benedson

On being evangelised

Last night i went to see the evangelist J.John at the Manchester Velodrome with my new church. Now, personally I react against anything like this, so i need to practice generosity when critiquing what happened... J. John spoke well was funny, engaging and used a good number of analogies to get his point across. At the end of the evening he did an altar call type thing and asked for people to turn to Christ and a number did, as well as a number of re-dedications...

Okay here are my issues...

1 - Doctrine of atonement based solely of Penal substitution, nothing was mentioned about incarnation and resurrection. This therefore presents a particular theology of atonement that preys on guilt...
2 - Have the evangelists bottled it? Why don't they just go for fresh conversions, rather than adding the rededication bit? One critique of the emerging church is that we're too focused on the de-churched...for me this was more about the de-churched than the non-churched. I think that the rededication bit is important, but noticed that most people who i knew who were standing at that part were good Christian people...
3 - Free Gift if you stand...is the gift of eternal life not enough?
4 - Christian subculture - don't you just hate it! A subculture that the majority of my non-Christian friend would be extremely suspicious of.
5 - Why does it always have to be slick and success based? We heard nothing of failure brokenness and the struggle of faith. I honestly think that to engage missionally with the emerging generation then it needs to be more about the honesty of our brokenness.

But it works for lots of people...and maybe this is about a diverse number of approaches to mission. This is one approach of many...

Technorati Tags: Ben Edson, Evangelism, mission, J.John

Missiology in a culture of dispossession

I was in a fascinating meeting on Monday with Timothy Gorringe, Professor of Theology at Exeter University, the meeting was part of MTAG and Prof. Gorringe was reflecting on missiology in a culture of disposession.

He made six points with wrt mission and so i thought that I'd share them with you as they correlate with a large amount of my thinking about contemporary missiology.

1 - What is Gospel? What is Good news? Good news needs to be understood in relation to hurt. Good news heals past hurts, Christ touched a raw nerve and brought good news to it. What therefore are the raw nerves in contemporary society that the good news of Christ needs to speak to. Gorringe claimed a raw nerve was 'environmentalism and the denial the facts of it'. We explored as a group that perhaps 'Fear' was the raw nerve and that environmental destruction was one manifestation of that. Other recent ones include the destruction of the planet due to the big bang experiment last week.

2 - Community - the role of community in contemporary missiology. I've written a bit about this here. But my experience of coming to faith was through the witness of one particular community, and how they lived together and sought reconciliation within their conflicts. There were significant people along the journey but i was evangelized by a community rather than a professional evangelist...

3 - Integrity - Mission is living with integrity. We had Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmat to stay recently and the thing that struck me most about them was the way that they lived outworked their values. Therefore when they spoke about environmentalism etc. this was outworked in a localised context for them.

4 - Depth - Human beings are deep water creatures that dies in the shallows. Faith needs to be of a depth that people need. We cannot have that depth if the issue of justice is ducked...

5 - Life - Where is the life in the church? Life attracts people, worship needs to energise people for life.

6 - Resistance - The church must become a community of resistance. A community that subverts the cultural norm, a community that dismantles the dominant consciousness and offers an alternative to it.

Technorati Tags: Ben Edson, mission

the complexity of aid...

A story from Michael Taylor.

Some women in an African village had to walk a considerable distance to fetch water for their community. A Christian Aid project gave the village a well within the village precincts, so that the women no longer had to walk to fetch the water which was now always available.

However the well was consistently vandalised. It turned out eventually that the women themselves were vandalising the project. This was because, despite the arduous walk to fetch the water, the women enjoyed the time spent on the walk because it gave them time out from the village, from the men, and time and space to talk. The women were not consulted about their wants and needs. It was assumed that the project was good for them without asking their opinion.

It's never simple...

Technorati Tags: Ben Edson, mission

Crazy Busy Summer

Summer has been shockingly busy for me this year - hence the quietness of this blog - there were a few major things, family occasions - including a surprise Ruby wedding party for my parents and my brothers wedding! I also finished my training for ordination (that was a trial...) and got ordained and started my curacy.

I now have a 50/50 split in my job where i spent half my time in an 'ordinary' parish church - if there is such a thing, and the other half with Sanctus1. The Parish Church is Christ Church Brunswick, The parish is really diverse, it borders the city centre and takes in the student corridor but the majority of it is ex local authority housing and going through a major process of regeneration. I'm really enjoying the diversity of it.

Holidays happened, fortunately we went to France and managed to get two weeks away from the grim british summer, and then there was Greenbelt - my first year of coordinating worship - that seemed to go well, but was a lot of work! I'm now looking forward to a long stint in Manchester, when i hope to blog more...

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I am Everyone

Orange's new 'I am' campaign needs subverting in some way...I'm thinking that a service could be based around it...

Technorati Tags: orange, i am