TEAR’s Gift Catalogue is part of a long-term program designed to give communities the resources they need to address their problems in appropriate, sustainable ways.
As Christmas approaches the temptation is for us to be sucked in by the consumerism of it all. But Christmas celebrates Jesus coming into the world to bring salvation…
… so why not bring salvation in the life of a poor community this year?
$5 is not even enough to buy a Big Mac meal, but it could pay for training in fish farming for a community, or buy school supplies for a student
$20 is not even enough to buy a new DVD, but it could buy safe water for a household
$45 is not even enough pay most people’s monthly phone bill, but it could pay one child’s primary school fees
$70 is not even enough to buy a toilet seat , but it can buy a whole toilet for a community
$100 can’t pay for your work laptop, but it’s enough to act as loan to help a poor family start a business which will lift them out of poverty
The bonus of your generosity through TEAR is that you know the money is going to the people who need it because TEAR gives all money donated through the Useful Gifts program straight to their partner projects who work on the ground.
So please be generous this Christmas, and give to people who won’t refund your gifts or throw them out. It would be great to raise $5000 by Christmas time, so please consider a gift to an unmet neighbour.
MCA
arrogant middle class white people
I can say that because I am one.
I got thinking about this post when a friend of mine went to a Christian gathering of some kind. The people there, all middle class white people, were discussing giving to the poor in their area – a great cause!
My friend however was appalled at the way in which the these people spoke so condescendingly of the poor. They talked about maybe inviting them to dinner or church so they could teach them how to earn and save money, and so that these people could learn from their lifestyles. Keep Reading…
