Martin and Hazel Frost Our Life in Argentina

pa href=http://www.thesimplepastor.co.uk/2010/09/i-link-therefore-i-am-02-09-2010/The Simple Pastor/a links to a a href=http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2010/08/30/an-faq-on-the-difference-between-mormonism-and-biblical-christianity/?utm_source=feedburneramp;utm_medium=feedamp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+between2worlds+%28Between+Two+Worlds%29amp;utm_content=Google+ReaderFAQ/a about the difference between Mormonism and what the Gospel Coalition grandly calls Biblical Christianity. (This is already a red flag for me; is there any other kind?) It turns out to be the sort of thing that makes me sad for the state of apologetics. The FAQ is a dubious collection of proof-texts with no developed argument and no exegesis. Biblical Christianity is, apparently, a facile and one-dimensional Christianity./p !--break--!--break--pLet's take the example of human exaltation. The FAQ claims it just can't happen, and here are some proof texts. Well, hello, Evangelical Protestants are not the only Christians iactually/i, and the doctrine of a href=http://orthodoxwiki.org/Theosistheosis/a has been part of the Christian tradition since... well, since Peter said we could become partakers in the divine nature. /p pBut you'd never guess that from the answer given. Either the guy who wrote it is ignorant of a large part of the Church's Tradition, or is just being disingenuous. It doesn't take the Bible seriously (because, you know, Peter did actually come out and isay/i that, so please don't just ignore it) and it doesn't take Mormons seriously either, because they read the Bible as well and they know pretty darned well those proof-texts are in there and maybe, just maybe, they have a different interpretation to us./p pUnfortunately, there is nothing so nuanced as interpretation in this form of apologetics, nor any awareness that the Evangelical guy is using interpretation as well; (that one's a killer) the Bible is just used plainly and simply as a hammer to beat down an opposing view. I'm not sure what's what the Bible is meant to be for./p pChanging the subject slightly, I've seen this when Protestants engage Catholics. There's a lot of you-say-X-but-the-Bible-says-Y going on. What do we expect them to say? Oh, really? We'd never seen that verse before any time in the past btwo thousand years/b! Of course, you must be right! This is what I mean by not taking the other guy seriously; credit them with isome/i intelligence, please. Religions don't just make doctrines up and never think about them again; there is usually some theological process going on somewhere./p pSo once you realise that, and are honest about the fact that Bible handling is a question of interpretation, then iproof-texting doesn't help/i, and you can stop doing that now, please./p pI know the FAQ is supposed to just give easy answers, but without providing any engagement with other views at all, it actually makes the job of evangelism bharder/b, not easier, because any Mormon who knows their own faith is going to run rings around these counterarguments. That's the problem with portraying a straw-man version of their faith./p pBut worst of all, it provides a straw-man version of Christianity as well. The richness, beauty and diversity of Christian thought is nowhere to be seen; the Bible is reduced to a convenient collection of counterarguments, some of which may even be relevant to the point at hand./p pHow can we do this better? Well, the OrthodoxWiki article on theosis provides a lovely example. It considers where the Mormon doctrines came from and how they differ from Orthodox belief, and in the summary is not a proof-text to be found; the discussion is on the level of theology, where it belongs:/p blockquotep Some Mormons also suggest that discussions of theosis by early Church Fathers show an early belief in the Mormon concept of deification, although they disagree with much of the other theology of the same Church fathers, most notably the doctrine of the Trinity. The Mormons' belief differs with the Orthodox belief in deification because the Latter-Day Saints believe that the core being of each individual, the intelligence which existed before becoming a spirit son or daughter, is uncreated or eternal. Orthodox deification always acknowledges a timeless Creator versus a finite creature who has been glorified by the grace of God. The Mormons are clear promoters of henotheism, and the Church Fathers have absolutely no commonality with their view. /p/blockquote pMuch better./p

pIt's been a working a href=http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/Greenbelt/a for us, helping out with a couple of worship slots and occasionally manning the Redcliffe stand, so we didn't get to see many talks. But I did want to get to see Stanley Hauerwas, especially once I saw that he was giving a a href=http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/3/9/americas-godtalk/a discussing /p blockquotep the misconception that the god often appealed to in US political and religious rhetoric is the same triune God worshipped by the Church and confessed in the Christian creeds. /p/blockquote pI've long believed that a href=http://www.simon-cozens.org/content/christianity-versus-american-christianityAmerican Christianity is fundamentally unrelated to Christianity/a, and it seems that Hauerwas believes it too./p !--break--!--break--pIt's worth reading the whole transcript, although of course you won't get all the wonderful asides, (I believe that G W Bush is a sincere Christian, but all that shows is how little sincerity has to do with the Christian faith.) but Hauerwas's conviction is that the fundamental American belief (you can choose your own story) is totally incompatible with the fundamental Christian belief (you are part of God's story). Once freedom is hailed as an absolute right, then corporate discipline and accountability have to go by the wayside (freedom becomes freedom from consequences) and truth-claims have to be relativized. (I believe that Jesus is Lord, but that's just my personal opinion.)/p pHere are some great quotes, but go read the a href=http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/3/9/americas-godwhole thing/a./p blockquotep American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in America. The god most American say they believe in just is not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness. /p/blockquote blockquotep Catholics in America, like their Protestant sisters and brothers, are likely to assume that there is no essential tension between being a Christian and an American. As a result, Catholics in America think the distinction between the public and the private, and their “faith” clearly falls into the latter, is a given that cannot be questioned. /p/blockquote blockquotep I cannot avoid the reality that American Christianity has been less than it should have been just to the extent that the church has failed to make clear that America’s god is not the God we worship as Christians. /p/blockquote

pOverheard a couple of days ago, a regional secretary for a large Evangelical organisation:/p blockquotep Well, I realised that feeding people didn't save their souls, so I stopped doing that. /p/blockquote pMan, people still think like that?/p !--break--!--break--

pI've recently been trying to think what the next new thing is going to be in mission - what are the areas that we're not working in yet that we should be doing in? Maybe because last night I was helping to build an installation for a href=http://www.feig.org.uk/our/a worship event at a href=http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/Greenbelt/a, the answer a href=http://twitter.com/simoncozens/status/21511828305came to me/a: the use of the arts as mission./p !--break--!--break--pAs Protestants we've had a tortured relationship with the arts through history: theologically we hate them, but the will to express ourselves through them has proved irrepressible. So just as soon as Luther kicked out all the icons and paintings from our churches for fear that they were becoming an idolatrous distraction from God, church music started to become more and more complex. Plainchant was replaced by harmonies, then counterpoint, then full orchestration, then Hillsongs. Today, of course, a long and elaborate worship session (which has become equated with singing) is ide rigeur/i; the worship leader is the new iconographer, with a little bit of rock star thrown in. If church art iwas/i idolatry, how much more has church music become. small(This is not an original thought; I read it on someone's blog but I forget where.)/small/p pBut while there are clearly sections of the church which are staunchly anti-arts, I think we're starting see elsewhere a realisation that we don't have to hate the arts. Music was a given. a href=http://www.civa.org/Christians in the Visual Arts/a started in 1979. a href=http://imagejournal.org/Image/a, a href=http://www.ruminatemagazine.org/Ruminate/a, and of course, Greenbelt itself, testify to a resurgence in artistic expression amongst Christians - and equally to a wider acceptance of art in Christian circles./p pWhat about mission, then?/p pAgain, since we have been so music-centered for the past, oh, four hundred years, the use of the arts in mission has historically been restricted to music - and not much of that; the focus has been mainly on music ifor/i (congregational) church worship, rather than music ias/i worship, much less music as outreach. /p pTraditionally heathen music was regarded as demonic, and so needed to replaced with good Christian (read Western) hymn tunes, such as the melodies that Wesley collected from the pubs and streets of his day. But recently the discipline of a href=http://ethnodoxology.org/ethnodoxology/a has emerged to try to construct culturally appropriate worship music; my own mission has founded the a href=http://www.wec-int.org.uk/index.php?option=com_contentamp;view=articleamp;id=1158amp;Itemid=240Resonance team/a to do this as a short-term mission opportunity. That's still mainly in the realm of congregational worship music, although they do do a bit of performance music as well./p pIt's a start, but I think we need to be thinking about the next stage: ways of getting our message across which are culturally appropriate, through artistic media. I think filmmaking is going to be a big thing for mission quite soon. From my context in Japan, a href=http://www.jitenshamovie.com/Jitensha/a is an excellent example of this. (And that makes an important point - I'm not proposing anything revolutionary and there are people doing this already, but it's still seen as niche; but I do think that this form of mission, like the other arts expressions I highlighted, will become progressively more mainstream.)/p pWhat does this mean? For starters it means that we will be need more missionaries with creative skills; that's a challenge. But the flip side of that challenge is a wonderful opportunity: missionaries who do have creative skills will be encouraged to use them, and not turned into drab sermon machines./p pI'd like to start thinking of some of the other ways that mission can engage with the arts; I do think that this is a missing area at the moment, and I do think it's going to change./p

pSo, you don't want to wade through the 80-odd pages of a href=http://www.simon-cozens.org/content/leadership-japanese-house-churchmy dissertation/a. That's fine; unless you particularly get off on academic prose, I can understand that. Here's a kinder, gentler version./p !--break--!--break--pFirst, nothing I wrote should surprise anyone who's involved in house church work already, in Japan or elsewhere, although it will make some points that they may not like./p div style=float:right; margin:5px; width:200px; text-align:centera href=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/095659431X?ie=UTF8amp;tag=widmar-20amp;linkCode=as2amp;camp=1789amp;creative=9325amp;creativeASIN=095659431Ximg border=0 src=https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41pcRFbwT5L._SL160_.jpg /br /Buy the Japanese House Church manual from Amazon/aimg src=http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widmar-20amp;l=as2amp;o=1amp;a=095659431X width=1 height=1 border=0 alt= style=border:none !important; margin:0px !important; //div ul li It's actually hard to define house church, and very few of them document what they're doing anyway - they're usually too busy out doing it! So after looking at the history a bit, I define a house church as a group that's influenced by apostolic/five-function ecclesiology, (although not all are) simple structures, and a focus on mentoring. /lili Everyone involved in promoting house church as a concept wants to claim that that they're just like the New Testament. This is because when they read the New Testament through their present experience, they see house churches there, because that's exactly what they're looking for. The reality is more complicated. /lili Growth rates are exaggerated by enthusiastic proponents, but true growth rates are really difficult to measure anyway because nobody's keeping score. You may not know all the churches in your network, let alone all the Christians. /lili Within house churches, there are no leaders, but there is leadership. What I mean is that leadership is a function, not a role; anyone may express leadership by furthering the goals of the group. The goals of the group normally involve evangelising, mentoring and discipling others, and so leadership and discipleship are pretty much the same thing. /lili The principle of leadership in Japan is group cohesion - keeping everyone together and keeping relationships well-oiled - as much as it is about getting certain tasks achieved. This is also how leadership worked in the first-century churches as well, through the paterfamilias system. /lili So what the house churches are doing, with everyone involved in furthering the goals of the group, makes good sense in their cultural context, and is actually pretty close to the New Testament Church too. /lili This style of leadership really makes sense in the postmodern context, and it will happen more and more over here too. /li/ul

pWell, my dissertation is now submitted and can't be changed, so I am happy to publish it here as well. (Facebook readers will have to click through to my blog to read the paper.)/p !--break--!--break--pI looked at the nature of leadership in the house church in Japan. In summary:/p blockquotep This study provides a survey of Japanese house church leaders, coupled with sociological analysis of leadership patterns in Japan focused primarily on the leadership of voluntary organisations and a historical review of house church movements, to determine the form and function of leaders and leadership within these movements. The key findings were that leadership is a function and not a role, is often coterminous with disciple-making, and can be characterized primarily in terms of the maintainance of group cohesion. /p/blockquote pIf you're interested in learning more about the Upward Outward Inward style of church planting described in chapter 3, you can now a href=http://www.wide-margin.co.uk/upward-outward-inwardbuy the book/a which describes it - it's an excellent book about simple church planting and discipling, and while it should certainly be of interest to those working in Japan, it's emphatically not just for Japan; it'll help you train disciplers wherever you happen to be. (Disclaimer: I'm both the translator and the publisher.)/p div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-document div class=field-items div class=field-item odd object codebase=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0 id=doc_35946947 name=doc_35946947 classid=clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000 align=middle height=500 width=100% rel=media:document resource=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=35946947amp;access_key=key-1vnur6vtkit9wh2qu7q5amp;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode= xmlns:media=http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/ xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/terms/param name=movie value=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=35946947amp;access_key=key-1vnur6vtkit9wh2qu7q5amp;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode=param name=quality value=highparam name=play value=trueparam name=loop value=trueparam name=scale value=showallparam name=wmode value=opaqueparam name=devicefont value=falseparam name=bgcolor value=#ffffffparam name=menu value=trueparam name=allowFullScreen value=trueparam name=allowScriptAccess value=alwaysparam name=salign value=embed src=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=35946947amp;access_key=key-1vnur6vtkit9wh2qu7q5amp;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode= quality=high pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer play=true loop=true scale=showall wmode=opaque devicefont=false bgcolor=#FFFFFF name=doc_35946947_object menu=true allowfullscreen=true allowscriptaccess=always salign= type=application/x-shockwave-flash align=middle height=500 width=100%/object /div /div /div

pI am not a particularly patient person. I'm an activist, I like to make things happen. I am not very good at waiting around for other people to make things happen. So it's kind of ironic that my two current pastimes - homebrewing and a href=http://www.wide-margin.co.uk/Christian publishing/a - both require a lot of patience./p pI won't say much about the first, because, well, Japan missionary and all that, and because that's just impatience with ithings/i - waiting for things to mature - which is not really that much of a problem. The impatience that I have when publishing is impatience with ipeople/i, and that's deadly./p !--break--!--break--pThere is an awful lot of waiting around in publishing - waiting for authors to finish writing, waiting for reviewers to finish reviewing, waiting for printers to finish printing. a href=http://marketingchristianbooks.wordpress.com/Sarah Bolme/a says, quite rightly, that selling books is more like a marathon than a sprint. Let's face it, I'm already on the first mile and I'm finding the mental battle hard going. I want things to happen faster./p pIn our church we often grapple with the question of what it means to live a distinctly different Christian life. What would being counter-cultural look like? I've felt very convicted this week about my own impatience. I think patience, like a href=http://www.simon-cozens.org/content/wisdomwisdom/a, is a value that we've largely lost. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that lack of patience is seen as a virtue in our society. We expect everything to happen on Internet time. Faster than Internet time, in fact, because if you can't wait for that download, you should get a faster provider. Can't wait for a meal? Get fast food. Get a faster car. Get faster friends. Get a faster life./p pAnd that's the problem with impatience, right there. It is pride: it is expecting everyone else to live their lives to your own pace. It harms relationships by treating time as more precious than people. Kosuke Koyama says that love is slow, and that God travels at three miles an hour because He slows down to walk with us./p pIf we want to live a distinctively counter-cultural life, we would do well to start by rediscovering that fruit of the Spirit that is patience, and God knows, I need to start with myself./p

blockquotep They love the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues and elaborate greetings in the marketplaces, and to have people call them ‘Rabbi.’ But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher and you are all brothers. And call no one your ‘father’ on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. /p/blockquote pI wonder when we'll get these verses. I mean, really get them./p !--break--!--break--pWhenever I see a speaker advertised as being internationally renowned, I think if he actually were, you wouldnt need to tell me that; I'd know of him already./p pWhenever I see a speaker advertised as having an international ministry, I think Yeah, me too, I've preached in England iand/i Japan./p pAnd when I see a church claim that they've launched a UK network because their congregation in the south of the city has planted a daughter congregation in the west of the city, well, I just laugh./p pNow to be fair, I'm sure that these speakers don't write their own copy. (Well, most of them don't, anyway.) But I'm sure they're not ignorant of it either. We all still want our titles and our elaborate greetings. It's another aspect of the will to a href=http://www.simon-cozens.org/content/powerpower/a. You'll see it particularly, and I know this is a generalisation, in the more charismatic and Pentecostal churches, and I think that's because power is a bigger dynamic in their a href=http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=210amp;pid=32925spiritual worldview/a./p pI guess the reason that churches do this kind of advertising is that it works, or they think it works; they believe that the people in the pews are more likely to come along to events when speakers have impressive titles than if those speakers do not./p pWhich means, I guess, that we don't value humble servant leadership, at all./p

pI promise not to spam you mercilessly with a href=http://www.wide-margin.co.uk/Wide Margin/a stuff, but I'm excited today because a parcel of fifty copies of a href=http://www.wide-margin.co.uk/christians-and-catastropheChristians and Catastrophe/a arrived at my doorstep. To celebrate, here are a few choice quotes./p blockquotep Matthew 24 has that edgy feeling that everything can be lost, but also everything can be saved. The Bible discourages the idea that security is normal. While, understandably, we usually strive to replace danger and helplessness by safety and control, we must also realise that the latter is ultimately illusory unless rooted in God. Also, as a response to danger, there are two sorts of behaviour, good and bad. Abraham does the risky thing. He sets out on a journey into the unknown and is commended for it. It demonstrates his faith in God. By contrast, King Ahaz (Isaiah 7-9) does what appears to be the prudent thing. He makes worldly-wise political arrangements and is condemned for it. They demonstrate his lack of faith. Situations of risk or danger can be a spiritual trap precisely because they can make people huddle together and emphasise their identity as against others. /p/blockquote blockquotep I have already said why I think memories are so important, but in a church or Christian community, our most important memory work happens in a eucharistic context. From the point of view of those facing disaster, the great eucharistic word is ‘renewal’. We are told that it was ‘on the night when he was betrayed’ that Jesus inaugurated the commemoration (1 Corinthians 11:23). Human failure is therefore the first circumstance we are invited to think about, and this is important because when we struggle with the knowledge that things are getting progressively worse and hope is diminishing, our natural reaction is to blame other people. But despite the reality of suffering as a result of other people’s behaviour – Jesus really was about to be betrayed, and knew it – it is not what Jesus wanted to talk about. Instead he promises that he will not take another Passover meal until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God (Luke 22:16). He assures his disciples (and us) that whatever disasters might follow, the feast of the kingdom cannot finally be postponed. Whenever we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, hope flares up again, even in the direst circumstances, and it does so because we reactivate our memories of that first event and the promise it contains. /p/blockquote blockquotep What all this means, rather surprisingly, is that the New Testament has very little to say about the next life. What matters is the here and now. There may be death and disaster just round the corner but that is all the more reason for getting busy. Jesus knew that his death was imminent, and that it was likely that his offer of the kingdom would not be accepted, but the offer was made all the same. Judas was caught up in purposes that were bigger than his understanding, but his betrayal still mattered. James speaks in his letter of ‘the coming of the Lord’ but only after he has attacked the rich for their exploitation of their workers and their luxurious lifestyle (James 5:1-7). Peter announces suddenly that ‘the end of all things is near’ but he certainly does not consider this a reason to down tools. It is all the more necessary, he says, to be serious and disciplined (1 Peter 4:7). /p/blockquote pI'm very pleased with this book; I don't agree with all of it, of course, and I don't think that many will. But it's certainly made me think about what it means to be living as a Christian in ithese/i times, and that's precisely what Jonathan's intention was./p pI hope that whets your appetite, and of course, if you want the rest, you know what to do. /p

blockquotep Philosophy matters. It matters more than most people realize, because philosophical ideas that have developed over the centuries enter our culture in the form of a world view and affect us in thousands of ways. Philosophy matters in the academic world because the conceptual frameworks upon which entire academic disciplines rest usually have roots in philosophy - roots so deep and invisible that they are usually not even noticed. /p/blockquote pI'm currently reading Lakoff's a href=http://books.google.com/books?id=1oPDSAAACAAJWomen, Fire and Dangerous Things/a - very slowly, because it breaks my brain. I think it was recommended in my linguistics lectures way back when, but I certainly wouldn't have been ready to read it then. Lakoff tries to expose, and then attack, a lot of the deep underlying assumptions we have buried in the way that we think. It is not light bedtime reading./p pLakoff is particularly thinking about categories and organisation of thought, but the broader point here in the quote is important - the way we think, the epistemology that we use as we look at the universe, is not universal or absolute; it is ultimately a matter of choice, something that we unconsciously inherit from our philosophical heritage. Our philosophical background is always something that we need to keep in mind - and expose where it provides questionable assumptions./p

pEveryone wants to talk about leadership in churches. You can find hundreds of books and seminars and magazines all dedicated to the subject. I have heard hardly anyone talking about power in churches. But the two are so intimately linked.../p !--break--!--break--pI've been thinking for a long time about issues of power in churches, and am starting to plan out what I would say if I was writing a longer piece about it. In a sense, it's a natural outworking of my thinking about a href=http://www.simon-cozens.org/category/subject-tags/passivitypassivity/a, because passivity can be encouraged or discouraged by those who have the power./p pThe interesting thing is, I suspect if you asked pastors Do you think you should have all the power in your church? they would answer no. But if you watch the same pastor on a Sunday morning, you would very often find that they behave in a way shows a very different priority. The person with the power is the person who does the talking. How much do they run the whole show, and how much do they give access to others? I've started to analyse Sunday services by proportion of time; if you have an hour and a half service and the pastor is speaking for forty-five minutes, that's 50% of the time taken up by one person. Because let's remember the model that we're aiming for:/p blockquotep When you come together, each one has a song, has a lesson, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation. /p/blockquote pThe picture painted here is not one where one person dominates proceedings. There needs to be someone in there to direct the traffic, sure, but to allow such participation and not to stifle it. Reducing the participation of others is a key way for pastors to reserve power to themselves./p pAgain, it's not just the Sunday services. I'm sure that in midweek groups, you probably won't see the dynamic you see in Japan where the pastor runs everything there itoo/i, but often you'll see something like it: the pastor controls what is taught in the form of helpful notes for the group leaders. Contrast this with a church I heard of recently where a team of lay people decide on the church's teaching for a season and prepare Bible studies together - power being shared, not concentrated./p pI've seen other ways that pastors - and laity - have used and abused power. Most of the abuses have been unconscious; it's just the way that people learn to do things, and because they've got the power, nobody corrects them. (I'm thinking, for instance, of the pastor who gave personal prophecies to people publically in front of the whole church. I'm sure he didn't realise this was inappropriate, but the effect was to build himself up as a person of spiritual power in front of his audience.) /p pAll kinds of unhealthy situations, from pastors acting without accountability through to a href=http://www.simon-cozens.org/content/toxic-faithtoxic faith/a right up to Jim Jones-like scenarios, have their root in the exercise of leadership without appropriate concern for issues of power./p pPower, like money, is not a bad thing so long as it is given away. It can be used to bless and uplift others. But concentration of power - especially for a generation that is suspicious of power - can and does harm. That's why it something that we need to be talking about./p pI wonder why nobody is?/p

pOne of the things that the emerging church movement has done for us has been to bring the importance of orthopraxy back into the foreground of Christian life. Or at least, we're talking about orthopraxy a lot more. But of course, talking about orthopraxy is not orthopraxy./p pLast week at church we read a Pete Rollins parable about a Christian businessman who uses his faith and good church commitments to justify and compensate for his oppressive, uncaring business life, and who, on losing his faith, became faced with his own inhumanity and changed his life. The message, of course, that it is better to be challenged than to have faith which does not lead to orthopraxy./p pAs far as it goes, that's a good message. But something about it niggled me./p pBecause, you see, this is the kind of story we tell in the emerging churches ourselves: we do not want to be like those other Christians who are very good at the right words but whose words do not lead on to action. (Despite the fact that there are an awful lot of other Christians out there quietly doing good works.)/p pIn short, I thank you, Lord, that I am not like that Pharisee. Way to miss the point./p pBecause such stories make sense only if they ido/i lead us on to action, if they have a so then, let us... element. A sermon at another church last Sunday was about how the congregation should to be open to changing and adopting new ways of engaging with the world in terms of evangelism and church style. Good to talk about, but better to do, and there was no so then, let us... about the sermon./p pA great example of getting it right comes from the a href=http://www.internationalbulletin.org/IBMR/a, which ran an issue this year about a href=http://www.internationalbulletin.org/node/201 how expensive Christian resources place them out of the reach of most of the world's churches/a. So then, it went on to say:/p blockquotep As of 2010 we are an on-line journal—freely accessible to all—with a published print option available for paying subscribers. With this shift the scholarly research for which the IBMR is well known now becomes freely available to readers around the world, even those whose economic circumstances do not permit them the luxury of a subscription. /p/blockquote pThat's convictions being put into action./p pAnd I know, I know that this is just another set of words about action, and not action. I need to find my own so then, let us and go and do it./p pSo then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us do good to all people, and especially to those who belong to the family of faith./p

pFor the past few months I've been quietly setting up a publishing company, a href=http://www.wide-margin.co.uk/Wide Margin/a. We've got one book about to hit the shelves, one more in production, and two more in the pipeline after that. It's been fun. More soon, but I wanted to get a link out there./p

pWhen Christians attack each other, that makes me sad; we're supposed to be a unified body. /p pWhen Christian leaders publically fire accusations of heresy at each other of heresy first and Matthew 18:15-16 be damned, that makes me sad; we're supposed to bear with one another in love. /p pBut when Christian leaders unfairly abuse their authority to baselessly and unfairly attack others, throwing in accusations of heresy just to make a point, that makes me angry. And I've just read something that made me really, really angry./p !--break--!--break--pI'm not going to call out the leader in question or their article in question because that isn't the point that I'm making. The point that I'm making is that iunfair/i criticism, playing the man not the ball, and use of spiritual authority to bully and intimidate, really is not the sort of thing that leaders should be doing. It's just wrong and unjust, and I get angry about injustice./p pIt was a rant by the leader of a denomination, about some book, which apparently is dangerous liberal heresy. (I bet you can guess who the book's author is.)/p pThe rant started badly, as the person in question detailed their spiritual concern as the leader of a large network of churches. That is a calculated power play; it is a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authorityargument from authority/a writ large. Sorry, but if your points were valid, they would stand up on their own merits. Instead, you bring your power into it and use that as a megaphone. Or a cudgel. That's bullying./p pThen there followed a whole host of irrelevant, sneering jibes which were just there purely to discredit the book's author: talking about the style of the book and not its substance. There were logical fallacies - and I happen to know that the leader is an intelligent and careful man, so I think these were deliberate. /p pThe leader quoted sentences from the book (out of context, needless to say) but did not specify what they thought was wrong with the arguments that the author made; the tone, of course, is that any reasonable person would agree that there's a problem with them./p pThe whole piece was carefully calculated to spread a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubtfear, uncertainty and doubt/a. /p pI've seen this style of argumentation before from evangelical leaders, especially when Steve Chalke's book came out (Did you hear what he said? I can't believe he would have said that! Of course I haven't read it - why should I, it's heretical nonsense?) and so I should not be surprised that we treat each other like this./p pBut we still do. It's wrong. It's unjust, it's unfair, it's unbiblical. It makes me angry that we do each another such disservices./p pAnd worse, these are our leaders? Have mercy on us, O Lord./p pI want to call out one particular point. The church leader was particularly exercised about the author's use of the postmodern paradigm./p pPostmodernism, we are told, denies absolute truth. (which it doesn't, it just says that absolute truth is impossible for us mere mortals to grasp - which is also, coincidentally, what the Bible says. This proves again, if proof were needed, that the leader actually didn't understand what he was raving against.) Because it denies absolute truth, it is therefore an evil liberal plot; unlike good old modernism which, as everyone knows, is Biblical through and through./p pThe lack of self-awareness of these people is astounding to me even now. We could do some reflection on the epistemological basis of the modernist worldview, but why bother? There's a simpler way to deal with this. /p pbIf nothing else/b, culture is like language. It changes. Resisting postmodernism is like resisting change in the English language; you can try, but the change is going to happen anyway. If you continue to fight against it, you just end up sounding stupid and people stop listening./p pIf you can't express your message in a language, don't blame the speakers for not understanding you; blame yourself. /p pLearn, adapt, change. /p pAnd if you can't play fair to those with whom you disagree, you have no business leading a church. None./p

pHere's how the dissertation ends (at the moment), applying what's happening in house churches in Japan to... well, us./p blockquotep Finally, do the Japanese house churches have anything to say to church government outside of Japan? I believe that they do./p pIn our analysis of house church leadership, we have been able to trace a straight line from the ipaterfamilias/i leadership of the New Testament house churches, through the network-connection understanding of apostleship in UK house churches in the 1960s, to the emerging house churches in Japan today. As we have previously noted, this is a very different definition of leadership to that found in most Western Christian literature, which emphasises vision, direction and so on./p pBut perhaps the prevalent thought on church government, and on leadership more generally, in the West is actually a temporary aberration against the mainstream of leadership-as-relationship-management—albeit an aberration which has lasted for two centuries. Certainly the overarching metaphor of command and control which permeates Western leadership thought reflects the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution. (Morgan, 2006) As we move into a post-industrial society, with its renewed emphasis on human relationship, (Holt, 1995:19) perhaps we shall see a shift in the notion of church leadership similarly away from the vision-and-encouragement model and more towards what the Japanese are already doing in terms of relationship management. (see Barna, 2001:56)/p pWe have already seen the rise of the networked organisation as a new model for church and mission, (Tiplady, 2003:112ff.) which will require a new set of leadership skills—those who are used to wielding considerable power and influence within their own organisation may find it difficult to adjust to an order in which achieving their goals requires a much higher degree of co-ordination with other organisations. At the same time, postmodernity places a high emphasis on personalization and individual choice, (Herangi, 2002:3–5) and successful leaders of postmodern church structures will need to be able to, in Taka and Foglia’s (1994) words again, “permit or encourage others to proceed to the life force through their own work;” in other words, take into account the diversity of individual choice and thereby trust the specializations of their subordinates, something which Taka and Foglia identify as a key factor in Japanese leadership style. Leaders operating in this model will tend to be catalytical, rather than positional, and will increase an organisation’s effectiveness through their ability to network those of different specializations and thereby giving others the space for synergy, as described by Brafman and Beckstrom (2006)./p pIt is therefore my contention that successful leadership patterns within the Japanese house church would provide a useful model for leadership within non-Japanese forms of church, in particular the more postmodern, emergent expressions of church in the West, and eventually more widely as Western church patterns are gradually reshaped by their prevailing cultural context. We will, I surmise, be looking to ideas such as those of Ōtsubo (1998), Kado (2008) and Kobayashi (2007) to develop a renewed model for leadership in this milieu. /p/blockquote pI apologise for using the word synergy, but I'm doing a leadership course so I think I get marked down unless I use it at some point./p

pI don't know about you, but I live in a world where what we do is what gives us significance. A great person is someone who does great things. It's a good start to say that we shouldn't be like this, that we already have significance because God made us and loves us and so on, but we're still living in a world where it's what we do that matters. I grew up in that world, and I've lived all my life in it, and that can't help but have an effect on who I am. In fact, I may as well just confess it: My name is Simon and I'm addicted to achievement./p !--break--!--break--pI used to enjoy it when friends gently teased me after I'd shown them what I'd been up to recently. Do you ever sleep? they'd say. To me that meant I was doing something right, I was achieving and performing: that I was impressing people with what I did. And it would work well. Particularly in my open source computing work, pulling off large numbers of extraordinary hacks gave me recognition and adulation. It got me well known, albeit in a small community. It felt good. I felt important. I felt significant./p pAnd it fed my addiction. But just like a substance addiction, you build up a tolerance, and you have to produce more and more to get the same reward. It was unsustainable. Burnout was inevitable. /p pAnd it didn't go away when I became a missionary. Missionaries are activists; we get into this job because we want to iget stuff done/i. William Carey told us to attempt great things for God. Just like in the rest of the world, it's about what we do, how much we do and how hard we try. A great person is someone who does great things. So the mission field is a fertile ground for workaholics. And it's the worst possible place for them: the guy who's addicted to achievement generally ends up either wittingly or unwittingly trying to make himself indispensible, which is pretty much the opposite of what missionaries are supposed to be doing./p pI know what it was, of course: it's that primal desire for immortality. That if I do enough, then at least some of it will be significant enough to survive me. It's vain and it's foolish, but there it is. I'm sure the Bible has stuff to say about this, but since the Bible is a collection of stories about people whose work has been significant enough to survive at least two thousand and sometimes four thousand years, in a way it has the potential to drive me further down the wrong path. Similarly, giving me a long list of who I am in Christ doesn't help. I know that stuff. Read it so many times. And it's not that I don't believe it - I do. It just hasn't changed the way I work, and hitting me over the head with Christ won't change that - Christ changed the world by the time he was my age; I'm running late./p pThis past year has been transformational for me. Of course, I still struggle with this, and I still need to check my motives sometimes to see if I'm doing things for the approval of others. Sometimes I am. I think I'll always struggle with it. But I've identified the problem, which makes me aware of it. I'm also getting better at just being myself. a href=http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pycQgqixEAQCRuth Haley Barton's book/a helped with that. Some quiet time in the cathedral, confronting some of the demons in my past, helped. Counselling helped. /p pMost of all, being married helped: knowing that there's someone who will love me even if I don't try to impress her goes a long way. A long way./p pAnother thing that helped was a story that the college Principal told, right at the start of our leadership course. He's also an activist and, OK, I don't think he's addicted to it but he certainly thrives on achievement. He'd been to see a friend who was lying in a hospital bed, unable to move, and wondered how he would cope if it were him. He told us that it made him ask the question Who am I when I'm not achieving?/p pWho am I when I'm not achieving? It's a good question. It forces me to give up the need to be great, to realise that I am not defined by what I do. That beside and beyond the achievement, there is actually a me there. Slowly, but surely, and really for the first time in my life, I'm beginning to find out who that is./p

pI've been reading the book of Proverbs on and off recently. /p pMuch of it, let's face it, is pretty trivially obvious. Let's take 12:17, for instance: The faithful witness tells what is right, but a false witness speaks deceit. Well, yes, by definition. (Mind you, a href=http://nothing.tmtm.com/Tony/a once told me that if someone uses by definition to seal an argument, you know they're lying.) But I've found two things intriguing as I've read through Proverbs./p pFirst, there is the insistence that wisdom is necessary. I remember reading recently (I don't remember where) that our information society has placed a high premium on knowledge and ability, but a low premium on wisdom. When we talk about successful people, brilliant people, we talk about their intelligence or their achievements, but we don't often talk about their character - in fact, character flaws are excusable if we know enough or do enough; Churchill is remembered as a great world leader, not an a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2002/nov/28/features11.g21unrepentant racist/a./p pBut the writer of the Proverbs hammers it down, verse after verse, that wisdom is what the human condition is all about: living well means living wisely./p pThe second, and the hopeful thing for me, is the equally strong insistence that wisdom is available. This isn't some esoteric thing that you spend years in meditation searching for. We don't look for wisdom; according to the Bible, wisdom looks for us, shouting in the streets to anyone who will listen (Proverbs 1:20-23; Proverbs 8) - this is not a hidden wisdom but a wisdom which is publically available, open to all./p pThe fear of the Lord. Listening to others. Pursuing justice. These are not difficult things to understand, although they may be difficult to practice. But that's all that it's about, to live wisely and to live well./p

pBobby Clinton talks about the need for leaders to a href=http://www.bobbyclinton.com/articles/downloads/3FinishWellArticles.pdffinish well/a. His research suggests that very few - one in three or four - leaders manage to get to the end of their life in leadership without becoming irrelevant or disqualifying themselves by doing irreperable damage to their integrity./p pSo when I heard the news that Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House Press Corps, decided to a href=http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-thomas-20100609,0,4996898.storyretire effective immediately/a after some unguarded and unwise remarks about Jewish legitimacy, my first reaction was one of sympathy. After all, the odds are good that I'll do something similar at some point.br / lt;!--break--br / This is something that's been a big theme of the past year for me - the Master's course that I'm doing has been very hands-on and practical, and has had quite a few personal implications. It's helped me to reflect on who I am and what the challenges and weaknesses in my leadership are likely to be. It's given me a healthy fear - not a paranoia, although it was that for a while - of the darker side of my character./p pI don't think I'll be caught out by making unacceptable statements about the state of the world. (Let's face it, that's pretty much ide rigeur/i for Christian leaders at times.) I'm more likely to use my big mouth and overconfident attitude to overrun my colleagues and alienate myself from them. That's how I'm likely to blow it: to have a big public bust-up with someone and call them an idiot. And then try to go around preaching a Gospel of love for neighbour./p pAnd no, just because I'm a forgiven sinner doesn't mean I get my integrity back. That's the whole tragedy of the Helen Thomas story: the longer you live, the more likely you are to make a mistake that derails you, because it only takes one./p pBut knowing what is likely to derail me is a big step to making sure that it doesn't happen. I can't say for sure I'm going to get to the finish line well, but at least now I have a map with the landmines marked on./p

pThis is the formal equivalent of the a href=http://www.simon-cozens.org/content/there-no-japanese-theologyrant version/a: Japanese theology is in a sad place, and the seminaries aren't making it any less sad. (I got 75% for both this and the preceding essay)/p div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-document div class=field-items div class=field-item odd object codebase=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0 id=doc_32563689 name=doc_32563689 classid=clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000 align=middle height=500 width=100% rel=media:document resource=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=32563689amp;access_key=key-1e3illuoazdkpso3syzamp;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode= xmlns:media=http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/ xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/terms/param name=movie value=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=32563689amp;access_key=key-1e3illuoazdkpso3syzamp;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode=param name=quality value=highparam name=play value=trueparam name=loop value=trueparam name=scale value=showallparam name=wmode value=opaqueparam name=devicefont value=falseparam name=bgcolor value=#ffffffparam name=menu value=trueparam name=allowFullScreen value=trueparam name=allowScriptAccess value=alwaysparam name=salign value=embed src=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=32563689amp;access_key=key-1e3illuoazdkpso3syzamp;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode= quality=high pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer play=true loop=true scale=showall wmode=opaque devicefont=false bgcolor=#FFFFFF name=doc_32563689_object menu=true allowfullscreen=true allowscriptaccess=always salign= type=application/x-shockwave-flash align=middle height=500 width=100%/object /div /div /div

pI've been refraining from posting any papers here recently until I've had them marked and returned, but here's one that's just come back on an attempt to provide an understanding of Christ in ancestor-worship religions. I'm not getting into the whole should Christians take part in ancestor rites? question because I find it excruciatingly boring. We've been blathering about it for four hundred years and we still only have contradictory guidance to give people. So the paper isn't about that; it's about how people from those cultures can see Christ as their older brother./p p(Facebook people may need to click through to a href=http://www.simon-cozens.org/content/towards-confucian-christology-firstbornthe original post/a to see the document.)/p div class=field field-type-filefield field-field-document div class=field-items div class=field-item odd object codebase=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0 id=doc_32121815 name=doc_32121815 classid=clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000 align=middle height=500 width=100% rel=media:document resource=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=32121815amp;access_key=key-dm4hr15vhhn8l5k13champ;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode= xmlns:media=http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/ xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/terms/param name=movie value=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=32121815amp;access_key=key-dm4hr15vhhn8l5k13champ;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode=param name=quality value=highparam name=play value=trueparam name=loop value=trueparam name=scale value=showallparam name=wmode value=opaqueparam name=devicefont value=falseparam name=bgcolor value=#ffffffparam name=menu value=trueparam name=allowFullScreen value=trueparam name=allowScriptAccess value=alwaysparam name=salign value=embed src=http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=32121815amp;access_key=key-dm4hr15vhhn8l5k13champ;page=1amp;version=1amp;viewMode= quality=high pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer play=true loop=true scale=showall wmode=opaque devicefont=false bgcolor=#FFFFFF name=doc_32121815_object menu=true allowfullscreen=true allowscriptaccess=always salign= type=application/x-shockwave-flash align=middle height=500 width=100%/object /div /div /div