Scripture Engagement

So, I had to mention the elephant in the room. Corona virus. It's actually being talked about a lot, so not really the elephant in the room, but anyway. One good thing that might come out of this enforced isolation, house-arrest, and stay-cation madness we're going through (not to mention the lack of loo roll), is that we are being forced how to teach online, work from home, and stay away from planes and airports. When we're over the hump of corona virus and our governments let us travel again, I wonder if we'll have learnt our lesson? We're in a global ecological crisis. It's no good just planting more trees to offset carbon emissions. We need to stop flying, and stop travelling long distances by train/car too. The more we can work out how to do things online, the better, as far as I can see. It's hard. It means extra work, and learning how to use all kinds of new computer programs, but in the end it might just pay off. In Greta Thunberg's language...

There is a growing trend in the UK church to equate mission with local evangelism. This worries me for several reasons: It seems to me that God's mission is much broader than evangelism, in that it includes liberating the poor i.e. the whole socio-economic side of mission is left out if we reduce it to evangelism. Exodus. On top of that it ignores the environmental side of God's mission - green ethics. Genesis 1-2. It forgets what is probably the main thing - God's mission is to the nations. That was the whole point of Abraham's calling (the beginning of God' redemptive story). Genesis 12. If we reduce mission to local evangelism we are back to the divide that used to exist between spiritual and physical dimensions (materialism), between one nation and another (nationalism), and between us and the rest of God's creation (anthropocentrism).  As Chris Wright has pointed out, it's not that God has a mission for the church in the world, it's tha...