Archive for the ‘Tim Keller’ Category

Posted on June 26, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Keller’s Next New Book

Hot on the heels of ‘The Reason for God,’ Tim Keller’s new book, ‘The Prodigal God: Christianity Redefined Through the Parable of the Prodigal Sons‘ is available for pre-order on Amazon.

(HT – Justin Buzzard)

Posted on June 23, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Missional Link Monday

Rick Meigs, the dude behind ‘Friend of Missional‘, has launched a synchroblog around the word ‘missional’ which he contends is in need of reclaiming and definition. 50 other bloggers will be posting their contributions on their own blogs during the course of today. Rick’s own contribution can be found here. I didn’t sign up for the synchroblog but I thought I’d point you around to some of the contributions.

South Africa’s very own Steve Hayes, Arnau van Wyngaard and Cobus van Wyngaard have both made contributions. Perhaps its quite significant that out of 50 ‘missional’ bloggers 3 are South African – maybe 3 and a half if you count Alan Hirsch There are probably at least between 5 and 10 other South African bloggers who could have been able to contribute to this synchroblog which suggests to me that the ‘missional’ conversation in South Africa is moving forward.

Out of all the contributions I most enjoyed Alan Hirsch’s and Brad Brisco’s. I found these two paragraphs from Brad very helpful:

“The church must move far beyond measuring success by the traditional indicators of attendance, buildings and cash. Instead we must create new scorecards to measure ministry effectiveness. These new scorecards will include measurements that point to the church’s impact on community transformation rather than measuring what is happening among church members inside the church walls.

A missional church may ask how many hours has the church spent praying for community issues? How many hours have church members (including staff) spent with unbelievers? How many community groups use the facilities of the church? How many people are healthier because of the clinic the church operates? How many people are in new jobs because of free job training offered by the church? What is the number of school children who are getting better grades because of after-school tutoring the church provides. Or how many times do community leaders call the church asking for advice?”

I would caution though that there are other traditional indicators – other than buildings, cash and attendance – that should and must remain in place. Indicators like praying and caring for the sick and spiritually struggling members within the church, commitment to personal bible reading and prayer, meeting together to study the scriptures and pray etc. These indicators still ‘happen in the church’ but they are important. The church’s impact on those outside is not the only indicator – in fact Paul in the letter to the Galatians seems to imply that doing good to all but especially those ‘inside’ is the best indicator. Nevertheless Brad does well in re-orientating our scoreboards.

What’s my take on the whole ‘missional’ thing? I’m pretty much where Alan Hirsch is in his contribution. Like him, and apparently Ed Stetzer and Tim Keller too, I think there’s a difference between the aims of the emerging church and the concept ‘missional’. Like him I do not primarily see ‘missional’ as something that radically alters my theological convictions but rather something that gives focus and direction to those convictions. Like him, I think that ‘missional’ is intrinsically linked with ‘incarnational’ (although I might be a little bit broader than him with regards to my understanding of ‘missional-attractional’ and why it can still be ‘missional’ – maybe, I don’t know). Like him, I think its important that we retain that core understanding of ‘missional’.

Posted on May 29, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Tim Keller’s Gospel – An Open Forum

I trust many of you have had a chance to read Tim Keller’s article, ‘The Gospel in All its Forms‘ and you’ll be happy to know that one of his talks at the recent Dwell Conference expands upon the material in his article (download the talk entitled ‘Dwelling in the Gospel‘). What I’d like to get to hear now is how you responded to the point he’s making: that essentially there is one gospel in the bible but it appears in many different forms in different parts of the Bible. I’d also like to hear how you feel about the implicit (or possibly explicit) criticism that he’s laying at the feet of traditional evangelicals. Or perhaps if you’re from a more ‘emergent’ persuasion and you’ve listened to the talk you would have noted his critique of the view the Neo espouses in Mclaren’s ‘A New Kind of Christian’ which is essentially that the gospel is too diverse and contextualized to speak of one single gospel (James Dunn’s view in the article).

My own view is firstly, that the gospel that Tim Keller is promoting is the biblical gospel and we’re the poorer for not embracing it in it’s richness. Secondly though, and following on from my first thought, I think this article is extemely important and deserves a wide readership – or maybe Tim needs to write a book on it. Thirdly I think this understanding of the gospel, held in balance, will change the face of our churches. What did you think? I’d love to here from the two guys who I know read this blog and were at that Dwell Conference – Grant and Chris, nudge, nudge, wink, wink;)

Posted on May 28, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Dwell Conference Audio

Some of the friends that I made when in the States recently attended the Dwell Conference in New York City. There they got to listen to the likes of Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, Ed Stetzer, Darrin Patrick and others on missional church planting and related subjects. All the audio from the conference is now available at the Acts29 website.

Posted on May 27, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

If there’s only One Article you read this Year…

…then make sure it’s this one by Tim Keller entitled, ‘The Gospel in All its Forms‘. Our churches need to get hold of this gospel and let it do its transforming work to the individual and beyond…

Posted on April 4, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

CT Reviews Keller

Christianity Today has a review up of Tim Keller’s book ‘The Reason for God’

Posted on March 13, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Keller on Redeemer

Tim Keller made the following comments in an interview when his church, Redeemer Presbyterian, was likened to a ‘megachurch’. I found what he had to say fascinating:

“I found that if you define megachurch as anything over two thousand people, then yes, then we are. But here’s four ways in which we’re not a megachurch, or we don’t do things people associate with megachurches. One is, we do no advertising or publicity of any sort, except I’m trying to get the book out there so people read it and have their lives changed by it, but Redeemer’s never advertised or publicized. And the reason is, if a person walks in off the street just because they’ve heard about Redeemer through advertising, and they have questions or they want to get involved, there’s almost no way to do it unless you have all kinds of complicated programs, places where they can go. But if they come with a friend who already goes there, their questions are answered naturally, the next steps happen organically, the connections they want to make happen naturally . . . We do not want a crowd of spectators. We want a community.

Secondly, we do almost no technology. We don’t have laser-light shows, we don’t have Jumbotrons, we don’t have overheard projectors, we don’t have screens. We don’t have anything like that. Thirdly, we have a lot of classical music, chamber music—we are not hip at all. We don’t go out of our way to be hip.”

I think he got lost in thought and left out the fourth reason – read the whole interview here.

Posted on February 15, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Last Post from SA and Tim Keller

I’m leaving for the airport in about an hour to head of to the States and so for the next two weeks I’ll be blogging from there and hopefully, in the second week, blogging from the Resurgence Conference at Mars Hill in Seattle.

Before I go though I thought I should just point your attention to the website for Tim Keller’s new book ‘The Reason for God‘. There’s a little intro video on the site as well as a number of mp3 snippets for download on various issues relating to the belief in God. For those of you who have been following the whole universality post you might want to check out this site because it contains short talks by Tim Keller on issues like the exclusivity of Christianity. So go check it.

Posted on February 7, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Keller Sermons

Steve McCoy points us to some more great Tim Keller sermons. This time they’re a bunch of sermons related to his up and coming book.

Posted on January 10, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

Birthday Nostalgia: Posts that Stirred the Pot

Being the birthday and all its time for another trip down memory lane. We’ve already had one trip back into the archives to find posts that I wished had received a bit of a wider readership but today’s nostalgic trip picks up the posts that drew a bit of heat and fire for various reasons. I suppose you can’t really write a blog with conviction and not stir up the pot from time to time. Well here are the posts that either stirred up others or posts where I got a opinionated:

Charismatics and Conservatives Together (15/09/07) – funny that the controversy this post stirred up had little to do with Charismatics or Conservatives coming together. Go figure.

Witherington and Progressive Revelation (21/09/07) – on this one, as much as I respect and admire him, as much as I and read his blog daily, I just couldn’t stomach Dr. Witherington’s understanding of the unfolding of doctrinal accuracy through the course of redemptive history. In fact I still can’t stomach it or justify it from scripture.

Reading Romans 7 and the Evangelical Conviction (11/10/07) – proof that even your own teammates shoot you sometimes (just kidding Kim – all’s forgiven).

“God is Dead” – But was he ever alive? (26/10/07) – a catchy title goes wrong…

Why I don’t Stone People (14/11/07) – I seem to have a fan base of atheists who visit this blog quite regularly. This post resulted in a bit of frivolous banter between us.

Tutu Gay Rant (19/11/07) – This little rant didn’t really stir too much but it did cause someone to write the longest comment I’ve ever seen on a blog.

What is the Gospel – An Open Forum (28/11/07) – ok so this post didn’t really draw all that much heat, except for that one guy disagreeing with me, Tim Keller, I mean who does he think he is? It’s not like he’s got a Facebook appreciation group that’s bigger than all my friends combined!

Proudly South African (17/12/07) – who knew that being a patriot would rattle the cages a bit?

Golden Compass Christian Hernia (17/12/07) – I managed to unsettle some folks twice in one day! There’s a simple math formula for topics like the Golden Compass if you haven’t figured it out yet. It goes like this: Golden Compass + Christian Blog = Controversy + Lot’s of hits! I couldn’t resist throwing my two cents in.

So far 2008 has been controversy free. Although I’m probably not going to shy away from the posts that stir a bit let’s just pray that I stir in godly way – there is such a thing.