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I attended a seminar last Saturday at Bramalea Baptist led by Milfred Minatrea, author of Shaped by God's Heart. The topic was on becoming a missional church. Also got to meet Darrell Buchanan, a pastor and fellow blogger from Hamilton, who attended. Seems like we've been in the same room before but it's the first time we met.

I've just posted my notes from the conference:

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I mentioned last week that application is one of the hardest tasks in preaching. It's easy to introduce all kinds of heresies in application or to give people an endless list of to-do's to complete, or become anthropocentric and make the application all about felt needs.

In The Drama of Doctrine, Kevin J. Vanhoozer suggests that the result of good theology is:

...not a set of timeless propositions, nor an expression of religious experience, nor grammatical rules for Christian speech and thought, but rather an imagination that corresponds to and continues the gospel by making good theological judgments about what to say and do in light of the reality of Jesus Christ.

In other words, we don't need more timeless propositions or rules for how to behave. We need to be formed into people whose imagination conforms to Kingdom reality, so that our actions flow out of our values, which flow out of our beliefs.

Maybe questions like these, from The Great Giveaway, by David Fitch will help. Fitch focuses on responses of faith, confession, obedience, and submission:

How am I to respond to this God?

In light of who God is, in light of what he has done, in light of what he has said, what step in my life should I be taking in obedience?

How should I be seeing a current situation in my life?

What sin should I confess?

What attitude should I repent of?

How should I see myself before God?

What am I not acknowledging about God?

How should I celebrate this in my own life?

How am I to respond in worship?

Taizé services contain long periods of silent reflection in response to what is read or taught. Often the period of reflection is as long as what was said. It would be interesting to preach for ten minutes and then go into a ten minute period of silent reflection using questions like these.

In any case, I hope to do a bit of thinking and writing about how to preach to shape our imaginations and unfurl the reality of the Kingdom rather than to hand out more to-do's. I'm interested in your thoughts.

Charlene and the kids were rear-ended yesterday by a black Mercedes SUV. The driver took off instead of pulling over, which wasn't a very smart move. Charlene got the license plate and we reported the collision to the police and our insurance company.

The plate matched an address not far from here. The officer rhymed off the charges that could be laid against this person - failure to remain, careless driving, failure to report an accident. I checked out the points and it's enough for her license to be suspended. Would have been much less if she had remained at the scene.

When I picked Charlene up at the doctor's today, I pulled in beside - a black Mercedes SUV. The same one. It's a small world. Who knows when we'll run into each other again. Maybe not as literally this time.

My latest column at Christian Week:

Three years ago, I heard a pastor talk about how to make Church attractive. His church provided different musical styles in different rooms concurrently to appeal to different tastes.

I could relate to his desire to make Church attractive. Churches face pressure to meet people’s needs and keep them in the pews. After 30 years of the church growth movement, churches are more contemporary and relevant than before.

But as he spoke, my mind filled with questions. Despite more relevant churches, overall attendance is plummeting. Statistics Canada reported this month that Canadians are practising their faith at home, but increasingly staying away from religious services. The study says Canadian-born residents are losing their faith. Perhaps these trends would be accelerated without the help of the church growth movement, but why are we losing people just as we’re making Church more attractive to them?

And even if this approach works, are there dangers in conforming Church to what people want?

I remember sitting in that conference when a familiar passage entered my mind. I began to wonder what it might mean for churches, not just individuals, to take this passage seriously.

One of the hardest parts about preaching is application. My preaching prof Haddon Robinson says, "More heresy is preached in application than in Bible exegesis." I think he's right.

One of the reasons I picked my thesis topic is that I want to explore how you can preach God's message without making it all about us, yet still have it affect our lives today. In other words, how do you preach sermons that are theocentric, not anthropocentric, yet still relevant?

David Fitch, author of The Great Giveaway, is way ahead of me. In an excellent chapter on preaching, he argues that preaching should not consist of a whole bunch of application points.

"The applications" of the sermons accumulate like an ever-growing stack of self-help books and tapes we can never hope to get to. After many months of this, because we cannot possibly put into practice all of the applications, preaching becomes nothing more than a scroll we wear on our foreheads that comforts us in the knowledge that we are the ones who are serious about studying Scripture...

Let us move from the first goal of preaching as the production of a set of application points to the goal of unfurling a reality we could not see apart from being engulfed in the story of God from creation to redemption.

Hear hear. Fitch gives some questions that help us respond to Scripture appropriately. I'm hanging them on the wall beside my desk, along with another quote on preaching I found last week. I'll post them here shortly as well.

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David Fitch writes:

I’m in Stratford Ontario with Rae Ann and Max. Doing a little R&R and loving it. (I needed it). Tomorrow I am at Resonate Echo in Hamilton Ontario to talk and discuss a few things emerging, the challenges of pastoring in the hyper-modern post Christian cultures we find ourselves in. Hope to see some of you there.

I'll be there too. If you are in the area, hope you can make it.

more details

Last Saturday, we went on a quest to find my Dad's birthplace. In all my trips to London, it never occurred to me to look. Where to start? His birth certificate gave us a clue.

30 Queen Street, Whitechapel. According to the registrar who recorded Dad's death, Whitechapel has changed its name to Tower Hamlets. It's a thoroughly working class neighborhood, once roamed by Dick Turpin, Captain Cook, Jack the Ripper.

We figured that the Whitechapel tube station was the place to start.

I never expected when we came to handle my Dad's affairs that we would laugh so much. It's not that we're happy he died; on the contrary, I find the whole situation quite sad. But there is something about being three brothers together on a common mission that brings energy even as the tasks drain. And if it's done right, the energy is enough to replenish the energy that's being lost.

So we're laughing, and that has been good for the soul. And I'm rediscovering the joy of hanging out with my brothers.

We've run into many obstacles, mainly to do with bureaucracy and the fact that things take a lot longer to do here. Funerals usually take a week or longer to arrange in England, and we're trying to do it within four days of our arrival. To register the death with the government, for instance, you have to make an appointment which sometimes takes a week, and you can't hold the funeral until then. But we got an appointment, not just with the registrar but with the crematorium, which is another small miracle.

So on Friday at 10:00 a.m. Greenwich time, we'll hold a very short service and Dad will be cremated. Later, we'll hold a simple service with the rest of our immediate family back home.

There's still lots that could go wrong - too many balls still up in the air - but I'd appreciate your prayers that all of this happens on time, before our flight back home on Saturday.

Thanks to those who have expressed support and prayed for us. It's been moving. We got an e-mail this morning that was just what we needed. It feels like we're being pastored through this by our friends.

My brothers David and Kevin are joining me tonight to fly over. It's not a good idea to fly so soon after seeing United 93 (saw it last Friday) but nothing I can do about that now.

I'm mourning a few things. I had planned to take my kids and Charlene to see Dad when they got out of school in a couple of months. They haven't seen Dad in years, and this was supposed to be the first trip I've taken in a long time that was just to see him, not to intervene in a crisis. I was also enjoying not flying over quite so often, and that didn't last too long.

I suppose I'm also mourning the father I never had. My Dad left so many years ago and was so shaped by alcoholic parents that he just wasn't the Dad we needed. I always found it hard at Father's Day to buy him a card because most of them just didn't apply. That wasn't going to change, but his death makes it seem much more final.

I heard a sermon by Ian Campbell the other week on the first line of the Lord's Prayer. Ian suggested that Satan may attack our relationship with our fathers so much because that distorts our image of God. That just may be true.

Anyway, I'm grateful for my friends and ready to fly. If I can find Internet access in the UK I'll be back on soon. Peace.

From 2004 when I over for a visit:

I leave in about an hour. This could be the last time I see Dad. Maybe not. I've thought the same thing whenever I've left since 1989. One day it will be true.

Dad was 46 when I was born. My parents were separated by the time I went to school. Dad moved to England by the time I was 10. We've had contact since, but part of my wonders why I care. I must fulfill my duty, but caring is something entirely different.

Dad is flawed. He rants. He has done the most unspeakable things to members of my family. I won't even describe them here...

I asked Dad this week if he had good memories of his childhood. He said no. He said he tried to give us the childhood that he never had. I'd say he got only partway there...

I'll soon be on my way. Bye, Dad.

Just got a call. My Dad passed away in his sleep one hour ago.

Pastor Sam is frustrated. He is tired of looking after the sick and the hurting members of his congregation, when other pastors are clearly able to devote their time to greater goals. Now, thanks to a megachurch pastor's new book You Too Can Be a Megaman of God, Sam believes he can delegate pastoral care to a committee ("let the lesser people take care of the lesser people") and begin to megasize his church.

More at my book blog

Technorati Tags: Calvin Miller, O Shepherd, Where Art Thou?, pastoral care

From the DashHouse Archives, written by Mark Riddle:

Is it any wonder it's easy for us to lose touch with the gospel when we can't even identify what it means to take up a cross?

Christ didn't die so we could have worship services that meet our needs.

Christ didn't die so we could be treated with kid gloves like a fickle consumer on sunday mornings.

Christ didn't die so we could get something out of bible study or small group.

Christ didn't die so the church could be active and busy.

The central theme for far too many churches seems to be comfort and customer satisfaction.

The central theme for christianity is suffering, the executioner's cross, the blood spilled and body broken of Eucharist, baptism's metaphor of death burial and resurrection.

Which bureaucrat thought to put these two certificate requests on the same form?

N.T. Wright suggests the church exists for different reasons than many of us think:

According to the early Christians, the church doesn't exist in order to provide a place where people can pursue their private spiritual agendas and develop their own spiritual potential. Nor does it exist in order to provide a safe haven in which people can hide from the wicked world and ensure that they themselves arrive safely at an otherworldly destination. Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us. The purpose is clearly stated in various places in the New Testament: that through the church God will announce to the wider world that he is indeed its wise, loving, and just creator: that through Jesus he has defeated the powers that corrupt and enslave it; and that by his Spirit he is at work to heal and renew it.

Wright unpacks what this looks like in practice, and I'm glad. I'm convinced that a renewed ecclesiology (theology and practice of the church) is one of the greatest needs we have today.

This is part of what looks to be a great book that arrived in the mail yesterday: Simply Christian : Why Christianity Makes Sense.

Technorati Tags: Simply+Christian

I'm spending Mondays working on my thesis, which is how to preach theocentrically. Right now I'm in the literature review. Nice to find gems like this, from Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology, that put the topic so well:

...the Christian life is not about us; it is about God. Christian spirituality is not a life-project for becoming a better person, it is not about developing a so-called "deeper life." We are in on it, to be sure. But we are not the subject. Nor are we the action...

The great weakness of North American spirituality is that it is all about us: fulfilling our potential, getting in on the blessings of God, expanding our influence, finding our gifts, getting a handle on principles by which we can get an edge over the competition. And the more there is of us, the less there is of God.

Instead, Peterson says, we're called to join "God and his actions in us and in the world," participating in what God is doing.

Christ Plays looks like one of those books I'm going to read more than once.

Technorati Tags: Christ+Plays+in+Ten+Thousand+Places, theocentric+preaching