POG (4)

Last week I listened to Os Guiness giving a talk called The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times at the Acton Institute. Here are some more notes I took while listening to his message.

Modern World

Our modern world is not created by ideas, but by culture.

Peter Berger warned about a world without windows

In the pre-modern world, the unseen world is real.

Modern people say that the unseen world is not real.

we live in this so-called real world.

Many Christians are operational atheists, unawares.

Jesus said we can live by bread alone.

Modernism has brought us to a place where we can almost live by bread alone. science alone, technology alone, management alone.

A church can grow with the right technology and plan.

No need for God→secular societies.

Fragmented Faith

Modernism has moved us from an integrated faith to a fragmented faith.

In a village it easy to integrate faith with everything, because you can walk around it.

modern lives are strung out

Work, church, home are in different worlds.

Faith is privately engaging, but publicly irrelevant.

Cities have fragmented our lives without awareness.

Science is modern, but culture is post-modern.

Call to Community

The New Testament call to community is the very toughest part of the Christian ethic to live out in our modern, over-stressed, over-loaded, fragmented society.

It easy to retreat altogether.

We need a few doing that for prayer, worship, and to provide place for rest.

But most of us have to be in the world.

but we must be different.