andygoodliff

The Bible in TransMission

The Bible in TransMission has been a flagship publication for Bible Society since the late 1990s.  You can download and read loads of good article here. Authors include Steve Holmes, Stuart Murray, Kevin Vanhoozer, John Drane, Chris Partridge, Nigel Wright, Ched Myers, Luke Bretherton, Brian Draper, Tom Wright, Eddie Gibbs, Jonathan Bartleby, Duncan Forrester. Worth checking out.

'Dallas Willard calls the issue of poor or non-existent discipleship the elephant in the Western Church. It's there in the middle of all we do. We walk around it, make allowances for it and try to live with it. But we rarely name it as the biggest obstacle in our missional task, and are even less likely to intentionally shift it'
(James Catford speaking with Steve Holmes, The Bible in TransMission, Summer 2002)

Baptists on children and church

If we are not to exclude believing children in our fellowship we thus need to think in a more open way about what 'membership' means. Believing children are already members of the body of Christ, but they have not yet covenanted with other members ... They are members of the body, but not yet commissioned ... Before this, children do not have a vote in church meeting, but they do have voices to which we need to listen as we think about the meaning of the life and the mission of the church. As members of the body of Christ, they supply some of the limbs through which Christ will become visible. The face of Christ will have empty patches if the features they supply are missing ... Christ wants to show himself to us through them, not through 'child-preachers' but through their simply being children.

(Paul Fiddes, Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology, 2003, 139)

One of the Five Core Values of the Baptist Union is being 'an inclusive community': 'our lives together will transcend barriers of gender, language, race, class, age and culture creating communities which welcome and accept those on the margins of life and learn from them.'

'... we cannot be a whole community unless children play a full part, nor can children develop in their discipleship unless they participate and belong in a meaningful way to a community of people of all ages committed to one another on the pilgrim journey'

(Anne Dunkley, Seen and Heard: Reflections on children and Baptist tradition, The Whitley Lecture 1999-2000, 1999, 33)

Children and Church (according to Hauerwas again)

    ... Jesus called to himself a child - the essence of one who is powerless, dependent, needy, little, and poor. He placed the child 'in the midst of them,' as a concrete, visible sacrament of how the Kingdom looks. Jesus' act with the child is interesting. In many of our modern, sophisticated congregations, children are often viewed as distractions. We tolerate children only to the extent they promise to become "adults" like us. Adult members sometimes complain they cannot pay attention to the sermon, they cannot listen to the beautiful music, when fidgety children are beside them in the pews. "Send them away," many adults say. Create "Children's Church" so these distracting children can be removed in order that we adults can pay attention.

    Interestingly, Jesus put a child in the centre of his disciples, "in the midst of them," in order to help them pay attention. The child, in Jesus' mind, was not an annoying distraction. The child was a last-ditch effort by God to help the disciples pay attention to the odd nature of God's kingdom. Few acts of Jesus are more radical, countercultural, than his blessing of children.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong, 1989, 96)

Children and Church (according to Hauerwas)

    ... Christians assume, given the practice of baptism, that parenting is the vocatiton of everyone in the church whether they are married or single. Raising children for Christians is part of the church's commitment to hospitality of the stranger, since we believe that the church is sustained by God across generations by witness rather than by ascribed biological destinies. Everyone in the church, therefore, has a parental role whether or not they have biological children.
    For Christians, children are neither the entire responsibility nor the property of parents. Parents are given responsibility for particular children insofar as they pledge faithfully to bring up those children, but the community ultimately stands over against the parents reminding them that children have a standing in the community separate from their parents. Therefore, the ways in which mentally handicapped children are received in such a community should be strikingly different from how they are received in the wider society. For the whole burden of the care of such children does not fall on the parents; rather, the children are seen as gifts to the whole community.

(Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular, 1994, 182)

Christian education takes time

I like this from Stephen Fowl's book Engaging Scripture (which I've just started reading) :

... contemporary Christians have two significant obstacles to overcome in any attempt to re-invigorate their catechetical practices. First, they must fight against a general cultural disposition that religious belief is  a private, individual matter, immune to communal formation and discipline. This disposition serves to underwrite the conviction that individuals can make up their theology, prayer, and worship as they go along, picking and choosing what suits them best. Secondly, Christians must recognize that Christian education takes time. It cannot be accomplished in small weekly doses. It cannot be limited to the young either. This is particularly the case when Christian education for children becomes a form of child care that separates children from the worship of the community.

Stephen E. Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation, 1998, 201

Christ-Shaped People

The Church is a Christ-shaped people ... It is a community in which people learn how to embody the story of Jesus Christ. The Church can only tell the story of Christ if it has first read Christ's story, consumed it in such a way that it nourishes and shapes the Church as consumer, reader and teller of the story ... Entering the story, becoming a character within its storied world, is then a matter of becoming part of the body that embodies the story.         
     Learning how to consume the scriptural story so that it nourishes and strengthens the body - how to read it in order to tell it aright - is a matter of disciplined practice, of ecclesial (narrative) ethics ... The aim is to shape characters fitted for life in the story og Christ; characters who, shaped in and after the body of Christ, are able to follow him into his Kingdom.

Gerald Loughlin, Telling God's Story: Bible, Church and narrative theology, 1996, 86-87)

The love of God made actual

Jesus of Nazareth is not simply an unprecedented irruption or intervention of God upon the stage of history. The love of God which becomes actual in this truly human and historical life is continuous with the love that operates throughout it ... at the centre of things is the self-actualization of God in time, the self-differentiation through love of the eternal to become temporal.

Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 1983, 2nd ed. 1997

Individualism is a non-relational creed

Individualism is a non-relational creed, because its teaches that I do not need my neighbour to be myself.

Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 1993