POG (5) Samuel Moment

This is the last of my notes on the talk by Os Guinenss called The Power of the Gospel

Transparency

The young generation talks about transparency, authenticity and accountability, as if they are new.

In a fallen world, morality is accountability through visibility.

People in the modern are more anonymous than any generation in history. Two Christians brother agree to hold each other accountable. They meet on a Tuesday night. They only know what they say about as happened since the last met

This is a little distorted

There is no real transparency.

Preferences

The modern world shifts us from authority to preferences.

Traditionally, God’s authority bound behaviour.

Now anything goes among evangelicals

This is the effect of consumerism, which expects us to pick and choose from among multiple offerings, depending on preferences.

Everything is a choice. This powerful cultural influence erodes authority.

Samuel Moment

The Western world is at a Samuel moment.

When Israel wanted a king, God said to give them what they want. but warned them of the consequences.

The Christian message to the modern world must be
“This is your choice; but there will be consequences,
and we will live differently, whatever you choose to do”.

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.

POG (3)

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.

What are the Keys to Kingdom Advance

Today there is a lot of analysis of how ideas change culture.

Secularism says that ideas spread through leaders
at the centre of culture, not the edges.

The Kingdom spreads differently.

1. Leadership of the Holy Spirit
2. Surprising reversals
3. Culture change is a by-product of seeking the kingdom.

Key lessons from Engagement with Culture

1. Times of success often breed worse failure, eg Christendom
   
   It was never perfect – we cant relax
   
   We always need critiques of our culture, even when successful

2. The greatest darkness is often just before the dawn.
   
   We she should not be discouraged at times of bleakness
   
   Look to God and see what he is doing.

3. The church moves forward best by going back first.
   
   The modern world is crazy about relevance and being up-to-date
   
   The reformation and renaissance were recovery moments.
   
   We must go back to the heart of the gospel, and live it.
   
   The future of humanity depends on us doing this.

Tools for discerning culture

1. History of ideas
   
   we need to understand the genealogy of ideas.
   
   This makes it easier to critique them.

2. Cultural Analysis
   
   Sociology of knowledge shows how life-context shapes thinking.
   
   eg clocks →fast past society
   
   Westerners have watches, Africans have time.
   
   cars, cellphones change society

3. Biblical World view
   
   shapes our wisdom.
   
   provides a framework of how thing fit
   
   supports critique of culture

POG (2)

Last week I listened to Os Guinness giving a talk called The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times at the Acton Institute. This video gives a great summary of many of the ideas that he covered in the book by the same name. It is a worth a listen. Here are some more notes I took while listening to his message.

What is the Explanation of the Power of the Gospel in Culture

CS Lewis says that the gospel is world affirming and denying at the same time.

Augustine, says we are living in the city of God in the midst of the city of man,
but not dependent on the city of man.

We are in the world, but not of it.

Not conformed, but transformed.

There have been two extremes in history

Worldly or isolated (retreat)

Three things are essential

• Engagement is essential

• Discernment
  

  American church is good at discerning ideas (can smell a heresy from a mile off)
  
  but not at discerning culture.
  
  However culture is more seductive than ideas.
  
  Evangelicals understand secularism and relativism, but not consumerism and fragmentation, which are far more dangerous.
  
  Evangelicals are attuned to bad ideas, but blind to cultural distortions.
  
  The American church is worldly. It is shaped far more by American culture than the gospel at many points, not in terms of ideas, but in terms of culture.

• Courage
  

  Christians consensus is gone.
  
  We need people to call the truth about evil, and say no.

We need to create a tension with culture that is culture changing.

Elections and Civilisation

The election in New Zealand was won by John Key’s center-right National Party, which got 60 seats in the 121 seat parliament. This is the closest that any party has come to governing alone without needing coalition partners in an MMP election.

The leftish Labour Party got only 25 percent of the vote, its worst result in 50 years. The pundits are blaming David Cunliffe, the leader of the Labour Party, for their heavy loss. A torrid leadership struggle has now started, but the reason for the loss goes much deeper. The problem is afflicting parties from the left all over the world.

Os Guinness gives the reason in the following quote from his book called Renaissance.

The West has cut itself off from its Jewish and Christian roots—the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the west. It now stands deeply-divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global arena.

All over the world, parties on the left are finding it hard to find a role in a divided and uncertain post-Christian culture. They have focussed on the rights of minorities: women, indigenous peoples, racial minorities, and homosexuals. Others target the unions or the poor. The problem is that these groups have conflicting interests, which produces a divided party. They are too small to create a coherent governing majority. Without a cohesive and unifying vision for life in a post-Christian culture, they will continue to fail.

Parties on the right do slightly better, because they have a Christian memory, even if they have rejected the Christian vision. They appeal to nostalgia by pointing back to more stable times in the past, when the Christian influence was much greater. This is a fraud, because they are incapable of restoring the good times that they promise, because they have rejected the faith that made them possible. However, until this lie is exposed, nostalgia for a better time will continue to win elections.