Paternoster sent me an advanced copy of a new book by Tom Sine, published jointly with IVP:US, that is due out in a few weeks. The book is called The New Conspirators (not to be confused with the neo-conspirators), which echoes the title of Sine’s 1981 best-seller The Mustard Seed Conspiracy and the motif that has defined Tom and Christine Sine’s global ministry since then.
In the introduction Sine argues that we are living in turbulent times and there is no sign of the turbulence abating anytime soon: ‘Tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, a storm brewing in the Middle East and volatility shaking our new global economy - doesn’t it feel like our world has been on a harrowing ride, where no one is at the wheel, since we raced into this new millennium?’ This may be grist to the mill of end-times speculation, but what Sine is interested in is how the church responds creatively to the global challenges in order to give ‘expression to God’s love for a people and a world’.
Although the church in the West is struggling to cope with ‘rapid change and declining participation’, Sine believes that ‘God is stirring up some small renewing streams that are cascading over the dry roots of traditional churches, carrying the promise of new life’. This is the central theme of the book. It aims to describe how the Spirit of God is working ‘largely through the vision, creativity and initiative of a new generation’ and to invite the reader to ‘join this conspiracy of compassion’.
Sine calls it a ‘conspiracy of the insignificant’. The mustard seed metaphor is no less relevant now than it was thirty years ago. ‘God’s strategy hasn’t changed. Jesus let us in on an astonishing secret: God has chosen to change the world through the lowly, ordinary and insignificant. This should give us all hope.’
It is perhaps worth noting in passing that Jesus’ image of a tree in which birds make their nests (Matt. 13:32; Mk. 4:32; Lk. 13:19) recalls passages in the Old Testament in which Assyria and Babylon are depicted as trees that provide a home for the birds of the air and shelter for the beasts of the field (Ezek. 17:23; 31:6; Dan. 4:12). Conceivably Jesus meant by the parable of the mustard seed that the movement of renewal in Israel that he was initiating would become a ‘kingdom’ to rival the empires of the world, providing an alternative form of security and prosperity.
In the introduction Sine also addresses a brief word to an older generation of evangelical Christians who ‘assume that all the important questions were answered decades ago and that we got all the answers right’. Sine hears enough young leaders asking enough difficult questions to suspect that modern evangelicalism may have got some of the answers wrong. So he wants to revisit five important questions about eschatology, discipleship, stewardship, church and mission.
The book consists of five ‘conversations’ rather than chapters. Quite why is not immediately clear, though having glanced ahead a bit I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the book is filled with quotations and stories from a garrulous new generation of church leaders. I propose to take one conversation at a time over the coming days, probably not with a view to developing a serious critique of the book but more to register some first impressions.
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