Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

Posted on May 6, 2010 - by Stephen Murray

This City

“This City Visual Art Exhibition” puts on display the works of a number of artists from a wide range of disciplines.

The title doesn’t so much refer to a particular subject or topic but rather headlines a collective of artists who have been gathered for this short, eclectic show – artists, who may not normally put their work up side by side, are sharing the same space to show the diversity of this beautiful city and its amazing people.

There will be also be some live music down at &Union.

St Stephen’s Church, 110 Bree Street, Cape Town (map)

Friday: 6pm – 10pm
Saturday: 10am – 2pm
Saturday: 6pm – 10pm

Artists:

Further; Lester Atkinson; Janna Prinsloo; Mike Scott; Steven van Niekerk; Roxi Bredenkamp; Brett Atherstone; Joanna Court; Frank Moodie; Brigitte Spring-Parfitt; Susan Hall; Grethe Bredenkamp; Nick Mills; Viv King; Roxanne Amos; Claire Jones; Andrew Breitenberg; Sam Beningfield; Cyrelda Victor; Leon Oosthuizen; Zeke du Plessis; Maria Schoeman; Leanne van den Heever; Louw van Eeden; Craig Lewis; Lindsey Boucher; Karen Uys; Linka Prosch; Natalie Florentino; Taryn Reynolds; Nicola Davidson; Dayna-Gay Tate; Marko Petrik

Posted on November 20, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Too much talk of Culture?

Thabiti Anyabwile and Carl Trueman think that there’s too much fascination with ‘culture’ and ‘engaging culture’ in Christian circles today. I must confess that I’m not completely convinced that they’re on the money, or (if I may be so bold) that the school of thought, ministry and theology that these gentlemen speak out of has taken culture seriously enough yet and what it means to engage culture in a way that is congruent with the gospel. But then maybe I’m just a naive, young, little upstart – ok so I know I am, but anyway… I really get the feeling, looking at the average reformed and evangelical church around me that culture, and real engagement with it is still something a bit mysterious and off the agenda at present even despite the large amount of press available about engaging the culture. (HT – Jason)

Posted on May 7, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Alan Hirsch Interview

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQL1JeYxGeo&hl=en]

Posted on May 6, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Congregations and the Cultures

BK has some worthwhile thoughts and links on the issue of mono/multi-cultural congregations – something South Africans definitely need to think long and hard about.

Posted on April 10, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Cultural Influence – The Decision we All Face

I engaged in a fascinating tutorial today which my church history professor took on the subject of the rise of scholasticism in Medieval Christianity. We spent a significant amount of time discussing the impact that the re-discovery of the works of Aristotle had upon the western church. As the westerners came into conflict with the Arabic speaking world through the crusades they came back into contact with large amounts of Aristotle’s work which had been faithfully preserved by the Arab scholars. The Aristotelian worldview and the culture it created confronted the lethargic western church and forced it to respond. Now what is fascinating from a historical point of view is the church’s response. Historically the church has responded to these cultural shifts in one of three ways:

1. One of the most common response is to condemn this foreign influence as being from the devil, damn it to the pit of hell and completely reject it.

2. Another approach is to adopt it wholesale to the point that it completely replaces one’s Christian worldview.

3. The third approach is to find some sort of compromise and integrate the foreign influence or new culture with the Christian worldview.

These three responses are evident so often in the pages of church history. We see them being expressed in the enlightenment period and how the church confronted Darwinism – we see it a bit today as the church confronts the current culture shift and post modernity. What I find interesting is the that many evangelicals tend to see the third response in a purely negative light. We’ve been trained to think of the concept of compromise in completely negative categories. This is actually extremely arrogant because it has to presuppose perfect knowledge of the divine revelation and its interaction with culture. When we paint the concept of compromise in purely negative terms it highlights a smug belief that we hold about our personal possession of absolute truth and that, functionally, we see ourselves as completely above reproach in all areas pertaining to the clash between divine revelation and culture. Yet the Bible itself tells us that this is not true – we don’t know all and are constantly revising and (hopefully) bettering our understanding of divine revelation and its relationship to the prevailing culture. Compromise CAN be positive when a new culture causes us to reflect upon the divine revelation with fresh insight and re-adjust our previous convictions that were in fact based upon faulty interpretations often derived from previous cultural influence.

The acknowledgement of this should bring about a great humility when dealing with the clash between the text and the culture. Its not a call for cultural relativism but rather a careful realization of existing cultural presuppositions and the onset of new ones. The reality is that everyone (even the fundamentalist) is working with and trying to negotiate these cultural presuppositions as they aim to be faithful to the divine revelation. I suppose the decision we all face then is whether or not to be honest about our cultural baggage and humble when we come to the Bible.

Posted on February 21, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

On a Journey – Part V

The roads are covered in ice – I’m thinking I’m going to be a bit stuck in the hotel today. The local TV news is suggesting that people should stay home if possible – we’ll have to see. Yesterday was a fairly busy day. It started with an early breakfast with John Ryan who is the pastor of Summit Community Church an Acts29 church just outside of St Louis. Besides pastoring his own church John also coaches other church planters and so we chatted a bit about the type of person Acts29 is looking for when they assess prospective church planters. It was a very fruitful time and, as with most of the guys I’ve met with already, John was really excited to hear about the prospect of church planting in South Africa.

Then I had the chance to go down to Tower Grove and the offices of the Journey’s social action and mercy ministry arm – Mission St Louis.  Josh Wilson, a really great guy, heads up the mission and he took us around a low-income area right next to Tower Grove and showed us some of the work the mission is involved in. From what I could see they’ve really entered the community and are actively working to be a blessing to and love that community – no strings attached. It was really an impressive setup and gave me plenty to think about in terms of mercy ministry back in South Africa.

After that I headed back to Covenant Seminary and after lunch got to meet up with Dr Phil Douglass who is the professor of practical theology with a special interest in church planting and church growth. Dr Douglass has over three decades of experience in assessing and researching church planting and so it was great to spend some time talking about the type of people he looks for when it comes to church planting. He also gave me free copy of his book in PDF format (P & R are about to publish it) in which he brings together years of research to talk about different personality types and the types of church planting they should be involved in. The little bit we got to talk about was so insightful and you could always sense his experience oozing through – so I can’t wait to get into his book.

Then last night I headed down to the Schlafly Bottleworks which is both a local brewery and pub. On Wednesday nights the Journey hosts public discussions at the Schlafly discussing cultural issues relevant to the broader St Louis community. This is all part of what they call Midrash (Hebrew – “commentary”) which is part of the church’s interaction with culture. Last night they had an open discussion on the issue of violence in America. Probably more than 50 people attended and not all of them were members of the Journey, many were just coming in for the discussion. It looks like a great way for the church to build relationships in the community as well as showing that they have a real interest in the issues that their city faces everyday – quality cultural engagement.

Finally I got back to my hotel and watched Arsenal play Milan in the champion’s league which a friend recorded for me. We should have beaten Milan!

Anyway, I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the weather today. I’ll just have to play it by ear.

Posted on January 3, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

That thing called ‘Church’

During 2007 I had interactions with numerous church pastors and planters, both in the flesh and on the web. Through these I’ve become convinced that I need to get my ecclesiology clear in my head over the course of 2008. So I’m going to concentrate my studies in this area. Here’s a list of some of the questions I want to have a look at (feel free to point me towards literature that deals with any of the questions below):

According to the New Testament what do you have to have, as absolute minimum, for a church to exist?

What is the relationship between the church and the Kingdom of God?

What is the relationship between the church and social concern (as opposed to the relationship between Christians and social concern)?

What is the relationship between the church (local) and culture?

Is the Knox-Robinson view of church too narrow?

What does over-realised eschatology look like in the church?

What does under-realised eschatology look like in the church?

How do the above two questions relate to the plausibility of the homogeneous unit principle?

What do those same two questions have to say about the depth of gospel community a church should be attempting?

Are multi-site churches theologically viable?

I think these questions are crucial to not only ponder but begin to give solid biblical answers to if a new group of young leaders aim to plant and grow fresh expressions of church that reflect the pattern of the New Testament.

Posted on December 17, 2007 - by Stephen Murray

Golden Compass Christian Hernia

This whole Golden Compass thing is really causing a ridiculous number of Christians to get their knickers in a knot. The Facebook group entitled “Do NOT Support the Golden Compass” had 158 873 members at the time of me writing this post. That’s 158 873 people who haven’t read 1 Corinthians 5 and Paul telling the Corinthian church not judge non-Christians for behaving like non-Christians. Seriously what do you expect? People might say ‘but they kill God in the end!’ – but if you start judging here where do you stop? Should I be picketing the sequel for Finding Nemo if it ever comes out?

I think the movie is great gospel opportunity. It puts God-talk on the table and its a great chance to talk about the God who really was killed by non-Christians 2000 years ago. Let’s focus on the main things and not have hernias over talking polar bears!

Posted on November 16, 2007 - by Anthony

Come here often? Prt 2

This is a follow up on some thoughts i have had after posting previously on visitors in our churches.  In those posts it was helpful to look at church services from the actual view point of the visitor, instead of trying to guess what they might think and feel about coming to church.  One theme of the two posts that i picked up on was the desire for the visitor not to embarrass themselves!  That really got me thinking because some of the horror stories coming out of the article about “hugging churches” made me cringe…a lot…a lot.  So in a sense it seems that for many, visiting a church means being unseen and yet also feeling welcomed.  For some of the journalists who had a good experience it boiled down to a sensitive Christian community that did not ignore them but made them feel welcome.  Easy, right?  Not quite, as i said before there is no formula because we are dealing with people and as much as humans exhibit the characteristics of the legendary lemmings, we cannot predict how people will react when they come into our meetings.

 Yet, i think we need to start with what i mentioned earlier, sensitivity to the visitor. This is key as i think for many churches we may have fallen into the trap that we are not expectant of the visitor, particularly the sceptical visitor.  Maybe we have stopped asking friends, maybe we have stopped listening to the world’s questions, or maybe we see services as times for Christians and should in no way should cater for the visitor.  For the Christian? Yes, first and foremost it is a time for us as Jesus’ disciples to meet together, encourage one another, hear from God’s Word, prayer together and generally fellowship.  But, our scheduled meetings are not some mystical time where God’s people are meant to meet “behind closed doors” ignoring the outside world.  Paul says to the Corinthians that there will be outsiders in their midst (cf. Paul’s assumption of the presence of unbelievers in the congregation in 1 Cor 14) and so as a church who meets together we need to be sensitive to this fact. Here’s an example that i know got me every time when i first started going to church meetings.  For instance, the service leader may tell the congregation that later we will “hear the Word of God” from the “preacher” who will come up and explain the Bible.  Now, try and put yourself in the visitors shoes and imagine what they might think of language like that? This takes us back to a questions i had in the previous post; What then is the purpose of our meetings?

Paul has one goal for for the public gathering of believers: to build one another up.  As Christians do this in love, it becomes a massive witness to the outsider.  However, what ever we do in our meetings needs to be intelligible and helpful for the outsider in order for them to simply understand what is going on.  This seems pretty obvious…until you think through the various practices we have at our Church meetings that we understand, but for outsider is completely irrelevant. 

Which leads us to the question: how much should the outsider’s perspective shape the way we do our church services? (or do church as a whole?) Is it just an issue of the language we use? or does it go even further to mindsets?

Here’s my take for what it is worth: sensitivity means understanding that there will be outsiders in our midst.  The cultural and perspectival gap between the believers and non-believers will be massive, that gap needs to be lessened.  So yes, the outsider should have a definite say as to how we do our meetings in order to make it relevant, fresh and missional.  If it becomes a “locals” club for Christians with only their preferences then how are going to connect with the unbeliever?

Lets try and be sensitive to the outsider and purposeful in bringing them in!

Posted on November 9, 2007 - by Stephen Murray

Horton on Transforming Culture

My friend Lenny pointed this article out to me by Michael Horton, entitled ‘Transforming Culture with a Messiah Complex.‘ It’s an extremely challenging read and makes me wonder if I sometimes don’t, in my own thinking, put the cart before the horse so to speak. Here’s a quote to get you interested, but make sure you read the whole thing:

“If this theological argument is correct, then we should question popular statements like, “All of life is kingdom work.” No, proclaiming the Word, administering baptism and the Supper, caring for the spiritual and physical well-being of the saints, and bringing in the lost are kingdom work. Building bridges, delivering medical supplies to hospitals, installing water heaters, defending clients in court, holding public office, and having friends over for dinner are “creation work,” given a pledge of safe conduct ever since Cain under God’s regime of common grace. In this work, Christians serve beside non-Christians, as both are endowed with natural gifts and learned skills for their common life together.”