Jesus the Radical Pastor on a sound bite gospel

Check out the original post here -http://www.jesustheradicalpastor.com/the-american-sound-bite-gospel
I am stunned that some Christians still defend a sound bite gospel. You know, the 4 steps, the “bridge over troubled waters” packaged presentation. The wondrous, thunderous, mind-boggling, heart-stopping gospel of the Bible and of Jesus himself is horribly reduced to bumper sticker phrases.
With what other literature or great [...]

NT Wright - Emperors and Angels - A Reflection On Christmas

Isaiah 9.2–7; Luke 2.1–20a sermon at the Midnight Eucharist, Christmas Eve 2006
by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright
Sing a song of Christmas, of emperors and angels;
Sing a song of Christmas, of darkness now past;
Sing a song of starlight, of shepherds and of mangers;
Sing a song of Jesus, of peace come at last.
And don’t [...]

Missional Jesus 4

Continuing the Missional Jesus series from Jesus Creed.
Missional Jesus 4
The missional Jesus enlists others in his mission; and one can see this as an evangelistic summons into the work of the kingdom by attachment to Jesus. A good place to see this is the fuller story of Peter’s conversion in Luke 5:1-11.
What I love about [...]

Missional Jesus 3

Continuing the Missional Jesus series from Jesus Creed.
Missional Jesus 3
With Mary and John Baptist now watching from the sideline (as it were), Jesus becomes the center stage as we work our way through the themes connected to Missional Jesus.
No better place to begin that Luke 4:16-30.
1. Missional Jesus publicly announces the centrality of himself to [...]

Missional Jesus 2

Continuing with the series from Jesus Creed.
Yesterday we looked at Mary. Today we look at John the Baptist’s understanding of the mission of God. The principle text, of course, is Luke 3:1-18. How did J-B understand the mission of God?
How often do we think of John the Baptist? Really. Now the big one: Do we [...]

Missional Jesus 1

Over at Jesus Creed, certainly one of my long time favourite blogs, Scot McKnight has started a series called Missional Jesus. His question is: How did Jesus understand the missional life? This, of course, involves two missions his mission and ours. We will learn that his mission is our mission because his mission is God’s [...]

The order of missiology and ecclesiology

One of the key changes in my thinking over the past few years has been how I have understood missiology and ecclesiology, particularly in regards to how they should relate to each other. Of course I didn’t begin to think about them in those terms, earlier on the issue was more simply described as ‘what [...]

Hospitangelism

We were chatting the other night at Loam about hospitality. Kate ran the night and has also written this great article that is well worth a read. During the discussion we of course covered many topics and as we did my mind kept flicking over to the role of hospitality in evangelism. I was struck [...]

A resurection story

The Rev has returned (started posting again) and has kicked off with this cracker of an Easter reflection.
Jesus of Nazareth, a working class man, from a poor neighborhood in a rebellious and troublesome part of the Roman Empire begins at thirty years of age to announce the kingdom of God.  This man rises from total [...]

A Scot McKnight Good Friday Reflection

As you may have noticed I think that studying the background, the context of the biblical stories that we know and love is really important. So when I stumbled across this piece by Scot McKnight I had to share.
We need to reconsider why it was that Jesus chose Passover (a night of celebrating and remembering [...]