Category Archive

This week has been busy for me as has been obvious by the (lask of) posts.  Today is no lighter just the necessity to keep writing is making me do this.

As part of all the meetings this week one person has confessed that God is convicting them of working in teams and having the other people around them to help and to sharpen them.  This is not a message many of us like to hear from God as it makes us realise our own weaknesses “I am not a team player” and prejudices “I like to only work with organised people”.

The funny thing if I was to say to married people what drives you nuts about your spouse I think it would be the same issue.  We are different and the differences feel so huge how can I work with this person?  I know I have committed to them but how do I work on this?  Funnily enough as i was thinking about this topic this morning there was a discussion on another blog concerning why romantic weekends are overrated and some of it gets down to working with the partners differences.  The post is good enough to read just for the quotes from Alaine de Bottom.

I could say like usual it gets back to commitment but its not just that.  If we have no positive reinforcment that we are connecting with people who are different to us then we will not engage.  Jesus when he left did not say “just be committed to me it will be all ok” he said “When I go another will come”.  We can not follow God out of a one way commited relationship.  God also gives us reinforcement that He is part of our lives.

You see we need one another to be the Body of Christ and we need one another to be conformed to the image of Christ.  Jesus did not leave us alone but left us his Spirit and his (spiritual) brothers and sisters.  Commitment is great but practical strategies are needed as well.

While I may talk about more practical strategies next week one that works consistently is getting a mutually agreed third party involved.  What I am effectviely saying is go to a counsellor together; don’t just have one of you go as that will breed distrust and resentment.  Or find a third person who can help the two people not getting along to work together in the same room.  That is one approach Jesus has given us - we all have the Spirit and He will help us get along as a body.

So where do you need to work with someone who is different?

My super son has decided that it is ok to say grace again.  He used to bless us with wonderful brief graces before meals and then suddenly decided he did not feel well and stopped doing them.

Well they have started again and he seems to be telling us that important things are sleep, small group, kinder and occasionally food.  These are the things he keeps thanking God for.

I am delighted that he wants to share his young spiritual life with us even when he seems to forget the purpose of the practice such as thanking God for the food.  Yet I really want to encourage him.

You see in the end I think all Christians start off young.  They don’t know the right words to say or have the language or the concept quite right.  Yet if we allow these young Christians to share with us and affirm the good and try to downplay the bad we help form them in the communities we are part of.

So in the end I am thankful for my graceful super son and hope I can continue to learn to encourage little one to grow.

Who do you need to encourage to grow today?

There is a really quick way to offend my wonderful wife, give her a large gift to make up for not spending time with her.  This is not something I remember ever doing but that charge has been levelled, by her, against different people over the years we have been together.  Of course I may have selective memory about my own bad behaviour.

What this makes me think is that relationships have a certain durability to them that can be damaged by ignoring them and trying to make it up by other means.  Like the husband who brings home flowers because he is late from work the gift does not help the relationship; it is just an apology.  We teach our super son that we would prefer good behaviour and not apologies and some of it seems slowly to be sinking in.  This is as true in other relationships.

For my wonderful wife the best gift you can give is the gift of time.  The theological reflection on this is not that relationships are different and what is the best thing to give someone varies but rather what is the strength of your relationship with someone?  I know what is the best gift for my wife, at least to a limited extent.  In your relationships what is best?  Someone I know proposed recently and did it in a way that I would consider romantic, I hope he and his fiancée thought it was romantic too.  That is the way these things should be done.  To paraphrase Tony Campolo from this weekend, he looked into the woman and saw her and connected.  Giving gifts, in whatever form, requires we look into the other person and draw out what is best for them while remaining connected.  Sure a practical gift like a mulcher may be appreciated but does it reflect a strong relationship with that person?  Does it reflect knowing the person?  Does it reflect looking inside them and giving them what their heart really wants.  I know I don’t always succeed but at least I do sometimes.

So what is the strength of your relationships and what gifts are appropriate for your relationship?

It has been a while since I read this chapter of Creating Significant Learning Experiences and have just had a glance over it again.  It is the biggest chapter so far around 42 pages and is really part I of II.

In this chapter m Fink covers 3 of 12 steps of integrated course design.  I have finally figured out why I have problems with some of this approach but before I address those I will explain the 3 steps considered.

The first step is identifying situational factors.  What is expected of the unit being taught?  Is it easy to digest as it is introductory? is there just a right answer to a question?  what is expected by stakeholders?  and what is the nature of the teacher?

The second step is to formulate significant learning goals.  This is actually illustrated nicely across a series of fields for demonstration purposes.

The third step is to formulate feedback and assessment procedures.  How do we mark and how do we give feedback?  This is not an easy issue.  One issue of the feedback requires is that it should be high FIDeLity - Frequent, Immediate, Discriminating and done Lovingly.

I now remember why I love this book as it makes suggestions as to how to do all these things in a very practical manner.  I also realise why I have a problem with this as in the Australian situation many of these items are created away from the lecturer in accreditation documents and need lots more time than is given to them.

Now if I start to apply this to church I realise why I like some of Andy Stanley’s writings as I think he embodies these sort of ideas.  I notice more pastors are becoming intentional about their thinking on what should be preached (learning goals).  Some pastors are aware of the limitations of the audience, the audience’s expectations and the place where they minister (situational context).  Finally good church leaders will give high FIDeLity feedback when something has happened.

In other words, like I have been thinking, a good church and a good educational environment will be similar,  but more of that another time.

I am quite surprised when I present a paper what gets focussed on.  What I consider the important issues get missed and the lesser focus of the paper is magnified. This happened again last week when I presented the paper at PCBC.  I expect this paper will eventually be published online at the PCBC Webjournals page.

Along a similar line I received this morning an announcement that the Crucible is now available.  I have known this was coming for a period of time and hoped it would happen sooner than later as I wanted to publish a paper in the Australian context more than the US one.  It means my current work can be redirected, peer reviewed and hopefully accepted.

Last night we had a great night at our small group.  All three of us made it as my super son was so looking forward to it.  He is starting to get the idea of it all, now loves church (except the worship which, to quote, “hurts his ears”) and is really growing up.  We are really thankful to God for this.  I had to come home a little earlier to put my super son in bed but it was a great night.

So over all we are feeling good at the moment and se God’s hand continuing to work in our lives.

I am trying to keep in touch with people.  Most of my students (past and present) are on facebook.  A few people I know are just on email.  Today and this week I will get to catch up with a few people that I just see face to face as my college is hosting a conference and I am presenting a paper.

The paper may end up on this blog or published - with a link - because it is about the church, training and education.  In other words the majority of areas that this blog is about.  I am not sure what the response will be as I go over so many different areas.  I still need to prepare a couple of slides for the presentation to make it easier to focus on.

So overall it will be a busy week and some work I need to get done has to be shelved at the moment and I;ll get back to it next week.

So how do you keep in touch?

One of the most difficult things lecturers need to learn is that teaching is not learning. Just because I taught you something does not mean you as a student have learnt it. Actually this is probably a good lesson for all of life but that is another days topic. L Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences challenges teaching staff on how to create or design a college course that encourages learning.

In chapter 1 Fink sets the scene using evidence of the poor learning that is occurring in many US and UK colleges. It also states that lecturing is not a good way to encourage learning. This generates concerns for faculty, students and the public.

The solution according to Fink is to create significant learning experiences. These experiences have students engaged in the process and classes are high energy. [Ok at this point I am convicted for tomorrow's lecture and have just changed some things]. The impact is significant and lasting change. I think many preachers need to hear this as well.

This moves to an understanding of new kinds of learning - Industrial age to Information age paradigms are examined. I am particularly intrigued by this as I think of the history of preaching and wonder how long it took Peter or Stephen to preach in the New Testament. Maybe less is more. From this Fink gives an overview of the new forms of teaching.

In the end the proposal is to redesign - sounds familiar eh? The way to fix things is to do it differently.

Now I could put on either hat here the academic or the ecclesiologist. Both groups academics and church leaders are being told the same thing - we must change - but it does not mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It means making conscious decisions as to what we accept or reject.

I am going to quote and then paraphrase a comment that reflects where I am at in reading this:

We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers. (Spence in Fink 2003:1)

And my paraphrase:

We won’t meet the needs for more and better discipleship until church leaders become designers of discipling experiences and not preachers.

So can we improve?

p.s. My original paraphrase has been changed I orignally said “learning experiences” on reflection I really do want to say “discipling experiences”

Last week I discussed visits to churches that the church’s pastors would hate to be associated with. This week I’ll do the positive.

10) Visiting a church for a friend’s first sermon and being invited onto the podium because you are a student too.

9) Have a few marriage propositions from the previous visit passed onto you. Visiting a church overseas, and upon arriving home find a letter saying “We recognise we are not near you but if there is anything we can do …”

7) Visiting the church of a (now) well known pastor and have a chat with him after the sermon during which he says, “If you make this your church come back and have a talk with me.”

6) Visit a megachurch with your mother and when the church breaks into prayer triplets have a complete stranger pray for her. Mum remembered this for years.

5) Say to the pastor at your first visit “I like the church and I’d like to meet with you” and then have a two hour conversation over lunch.

4) Running into old friends at the church you are visiting and having them say hi after they have led worship.

3) Getting invited out to lunch and/or dinner by people you have just met while visiting a church.

2) Visiting a very conservative urban church and hear a prayer request concerning AIDS for a member of the congregation due to the member’s former spouse infecting them.

1) Visit a church and it feels like where you should be just after making a commitment to Christ.

Yesterday was a really busy day for me.  An article on Envy (and the start of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins) was not written.  Oh well tomorrow God willing.

What happened was that one of my co-workers has lost his voice.  I volunteered to take his lecture as it is an area I am familiar with and enjoy teaching.  Overall it was a good experience.  One of the rowdier students apologised this morning for his high sugar intake at lunch which “made” him quite disruptive in the class.

This of course meant that things I wanted to get done have not been started and others put on hold.  At the same time I am really happy that I could volunteer and help someone.  Teamwork seems to me to be able to step in and voluntarily take the place of some one when necessary.  I know people who think teamwork is being able to be assigned to another role but that can be a form delegation and manipulation rather than teamwork.

So in the midst of my busyness other work did not get done but still the team shows it strength.

Last week to add to what may have been stressful yesterday the family started attending a small group at church.  By God’s grace it is across the road from us and is full of lovely people.  We did not enquire if it met weekly.  Somewhere between all my lecturing I saw an email informing me of when the group is so it was not last night and I could work on other things.

My super son though was disappointed as he loves the idea of going to a “little group”.  Small and little are the same idea to him of course :)  He was too tired, as he is still recovering from his chest cold, to have gone anyway so it all worked well.

So how are you working in a team?  Busy or relaxed?

With the move to Melbourne we have visited a few churches.  This has made me think of other amusing experiences I have had in visiting churches and thought I would summarise the odd ways NOT to make someone feel welcome as a visitor.

Remember to take these lightly as they are based on my possibly faulty recollections of visits.  And if you think your church is here, possibly guess again.

Next week I might add the list of really positive things that have happened when I have visited churches.

10) Give all visitors a red rose to identify them as visitors.  This includes the single guy by himself.  *BLUSH*

9) Do not advertise your dress and Bible code as grey suit and Revised Standard Version.  All visitors are self-identifying as they do not meet this code when they arrive in jeans and with New International Version Bibles. Welcome a visitor from the pulpit by getting their name and country of origin wrong.

7) Welcome a visitor from the pulpit by forgetting their name asking for a prompt and then saying “now what was your wifes name?” straight after being introduced to her.

6) Have a pastor turn away from the visitor as they are not of the pastor’s ethnic background or the ethnic background of the majority of your church and shake the hand of someone else.

5) Ignoring the visitor who the senior pastor has asked to be introduced to the next time they are in church.

4) Doing 5 straight after a sermon on all people are valued and respected and ignore the visitor because there are special guests from overseas who have just dropped in and need to be taken care of.

3) Say you are a seeker sensitive church and use so much jargon/Christianese that visiting Christians can not figure out what you mean.

2) After registering a child for the childrens programme and saying “No juice, no jam” on the paper work call in the parents and say “We have just fed him some jam, will there be an anaphylactic reaction?”

1) Give visitors an items so large that it can not be missed that they are visitors (imagine one of those foam hands for example) and then have no one say hello the whole time they are slowly leaving the church.

The gospels do not paint Jesus as having a close family.  His (half-)brothers accuse him of being crazy and his relationship with his mother is rather interesting.  Now having said that I am not saying we see all the familial relationship of Jesus in the gospels but only parts that help us be aware of Jesus’ message.

Applying this to contemporary circumstances becomes a challenge.  If I was to ask you how close is you family and then ask you to compare it to Jesus’ family, your family probably looks a lot less dysfunctional than you thought.  As an aside it is interesting to notice how dysfunctional most of the biblical families are.  Closeness is reflected elsewhere biblically in places like the Song of Solomon for marriage and the book of Acts for close community, even the book of Ephesians for family.

But how about you apply this to your marriage or your immediate family.  How close are you to them? There are choices we all make as to how much we let people share our lives and we will share theirs.    But what degree of control do we have for this to be reciprocated?  If someone does not want to be open and transparent how can we encourage them to be so?

So what ways do you encourage others to be part of your life?

This weekend I visited another church and heard someone speaking about the need for our faith to be active, there is no such thing as an inactive or passive faith. This got me to thinking about people who express their faith in a manner which I would not consider Christian. Both calling yourself a believer because you live a moral life or living an immoral life and calling yourself a believer thus seems to be a contradiction because your faith is either in rules or not being outworked.

The answer some people give is that their faith is more inward than outward or similar sorts of ideas. I am not sure this is viable thinking biblically as our faith must be outworked according to the book of James. Nor is it biblical to live a moral life and call yourself a believer because Jesus did not come to give rules but life and he did not die to make us live more morally.

Ultimately the idea that there are faith levels seems to be mistaken. A number of people who consider the state of the church in modern society argue that we “should live as if our lives made no sense without Jesus Christ as Lord.” I am not sure of the original source just that I have read this a few times. This means that our faith in some way should be at a level that means we live different (non-moralistic) lives. This means there is no levels but a minimum which declares Jesus as Lord and lives differently because of that.

So what level is your faith at?

John Grisham is a church goer and as far a I know a committed Christian.  I still think Grisham’s, according to one interview I read semi-autobiographical,  The Testament is one of the best Christian novels I have read.

Then along comes The Appeal. This is an interesting book because while the outcome is obvious the route to it is not.  Grisham’s characters in this book are sympathetic for the lovable ones and horribly vindictive for those you are to loath.  This is fiction based on some ideas and situations of real life.

The plot revolves around three groups of people, the small people, big business and the legal fraternal who has to interact on behalf of both. The small people are from the South and have small town lawyers and churches on their side.  Big business is, of course, New York based and deliberately woos other churches to its side. The legal profession is in between and is shown to be at the mercy more of big business than not.  This is Grisham’s point and he is quite obvious in the author’s notes how he wants things to change in the legal profession.

As I said the outcome is expected but the route is not and the suspense towards the end when one of the characters starts to change sides - like the old American joke - “What’s a republican?  A democrat who has been mugged” - makes you wonder how things will turn out.

The use of churches as part of the backdrop is an interesting reflection of how churches can get co-opted, by either side in a debate, to causes they themselves do not understand well enough.   It continues to make me think about how as churches we need discernment.

Overall a satisfying read and a reminder “what does it profit a man if he has the whole world and loses his soul?”

It has been said that a sign of an open mind is being convinced you are wrong.

Over Christmas I met someone from what is best described as a multi-site church.  I respect the church and its pastor who I met once and then exchanged  emails with.  I expressed a concern that I am not convinced multi-site churches are a good idea.

I am still not convinced they should be planned for.  Remembering history however reminded me I am wrong to expect these not to happen, we just are used to them being called something else.  The something else is the change of title of the Senior Pastor or Minister or Reverend to Bishop.  In history we have had popular bishops, one of the most famous is Ambrose of Milan.  He was elected by the leaders of the day, both clergy and governmental and the people.

I am wondering if this is much different from some of the “New Apostolic” leadership we are seeing in some charismatic and Pentecostal circles.  Some people are pastors of thriving churches and others want this person as their bishop.  It does not mean they hear the bishop preach every week but they do hear him regularly as a form of unity.

For those who think this sounds a bit like the Anglican Church or even the Roman Catholic Church you are probably right.  What we often think about these churches is their abuses and deficiencies not why they came about in the first place and what was valued.  Someone else who seems to think that the “New Apostolic” is the “New Episcopal” is Mathew Clark.  A couple of his articles can be found here and here.  Every so often I think the Pentecostal church is repeating everything the early church did as well just in a faster manner.

So what about the self-confessed apostles?  I think they need to stop believing their own press. Yet there are other pastors who end up growing a congregation that is too big for a single service and a single location and ends up becoming a multi-site church.  This still means there needs to be good, or more likely for a larger church excellent pastoral care, at the local level but it is not the bishop who will visit you in hospital but a local leader.

I am willing to admit I get things wrong.  What keeps you humble?

One of the most famous maxims on leadership at the current time is from John Maxwell, “Leadership is influence”.

This has led many churches to decide that their mission is to influence the world. This idea is starting to come under alot of attack by those who are re-reading the Bible and thinking about these issues.  People such as Alan Hirsch, Greg Boyd and others are recognising we are at the end of the Constantinian or Christendom era and need to go back to the mindset of the early church for reaching out to people.

I don’t want to consider the issue today of emerging and missional church, see yesterday’s posted videos for great insights.  “Would Jesus on a bad day say, ‘What would I do?’” and the fact that we don’t do these things to be hip were lines that I loved.  I want to consider the passage of John where Jesus says “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35).

It seems to me that if we want influence we need to first have love.  Jesus disciples were not to be known by arguments where in the Messianic kingdom they would sit but by the fact that they loved one another.  This is a bit of a radical idea.  We remember the disciples for their faults or triumphs not their love.  We remember Peter who sank and denied his Lord, not the Peter who was restored. We remember Peter who preached and saw thousands saved but not the Peter that ends up in jail with John.  We are reminded at this point the disciples don’t blame each other.  If it was me I could imagine Peter and John saying, “If only you hadn’t gone over to heal that guy” and “If only you listened more closely to our Lord”.  Peter and John end up singing in jail together.  That is a mutual love which we rarely see.  Discipleship is not about doing it alone but, in love, with others.

I am not saying this is easy, sometimes it is very hard but if we really want influence then we must have love first.  So what ways does love lead to influence?  I’ll let you answer that.

The worst trouble in surfing the net is I find things to buy. At least the DVD set from IdeaRipple is affordable.

Get a preview here:

So am I the only person interested in the emerging church movement with hair?   It sure feels it when I see something like that

Recently Skye Jethani blogged about Excellence needing to be removed from our vocabulary.  I read the post and then sort of forgot about it.

This week I had the experience of attending a different morning service at Citipointe to the one my family normally attends as we had a bit of sickness and tiredness in my other family members.  My super son reacts to salicylates and it would not have been nice to have him in KidzChurch bouncing off the walls, he is fine today.  My wonderful wife had eaten some gluten and being a coeliac this is not a good thing, she is getting over this now.

Somehow, while sitting alone, I got to thinking about a comment one of the older members of the congregation made ages ago about feeling some of the church services were performance oriented. That member and I both go to an evening service of around 100 people while the morning services and the major evening service have around 1,000 people in them.

Our church would say it strives for excellence and this is not a bad thing but I am starting to think that excellence equates to “we do not make mistakes”.  Thus in the big service there is rarely a wrong note or wrong timing.  In the smaller service which is much more relaxed this can happen, the worship leader may come in early or the band play the wrong notes.  Everyone laughs and gets on with it.

Why do the larger services, everywhere I am familiar with, become more professional and less relaxed and thus less human?  If in church we should accept our and others imperfections why do try to hide them so well by being “professional” and “excellent”.  We accidentally seem to say that the humanity which Christ died for doesn’t really need salvation if we can get everything right in church.  This is a pernicious form of pride that seems to sneak up on us because we are striving for excellence.

I am looking forward to reading a book I have just come across called Pagan Christianity? which explores where we get some of our ideas for church from but I do not know if excellence or humanity is one of them.

Thoughts?

Last night the ABC showed the Lady Chatterley Affair.  This is a dramatised reflection on the trial of Penguin for publishing the DH Lawrence novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lovers” for 3 and 6.  It was an interesting reflection on the issues of freedom of speech and what is really important in relationships is it the almighty orgasm or true love and commitment?

I don’t want to spend much time on the show itself as there are many who would be appropriately offended by the language, graphic nature and sexual acts discussed.  Yet this is on TV which is part of the original issue. If the book had “literary merit” Penguin would not be sued.  Nowadays we can’t sue TV stations for breaching common standards.

What this made me realise was that this is a rubicon of the 50s and the 60s, an event not often discussed.  With the acceptance of the book as having literary merit, words that were used by the working class and the upper class were made available and eventually acceptable to the middle class at least according to the show.  Thinking about it I see no reason why this is not true.

In the process the novel also seems to have shown in 1928 that happy sexual relationships could be had outside marriage and that sexual acts not previously discussed by most people were possibly available for mutual enjoyment.  These then become part of the modern psyche with the book out selling the Bible after the trial.  The swinging 60s becomes more understandable if we realise the message of this book was so readily available.

In the end I see the history of the 50s and 60s as many forces coming together but this was one I had not noticed before.  The trial and the book bring the change of language and set of expectations that ultimately leads to the worst of the net today.  While I do not want to turn back time and reverse all the decisions I now see how the church failed at that time.  It could not say, and often does not do so today, that sexual relations are best when exercised in a marital relationship.  They may be good outside that but without commitment, love and Jesus Christ the sexual relationships become less than what God wants them to be.

John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich, and of a fairly liberal ilk, was supportive of the novel, so was most of the intelligentsia. The church has had a subtle process of censorship of books like these.  For once I agree on censorship, but only when done this way.  The book is available but no one is encouraged to read it.  I have never read the novel and still have little interest in doing so. Yet to understand the environment in which those outside the church live we need to understand the significance of such a book.  This changes how people think and behave, especially when there is such controversy.  We need to still be careful today when we are offended by works of art that have “merit” but we do not like.

I am sort of glad I saw the show for its history but the rest I can leave.

One of the books I never read for my thesis was Wayne Cordeiro’s Doing Church as a Team. I quickly read it a couple of days ago to figure out if it was aimed at teams or leadership. It is ultimately aimed at leadership of teams. The best point I found was the fact that a team should be four people and you can keep delegating down. So each member of a team of 4 builds a team of 4 and each member of that team builds a team of 4 and so on. This is the first material I have heard on the practicalities of team based work.

The reason I finally read Coreiro’s book was I had read a very different book on teams. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni is a very practical book with the theory tucked at the end.  The descriptions Lencioni uses reminds me of places I have worked and had managers say exactly what some of Lencioni’s character say.

I really enjoyed the  book.  Now I expect if you have read this far you may be surprised that this is filed under theology rather than something else.  The reason the reading of Lencioni’s book became theological for me was finally understanding the issues of leadership that I struggle with.  I know within Australian Pentecostalism there is the idea that “everyone is a leader”.  This is a complete fallacy but it is still spoken about.  The answer I have realised is not to deny this but to say “Everyone is part of a team”.  Whether teams have captains or not is a different issue.  For the church the captain is Jesus and what that means for teams may need different interpretations.

The issue is not how do we empower people to be leaders but how do we empower them to be part of teams, people who trust one another, share deep feelings which sometimes leads to conflict,  being committed to the team and its vision, not avoiding accountability and paying attention to results.  This is a much bigger ask than empowering people to be leaders as we need to be part of functioning teams first.  Which means we have to overcome these own issues in our lives first.

Our salvation has become so individualistic that our service to God has gone the same way.  We must now all be leaders for God and not team players.  We can be individually saved by Jesus and not need the church. This was part of the thinking behind my thesis - why do we have church and how does it function?  The priesthood of all believers is not supposed to be individualistic but an exercise in team work.  These books confirm my thinking but it is Lencioni who will make me think for a while as to what to do about building teams.

I had the pleasure of meeting Roger E. Olson a few years ago at an Society for Pentecostal Studies meeting. We were both about to go into sessions where we were speaking/chairing and I did not have long to speak to him. I bailed him up about a comment in a paper he had written as I knew it could be interpreted two ways and I wanted to know which one he meant. It was the way I hoped it would be, phrased in such a way to keep everybody happy.

Roger’s new book Reformed and Always Reforming is a great read though I must admit it is slightly repetitive at points. The editors could have cleaned up some of the prose as the same thing is said a few times about the same people. It reads as if it was a series of addresses that have been compiled into a book and slightly more editing could have been useful.

The back cover of the book says “Can we be more evangelical by being less conservative?” That is the thesis of the book and the book succeeds in showing so. I also think I will write a paper, in response to the book, “Pentecostals as Pre-Cursors to Postconervatives: We Can be more Pentecostal by being more Evangelical”.

So what is the content?

The lengthy Introduction sets the context for the whole discussion. It defines terms, names names, and says who are postconservative theologians and who are opposed to postconservative theology.

Chapter 1 is a consideration of the style of postconservative evangelism. Here Olson shows that the centre of doing evangelical theology is being evangelical. Being evangelical for Olson is defined by 5 points which I understand as:

1) Centrality of Scripture
2) Conversion
3) Christ
4) Evangelism
5) Christian Orthodoxy with God’s word as the highest authority for all Christian faith and practice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Stanley is the pastor of North Point Church in Atlanta.  I wish I had known this when I was in Atlanta this year as I may have dropped in on the Sunday I was around.  I seem to like how Andy thinks and find his books resonate with me in a surprising manner.

So his book Choosing to Cheat: What Happens When Family and Work Collide was a challenge for me.  It is still on the bedside of my wonderful wife as we have lots more of it to discuss.

The basic thesis that Andy puts forward is that we all have the same amount of time in a day it is our choice on how we use it.  The balance we need to work out is between family life and work life.

I understand Andy’s basic point to be that the only place we can not be replaced is in our family.  At work or at church our employer or God could replace us.  We are the ones who make our family though and without us being present the family does not exist.  For the other areas of life we may find that these are diminished without our presence but they do not stop existing.  I think there is an argument here that if we were all not  at church it would no longer exist (depending on your theology) but somehow the nature of being God’s people limits this in some manner.

Andy actually puts this into practice and works only 45 hours per week.  He says his staff get frustrated that he is not always around.  I just hope these staff are single people rather than ignoring what their pastor teaches.

Another analogy Andy uses earlier on is if one partner of a marriage keeps the other partner hanging it is like asking a friend to hold a heavy rock for a long time.  Eventually the friend drops it not because of unwillingness but because it is so hard over such a long period.  This one has struck home for us and we are re-assessing how we work (or don’t work) as a team.

For me the theological issue like usual is how do we express Jesus is Lord not just in confession but in how we live?  this book challenges us to get it right at home by having the right priorities at work.