The Future of the People of God

These talks are amazing, and very refreshing. It is one thing to answer with authority, Tom Wright asks questions with authority, something of the character of Jesus in him.

I’m not so sure of exactly what the community’s idea of an emerging theology is, but what I see in these talks is a gospel of empowerment. Not simply empowerment of the individual, but also of the community. I say that because in the West we perhaps overemphasize the individual to the hurt of the community, and at times that leaves us with dysfunctional communities and therefore dysfunctional individuals.

Look closely, Jesus says let “the little children come to me.” He does not say compel them to come to me. He doesn’t say make your unruly teenagers sit through the church service. Yet some of us do. And what’s worse, we do it in the name of the Lord.

Widespread Agreement

So, in some sense, the role for EVIDENCE AS A MISSIOLOGICAL RESOURCE in an emerging faith is to carry the good news of God’s kingdom into the postmodern condition and to reach back and help more modern-minded others to ascend “the mountain of the Lord” (Isaiah 2:3) together with us.

In this emerging postmodern condition, when growing numbers of Christians and followers of Jesus are once again recognizing themselves as exiles amid empire, when a plurality of difference rather than homogeneity is the norm of everyday life, as we enter an era of post-Christendom, the language of “my God” is called for once again. Within post-Christendom, space enough is produced for “my God” and “your god.”

God? Is that you?

Cornell, my neighbor, reintroduced me to the wholeness of our past conception of the interaction between spirit and earthly life, good and evil. We’ve come a long way. But if we turn around and reconsider where we come from it can show us many things.

An engine of the imagination of the Church is that the bizarre reality of Jesus occurred.

The modern prejudice against the past feeds the dismissal of Christianity as mere myth, a story, and it competes in a world with too many stories through the media.

In a way, the Church feels free of its past. Without being an integral part of the political apparatus, or even referenced on ‘values’ questions, the spiritual has broken slightly more free of its bonds with the apparatus of civilization.

Isn’t it amazing how restricted we are from the spirit world. First God gave the Commandment to have no other God but He. So we shut down all spiritual knowledge outside of the specific consciousness of God. Then we were given access to one soul as proof that both God exists and souls enter an afterlife. From that restriction we have had to figure everything out spiritually.

The main talks given by Tom Wright at the Future of the People of God conference are now available for download. These are large mp3 files (around 8-9 MB each) and I don’t know how well the server will cope with the strain. If you have trouble downloading them, try again later when everyone else is asleep. The interactive sessions and the workshops are not currently available.