Scripture Engagement

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...

Often we talk about being 'in God's house' on a Sunday morning. What does the Bible mean when it talks about God's house? In the Old Testament it refers to: Bethel, 'the house of God', a place where Jacob met with God in a dream, and God spoke to Jacob and renewed the covenant he had made with Abraham with him Gen 28:10-22. This place is mentioned frequently throughout the rest of the Old Testament The house built in Shiloh to house the ark of the covenant Jdg 18:31. It may just have been a tent, like the tabernacle, we don't really know, but we do know that the ark was kept in the most holy place, where God's presence was powerfully experienced The temple 1Ki 5; 1Ch 6:48 often referred to as 'the house for Yahweh [the LORD]' rather than 'God's house' 1Ki 6:1, and it was filled with a cloud representing Yahweh's presence 1Ki 8:10, though this wasn't actually where Yahweh lived, as the whole of heaven cannot contain h...

Not much has been thought about Scripture Engagement research. There are two types: Research before starting S.E. work Research to find out how well existing published Scriptures (often print New Testaments) are being used I will focus on the former. It's very tempting to dive into making Scripture Engagement products without really thinking through what the needs are, what works and what doesn't, and what people are likely to respond to. Here are some ideas: Find out whether the culture is honour-shame, power-fear, or purity-pollution. This will help you know how to frame the good news in such a way that people will light up in understanding, assuming the Holy Spirit is at work in their lives. To do that one tool is the culture test , though it doesn't cover purity-pollution as a paradigm Read Wayne Dye's article on the Eight Conditions of Scripture Engagement, then fill out a questionnaire based on that article. Give each condition a rating, then work...

It's true - Arts flies the good news under people's radar screen. It's a great way of reaching people's hearts. There are lots of stories that corroborate this. In Asia there was one group that had one hundred hymns translated into their language, but the church was dwindling and few sung the hymns with enthusiasm. Some well-meaning mission workers had had these hymns translated some decades earlier, but the tunes were Western. In came some ethnomusicologists / ethnodoxologists and helped the local people work out which instruments could be used in a worship context, and then helped them write songs which used their own style of music. These songs were so popular that the church moved out of the building and into the village, and many many others started joining in with the worship times! Eventually there were a group of musicians writing songs and leading worship in their community, and the church continued to grow. This is just one of many stories I could share....

A lot of our work these days is with unreached people groups: those, often smaller groups that have very few believers, and no viable church (i.e. gatherings of believers). If they do have meetings they are often in homes, and might even be persecuted - raided as in the days of Pastor Wurmbrand and Brother Andrew. Since there is no viable church it is difficult, sometimes, to know how to get going in Scripture engagement work, including translation. Probably the ideal is to have some mission workers involved, and work alongside them. If they aren't available or can't be found then, or even so, a good way forward is oral storying, or producing audio and video series based on Scripture. Either way you need to design a story set. This is a set of stories that fulfils two criteria: It covers the main points of the Bible (not just the New Testament) such as creation, fall, the calling of Abraham, Abraham and Isaac and the ram that God provides as a sacrifice, the life of Moses, ...

It seems to me that we spend a lot of time talking about partnership, but sometimes our language betrays our true affiliation. We feel we belong to one organisation, and work in partnership with another, but can easily say things like: 'That's not our project it belongs to <organisation name>.' Or: 'We don't have any personnel in that project, apart from a consultant who visits regularly.' (!) If <organisation name> is a partner organisation, in what sense is it not 'our' project (in the collective sense of the word)? And if we have a consultant giving advice to that project and approving their translations for publication, how are we not involved? Partnership is one of the Eight Conditions , albeit the last (but not the least). It is only in last place because Wayne Dye added it after the other conditions, and in a sense it holds all of them together. Without partnership our efforts are in vain. In any case the true owners of ...

We often talk about the birth of the church at Pentecost as a completely new beginning. But was it? The event happened in Jerusalem, and the early believers often went to prayers at the temple or met in the temple portico. They were Jews, albeit from a variety of places.  Most of them only left Jerusalem as a result of persecution and a prophecy (Act 1:8). The fact that the early believers,   including leaders were Jews, means that as well as a new start we need to talk about continuity: The same people The same customs The same location Mostly the same beliefs When new churches are planted today there will be some continuity with the past. We shouldn't be afraid of that. Much of it is good, as it keeps people where they should be, in their communities. The new thing we want to introduce is 'the word of the Lord' i.e. the good news that Jesus the Messiah is Lord (and God). The rest is not unimportant, in fact it might be very useful background to this message, ...