• Archive of "creation" Category

    Seeing into the Future

    July 15, 2010 // No Comments »

    Remember all those times you rolled your eyes at your grandparents when they started a sentence, “You know, when I was your age…” ?  I had one of those experiences the other day, but in reverse.  I felt like I was peering into the future.

    I rolled up to a stop light with my window down and noticed that the car next to me was shut off.  Just when I was about to ask if they needed a jump, I realized that it was a hybrid, which basically shuts off when it comes to a stop – the engine stops running so it’s completely quiet.  It struck me as quite weird – and then I fast-forwarded 30 years or so and imagined myself in this same scenario, but as a grandparent with a grandchild sitting next to me (I guess they were old enough!)  Here’s how our conversation went…

    Grandchild: “Grandpa, what’s that noise?”

    Grandpa: “The car next to us is making that noise because the engine is running.”

    Grandchild: “Grandpa, that’s crazy, everyone knows that car engines don’t run when cars are stopped!”

    Grandpa (with aged predictability): “You know, when I was your age…”

    Grandchild (with youthful predicatability): [rolls eyes]

    Grandpa: [smiles with exceeding joy that his grandchild lives in a world where the idea of streets filled with planet-destroying automobiles that all run on non-renewable energy seems just as believable as the idea that one person could own another did when I was their age]

    Posted in creation, family, kids, sustainability

    Tending to Eden: An Interview with Author, Scott Sabin

    March 3, 2010 // 2 Comments »

    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.

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    Download.

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    If you buy the book through the Amazon link on this page, a portion of the proceeds will directly benefit the rural poor.

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    Posted in books, creation, environment, interview, justice, stewardship

    Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Cultural Pioneering

    December 31, 2009 // 1 Comment »

    Previous posts in this Series:

    Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping | Contextual Training

    Christendom bore no real need for leaders who were cultural pioneers.  After all, if the culture is already Christian, what do we have to pioneer?  It would be logical to conclude then, that as Christendom crumbles, the need for leaders with the skills for cultural pioneering would increase.  This would be true and mistaken at the same time.  It’s true that we have a greater and greater need for cultural pioneers, but the crumbling of Christendom isn’t the reason.  Rather, a missional vision of the church carries with it an inherent need for leaders who serve as cultural pioneers which means we need a vision of theological education capable of equipping men and women for this task.

    Allow me to offer just 2 basic points to support my argument for this need.

    First, missional churches operate out of the assumption that mission is part of God’s very character and nature.  God sends the son, the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit, the Trinity sends the Church as the Body of Christ.  Little wonder then that missional church leaders lament the modern phenomenon of churches playing the role of vendors of religious goods and services that spend the bulk of their time, energy, and money trying to get people to come.  Missional churches are not those who focus on offering the best “Christian” stuff (teaching, programs, groups, etc.), but those who focus on engaging with world’s darkest and toughest needs.

    Second, missional churches tend to be marked by their attention to Jesus’ announcement of the good news of God’s Kingdom, the new reality inaugurated in Jesus.  Just as Jesus stood at odds with the culture of his day on account of his allegiance to God’s Kingdom, so too the missional church of today will find itself at odds with the culture of our day as we seek to embody God’s Kingdom through faith in Jesus.  To understand the local church as an expression of a new reality, however, means that we recognize the need for leaders capable of cultural pioneering.

    Current models of theological education seem to come up short in terms of their fit to equip male and female leaders on both these counts.  How then are we to go about doing so?  I offer three ideas for the training of cultural pioneers.

    1) Deep involvement in a missional community

    There is no better way to learn how to be a cultural pioneer that to participate in a community that is seeking to do this very thing.  My hope and expectation would be that to a great degree, the various aspects of this missional vision of theological education that I have been describing would all serve to produce leaders who think and act in terms of cultural pioneering.  I have a hard time imagining that someone could give themselves to a process of formation that is rooted in community and centered around character formation through the shaping of Kingdom convictions and contextual training and emerge as someone who would rather manage a program driven group of individuals than lead a community into the world as an expression of God’s alternative reality.

    2) Encourage Cultural Creation & Cultivation

    I am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Culture Making, for my thinking (and language) on this.  The power and trajectory of Christendom resulted in a church that, at various times, thought of “culture” as some monolithic thing that it could condemn, critique, copy, or consume.  Only now, as we increasingly find ourselves on the margins of society, are we rediscovering the postures of creating and cultivating culture.  We create culture through values, practices, and imagination.  However, as Crouch says,

    We cannot make culture without culture.  And this means that creation begins with cultivation – taking care of the good things culture has already handed on to us.  The first responsibility of culture makers is not to make something new but to become fluent in the cultural tradition to which we are responsible.  Before we can be culture makers, we must be culture keepers.

    This leads us directly to the third ingredient in forming cultural pioneers.

    3) Practicing Discernment

    The need for skilled discernment is going nowhere but up!  Never before in human history has so much information and so many opinions been so easily accessible.  Add to this the pervasive individualism and relativism of Western culture and you are left with a cultural nightmare for those who believe in such a thing as contextual faithfulness to biblical truth.  As Jesus’ disciples were, we must be taught to see, hear, and feel with eyes, ears, and hearts attuned to the reality of the Kingdom of God in our midst.  How are we ever to create culture unless we can discern our way through it as followers of Jesus?  This takes years of practice within community and remains a lifelong discipline.

    Are there other aspects of cultural pioneering that you think I’m missing?  How else might we equip others to this end?  Anxious for your (end of the year and end of the series!) thoughts.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, creation, culture, God, Jesus, kingdom, leadership, missional, modernity, spiritual formation, theological education, theology, western culture

    Theology of Ecology

    August 20, 2007 // 1 Comment »

    Here’s a great short paper by Matt Krick on the relationship between how we understand God and how we understand creation. I’m inclined to side with Matt in asserting that our salvation is inexorably linked with our stewardship of all of creation.

    Posted in creation, salvation, stewardship, theology