Scripture Engagement

You might have heard of Wayne Dye's Eight Conditions for Scripture Engagement . How can an analysis of a project be carried out? The simplest way is to use these online Google forms . Here are the steps: Get your team and partners together. Have someone teach Wayne Dye's Eight Conditions (or ask everyone to read it beforehand in the LWC) Fill in the first form. Give the condition an overall rating out of five. Five is high, one is low. Fill in the second to eighth forms and give them ratings. Work out which conditions have the lowest ratings. Start working to try and bring those conditions up. Work out a Scripture Engagement strategy for that people and adapt your project accordingly. For ease of use I've posted the links to the forms below, with some instructions: The Eight Conditions Questionnaire in Eight Parts The Eight Conditions questionnaire is now online in eight separate parts so you can answers short questionnaires on just one condition at a ti...

We often talk about holistic mission. What does that mean? It's about mission to the whole person not just their 'soul' (inner being). There's nothing unspiritual about meeting someone's basic needs for food, clothing and so on. In fact we encouraged to do so. ...learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause. Isaiah 1:17 ESV http://bible.com/59/isa.1.17.ESV We also have Jesus' example to follow: Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. Luke 8:35 ESV http://bible.com/59/luk.8.35.ESV Both his physical and spiritual needs had been met by Jesus. Lastly, you might ask how this works in  mission. Those working within a community are often told of needs within that community. How can these be met? Well, those with medic...

New English translations of the Bible are very popular these days. People often ask me which one is best, or which I prefer. The answer is complicated: I'm not keen on archaic words in translation, which means I don't use KJV much, or even NIV, which follows it to a certain extent Sometimes it's good to expand the meaning of the Hebrew or Greek to make it clearer, especially when there is an assumption made because the original audience would have known something that we don't. It should be implicit information though Genre is often ignored by translations. The Bible is rich and varied. We don't want Proverbs to be like a story or sermon. They're supposed to be short and pithy to have greater impact. Hebrew often skips verbs to achieve that. We may not be able to go that far, but translations should keep proverbs as short as possible. Likewise poetry should have rhythm, alliteration and other poetic features, albeit using the richness of the English la...