Alan Hirsch is an awesome relational connector.  He introduced me to Steve Addison, who is a missional catalyst in Australia and is finishing a book on movements.  Steve has had my editor, VJ, do some work in the past with him, and now he and VJ are working together on Steve’s book.  Turns out Steve and Bob Roberts are good friends as well, and I am mentioned in Bob’s book on Multiplication, pg 87, second paragraph.

Now Alan introduces me, via his blog, to a guy named Mark Sayers, also from Australia.  Mark has a great post on the gospel for the Olympics.  Here’s a short quote:

Along with millions around the globe I watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. The ceremony told the story of Chinese civilization but then at some stage during the middle ages shot forward into a kind of future world, in which children wished for a better world free of global warming and a giant planet emerged, symbolic of a united humanity.

What we were watching was a worship service. A worship service with a congregation of millions, who came together to worship the two great implicit religions of our age, sport and nationalism. We witnessed a sermon which preached a humanist gospel and an achievable humanist heaven on earth.

However as the athletes of the various nationalities marched in a show of harmony, the soldiers of Russia and Georgia went to war and armed conflict again visited Europe. Today as the medal count in Beijing rose alongside the casualty count in Georgia, the humanist gospel of the Olympics was punctuated by the reality of the human condition, and we were reminded of just how far we are from the dream of global peace.

and a link to the entire post.

May I also recommend to more of his posts:

1. How to save yourself and the world
2. Mission in the age of facebook

Martin Lloyd Jones, in his book Authentic Christianity which is from his Studies in Acts Series, makes the following statement:

I am convinced that the trouble with the world today is that it does not believe in God.  And much of our evangelism goes wrong because it starts with the Lord Jesus Christ.  But you must start with God the Father, God the Creator, one whose glory fills the heavens, who is over all.  With reverence I say that you cannot understand the Lord Jesus Christ, and indeed there is a sense in which there is no meaning to Him and to the message about Him, unless you start with God the Father.

Continue Reading

I don’t know why I started this book at this time. Maybe because I was tired of seeing it sitting on my “To Read” shelf for what seems like a year. Maybe it was because I tend to start large projects in the midst of large projects. Currently I am a little behind in reading for my doctoral work, I’m writing a book, I have a paper due in April which I need to read another 1,500 pages, and I begin to start writing my dissertation this summer. Oh, and I do pastor a church. Thus it makes all the sense in the world to start a 581 page book (including indices, 535 pages of reading) at this time, right?

Christopher J. H. Wright (Ph.D. Cambridge) is the director of international ministries for the Langham Partnership International (known in the US as John Stott Ministries). He has taught Old Testament and was the principal of All Nations College in Ware, England. He and his wife also served in India as missionaries and teachers for five years.

This book is the 2007 Christianity Today Missions/Global Affairs Book winner. The description of the book is:

Most Christians would agree that the Bible provides a basis for mission. But Christopher Wright boldly maintains that mission is bigger than that–there is in fact a missional basis for the Bible! The entire Bible is generated by and is all about God’s mission.

In order to understand the Bible, we need a missional hermeneutic of the Bible, an interpretive perspective that is in tune with this great missional theme. We need to see the “big picture” of God’s mission and how the familiar bits and pieces fit into the grand narrative of Scripture.

Beginning with the Old Testament and the groundwork it lays for understanding who God is, what he has called his people to be and do, and how the nations fit into God’s mission, Wright gives us a new hermeneutical perspective on Scripture. This new perspective provides a solid and expansive basis for holistic mission. Wright emphasizes throughout a holistic mission as the proper shape of Christian mission. God’s mission is to reclaim the world–and that includes the created order–and God’s people have a designated role to play in that mission.

His objective is to “not only demonstrate …that Christian mission is fully grounded in the Scripture…but also to demonstrate that a strong theology of the mission of God provides a fruitful hermeneutical framework within which to read the whole Bible.”

The book is divided into four sections. In the first section he surveys steps that have already been taken toward a missional hermeneutic and argues that more is need to move the discussion forward. He also sketches some of what he thinks a missional hermeneutic entails.

The second section (The Mission of God) examines the “missiological implications of biblical monotheism”. Section three (The People of Mission) considers the primary agent of the missional of God - the people of God. He reflects on election and mission, redemption and mission, covenant and mission, and ethics and mission. In the final section (The Arena of Mission). Wright considers the wider canvas of the world itself - the earth, humanity, cultures and nations. He explores “the missional implications of the goodness of creation and the connections between creation care and Christian mission. He also explores the paradox of human dignity and human depravity and its implications of missions. He sees the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament as the most international of all biblical literature and gives us a “rich source for reflecting on a biblical theology and missiology of human cultures.” He also examines the eschatological vision of the nations in the OT as a missional rhetoric and traced into the New Testament mission theology and practice.

The mere size of this book is daunting; it has been, so far, quite easy to read and filled with important concepts in contextualization, bibliology, and post-modernity. It also provides a new perspective on the Old Testament, one that is welcomed by this writer.

We will start on Tuesday with a look at the introduction where he defines several words related to mission, including missions, missional, and missionary.