Blog Archives
Q&R – what can we do to help the planet?
A reader of life.remixed writes:
Hey Matt,
Nice post on creationism [referring to this - MCA]. I have a challenge for a future post. So much of the material I read (mags, news, online etc) cries out for us to change what we’re doing to save the planet. The problem is, even if I wanted to I couldn’t make all the changes they describe.
I would love to see a 5/10/whatever point plan outlining the most significant changes someone can make (eg is eating vegetarian or not having a car best for reducing carbon emissions. Or it might be turning your appliances off at the wall saves more carbon than not driving. Make sense?).
Anyways, just a thought!
Such a good question, and one that I have received many times over in different ways; essentially, what can I/we do to help the planet? Read the rest of this entry
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
a full-er fourfold gospel?
About nine months ago a friend and I were preaching at a Church and the subject was “The Kingdom of God.” Easy, right? Well, anyway, we decided to simply have a public conversation, and our preparation was to sit down for an afternoon and dialogue about the kingdom.
What came out of that conversation was exciting for us. In fact our discussion has largely shaped the way I articulate my framework from which to discuss the gospel and the kingdom.
A Generalisation - Contemporary Evangelical Salvation
Our basic premise was this – evangelicals have tended to see “salvation” as being primarily related to one’s own reconciliation and continuing relationship with God. Thus salvation has tended to focus on the dynamics between humans and God, and how that might affect an individual’s post-mortem fate. However, if we go back to the beginning of the Scriptural narrative in Genesis 1-11 we find that such a view of salvation is, though present, inadequate to make sense of the entire story. Read the rest of this entry
