Friday, March 28, 2008
mission storytelling roadshow
Over the next few weeks I am part of a mission roadshow, Baptist initiated, called Sharpening the Middle. It is a follow up to the Sharpening the Edge conference last year (short youtube video clip of me in action here), telling the stories of grassroots missional experiments and classic church planting going on here in Aotearoa.
The roadshow consists of three regional workshop days, in Auckland (April 5), Wellington (April 10) and Christchurch (April 12).
Topics include:
* The challenge of Mission facing the church in NZ today – Murray Robertson
* Thinking Biblically about Mission and Church in NZ today George Wieland
* Discerning the biblical frameworks George Wieland, Steve Taylor
* Local church stories – including Opawa story.
This day is specifically aimed at our existing churches (defined as the ‘middle’). For me this is quite meaningful, as it’s nice to have emerging church conversation tucked up within Baptist mission and life.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
storytelling the kingdom
This is a story I wrote yesterday. It’s a missional reading of Matthew 13:44; The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a person found it, they hid it again, and then in their joy went and sold all they had and brought that field.
It’s called the Brown paper bag.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
God revealed in community
a tangent touched off from here
Modernity sold us a pup. It sold us a belief you needed truth as all-encompassing and systematic. Modernity took truth and wrapped it in culture and then sold it to us as a cultural syncretistic product: truth as pure, abstract, timeless.
Yet, the God of the Bible was a God of community moulding community in the desert, moulding community in the church urging community through the broken body of Christ ..telling story after story, narrative after narrative of the actions of the communal God refusing to sieve narrative into doctrinal purity, God took the risk of letting stories serve as the interpretive vessel for the body of God.
For where 2 or 3 are gathered in my name, there is Christ he broke bread and gave it to them then their eyes were opened and they recognized him .
The God of all, revealed in community
When moderns encounter postmoderns they sniff for a watering down of truth. What they fail to smell is the decaying odor, the rotting carcase, of their modern, all-encompassing, systematic cultural approach to truth. (Note what I said, the cultural approach is rotting, not the truth.)
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