lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "books" Category
Tending to Eden: An Interview with Author, Scott Sabin
About a month ago I offered a book review of Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People by Scott Sabin. Scott is the Executive director of Plant with Purpose.
Plant With Purpose is an international environmental organization that transforms lives in rural areas where poverty is caused by deforestation. For over 25 years, Plant With Purpose has provided lasting solutions to heal the relationship between people and their environment by planting trees, revitalizing farms, and offering loans to create economic opportunity.
Yesterday, I had the chance to actually interview Scott and ask him a few questions about the book. Besides providing an overview of Plant with Purpose and the book, Tending to Eden, we spend some talking about the devastation in Haiti, one of the places where they serve, the vicious cycle of poverty and environmental degradation, and the relationship between creation care and the gospel. The whole interview (~ 22 mins.) is worth the selection of the book that Scott reads toward the end.
If you’re reading this in a feed reader and don’t see the audio player, click through to see it.
Use THIS LINK to see others who wil be participating in the blog tour today, to find out more about Plant with Purpose, and to purchase the book. If you buy the book through the Amazon link on this page, a portion of the proceeds will directly benefit the rural poor.
Book Review – Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People
I was fortunate enough to receive a pre-release copy of Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People by Scott C. Sabin from Judson Press.
Sabin is the Executive Director of Plant with Purpose, a Christian relief and development agency.
Christians have a responsibility to love and care for our environment as part of God’s creation and Sabin gets that for sure, but that’s not the genius of the book. The real beauty of this book comes in the author’s ability to explain to readers, with remarkable insight and simplicity, the inherent connection between caring for the environment and caring for the poor and oppressed. He does so by providing a relational framework for understanding the issues throughout the book. Through first-hand stories and lessons learned from years of experience, Sabin unmasks the naivete and ignorance of the brand of evangelicals for whom creation care is auxiliary to (their version of) the gospel. He suggests – at times more implicitly than explicitly, that all the challenges we face, as well as the solutions to those problems, are relational in nature
Throughout the book, the author tackles issues such as deforestation, sustainable agriculture, sanitation, grassroots enterprise, and climate change. In each case, his aim is to point out how our engagement with these issues has everything to do with out concern for those who are most globally at-risk.
For Sabin,
…without God, all the development and environmental restoration in the world will not bring transformation.
At the same time, he is able to articulate that transformation is not something other than God-infused labors of development and environmental restoration.
As someone who believes that one of the hallmarks of the missional church is listening to voices from the margins, I was struck by this comment from the author.
The idea that stewardship and conservation are part of a liberal agenda seems ludicrous in much of the developing world. I remember the shock on the face of our Dominican director when I tried to explain the suspicion with which many U.S. churches regarded the environmental aspects of our work. It was a horrifying thought to him that American Christians would be less than enthusiastic about caring for the earth. Many of our brothers and sisters in the developing world are way ahead of us in their understanding of stewardship, and there is much that we can learn from them.
For anyone wishing they could find a book that offers a global view of some of the most pressing environmental challenges without getting lost and confused in technical jargon, this book is an excellent resource. The book even features a discussion guide at the end for each chapter making it an excellent choice for groups interested in studying and talking about these issues together. Through raising our awareness and offering practical suggestions, Sabin offers readers a hope for the future that is rooted not in our ability to affect change, but in God’s invitation to join him in his mission of the reconciliation of all things.
Reflections on the Missional Learning Commons
Amy and I had a great time at the Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne two weekends ago.
The theme of the weekend was,”Deeper Church.” Essentially what that meant was having discussions about certain topics which surface when we stop thinking about church as a worship service with a host of corresponding programs and begin to embrace church as a way of life in which we are joining God in his mission of reconciliation and the restoration of all things. Some may want to try and explain how these are really two ways of saying the same thing, but for the vast majority of people who have been involved in this conversation for any length of time, the differences are too real and too important to dismiss with semantic gymnastics.
On Friday night there were maybe 30 people in attendance to discuss Soong-chan Rah’s book, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. This conversation was continued as the topic of the final session on Saturday. Both conversations were engaging and helpful. While the book had clear shortcomings and oversights, it served as a springboard for us to ask the question, “Why are missional congregations so white?” We see this as a problem because implicit in missional theology is the value for listening to voices from the margins of society – something which should be a no-brainer to those of us who regard Scripture (a book authored by those speaking from the margins of society!) as our guiding text. Those who live on the margins of society have much to teach those of us who don’t and the longer our congregations remain socio-economically and culturally homogeneous, the more the Body of Christ, and by implication, the world to which we testify of an alternative reality, suffers.
In light of that, we had discussions about the practices of deeper churches, what sharing the gospel means and looks like for deeper churches, and whether or not these deeper churches should have paid staff. This session was led by a 3-person panel: Matt Tebbe one of the pastors of Life on the Vine who is bi-vocational, JR Woodward, who raises all of his support, and Bob Havenor, who was advocating for an up-paid approach to church leadership.
Thanks to Ben Sternke who put the missional commons site together, you can find audio from all of the sessions here.
If you are in the midwest and interested in the missional conversation, I hope you’ll consider joining us next year – details TBD.
Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: Character Formation
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness
In my last post I tried to make a case for the necessity of theological education of missional leaders being rooted in missional community. With this as a contextual prerequisite, I would further suggest that the ultimate aim of a missionally oriented process of leadership training is the formation of Christlike character.
more of this artist’s amazing photography here
It is too naive to suggest that Christendom was wholly uncritical of the character of Christian leaders. It is more accurate to say that there’s an inherent assumption within Christendom that if we can only ensure that our leaders believe all the right things, their character will follow suit. This has turned out to be a deeply lamentable mistake.
It may be necessary for me to reiterate at this point that I am no anti-intellectual. You would never find me downplaying the importance of continuing study, exposure to new perspectives and ideas, or deep, thoughtful reflection. Instead, I would suggest that a missional vision of theological education will only value intellectual dimensions of training inasmuch as they contribute to the formation of Christlike character in missional leaders. Therefore, we might expect a missional vision of theological education to…
1) Train leaders how to think as opposed to telling them what to think. This is only possible when we humbly buy into the reality that our systems of truth are all fallible and trust that encouraging leaders to follow Jesus is preferable to warning them of the dangers of venturing outside of a particular theological grid. Thus, through books, articles, media, speakers, discussions, conferences, etc., we may freely (and wisely!) expose leaders to various biblical/theological traditions and perspectives. Where the rubber meets the (missional) road, so to speak, is in the questions we encourage students to ask of what they are being exposed to. I won’t go into them here,* but I submit that a missional vision of what it means to be the Body of Christ inclines us to ask different questions of all that we learn than that of Christendom.**
2) Conjoin all intellectual study with missional practice. Only given the assumptions of Christendom could we have divorced religious study from community based missional practice and witness. A missional vision of the church and theological education is characteristically and relentlessly incarnational. Missional theology is nothing if not that which we come to know about God as we participate in God’s mission in the world through the Body of Christ. In this light, I would suggest that each and every aspect of intellectual study find its place within a structure of missional practice which includes both personal and corporate spiritual disciplines.
3) Develop a community based assessment of a leaders process of character development. When character formation is the central issue in the equipping of missional leaders, time frames are perfunctory. It’s not one’s ability to make it through a process that qualifies them as a leader, but the manner in which they participate and their holistic development from start to finish. It takes a community to discern these things. As valuable as having the commitment and support of a community is to a leader in training, their willingness to speak the truth in love regarding their development is every bit as essential. Incorporating various means of mentorship and scheduling regular checkpoints between leaders and communities are key components of a missional vision of theological education.
What we know and what we can do as leaders isn’t just meaningless w/o Christlike character, it’s actually negative, destroying the very nature of what it means to follow Jesus and participate in God’s mission in the world. As Jesus was only worth following inasmuch as he said and did as God said and did, so too are his disciples w/o power and authority if they are not leading out of this sort of Christlike character.
This is all relates to the subject of my next post, the shaping of convictions. Hope to have some helpful dialogue before then though, so let’s have at it!
*You can find a very helpful article on this subject here.
**In proposing this I readily (and happily) admit that we will always be coming from a particular (hermeneutical) vantage point. I will explore this further in a future post, but the notion of some completely objective posture in the formation of leaders is neither possible nor desirable.Make the World Better – One Link at a Time
Every now and then I do a little shoutout for Better World Books.
I love books, and I get excited whenever someone recommends a book they think I’d be interested in. But I have to be honest, every time I see a book referenced with a link to Amazon, Google, or some other corporate giant that isn’t doing anything unique and creative for the good of others, I get a little sad. So here’s my pitch for you to make Better World Books your Go-To place for shopping, referencing, selling, and checking out books.They’re into recycling.
They buy books back from you.
They work for global literacy.
They are committed to social awareness and sustainability.
They never charge you shipping!
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You can subscribe to their blog.
Follow them on twitter.
Connect on Facebook.
Check out their stuff on YouTube.
Grab a gift certificate for someone.
And if you get really inspired, you can get me something off my wishlist
Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
This post was supposed to have gone up back in February, not quite sure how it got lost in the fray. Oh yeah, that’s right – I was busy falling in love
I was able to polish off another book I have been working on yesterday, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch. Recommended by several others, it was another one that had been on my reading list for a while, but once I started I flew through it.
Taken in the dual senses of creativity and interpretation, Crouch offers an understanding of culture as “what we make of the world.” (23) As any good author on the subject might, Crouch devoted the first section of the book to trying to unpack the huge and loaded term, culture. From language to lasers and omelets to interstate highways, the author seeks to help readers understand the subtle nuance and the huge impact of cultural goods and practices.
Perhaps because it helped me understand so much of the way God has wired me personally, the import of the book came down to one single phrase…
Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. (64)
I think at heart I am a culture shaper – always thinking about practices and activities people and communities can engage in together which offer the necessary context and space to think differently (perhaps more on this in a future post).
At any rate, this notion leads into the author’s central section on the gospel. This is a masterful section in which Crouch offers a narrative account of the relationship between God and humanity through the whole Bible highlighting God’s culturally creative nature and our place in that work from the Garden of Eden to the city of New Jerusalem. There is simply too much goodness to unpack here. The author rounds out this section with a helpful discussion of Niebuhr’s classic, Christ and Culture.
The final section of the book is on our subsequent “Calling.” This section was good, but to be honest, I thought Crouch missed a huge opportunity to speak more directly to the implications of “Culture Making” for the local church. To be sure there are, in this section, the seeds of further thought which the author may have intentionally planted and left unwatered, but I felt let down.
Culture making is intrinsic to the Church’s participation in God’s mission in the world. With God, we seek not to convert culture, neither to condemn it. Rather, as those who live in the reality of the Kingdom of God, we create culture that both reflects and engenders the purposes and character of God. I can’t think of anything more incredible to give my life to.
Hi There…
Hey, I'm JR - welcome to the blog.
I'm just an average guy trying to shape his identity around God's dream for the world and his place in it. This blog is a place for me (and you!) to reflect on and discuss all that might mean. Looking for a bit more on me? Check out the about me. Peace.
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