Moving gospel pictures to different walls…

On Monday our elders were listing to a talk by Jonathan Dobson. Slightly weird listening to a talk where he’s referencing stuff that’s come from our church, but he’s putting into practice what we’re talking about! Challenging and encouraging.

One of the things we got talking about was his emphasis on constantly reminding people of what they’re about every time they get together. So Dobson uses the acronym ‘SPEL’ (irony?) Shared life and Truth; Pray; Engage peoples and cultures; Love one another.

I was very taken by this approach. In my experience when you stop reminding people of what you’re about we so easily slip back into ‘learned’ ways of doing things rather than biblical ways of doing things.

Someone raised the issue of people switching off to this though if you talk about it too much. Apparently if a picture has been on a wall more than two weeks then you don’t notice it as much.

So my suggestion was – rather than taking down the picture altogether – why not move it to a different wall?

Rainbows

This morning as I headed out my door to the office I could sense the light rain before I felt it land on my recently gelled hair. I looked up at the sky to see the offending cloud but the sky was blue.

As I rounded the corner a beautiful rainbow streaked across the sky rising out of the tops of the flats opposite my road.

It got me thinking about God’s promises. It’s struck me a lot recently as I’ve been engaging pastorally with people how often we believe the lies Satan pumps out. And we believe them so easily. The lie that man is to be feared. The lie that I am in control, or when I find that I am not, the lie that I should be in control. The lie that life and satisfaction is to be found in lust.

But we see the desctructiveness of these lies over and over again. Stress indicates to us that all is not well when we seek to be in control. And yet we indulge the stress, we talk about it as if it is just what I am going through right now and that the remedy is running from the problem – on holiday, or to bed, or to solitude.

We would do well to look at a rainbow from time to time and remember God’s promises. His promises that he is in control, that he is to be feared – not man, his promise to give us life – to the full! But that life is found in losing our lives.

Interested in different ‘Christian’ music?

I’ve just set up a new website that not only sells Doc Brown tracks, CD’s and tickets for gigs, but will also be selling the new Crowded House CD.

No, sadly we’ve not done a deal with the award-winning New Zealand band. In fact, to avoid copyright issues we will have to call the band on the CD something different.

We’re in the process of recording various songs written by people in the Crowded House network of churches, including Tim Chester, Rob Spink, myself and Del Delahoyde. We use these songs in public ‘worship’ and thought it was about time we got them done on record. So, the ‘House Band’ is putting together versions of these songs, aiming to have them ready for the Total Church conference in February 2010.

Anyway – you can go and have a look now, and come back to check in Feb 2010 to get your copy of the new CD.

Applying Keller

I love it when God teaches us things and then gives us an opportunity to put them into action almost straight away.

Yesterday afternoon I was involved in a seminar for Porterbrook and we were talking about how to teach the Bible. Tim Keller, a church leader in New York takes the following approach:

When looking at a passage look at:

1. What you must do – what does the passage tell us we should be doing.

2. Why you can’t do it – no matter how hard we try on our own we will not be able to do what the passage asks

3. How Jesus did it – look at how Jesus is the one who was perfectly obedient, who could do what his father asks

4. How we can do it through him – because we are in Jesus and Jesus is in us by his spirit he helps us to follow him and be like him

It was great having this in my mind when talking to ‘Y’ last night. When she raised the issue of wanting to follow Jesus and be like him in being selfless she was seeing the first point of the outline above. The Bible calls us to follow Jesus. We had been talking about that in terms of forgiveness.

What she didn’t see was point 2 – on her own she can’t do that. So that’s where I went next. I explained how we fail.

We had already talked about point 3 – how Jesus has done it, so there was no need to go over that. Yuki already had seen how selfless Jesus was. So I moved on to point 4 – we can be selfless only through Jesus – its by his Spirit living in us that we can be like him. The challenge for Y at the end was to follow Jesus and have his Spirit come live in her.

That’s what I’m talking about!

A number of people ask me what a ‘Gospel Community’ is about – how it differs from a small group or a home group.

Well, last night I had the best experience of what a Gospel Community is about and it may give you a glimpse of what I’m talking about…

The ‘let-me-tell-you-about-Jesus-and-my-life’ approach…

When I was at university I was very much in the ‘two ways to live’ mold of evangelism. I have nothing against Two Ways to Live (except their lack of mention of the people of God) and have used it many times in sharing the gospel and it still is there in my mind as I have conversations with people. It helps give a framework from which to bring the gospel to where the person is at.

As a result of this, though, I remember taking issue with people who had a ‘let me tell you what Jesus has done in my life’ approach to evanglism.

What dawned on me this evening was that I think now I probably would take a ‘let me tell you about Jesus in my life’, but perhaps from a different angle than those I took issue with at University…