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Monday, June 21, 2004

Mike Yaconelli, M (2003) Stories of Emergence: Moving from Absolute to Authentic  


Permeating much of my experience in ministry was the underlying assumption that bigger is better. 1 can remember going to conferences and seeing a kind of Spiritual Darwinism at work. The people with a platform- the ones everyone wanted to hear and shake hands with were always the guys from the big churches. Pastoral credibility 1 had everything to do with how big a budget they had and how many worshipers came to the Sunday event. If a church decreased in size, one could only assume the pastor wasn't doing God's will and his books were destined for the discount rack. - Spencer Burke in Stories of emergenceGordon Homepage 06.26.04 - 4:55 am #

Salvation, as normally understood outside the context of the whole story (say-a-prayer-so-that-when-you-die-you-can-go-to-heaven), lacks the power to be compelling. The reductionist version was never right or true. Lacking the context of the story of God and his Kingdom, salvation became, in late modernity, just another consumer item that supposedly secured one's eternity. Todd hunter in Stories of emergenceGordon Homepage 06.26.04 - 4:56 am #

I contrasted the biblical perspective - that the words of Jesus are made flesh by the evidence of believers who are genuine salt and light - with prevailing practices that reduced the gospel to methods that communicated propositional truth (the plan of salvation) followed by persuasion to "receive Christ." I began to wonder: How this is different from marketing methods designed to promote consumer products? I couldn't help but conclude that we had engaged in serious biblical reductionisrn in which the gospel becomes little more than a consumer product marketed internationally with an abundant life message "dreams will come true"' James F Engel Stories of emergenceGordon Homepage 06.26.04 - 4:57 am #

Christ, in other words, (within the great commission) put forth a seamless agenda with no dichotomies or variations in priority between evangelism, holy living, and social transformation.This great truth about Christ's kingdom and reign almost completely eluded me until the first of the famous Lausanne conferences held in 1974. One leader after another from the Two-Thirds World prophetically declared that our western evangelistic preoccupation, while foundational and necessary, had not transformed the world as Christ intended.1/2Gordon Homepage 06.26.04 - 4:58 am #

2/2They issued a clear call to return to a local, church-based, kingdom focused gospel that would penetrate all of life with the lordship of Christ. Then and only then will the church have a compelling message in a pluralistic world. At their insistence, the famous but now almost forgotten and ignored Lausanne Covenant called for church-based holistic ministry that takes the entirety of the Great Commission seriously.For many in attendance, including me, Lausanne was the high-water mark of evangelical Christianity …where the process to break out of modernism and restore Christ's holistic balance in our response to his Great Commission. James F Engel Stories of emergence

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Palin, M. (2003) Sahara  


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Sunday, June 06, 2004

Bonhoeffer, D. (1953) Letters and Papers From Prison 


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