Author Archives: Phil

Mission resources and video

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The audio from last week's Global Connections conference, 2020 Vision - Mission in times of uncertainty, is now available on the GC website. Personally I'd direct you to Eddie Arthur's opening message and presentations by Richard Tiplady and Gerard Kelly. Not that they were necessarily better than any of the others, it's just that they presented in ways that particularly engage me. Personal taste and all that.

I also know that Wes White was quite brilliant, but I think I'm going to have to listen to him a few more times for it all to go in.

It was truly an excellent conference, although, my personal highlight came in the evening discussions in the bar. Wisely, we didn't record these times, I'm not sure the jumbled mess of our conversations would be editable, but the relationships, understanding and insight that these times generated were well worth losing extra sleep for.

LICC have shared a video of Alister McGrath's lecture Why God won't go away on their YouTube channel. It's a response to the New Atheist movement and worth a watch when you have 90 minutes going spare. The video is at the bottom of this post.

Finally, OSCAR, who provide support services to the UK mission community, have set up a group on LinkedIn. If you're on the social networking site and have an interest in mission you may want to take a look.

The apologetics argument

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A few days ago I posted about the research I had done into the authority of the Bible. But, yesterday I was challenged about the reasonableness of always looking for the logical answer.

The big-name Christian apologists are, basically, modernists. Their method of apologetics is to show that belief in the God of Christianity is entirely compatible with human rationality. In other words, they are accepting the proposition that human rationality is the standard against which God is judged. This may not be particularly glorifying to God but it certainly glorifies human rationality.

They might say that they are accepting this proposition as a starting point because it is the mindset of those that they are going up against, and hey, we’re into contextualization and starting from where the other person is coming from, but you can’t be a Christian and leave that starting point unchallenged. The Christian starting point is that God is the standard against which everything, up to and including human rationality, is judged.

This is why I have no interest in debates between prominent atheists and prominent apologists. They both place their ultimate faith and authority in the human capacity for reason and logic and in the need to make rationally defensible choices. In that sense, they’re both arguing the same side.

Worse, if you do go down that road, what kind of a God can you end up with? A God who is rationally defensible may be the clockwork god of the Deists but not the surprising, challenging and sometimes confusing God of the Bible.

From the blog of Simon Cozens

HT Kouya

For a moment I questioned whether I was barking up the wrong tree and whether the research I had done was relevant to a generation that questions truth and authority anyway. Well,

1) Knowing that there is accurate and reliable evidence for God, creation through intelligent design, Jesus and his death and resurrection is important for me, even if it has no real bearing on my conversations with others.

2) My belief in the rationality of the evidence for God does not necessarily mean I believe that God is rational. In fact, I think I believe God to be totally irrational. Rationality would probably have put paid to the world at the point of the flood, even if it had been allowed to continue that far. I wonder even, if a rational God would have given us free will.

3) It’s too easy to assume that times have changed and that we now need to adapt our communications to a postmodern audience. The problem is that audiences are very rarely made up of just postmoderns, and even when they are, there’s a sliding scale with some postmoderns looking very like modernists. Although, I agree that debates aren’t the most effective form of communication. Were they ever?

Surviving without e-mail

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The BBC website is carrying a story about the boss of an IT company Atos, banning all internal e-mail.

Thierry Breton caused a sensation last week when he told an interviewer that he planned to ban internal email at the information technology services giant, Atos.

Read the full story here

Let’s be clear from the outset, he’s not planning to ban all e-mail. If you’re trying to get in contact with someone inside the business you will still be able to e-mail them. What Mr Breton is stopping is the stream of e-mail that goes from one desk to the next.

Personally, I reckon this is a brilliant idea.

In the last year I had to review my e-mail using habits. I wasn’t getting work done as well as I should have been because every five minutes there was another e-mail that would need replying to. Just that little envelope icon was enough to cause a distraction. So, I now have a plan.

For the most part I only open, read and respond to e-mail first thing in the morning and last thing in the afternoon. In cases where I think that the e-mail I’m sending will illicit a response that will require more of my attention, I’ll schedule it to be sent towards the end of the day, meaning that I won’t need to deal with any response until the following day at the earliest.

This may sound a little cheeky, but there are days when conversations can start by e-mail that are no help to anyone. While I’m not a great fan of meetings either, I can see times when it makes sense to get five people in a room to discuss and issue rather than attempting it by e-mail.

I should also say that there are occasions when rules need to be broken. Dealing with external clients and customers, I’ll try to respond more quickly. Coming back off holiday, I’ll sit for a morning or a day to clear the backlog. I’ll even deal with messages on my phone when I’m travelling and there’s not much else to do. But, in general, the principles above still hold true.

So this is currently how I manage e-mail, but I’m willing to learn. So if you’ve got any tips or tricks I’d love to hear them.

“Turn in your Bibles… I mean phones!”

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What happens in your church when the minister tells you to reach for your Bible and turn to a passage? It seems, at mine, there’s a few of us who reach for our phones!

What happens in church when the minister asks you to reach for your Bible?

This is by no means the death of the printed Bible, but it’s certainly a sign of our times when the Bible has become an app on a phone.

Of course, it’s not just in the west that Bibles are appearing on mobile devices. Many African countries are seeing an explosion in mobile phone use. These aren’t smart phones necessarily, but even basic phones can handle text reasonably well. So, in these situations Scripture is being encoded in files that can be shared across mobile devices.

The only downside that I’ve experienced from this growth in electronic communication was the Sunday that I got to church to find that the battery in my Bible was flat – that never used to happen!

 

The authority of the Bible

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Almost two years ago, Wycliffe Bible Translators commissioned some research that showed that Christians, when presented the choice between giving to a charity that fed the hungry or translated the Bible, they’d choose to feed the hungry. The implied message from the research was that it was better to keep someone alive than concern ourselves about their place in eternity.

I should throw a note in here that the choice isn’t really that stark. The work that Wycliffe does in language development contributes to all eight of the Millennium Development Goals. Very often the communities we work in/with are the poorest of the poor and the most marginalised – but more about that another time maybe.

A few months after that research was published, the Evangelical Alliance in the UK released some research that said that the under 25s were, “Less likely to strongly agree that the Bible has supreme authority in guiding their beliefs, views and behaviour.”

I grew up around people who would describe themselves as, ‘Bible believing Christians’, but while they were always willing to talk about the content of the Bible, they were never very good at responding to the challenges of science and culture that seemed to resign the Bible to a place on the bookshelf.

At about the time the research about declining belief in the Bible was published, I heard a message by a minister of a church in the United States, that gave reasons for why the Bible could be trusted. This spurred me on to my own research into the historical accuracy and authority of the Bible.

The result of this has been…

…For the last few months I’ve been speaking in churches about the authority of the Bible, trying to redress the results of the research and encourage Christians to have confidence in the text of the Bible. I’m not an expert in one area, just someone who has found answers to the questions I’ve had and have had the opportunity to share this with others. [Get in touch if you're in the UK and would like me to do this with your church community].

…My confidence has increased in the Bible. It is historically accurate. The events it records really happened. There is a reason for my faith.

The notes I’ve pulled together and the source of most of my research are now up on this blog. They are notes, and there’s always more digging that can be done. Feel free to follow the links to the Authority of the Bible page to see for yourself. I hope they are useful.

Your comments and questions would be welcome.

Global Connections: 2020 Vision

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What part do you think Christians in the UK will be playing in mission in 10 years? Just think, another 10 years and it’s going to be 2022! – maybe we will all be travelling in spaceships.

The Global Connections conference that I’ve just come back from was thinking about mission and the future, what it’s going to be like, how the church in the Global South is going to have way more impact on us in the West, what’s happened to our old models of mission, what part the Church in the UK is going to play.

I think I have been mostly impacted by the question of the role of the Church. Mission agencies simply don’t exist without the Church, but how do we connect and work together rather than in isolation?

So, the question I’m asking you:

  • How can mission agencies help your church with local and world mission?
  • How can your church get involved in God’s mission in the UK and overseas?

I’d be interested to hear your comments.

Reaching the unreachable

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Premier Christian Radio have started their Christmas campaign today. On their website they say,

This Christmas we’re using our National Digital Platform to reach the maximum number of people possible with a message of faith AND hope, the REAL Christmas message. Your gift today will not only support our National Christmas Starts With Christ Campaign .. but will help us keep broadcasting into 2012.

Considering I work for Wycliffe Bible Translators, it would be really easy to take a shot at PCR by pointing out that maybe those that are really unreached are the 300+ million people who live without a single word of Scripture in their own language. But, that isn’t quite right.

You see God loves us all equally, both listeners of PCR and remote communities without access to the Bible in their own language. Sometimes that’s hard to imagine, especially when we can all think of people that are hard to love – but God loves them too. And, he wants us all to know him and love him back. So God does things to get our attention:

  • Christian friends who occasionally bang on a bit about church and God and life and death
  • Church spires and bells
  • Christian radio stations
  • The view of the Oxfordshire countryside on the M40 just past junction 5 (going west)
  • People who love and care for others (in this country and overseas)
  • The force of nature
  • Comfort from a friend when your world’s falling apart

God is in it all, and if we take the time to look for him we will see him.

What does that have to do with PCR’s fundraising campaign?

Well, some people in the UK will find God through PCR and what they broadcast and it would be wrong of me to think that a small community living in isolation in the mountains of Papua New Guinea deserve God more than the people of Warrington, Widnes, Walton-on-Thames or Walthamstow. Really, we all need God, and we shouldn’t assume that we are all going to find him in the same place. PCR can reach people that Bible translators won’t.

So, if you’d like to give to support Premier Christian Radio, please go ahead. Their giving page can be found here.

But there are unreached in this world who can’t even hear about God in their own language. They may know he’s there through what they see around them, but they don’t have the means to get to know him because his words to them are still tied up in foreign languages. God loves them all the same.

If you’d like to give to Wycliffe Bible Translators you can do so online.

Speaking up for something

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Do you ever get those days, weeks, months, where the same thing keeps cropping up? You notice a theme in conversations, films, magazine articles, talks, etc, that seem to be poking at you… asking if you’re going to do anything about it.

I seem to be having one of those periods.

A few weeks ago, Eg, the magazine of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, turned up on my desk. They had devoted most of the magazine to remembering their founder and President, John Stott. The first article was a reflection written by LICC’s Director, Mark Greene.

In his article Mark writes…

I’d gone to see him down at his care home to share my impressions of the Third Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization. I told him about the things that encouraged me, and about the things that I had hoped might have happened, and didn’t, but still may…

By that time, John’s capacity to speak in paragraphs had become limited, but he didn’t need a paragraph. ‘It lacked a gadfly,’ he said. It was this that stopped me in my tracks. And he was right. Somehow, for all the good things that had occurred at the Congress,  for all the wisdom and praise present, it had lacked that sense of urgency, lacked someone so passionate about something, so impelled by the Spirit that they could not  be silent – someone with a message, a corrective that would help set the course ahead. ‘Well, it would have been pretty hard to get anywhere near the microphone,’ I said, perhaps a bit defensively. ‘In 1974, they didn’t ask for permission, they just grabbed it,’ he replied. Indeed, and in the theological ferment that followed, the evangelical movement changed forever.

Read full article here

I was also fortunate enough to spend some time at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit, where similar themes appeared.

Seth Godin talked about leading tribes and Erwin McManus dropped the line, ‘It’s not that hard to bring people to God when you tell them a story they can find themselves in.’

You know, written down like this it doesn’t really look like they are all talking about the same thing. In fact, you could probably have been to all the things I’ve been to and read all the same material and come to a completely different conclusion. But, what I take from this is – if you’ve got something of value to say, if you’ve got something useful to contribute, then speak up and stop avoiding the subject.

Christians in Science – The Bible and modern science

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So here I am on a Saturday morning sitting at the back of a Christians in Science event in central London.

OK, it’s not a usual event for Wycliffe but it’s an interesting experience.

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Landed

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I love travel but there’s something nice about getting home.

Yesterday afternoon my flight from Nigeria touched down at London Heathrow and I returned to the milder climate and more sensible driving of the UK.

There were a couple of occasions over the last few days when I wondered if we were ever going to make it. The road from Jos to Abuja cuts through some beautiful countryside, but you daren’t take you eyes off the road for a second as the pot holes are big enough to ruin a wheel and trucks and cars coming in the other direction are quite prepared to face you down as they attempt to overtake or seek out smoother tarmac.

Our last night was spent in the Catholic guest house near to the airport. Not a luxury facility but still well equipped by Nigerian standards as well as being clean and affordable. The downside turned out to be a nearby church that had opted to hold an all night prayer and praise session with the volume turned up to 11. The quality of amplification didn’t make it possible to understand what the preacher was saying but his enthusiasm was unmistakeable.

Now I’m home with a couple of days to let my body and head recover before going back to work. It’s going to take that long to get over the physical impact of the last few weeks. Then it’s on with the job of writing up our experiences.

Thanks for the prayers about this trip. They were answered in so many ways.