John Stott - 1921-2011

“The modern world detests authority but worships relevance. Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance, and that the secret of both is Jesus Christ.” - John Stott


I heard today that John Stott died. It's sad news. John Stott was one of my heros. Over the last ten years I've loved reading his books and listening to his preaching. He has been probably my favourite writer, preacher and theologian since I was introduced to his work in early 2002.

It was reading Evangelical Truth before starting bible college that I realised there were other people who believed in Jesus the same way I did. What Stott described in the book described how I felt about faith. He spoke about a faith that loved Jesus and held firmly to the Bible. A faith that was real and vibrant and tied to God's personal revelation to us through his Son and his word. I read the book and felt like I had found home.

While I never met him, John Stott always struck me as a man who I would like to be like. By all accounts he was humble, gentle and caring. I heard a story once from someone who met him at a conference that at meal times he would only take small amounts. He did this because he knew there were people in the world who didn't have enough to eat, so he would not take more than he needed in solidarity with them.

He had a great heart for the poor and was so influential in the evangelical world in showing that biblical faith is faith that loves the poor and works for justice. He showed that you did not have to sacrifice orthodoxy for justice and mercy.

Most of all he loved Jesus, and that shone through in everything he he wrote and said. He loved to show us Jesus as he showed us his word.

He also loved birds.

I am very thankful for the life and ministry of John Stott. I'm sad that he's no longer here. I very happy for him that there is no where now he'd rather be.


Quote and photo from this blog.

Equal Distribution

We had a bible study at work today on wealth and how we spend our money. I thought I might try and find out how much money there is in the world, divide it by 6 billion and then try and have that amount of money in my life. I thought perhaps that would be a good way to make sure I had only a fair share of the world's money.

But the internet won't tell me how much money there is in the world.

At least the first website I checked didn't tell me.

My plans have been foiled. Perfect logic failed by imperfect Google.

It's the story of my life.

It's Voting Time Again

So I had a coffee today with one of my friends who is a staunch Liberal supporter. I always enjoy meeting up with him because politically we tend to disagree on almost everything while theologically we agree on almost everything. It's always amazing to me that two people can have such similar views of faith, and of what we want the final outcome in society to be, and such vastly different views on how to get there. We have very enjoyable conversations. I like people who can disagree and argue their case well. I think he argues better than me. One day he could be Prime Minsiter. I hope so.

At one stage I mentioned that I'd consider voting Greens in this state election. I wasn't saying that I was voting Greens, merely expressing that I was an undecided voter and I like some of the Green policies. Anyway, he was pretty firm in letting me know that voting Green is a terrible idea for a Christian. He was telling me that the Australian Christian Lobby doesn't support any party they just tell you not to support the Greens. Good Christians don't vote Greens.

I often think about how in politics the Christian is generally faced with the issue of choosing between voting for conservative parties which are strong on individual morality, or the leftist parties which are strong on corporate morality. No parties seem to be able to handle being both, from a Christian point of view.

Anyway, I'm not sure who to vote for this state election. I told him he was allowed to send me whatever he wanted to show why I shouldn't vote Greens.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna try and work out who to vote for. This state election is even more uninspiring than the federal, which is a real shame because I like politics when you have good choices to make. Feel free to give me some voting advice.

I was going to vote for my friend Chris Simpson but it turns out I miss out on his electorate by a street. But if you're in Willoughby, I reckon, vote for Chris, he's a good guy, and he's not a Green.

Christians and Government Aid

I read this blogpost on Ed Stetzer's blog about how huge amounts of evangelicals in the US are in favor of cutting foreign aid, welfare, unemployment benefits and education in the federal budget, as opposed to spending on the military and security.

I don't understand how a Christian can arrive at a view like that. Like if you said to Jesus "Should the government spend $10 on clean water for an African village or should it buy some bullets?" I feel like I know what Jesus' answer would be.

But Stetzer poses the question about how the church should be responding to the talk of the federal budget and the responses he got were enlightening.

Basically, the people who were in favour of budget cuts to aid and education seem to be saying that it's wrong for the Christian to be outsourcing their individual responsibility to help the poor to the government. Christians should be changing the world, not getting their government to do it for them. When we support aid we're just avoiding what we should be doing ourselves.

Now this idea makes more sense than just saying "Stuff poor people, let's buy tanks!" (Though tanks are awesome!)

The advantages to aid coming from the church and individuals is that it can bypass the government's political agenda, money doesn't have to be spent on propping up government backed dictators, or doing aid work to ultimately benefit the donor country. It means that aid can go where it's needed, with no agenda or a gospel agenda. Both agendas I think would be more appealing to Jesus.

However my view is that if the government is going to take the money that God has entrusted me with then I would like them to be spending it on things that seem to be more in-line with God's Kingdom values that nuclear submarines. Plus as a member of a democracy when the government that represents me spends money they do it on my behalf. So it is my responsibility to urge them to spend the money on the things that align with my values. As a Christian that falls more in the camp of aid and education than national security. I'm not shirking my responsibility by seeking that my government helps the poor and marginalised, I'm fulfilling it. And with the money that is left over after tax I still have a responsibility as a Christian to spend my money on helping the poor and marginalised. It's not either/or, it's both.

That's what I think. I might put some of that in a comment.

Anyway, what I am pleased about is that now I have a better understanding of why people disagree with government aid and it's not as loony as it first seemed.

A Day with a Heretic

I went to a World Vision event today where Tim Costello, Fuzz and Carolyn Kitto, and Brian McLaren spoke about the way the church can be relevantly engaging with the world.

I went because I wanted to see Brian McLaren. Probably because I'm a stickler for theological controversy. I knew that McLaren gets a bit of bashing from the conservative Christian crowd for his thoughts on scripture and his leadership within the emerging church. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I knew he was in Australia and I wasn't going get the chance to see him as I wasn't going to Stump. So I decided to go to this.

For a while before I forgot what the day was about. Seeing as it was a World Vision event I started to worry that I was going to spend the day being told to sponsor children, give money to World Vision, and get in small groups and discuss the Millennium Development goals. And while all of those are good things, I'm little bored by them.

However when I turned up they told me the day was about helping the church to engage relevantly with the world. They didn't even say "engage relevantly with the world so everyone can give more money to World Vision." I actually felt like it is probably some of the best work that World Vision can be doing in the west for long term change. They are educating people, church leaders in particular, at a fundamental level about why the church needs to shift its focus to the great issues of justice and compassion facing the world today. When you shift people's understanding and attitudes rather than just their money you'll achieve a lot more long term gain.

Tim Costello started off the day by giving an excellent overview of the need for the Church to express it's faith through dealing with the emergencies facing the world today. He showed us the historical underpinnings for Australia's relationship with the church and the churches relationship with society. I enjoyed it a lot.

Fuzz and Carolyn talked about the need for the church to have a missional focus.

And Brian talked about the need for the church to stop focusing on itself and start focusing on the world.

My experience of McLaren is not that he's a raging heretic, false prophet, spawn of Satan. He said a lot of stuff I really liked. He talked about the need for institutions to protect the gains of previous movements and movements to make the gains not being made by institutions. In other words he seemed to be saying the established church is needed to preserve the gains of the reformers of the past. And the emerging church need to make gains to be preserved by established church. So the emergers and reformers make gains in their movements and cement those gains in the the institutions who protect them. The church is always moving forward then with movements leapfrogging the the establishment.

People seemed to hear this as a call to abandon the institutional church and surge on ahead because they're too busy protecting the past. But I heard it as saying both parts of the church are need each other and the best situation is when the whole church can be working together to surge ahead to be growing and adapting to the ever changing contexts it exists in. I liked his optimism for the church.

He had a lot of criticism for the traditional view of salvation being "believe in Jesus, go to heaven." He said salvation isn't about agreeing with a set of doctrines and then getting eternal life, but he related salvation back to Abraham's call in Genesis 12, saying that salvation about being blessed to be a blessing. He wanted to emphasise that our faith is not just to secure us eternal life, or God's blessing, but to transform us to be people who bring God's kingdom to earth now.

I really liked his emphasis on the need for our faith to be outworked in our loving interaction with the world. We need to be people who are caught up in God's preference for justice and mercy. Like James says faith without deeds is dead. We definitely need to get the focus of salvation off being some scheme devised to meet our needs of eternal security.

I did feel however that he seemed to overemphasise the idea that the primary reason for our faith is to transform the world. The impression I got was that he was discounting the eternal nature of salvation to focus on the immediate implications. We need to affirm that God saves us to bless the world without forgetting that there is however more to it than just this world right now. I would want say that while we have a responsibility to be bringing the values of the Kingdom to bare on our communities, society and world right now, that's not the end point of the kingdom. Salvation is not ultimately about our happiness but God's glory. God saves us for his glory. When we are changed and transform the world, he is glorified. When the poor are helped he is glorified. And when his Kingdom comes he is glorified. At some point God will finish the Kingdom work that he started in Christ when Christ comes back and establishes God's just rule for eternity. We are called to be transforming the world now, but in the knowledge and hope that God is going to wholly transform this world in the future.

Another of McLaren's things was that we need to understand the narratives of the Old Testament to properly understand the life of Jesus. The narratives being those of Genesis (creation and reconciliation), Exodus (liberation and formation), and the Peaceable Kingdom (justice and mercy). I really liked the importance he placed on viewing Jesus in light of the stories that have come before. Jesus wasn't just some guy who arrived in Israel in 0 AD as an isolated event in the history of the world. He was the Jewish messiah, the culmination of years of God's self-revelation of his people through the great narratives of his redeeming work, he is the climax of God's story of his work with the world. I think that reading of the OT makes our understanding Jesus' life and work even richer. This is a pretty similar idea to what NT Wright is pushing when he talks about Jesus. I want to keep thinking about that.

So if I can sum up my McLaren thoughts, from everything I saw and heard yesterday he's not a dangerous heretic set to destroy the world as we know it. I know I disagree with him on a number of issues. His view of the Bible is less conservative than mine. (I reckon he and my Mum would get on.) I think he's got lot's of good stuff to say, and he has a lot to helpfully challenge the church on. If he continues to run around the world telling Christians to be blessed to be a blessing, I can't complain about that. Go McLaren.

Good

Cadbury Dairy Milk is going Fairtrade. Applause.