Posts by Arthur Davis

May 16

Head shift (another one)

Our life in Dodoma has got a pretty good rhythm now. For the time being, I mostly know what to expect. We’re feeling pretty well together and not isolated. There’s tiredness, but no shell-shock.

I’m always casting around for new experiences; it’s part of what drives me. I’m always animated by innovation, exploration, and the possibility of discovery. And, after a couple of months living here in Tanzania, Swahili lost its newness — so I automatically started fishing for something new. I continued with my regular practice of navigating trends in Australia and USA. I continued reading a lot, mostly online, most of it funnelled through social media; most of it, in effect, headlines.

‘Your head’s not really in Tanzania,’ noticed Tamie. Read more

May 14

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Student movements and slippery slopes

A story from the history of student ministry:

After an hour’s talk, I asked Rollo point blank, ‘Does the SCM put the atoning blood of Jesus Christ central?’ He hesitated, and then said, ‘Well, we acknowledge it, but not necessarily central.’ Dan Dick and I then said that this settled the matter for us in the CICCU. We could never join something that did not maintain the atoning blood of Jesus Christ at its centre; and we parted company. Norman Grubb

It’s part of the history of CICCU when, in 1918, SCM approached them to discuss reunification. This encounter clarified CICCU’s doctrinal emphasis, and has been seen as a key moment behind the foundation of IFES.

It’s the story with which John Stott begins The Cross of Christ, it’s the story that was referred to a number of times during my undergraduate years in my local IFES group, and it’s the story that was part of galvanising an evangelical identity and ministry pathway for me personally.

It was inspiring. It was also a cautionary tale: ‘And look what happened to SCM! They lost the plot!’ Read more

Apr 28

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What we talk about when we talk about God (book review)

Like so much of Rob Bell’s work, What We Talk About When We Talk About God is really a sort of sermon: accessible, full of anecdotes, and with a clear persuasive thrust. The content, too, is what we might have expected. When We Talk About God shows Bell drawing on his whole back catalogue of tours, films, and books, now synthesising it more explicitly for a post-Christian audience. Bell has spent most of his career dismantling dualism and ‘escapology’ in Christian circles, and he now goes to work on its equivalent in wider Western culture. Read more

Apr 2

John Stott’s daily prayer

Good morning Heavenly Father
Good morning Lord Jesus
Good morning Holy Spirit

Father, I worship you, Creator and Sustainer of the Universe
Jesus, I worship you, Saviour and Lord of the world
Spirit, I worship you, Sanctifier of the people of God

Glory to the Father, and the Son, and to the Spirit
As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever
Amen

Father, would I live this day in your presence and please you more and more
Jesus, would I take up my cross this day and follow you
Spirit, would you fill me and cause your fruit to ripen in my life:
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control

Holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity
Have mercy upon me
Amen

John Stott’s evangelical expression of faith wasn’t a flighty, novel sort of thing. A prayer like this takes us back before the Reformation, back even before the split between East and West, echoing the ancient mass and the ‘Great Tradition’ of Trinitarian reflection. This is the sort of stuff that Christian communities have always brought before God together.

This is also a liturgy, words to be enacted and then grown into and lived out, words that do not merely name our requests before God, but name the meaning behind everything we experience: words with which we can understand, This is what we have been part of all along, this is where we find ourselves, this is where we will belong.

Read John Stott’s biography

(The rendition above contains my own minor style edits.)

Mar 16

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Evangelicals and the fundamentalist tendency

I recently wrote a review of Michael Jensen’s book, Sydney Anglicanism: An Apology (Wipf & Stock, 2012). The questions being asked of Sydney Anglicanism are good questions for any evangelical Christian, and the book prompted some further reflections for me. The nature of evangelicalism is something that Tamie and I have been exploring for several years now.

Jensen responds to the charge that Sydney Anglicans are fundamentalists in one of his early chapters. Part of his aim is to establish that ‘Bible-believing’ is not synonymous with ‘fundamentalist’.

He notes that fundamentalism is a real phenomenon, not simply a swear word. As he puts it, fundamentalism is ‘a kind of religious mentality that is most egregiously in evidence in a kind of epistemological double standard… that confidently asserts the objectivity and interest-free status of its own reasoning while at the same time decrying the prejudice and interest-laden nature of the reasoning of its opponents.’

My question goes something like this: how can we claim to hold Scripture as our final authority in a way that’s not fundamentalist? Read more

Mar 12

Rediscovering our tradition through the new hymns movement

I recently gave some hints about how we can be more aesthetically engaged, so let’s pick up on that note once more.

For decades now, a certain sort of music has been popularised for Western Protestant Christians: worship music / contemporary Christian music. But in the early 2000s, something else started brewing.

The new hymns movement is something I’ve begun exploring only recently. These artists draw direct inspiration from traditions that have been obscured to us, and they take what I consider a more community-minded approach to music-making, a folk/roots sensibility. Probably because of this influence, it has become popular to rework hymns — the famous ones, that is — but there’s even more exciting stuff around. One group that helped pave the way (and grew from a university ministry!) is Indelible Grace:

Our hope is to be a voice calling our generation back to something rich and solid and beyond the fluff and the trendy. We want to remind God’s people that thinking and worship are not mutually exclusive, and we want to invite the Church to appreciate her heritage without idolizing it. We want to open up a world of passion and truth and make it more that just an archaic curiosity for the religiously sentimental. We believe worship is formative, and that it does matter what we sing.

In this post, let me introduce you to Cardiphonia as an avenue into the new hymns movement. Cardiphonia is curated by Bruce Benedict, who gathers all sorts of musicians to create amazing compilations. Most Cardiphonia releases are free to download and each comes with a songbook. Let’s take a quick tour through some of their releases. They’ve amassed a huge collection now, so I’ve picked out just a few highlights for you to explore. Read more