On Evil's Elimination

Later this year, the University Fellowship of Christians have their God vs. Evil events. I'm really looking forward to them, and I figure now is a good time to prepare for it by getting my head back in the game, so to speak.

Obviously, you could scarcely manage to be a Christian for as long as I have without giving evil/suffering/pain considerable thought. For instance, I particularly appreciated Henri Blocher's, Evil and the Cross.

More recently, I liked Alvin Plantinga's video interview on CPX a couple of years ago (the last part of the interview, especially).

But just today, I read the transcript of this address by Greg Clarke, also from CPX. It's entitled, The Elimination of Evil.

At one point, Clarke compares a popular estimation of God's judgement with a biblical picture:

This gracious act of Jesus, as God incarnate, is an entirely different kind of act to what people expect of a perfect God who is judging evil. It is almost the opposite of what Zizek [...] calls ‘divine violence’ [...] a gleeful divine punishment, pleasurably handing out what the evil creatures deserve. But the message of Christianity is vastly different.

Well worth a read. And it comes with a bonus: Clarke also includes a lengthy quote from Bono, which is bang on target.

Beyond Hellish Self-Centredness

Recently, I finished reading David Powlison's, Seeing with New Eyes. My ol' mate Kristan recommended it to me years ago, and I'm very thankful that he did.

Powlison's writing about Counseling as a professional in the field. But he's an evangelical trying to put the horse back in front of the cart in a discipline where the cart has led the way for a good while. (Note: this book pre-dates Tim Chester's, You Can Change, by some 5 years, I think).

I particularly appreciated his thoughtful critique of Gary Chapman's, The Five Love Languages. Chapman's book, says Powlison,

"...not only leaves fundamental self-interest unchallenged, it plays to self-interest." (230)

He pithily captures the dynamic here:

"[Five Love Languages] does slightly alter the 'You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' calculus. It is a 'glorified version', taking a small step in the right direction by reversing the order. 'I scratch your back (and then it's likely you'll scratch mine).' " (232)

Now, let's be clear, there's lots of handy stuff in Chapman's book as Powlison is quick to point out. But oh-so-many Christian-ish psychology books pull the same move (e.g. Kevin Leman's books spring to mind).

Powlison pin-points the problem when he makes the gospel his point of comparison:

"The love of Christ speaks a 'love language'--mercy to hellishly self-centred people..." (236)

That's the language in which Christians must become fluent.

Cultivating Intelligent Engagement with Common Objections

Recently I was looking over the Effective Ministry stuff again. These common objections caught my eye (numbers are percentages for people in their twenties):

• Irrelevant        13
• It’s for non-copers        17
• Set of rules        5
• Science disproves it        6
• No proof        10
• For the well off        2
• The only way?        9
• Problem of suffering        31
• Truth of the Bible        27
• Good, but not for me        21
• Too many hypocrites        5
• I’m not good enough        5
• Other        3

It got me thinking, "Where are we equipping our people to intelligently engage with these common objections?". It's not hard to relate any of them back to the gospel, either, as (for example) Tim Keller has shown in The Reason for God.

But then a second reflection came to mind: perhaps there's an implicit assumption that undergirds all of these objections. Let me put it positively in the language of a hypothetical objector:

"I want to be thoughtful about how I live in this world, and why I live that way. And I just don't think churches are in the habit of intelligently engaging with real issues with satisfying depth."

As an axiom, it's kinda the flip-side of the naming of the Brights Movement, for example.

So what? Well, if I'm right, then...

• we've gotta assume that our public communication (e.g. advertising for church) has to punch through that assumption to register anything more than glib dismissal.
• where we fail to engage with current issues, it will more likely be taken as deriving from our inability to do so, rather than our burden for evangelism-ahead-of-apologetics.
• the task of training our people in winsome apologetics paves the way for evangelism methodologically, as well as topically.
• the way we engage is important--and I don't mean rhetoric. But as we carefully articulate our engagement with any of the above topics (or indeed, something else altogether), we undermine the knock-down strength of all of them by illustrating the depth and integrity of Christian thought.

RTR now (finally) has a website

At long last, the brilliant Australian journal, Reformed Theological Review, has a website.

In the past, if you wanted to, say, change the mailing address for your subscription, you had to use one of those red post-box things in your street, together with stamps, an envelope, etc.--I could never figure it out.

No longer!

Subscribe now. Here. I dare you.

Food for smallgroups Thought

Crossroads Classic smallgroups are just about to kick-off for the year.

I'm spending some time with our leaders tomorrow, and we're going to take a look at the models advocated in these two articles:

• The Big Read - on reading big slabs of Scripture
• The Swedish Method - on a super-flexible framework for studying a shorter passage in a group

This year, our smallgroups will follow a varied curriculum across the year: a couple of months reading big slabs of Scripture; a couple of months at a slower pace, in the details; some time functioning as a book club; and more.

So I need to figure out how to coach our smallgroups leaders to run fantastic book clubs... hmmm. More thought required :P

Our Lab on Team Leadership

Yesterday I wrapped up a six week ministrylab (Crossroads training course) on Team Leadership. The idea was to develop both the practical skills of our team leaders, and their 'inner life' as leaders. For one of our sessions, Nathanael Jeanneret--a great ol' mate of mine--came along to give us a bit of a masterclass on running meetings. He's developing an app called, Meetron, which is set for release around Easter 2012.

You can grab the (rather full) notes of the entire lab from our ministrylab page. Check it out, and let me know what you reckon.

I'll be running the lab again in February(ish) 2012.

By the way, John Dickson's Humilitas worked really well as a companion reading to the course. I recommend.

Kids These Days

Recently, I was reading Their God is So Big--a kids' ministry handbook--with Nick Mollison recently. Here are a few things that grabbed my attention (no surprises, just helpful reminders to me):

• Two year-olds
• have short attention spans, you have to change it up regularly
• they like to help
• they thrive on routine and repetition, rather than getting bored with it.
• Three-Four year-olds
• fantasy and reality remains a blur, so work to reinforce the historical truth of the Bible
• Structure your various activities so that they give you their attention at the key time
• use visual aids to lessons
• Five-Seven year-olds
• involve them in helping you
• give them approval
• delegate small tasks to them