Month: July 2007

Categories
Present

Postmodernity, Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y

HypocrisyMany books have been about postmodernity and the generational differences between Builders and Boomers and Busters (Gen Xers) and Gen Y. I have purchased and read a lot of them. The problem with such books is that they try to treat large numbers of quite disparate people as if they were a homogeneous group. Looking at a person as the average of a set of statistical values does not really help you connect with that person.

The Holy Spirit works to create changes in people in the strangest of situations, sometimes even in uninspiring declining churches. However, the Holy Spirit is far more likely to bring about changes within a person’s life within the context of a dynamic community of passionately devoted followers of Jesus. The good news will only appear real to listeners if the environment in which the good news is communicated is consistent with the message.

It isn’t difficult for an outsider to be inspired by the radical teachings of Jesus about caring for the poor, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being peacemakers, turning the other cheek when someone hurts you, loving your enemies, giving generously to the needy, and being non-judgmental, but if the outsider perceives a credibility gap between the message and the actions of the community which preaches the message, the outsider is not likely to want to join.

Categories
Past

Humble Beginnings

SlaveryWilliam Wilberforce was most famous for his lifelong and ultimately successful campaign to abolish slavery in England. The film Amazing Grace, now showing in Australian cinemas, is about his life. But his influence on the world went deeper than just one issue. He was one of a small group of friends who became known as the Clapham Sect. They were fully devoted followers of Jesus, and made some very significant contributions to the world.

Wilberforce was one of the founders of the Society for Missions to Africa and the East (subsequently known as the Church Missionary Society) in 1799. This was right at the start of the modern missionary movement, just six years after William Carey had landed in India. The Society was at first unable to find Englishmen willing to be sent as missionaries to Africa, and over the course of the first ten years only five missionaries were sent out, all of them German Lutherans.

All five of the missionaries went to Sierra Leone, a colony where freed slaves from England were resettled. The capital of Sierra Leone is still called Freetown. Four of the missionaries were faithful to the end and died at their posts in West Africa after between two and 17 years of service. The fifth deserted and became a slave trader.

Categories
Faith

Contagious Faith

TightropeSeth Godin reports on a number of things which are contagious. According to a recent study, a person’s chances of becoming obese increases by 57 percent if they have a friend who becomes obese. Other contagious things listed by Seth include teen suicide, terrorism, spamming, graffiti, and becoming a millionaire. You just have to hang around with the right friends.

Faith is also something contagious. I’m talking about active faith, not passive faith. The type of faith which involves following the Holy Spirit’s promptings to do things which appear risky or foolhardy to others and which are doomed to failure without divine intervention. The type of faith that makes life an adventure and gets the blood pumping. The type of faith that believes God is living and active in the world today, and we can have significant roles in his mission.

Contagious faith is frequently at work in the world. In Africa, contagious faith in Jesus has spread from less than 9 million believers in 1900 to 417 million today. The makings of contagious faith exist in every believer’s heart. All it takes is a willingness to listen to what God is saying, and the courage to step out wholeheartedly into the unknown and risk everything.

Categories
Books

Rich People don’t necessarily have the answers

White ManAccording to the way most people think about it, poverty is a problem caused by lack of money. The answer is simple: teach people who are poor how to make money. If they don’t have enough money it must be because they’re not smart enough to make it, so they need to listen to us while we give them the solution. That isn’t a very fair characterisation of foreign aid, but there are often overtones of superiority in the way aid is provided.

William Easterly, professor of economics at New York State University, explains why foreign aid has been so unsuccessful in his book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. According to Easterly, there are two types of foreign aid workers: Planners and Searchers. Planners keep coming up with utopian plans which don’t work, whereas Searchers keep looking for small ways to make a positive difference. Unfortunately, the aid world is dominated by Planners.

Easterly’s views are quite controversial, and they are obviously unpopular with the people who bear the brunt of his criticism. It is very difficult in this argument to know who is right, but judging from the responses of bloggers to his ideas, Easterly’s ideas are getting the upper hand. The book is a very entertaining and thought-provoking read, one of the best that I have read this year.

Categories
Poverty

Maybe Africa isn’t such a Basket Case

BeggingControversial New York University economics professor William Easterly has published an article in the Los Angeles Times arguing that the media and the international development establishment have been portraying Africa as a more backward basket case than it really is. He says that cellphone and Internet usage has doubled every year for the last seven years, and foreign private capital inflows to Africa exceeded foreign aid in 2006.

According to Easterly, foreign aid won’t be what helps Africans to escape from poverty. They will be escaping “the same way everyone else did – through the efforts of resourceful entrepreneurs, democratic reformers and ordinary citizens at home.” At the TED Conference in Africa in June, Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda said, “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?” Bono, who was in the audience, and who is a strong supporter of foreign aid, shouted out his disagreement.

As a result of my own experiences with foreign aid on the ground in Africa, I tend to agree more with the position taken by Mwenda and Easterly than with that of Bono. Mwenda’s argument that 30 years of Western aid to Africa has achieved nothing seems to be supported by the statistics, although to be fair to Bono, he advocates intelligent use of foreign aid, rather than repeating the mistakes of the past.

Categories
Future

Technology in the Church

TechnologyIf the job of the church is to follow as closely as possible in the footsteps of a man from Nazareth who wore sandals, had hardly any money, and never used electricity or a motor vehicle, what use do we have for technology in a church? Instead of spending money on sound systems, lighting, air conditioning, video projectors and other equipment, shouldn’t we be selling it off and getting back to the basics?

Well, that depends on what you consider the basics to be. If you believe that the message of Jesus was fundamentally about being nice to other people, then I would agree that technology has no place in a church. But if you believe that Jesus has appointed us with special roles in fulfilling God’s mission here on earth, saving people from the consequences of their sin, then it would be foolhardy for us not to use the resources which he has given to us.

If we need to communicate the good news to others as effectively as possible, we need to do so within a cultural context which will maximise their understanding of the message. If people typically receive what they regard as true through the media of television, the internet, radio, and conversations with friends and acquaintances, then we need to be using the same media to communicate the timeless message. If we don’t speak in ways which people can understand, we won’t be heard at all.

Categories
Present

Modern Tower of Babel

SkyscraperNewspapers yesterday reported that the Burj Dubai which is under construction has already become the world’s tallest building. Avid Bible readers will recall that the Tower of Babel was the tallest building of its time, erected as a monument to humankind’s independence from God. The direct result was a scattering of people over the face of the earth and a confusion of languages. Pride leads to separation from God and separation from other people.

To celebrate the new world’s tallest building, let’s take a look at how we’re faring some thousands of years after the Tower of Babel. Some of the loudest voices we hear in the media are those of atheist philosophers who proclaim that God is unnecessary to explain the world, so therefore he doesn’t exist. Hmm, interesting logic – the world somehow blasted itself into existence out of nothing, and that can all be explained away by rational science.

Let’s see how we’re faring on the language front. There are 35 languages each of which is spoken as a first language by more than 30 million people. No language is spoken as a first language by more than 15% of people. Even English is spoken as a first language by less than 5% of people. It really seems as if we haven’t made very much progress since the Tower of Babel in respect of either prideful boasts against God or communicating with each other.

Categories
Past

William Carey

MissionsAn English school teacher in the 1780s, William Carey was inspired by reading the journals of the explorer Captain James Cook, and became obsessed about spreading the good news throughout the world. This was at a time when the vast majority of Christians in the world were located in Europe, and there was very little effort being made at sharing the good news with any other cultures.

In 1789, Carey became the full-time pastor of a Baptist Church, and in 1792 he published a small book which became extremely influential, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, and later that year he was one of the founders of the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen (now the Baptist Missionary Society). He then set of with another missionary and his family, and arrived illegally in Calcutta, because missions work in India was prohibited.

Although Carey’s direct missionary efforts were not particularly successful (he was in India for over 6 years before baptising the first convert, and he neglected his wife and children), he completed a number of Bible translations into local languages. His greatest legacy, however, was in inspiring others to missionary service. He was directly influential in the foundation of the Baptist Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society, and indirectly influential in almost every other missionary effort of the time. Now, 200 years after his death, there are more Christians in Africa, Asia and South America than in Europe and North America.

Categories
Faith

Miracles

Loaves and fishesA lot of people find the miracles in the Bible to be a stumbling block. Such people argue that we now live in a more advanced age. We understand more about the principles of science, and we know that supernatural events don’t occur. Over the past century there have been various attempts at demythologising the Bible, and efforts at rediscovering the historical Jesus, free from any miracles or interpretations.

I myself think that such efforts are a lot more irrational than believing in a God who is able to perform miracles. If there is a God who is so powerful that he can create the universe and everything in it, then it must be trivial for him to throw in a few extra miracles and a resurrection. It is illogical and incredibly arrogant for me to attempt to redefine the limits of God’s powers by reference to my own very limited cultural understanding.

But on the other hand, miracles are of very limited usefulness in persuading someone to believe in God. The most unmistakeable miracle performed directly in front of a determined skeptic will be explained away as a statistical aberration or an occurrence of a phenomenon which has a scientific explanation which is yet to be discovered. How else can atheists explain away the creation of the world and everything in it out of nothing?

Categories
Books

The Bridges of God

BridgeHow exactly is it that people come to faith in Jesus? It’s something that requires a miracle of the Holy Spirit working in someone’s heart, of course, but there’s a human element which provides a context in which the Holy Spirit works. In the Western church nowadays, we tend to assume that it happens during one-to-one interactions, and so we emphasise personal evangelism and personal commitment.

In his very readable little book entitled The Bridges of God, first published in 1955, Donald McGavran asserts that people primarily come to faith in Jesus through group decisions, rather than through individual ones. The book, which is one of the most important missiology books of the 20th Century, asserts that the “mission station” approach to evangelism, which involves rescuing people out of their environment one at a time, is inferior to the “people movement” approach, in which whole groups of related people become Christians at the same time through a group decision making process.

Although the book talks primarily about cross-cultural missions work in non-Western countries, it seems to me that McGavran’s insights are highly relevant to evangelism today in Western countries. In spite of the value which we place on individualism, most people make their important decisions in life through a consultation process with other trusted people, although they are usually peers rather than family members.