Scot McKnight opens The King Jesus Gospel by relating several stories about the confusion of the word ‘gospel’. He reckons evangelicals by and large use the word to be ‘how you are saved’ and that this results in a culture where the key thing is to get people ‘over the line’. […]
Contextualisation is big deal for those of us who live in another culture. I defined it here as the necessity and complication of putting off your own culture to live in another. I thought we might explore the idea by taking a case study: the small group Bible study. Let’s start […]
Thank God he uses us in our ignorance. I’ve been thinking about worldview and I now consider my former approach to betray a cultural arrogance.
We started a discussion here about how we talk about the professions and ‘full time vocational ministry’. It seems that a great deal of the motivation behind the push for people to go into full time vocational ministry is that we are living in the last days. This is the […]
“Being a doctor is just delaying people’s deaths.” Have you heard this line before? It’s an argument used to encourage people into full-time vocational ministry. The idea is that medicine isn’t worth doing because everyone eventually dies and ministry is more valuable because it lasts into eternity. That sounds like […]
As we think about going to Tanzania, one of of our big prayer points is for humility. There’s an arrogance that comes with being western and theologically educated that is counter-productive to learning from Tanzanians. I’ve been learning that already as we meet different people doing church visits. At supper […]
When I began this series in 2010, we were part way through the CMS Australia application process. Now we’re nearing the end of the final stage, the five-month intercultural training course. For the past few years, however, we’ve been working on partnerships. One dimension of this is the online tools […]
Meet Jesus at uni 