Tim Keller - Cultural Transformation

Tim Keller - Cultural Transformation from Newfrontiers on Vimeo.

From Adrian Warnock's blog.

In his final session with Newfrontiers Keller highlighted that we find relating to the culture to be an increasing problem in the West. We now have a post-Christian culture. The Anglo-saxons struggled with Christianity because it believed in forgiveness and compassion for the weak. They felt that culture couldn't survive without respect and fear. Northern European paganism was bloodthirsty and power hungry. Christianity changed the attitudes to the poor and weak. Society now says we don't need Christianity because we care for the weak, and we forgive.

They have robbed christianity of all their assets but thrown out God. The claim is that we dont need God to have a society. Lets be Christian for 2000 years then throw it out, and maybe it works. We have a new situation. Secular societies in Europe are living off the plundered capital of Christianity. But we have earned the scorn of the unbelievers.

The old problem of paganism is the idea of individual power which is creeping back in. At the street level increasingly as Christianity recedes life will be based on individual power and exploitation. Europe almost needs to get really non-Christian to get Christian again. It has many of the benefits and refinements of a Christian civilization but has lost the heart.

Have to reflect more and more about how to relate. Three wrong ways to go and one right.

1. Defensive against
- triumphalism, Marked by the Christian right. Attitude is that largely through politics we need to take back the culture by taking Christian values and making sure the law upholds them. No distinction between private and public. Get back into corridors of power. Get legislation.

2. Purity from
They say that Christians shouldn't try and purify society at all. Neo-Anabaptist - form counter cultures but don't salt society. Just win souls. Stay away.

3. Relevant To
Christians are so out of it we need to change. Make our music and message are culturally relevant. Hip. Get updated.

4. Faithful presence within
We are not trying to take over nor trying to be absent. We need to be willing and able to take our people into the financial world, the arts, the academic world, movies and TV. Be in all those places. Going to them to serve. We have to help people integrate their faith with their work. Churches tend to pull people out of their world into the church. "I want to teach you how to run a bible study and eventually become an elder". We need to help people to know what kind of roles can I accept as a Christian actor. What I am doing is important.

You are salt of the earth. This is about being a preservative, medicine and seasoning. Serve people changing people, leavening. If you are not salt you are sand. It's tough not to suck up to the culture and compromise. We must be faithful.

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The Qualities of a Great Missionary

Qualities of a Great Missionary--Part 1

by
John MacArthur
All Rights Reserved

(A copy of this message on cassette tape may be obtained by calling 1-800-55-GRACE)
Acts 14:1-10        Tape GC 1747

Introduction

This lesson could well be entitled, "The Qualities Of A Great Servant Of Christ." A missionary is not necessarily someone serving on foreign soil. The passage deals with Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey, certainly they exhibit qualities of a great missionary.

Click here to continue reading...

Video: Tim Keller- The City/Adrian Warnock's Comments From His Blog

Tim Keller - The City from Newfrontiers on Vimeo.

From Adrian Warnock's Blog

During Tim Keller's second session with Newfrontiers he spoke on the importance of cities.

Cities are strategic and have lots of people yet they are poorly served by the Church. Disporportionately important and disproportionately underepresented in terms of ministry. This is not to say that every Christian should move to the city, but that movements like Newfrontiers as a people should begin to focus on the cities more.

Biblically cities are a place of refuge. They are places of Cultrual formation and communication. Cities in the Bible were smaller 1-3000 people but densely populated and behind a wall. The fortification brought protection. In cities you had law, elders in the gate, cases were solved. Decisions made. Not just blood feuds. Away from the city it was all about farming. In cities there was specialisation and hence economy.. Civilisation literally means citification. Densely populaterd and diverse even in old times.

Cities were and are places for the weak. If you are single and in your 30s or 40s and unmarried you are a freak outside of the country, but in the city you are normal. Foreigners outside of the city feel like an alien, but in the city you are not alone. In the city there is always lots of you whoever you are. Where immigrants go to assimilate. If you are homosexual out of the cities until recently you would get beaten up, but in city you are safe. Cities are harder to live in if you are white male married with a family. For everyone else cities are easier. Eg very wealthy people are minorities in smaller community they get set upon. So they congregate to cities. Cities are merciful.

Cities are places where culture is formed. God told Adam and Eve to build a culture = dominion. They failed. Heaven is a city. Coming out of heaven it wasnt a suburb or a garden In the middle of the city is the tree of life. They were meant to turn the garden into a garden city. Garden of Eden the word used was more of an urban park.

Cities are culture forming wombs. You are thrown togetehr with people who are like you, but also with people who are not like you. This leads to massive creativity. This creative tension always births new culture. Dont abandon the place where the culture is formed and then complain about how the world is going!

Paul gets a vision - Tim joke that he was obviously not a presbtyerian or he would have said "I must have eaten something" Tim continued in light-hearted mode to claim that Paul must have been a member of Newfrontiers (!) Paul always went ot the cities to preach. So urbancentric in his mission. Ignored the countryside or rather left it for the churches he planted to reach out to Paul only planted churches in cities.

1. Personal cruciality in cities. People are constantly going through changes, not as conservative open to new ideas. People are set in their ways outside cities.

2. Cultural crucial. schools are there. Journals are there.

3.Global cruciality - win not just individual people, but win the world. Can go to morroco for ten years and do mission or go to London and reach the world. Because Christians concentrated on cities, a high percentage of cities were Christian by AD 300. Countryside remained laregely pagan and in fact htats what the word pagan means. If the cities are pagan and countryside is pagan then culture is going pagan. As the cities go so goes the culture.

Five convluding reflections

1. If you want to reach the world you try to reach cities. World is in the cities people are more open to the gospel than they would ever be in their own countries.

2. If you want to reach overseas as well as your region, reach the cities. "New Jeresey is way father from New york than Manilla" Start from the inside and work out.

3. You need to reach the city in order to reach the culture. Chruches in cities are the only hope that the things coming out will change.

4. HAve to reach the whole city to reach the world. Cant neglect the urban poor. We will have no credibility for the wider culture if we are not involved with this. The immigrants must be reached as you can prove Ephesians 2 is true - that the gospel enables people to get along who outside of Christ would never get along. Need multi-ethnic churches. Got to reach the elites.

If you really want to drive the gospel deep into your heart, you have to go to cities. Don't want anybody to think that ministry in cities is more important than elsewhere, its just that God is caling people everywhere. There are people who have come to faith in christ in cities that have changed so much that didnt believe if hadnt seen it. Gospel can change people. Complexity of cities drives you to your knees. Too many problems. Hard to grow preachers kids up to respect christianty. Can be embarrassed by church. Not so much if it is leading to salvation. Tim explained that for years he had a Q and A time after every service. He encouraged us to make a major fuss over baptism.

Summary:

1. If you want to reach the world you need to reach the cities. Because the world is in the cities. There are people in the cities who are more open to the Gospel than they ever would be in their home countries (towns).

2. If you want to reach overseas as well as your region... (example a new church in the NY area planted their first church in another country. The immigrants of that church wanted to plant a church in their home country.) You have to reach the city to reach both the region and the world.

3. You have to reach the city to reach the culture. "As the cities go so goes the culture. Churches in cities are the only hope."-Tim Keller

4. You have to reach the whole city to reach the world.

-The poor cannot be neglected because God has always worked mightily among the urban poor. And we will have no credibility among the broader culture if the Christians are not radically involved with the poor. The best place to do this is in the city.

-The church has to reach the nations. Eph 2 The Gospel enables people to get along in Christ who otherwise would never be able to get along. You have to have multiethnic churches.

5. If you really want to drive the Gospel deep in your heart you have to go to the cities.

Advancing the Gospel into the 21st Century

by Tim Keller
 
We are entering a globalized, urbanized, and post-secular world. This means that we are going to be more like the Roman Empire than anything seen in centuries.

First, it is a globalized world again. The triumph of Rome's power created the Pax Romana and an unprecedented mobility of people, capital, and ideas. Cities became multi-ethnic and international in unprecedented ways. So today cities link as much, if not more, to the rest of the world than they do to their own geographically connected countries. Saskia Sassen in The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo makes the case that increasingly the residents of these cities are more like one another than they are like other residents of their own country. (Click here to continue reading).

World Mission and the Global City

The two great new realities for world mission are globalization and urbanization. A 2002 article in The Economist said that in 1950, New York was the only world city with a population of over 10 million people. Today there are over 20 such cities, 12 of which have arrived in the last two decades, with many more to come. All of these new megacities are developing in what used to be called the Third World. Why?

In the 18th century, a combination of population growth and technology brought rural Europe to its "carrying capacity," creating a surplus population, and in every family some left countryside and small towns to make a living elsewhere. As a result there were 150 years of urbanization in which the great cities of Europe swelled to be the largest in the world. Many experts now believe this is beginning to happen in Africa, Asia, and to a lesser extent inLatin America, where the cities are literally exploding with new immigrants from the villages and rural areas. If urban-rural population in the southern hemisphere stabilizes at 75 percent to 25 percent, as it did in Europe and North America, then over the next few decades we will see over half a billion people move into the cities of Africa and Asia alone—the equivalent of one new Bangkok (8 million people) being created every two months. (Click here to continue reading this article)

GO!

Missions and the Sovereignty of God