Hey, this just not my phone, this is also my library!

We are very aware that mobile hand phones especially smart phones have become as essential part of life in the last two decades. Nowadays we cannot imagine life before these small portable mobile devices. Pay phone booths, expensive operator assisted calls and land line are slowly becoming a thing of the past. The world has become even more interconnected as never before. With the ever expanding cellular infrastructure development, cellular mobile phones are becoming common in some underdeveloped countries even before the land based telephones. According to the United Nations more than 6 billion of the 7 billion people on earth today has access to a mobile phone!

This is an exciting time for the Church. Most mobile phones not only receive voice phone calls but also books and videos. This means that The Church has a unique opportunity today to make the bible available to almost 85% of the people on earth by means of free downloads of e-bible or audio bible! This is a fantastic opportunity. Not only e-bibles but also books on Christianity, Christian living and theology.

The revolution that resulted from the Guttenberg Press caused not only a revolution in learning and knowledge, but indirectly the Protestant Reformation. The bible became more easily available and was translated into a more readable form in the local languages from Latin or Greek. The limitations to that revolution was printing costs, distribution and point of sales/bookshops. The present e-book revolution bypass the limitations of the printing press (surprisingly this has not really translated to cheaper books). The electronic version is easily distributed and downloaded at the cost of a website and mobile apps.

The e-book revolution has placed the power of publishing and distribution into the hands of the authors and readers. Publishers are gatekeepers of printed books and while it is acknowledged that as corporate companies, they need to make a profit, they however also limit books published to that of a few superstar authors. Authors should make their works free or at a minimal charge on the Internet. This is especially true of sermon transcript, books on Christianity and Christian living. In fact, superstar authors and pastors should be the first to do so. Many do not need these incomes from their books. The call is also to Christian theological publishers. For reasons best known to themselves, most of our theological writings in books and journals are locked up behind walls that demand we pay a high monetary price to have access to these books and articles. Open the doors and allow the knowledge and wisdom to be available to all. Commentaries, theological thesis and writings are valuable resources that should be available to all. Everyone, including the poorest Christian living in the slums should have access to a well-stocked Christian library through his or her phone.

The mobile phones also make easily accessible videos and audio messages. Through Youtube, Godtube and other such services, everyone will be able to access Christian documentaries, attend lectures, participate in conferences, and even attend Church services. The technology for streaming video is always improving as is the technology for uploading and downloading.

The dawn of a new era is here. It is now possible to share the bible and Christian teachings to at least 85% of the whole population, even those who are living at the ends of the earth. This is a tremendous opportunity. It is hoped that the Church will awaken to this opportunity.

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Bear Grylls Did Alpha

Started in London in 1979 as a brush-up course for rusty churchgoers, the Alpha Course has become a worldwide phenomenon and is now held in 163 countries. It is estimated that more than 13 million people worldwide have attended an Alpha Course.

The Alpha Course comprises 15 sessions held over 10 weeks and is free and open to everyone. No question is out of bounds, and participants are free to say as much or as little as they wish as they make up their own minds about the teachings of Jesus. Spirited discussions often ensue on topics ranging from Who is God? and Why am I here? to Why is there suffering? and Is God a delusion?



To learn more about Alpha or to find an Alpha course near you, visit www.alpha.org.

The Digital Great Commission

In my article The Influence of Globalisation on Christian Spiritual Formation in Churches In Malaysia and Singapore I highlight the use of technology may be missional.

Globalisation is not necessary bad. Using the improved communication and extensive networking provided by new technologies, it is easier to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world than before. The Internet has made it possible to reach even the remotest part of any country as long as there is Internet access. It has also allowed even the remotest part of the world with Internet access to be readily accessible. A Christian website may be accessed by anyone, even those in areas not accessible to missionaries. Social networking allows people to connect over long distances which otherwise will not know of one other’s existence. Streaming videos and MP3 allow download of materials anywhere in the world. The global culture has a made inroads into many other cultures. It is a two-way street. Local cultures may influence global culture. There is much potential in the wise use of art, music, video and writings to spread the Gospel. Anyone can upload something onto the Internet and have it viewed by thousands within the hour! YouTube may be used as a media for evangelisation. Virtual Christian faith communities may be set up online. The degree of Christian spiritual formation that may be done through the Internet has not been fully explored.

Christianity Today runs a Global Conversation on technology and mission.

THE GLOBAL CONVERSATION The Face-to-Face Gospel and the Death of Distance Al Erisman says we need to think about ministry in the digital culture the way missionaries think about the culture of the people they serve. Interview by Tim Stafford RESPONSES: Nigel M. de S. Cameron: Sci-Fi Reality Wha-Chul Son: Technological Divide Juan D. Rogers: Not Just Tools Haron Wachira: Blessings & Curses of Technology Video: Emotional Robots .

St Therese and Evangelism

The latest from Thinking Faith...


iWitness: St Thérèse: a mission of evangelisation
The tour of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux has been an invigorating event for the life of the Catholic Church in this country, but has been met by curiosity and even scepticism in some quarters. Sr Janet Fearns explains the value of the visit as an opportunity for evangelisation, as she recalls her encounters with journalists and pilgrims. How has St Thérèse enabled the many thousands of people who have queued to venerate her relics to become missionaries? Read >>

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The Gospel Conversation

THE GLOBAL CONVERSATION Whole Gospel, Whole Church, Whole World We must believe, live, and communicate all that makes the Christian message staggeringly comprehensive good news. By Christopher J.H. Wright

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Communicating with iGens

From Leadershipjournal.net

EVANGELISM
The Gospel for iGens
Reared on self-esteem and impervious to guilt, the next generation needs good news that can break through their defenses.
by Scot McKnight

The first step a young man takes toward a woman who he thinks might be his future is delicate. The operative words seem to be "sensitive" and "careful" and "first impressions matter." As in love, so in "gospeling" (or evangelism). When Peter preached at Pentecost, he opened his sermon with a time-honored citation of Scripture and then sketched, in third person, what had happened to Jesus.

| Finish this article |


also check out the new digital magazine from Leadershipjournal.net; a journal which is multimedia; has text and video articles.


Catalyst Leadership

See the August/September edition of Catalyst Leadership

Moltmann on Double Predestination

ESSAY:
Double Predestination: The Elected Ones and the Crowd of the Condemned
By Jürgen Moltmann
Professor of Systematic Theology at Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, Germany

The strong points of Reformed Theology are at the same time her weaknesses. In order to become fit for the 21st century in the common house of ecumenical theology and in the universal house of humankind and the earth, it seems necessary to reformulate the strength of the Reformed Tradition. This cannot mean adapting our tradition to the others or integrating our originality into what is common to all, but to find our own profile in new communities of Christianity and humankind. “If two are saying the same, one is superfluous,” says an old Russian proverb. It is not the intention of ecumenical community and interreligious dialogue to make each other superfluous. The difference is interesting.

Since John Calvin and Theodore of Beza, the founder of the reformed orthodoxy in the 17th century, “Calvinism” is famous on the one hand and notoriously accused on the other hand for the doctrine of double predestination: Humanity is divided into the elected here and the rejected there. God is totally free to choose whomever he wants and to reject whomever he doesn’t want. Both serve the glorification of his majesty, and who can argue with the sublimity of the infinite God?

The belief in divine election was and is indeed the strength of Reformed faith. It gave believers an invincible certainty in their faith to know that one is not only loved by God, and not only justified by the grace of Christ and sanctified by the inspiration of the holy Spirit of God, but also elected by the will of God. From this belief in the divine election follows the trust in the divine perseverance through the ups and downs of personal life until the final redemption: I shall not fall and nobody and nothing can tear me out of the hands of God. God is faithful to his election, Christ has prayed for me “that my faith shall not fail" (Luke 22:32), the divine seed of the Holy Spirit in my heart will not die. This belief was the power of resistance in persecutions, i.e. of the Huguenots in France and Reformed Christians in the Netherlands. Marie Durand was incarcerated in the Tour de la Constance in Aigues-Mortes in Southern France for thirty-eight years, sustaining and exhorting her companions in captivity for the sake of their faith, and here she made her famous inscription in the stone “Register.”

But does this strength of belief in one's divine election mean that the rest of humankind is lost and damned to eternity as the crowd of corruption, the massa perditionis as Augustine called them? Must we tell the rest of the world: “According to the Bible and our belief those who do not believe in Christ will perish?” as the president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches Choan-Seng Sonq from Taiwan asked? There are always two different explanations of the simple fact that one and the same Gospel provokes belief in one, and disbelief in others. It is either due to the will of God or of human beings. Because believers confess that they owe their faith to the grace of God, they see in unbelief the disgrace of God. Since they feel in their faith “elected,” they can see in unbelievers only “rejected” people. The other explanation refers to the free choice of human will: Those who decided for Christ see heaven as their eternal future, and for those who decide against Christ they see only hell as their future—or more recently “total nonbeing.” The result of the view believers have of unbelievers is the same, whether one follows Augustine and Calvin in their doctrine of double predestination, or Pelagius and Erasmus in their doctrine of the double end of human free choice.

I think it is not characteristic of the Christian Gospel to confront people with the statement, “You belong to the crowd of the condemned and your future is hell.” It was terrible to see in the movie “Breaking the Waves” a Calvinistic pastor burying a person having lost faith with the words, “We now hand you over to hell.” It is certainly not in the Spirit of God the creator of everything to condemn 95 percent of the people he has created in his image, and it is not in accordance with Christ to limit salvation to 144,000 elected only, for whom he died. We need no theological explanation for the existence of unbelievers or people of another faith. Our only answer to the rejection of the Gospel is preaching and explaining the Gospel to unbelievers and people of other faiths.

Faith is not only human trust in God, but also and in the first place God's faithfulness. It is in this sense that I take every unbeliever as a person in whom God is trusting, in whom God is present and for whom God is waiting. God believes in every human person. This can be called “objective faith” (Christoph Blumhardt).

It was Karl Barth who—following Blumhardt—gave us an ingenious christological reformulation of the Reformed doctrine of double predestination (Church Dogmatics II/2). The sequence of his argument is this: 1. Before God elects or rejects anybody, God determines himself to be the God of the people: “I shall be your God and you shall be my people,” is the covenant-formula of Israel. This can be called the self-election of God. 2. In the passion and Crucifixion of Christ, God has put his righteous condemnation of sin, evil and death on his own Son. Between Gethsemene and Golgatha Jesus suffered hell and eternal death for all of us, when he cried out: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” 3. With Jesus Christ's resurrection from the dead, hell and eternal death are therefore overcome. The election of grace is revealed: “Hell, where is your victory!” (1 Cor. 15:55). Grace flowing out of the resurrected Christ is pure grace and as such unconditional and also universal, all-embracing and excluding no one. This is the content of the Gospel and there is no terror in the doctrine of double predestination anymore.

“The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom,” said Karl Barth in § 32 of his Church Dogmatics (trans. is from Bromiley ed.). Why is this so? Because “God took upon himself the condemnation of sinful men with all consequences, and elected man to participate in his eternal glory (§ 33).” Is Barth teaching “double predestination?” Yes! But in a new dialectical form: God took the condemnation upon himself in order to embrace all in his election of grace. This is the new dialectical form of the old doctrine of “double predestination.”

Of course, this new formulation is not an explanation of the fact that some believe in the Gospel and others not. But do we really need a theological explanation of this fact, or can we best answer the fact that there are unbelievers with a new and better witness to the Gospel that God loves them with grace and is carrying all their sins and sufferings for them? Another question is whether universalism is the result of this reformulation. The answer is “No,” because we are witnesses of the Gospel not judges in the final judgment of God. Whether God will in the end embrace all with his transforming grace is His sake, ours is the witness of the Gospel to everybody. But if somebody dies in unbelief, is he then out, or is there hope also for him? The answer is: Our means of preaching and praying come to an end with death, but not Christ's power, because he was resurrected and has his possibilities with the dead, preaching the Gospel in the world of the dead. There is, therefore, no reason and no right for us to condemn and exclude anyone, living or dead. We are not the judges of faith, but the servants of joy.

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING/SUMMER 2001, VOL. 2, #2.

Relational Evangelism

I see a trend moving away from the 'confrontation' style of evangelism using the Four Spiritual Laws to a more humanising relational evangelism. I am happy about this because basically evangelism and sharing the gospel is about relationships. Here is an interesting interview from Christianity Today.

The Changing Face of Apologetics

Lee Strobel doesn't think the traditional methods work anymore.

Interview by Stan Guthrie | posted 6/11/2009 09:22AM

The Unexpected Adventure: Taking Everyday Risks to Talk with People about Jesus by Lee Strobel and Mark Mittelberg Zondervan, May 2009 304 pp., $9.99

Lee Strobel has written many books—The Case for Faith, The Case for Christ, and The Case for the Real Jesus among them—that provide intellectual reasons, wrapped in stories, for the Christian faith. Stan Guthrie, Christianity Today managing editor for special projects, interviewed Strobel, a former pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, at the Christian Book Expo in Dallas about his latest title, written with Mark Mittelberg: The Unexpected Adventure: Taking Everyday Risks to Talk with People about Jesus (Zondervan).

read more

Church Growth by Google

Churches are discovering that advertising on Google can be effective and inexpensive.

Tyler Charles | posted 2/06/2009

Attendance at Radiant Church in Colorado Springs had been declining for years when Todd Hudnall accepted the position as senior pastor. Recognizing the computer-savvy nature of their community, Hudnall and his team focused their efforts on improving the church website and using the Internet for advertising.

"Our position on Google searches was poor," Hudnall says, "so we decided to use Google Adwords. It has essentially replaced our large Yellow Pages ad; it's less expensive and seems to be more effective."

After two years of using Google Adwords, the number of first-time guests who learned about Radiant through the Internet has gone up 25 percent.

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Problems with the Manga Messiah?

I have received some negative comments about the Manga Messiah by some church leaders. I am curious about their objections. Is it because they are not used to the manga illustrations and their way of story telling? Or they object to the Gospel story told in a comic format? The Manga Messiah is all about Jesus Christ as told in the four Gospels.

I have read through the whole of Manga Messiah and I cannot find anything seriously wrong with it. This is taking into account that it is a paraphrased narrative synoptic telling of the the Gospel story. It is illustrated in the manga style which will appeal to the younger people who are reading lots of Japanese manga. I will not hesitate to recommend it to the younger folks.

I will be interested to know what are some of the objections to it.


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Is Your Gospel Too Big?

Christianity Today, September, 2008
Christian Vision Project

Missional Misstep
Emphasizing the big gospel can make it hard to communicate any gospel.
David Fitch posted 8/27/2008 10:40AM

David Fitch is an unusual church planter because he is also a theologian, occupying the Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary. And he is an unusual theologian and professor because he is a church planter, immersed in Life on the Vine, a "missional" church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. This double life has made his writing, both online at his weblog, Reclaiming the Mission, and in his provocative book The Great Giveaway, must-reading in emerging, evangelical, and mainline settings. One of Fitch's great gifts is his willingness to challenge his readers' assumptions, and his own. Here, he turns the tables on our big question for 2008, "Is our gospel too small?"

Can the gospel be too big?

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Christianity- A Reality Show?

Is Christianity a reality show? There is something interesting happening in the UK.

A lap dancer, a lesbian, and a lapsed Christian with a pregnant girlfriend are among the participants on the U.K.'s newest reality show, Make Me a Christian, where Christian leaders attempt to bring a group of unlikely candidates to the faith. The show's premise is to find out if Christianity can help repair the moral fabric of British society.

The volunteers aim to live by the teachings of the Bible for three weeks, guided by the Rev. George Hargreaves, outspoken political activist and leader of the Christian Party, and his team of mentors. The participants take Communion, get their own Bibles, receive lessons on the correct way to view sex, and learn about service in soup kitchens.

read more

Channel 4 has a few clips from the show.
George Hargreaves runs MakeMeAChristian.com for viewers who have become interested in Christianity.

Is Our Gospel too Small? An Orthodox Perspective

Christianity Today, May, 2008

CHRISTIAN VISION PROJECT

The Poverty of Love

The desert fathers and mothers would know instantly why our gospel is too small.
Bradley Nassif posted 4/30/2008 08:33AM

The last few decades, more and more evangelicals have been mining the treasures of Eastern Orthodoxy. One reason for their openness is the work of people like Bradley Nassif, professor of biblical and theological studies at North Park University in Chicago. For years he has been, as one editor put it, "a courageous and enthusiastic pioneer of Orthodox-evangelical dialogue around the world." While Nassif was exposed to evangelical faith in his youth, which he says gave his faith vitality, he has remained a faithful member of the Orthodox Church. But while championing the Orthodox cause, he's never been blind to its spiritual needs. As he put it in one article, "The most urgent need in the Orthodox world today is an aggressive 'internal mission' of (re)converting our people to Jesus Christ." In this Christian Vision Project article, Nassif suggests how one element of the Orthodox heritage might help reconvert all of us to the person and mission of Jesus Christ.

"Is our gospel too small?" Shouldn't the answer be obvious? As an Eastern Orthodox theologian, my first impulse was to point out that a small gospel has never been our problem. The name of the great 7th-century saint Maximus the Confessor symbolizes the maximal gospel proclaimed by him and all the Orthodox—one with cosmic implications that embraces the whole of creation. Proclaiming that kind of gospel has always been the Orthodox way. But then I came down to earth. Though Orthodoxy has a grand vision in principle, it often doesn't make a lot of difference in practice. I believe our theological compass is pointed in the right direction, but when it comes to following through on our not-so-small gospel, we are no better than anyone else.

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New Marketing for Old Church

April 21, 2008
Secular Thoughts on Sacred Marketing
Seth Godin’s advice on spreading your church’s message.
by Chris Blumhofer

StreamingFaith.com recently sat down with marketing guru Seth Godin and asked his advice on church “marketing” in our increasingly plugged-in, techno-driven society. At the forefront of Godin’s thought-world these days is “new marketing”—methods of communicating messages that aren’t top-down (from an ad firm to your TV) but side-to-side (from a bootleg YouTube clip, to your blog, to my blog, to the evening news). New marketing reaches smaller audiences, but it creates more of an impact.

His advice may surprise or offend, but it is still worth thinking about.

Consider these excerpts (you can see the full interview here):

"Churches are the oldest businesses around today. And yes, they’re businesses. They don’t necessarily sell a physical product, and they don’t always charge money, but there’s a transaction nonetheless. And that involves the individual paying attention. Attention is precious and it’s rare and it’s non-refundable…."

"Just because it’s important to you (and it could be your Tupperware product line or your sermon) doesn’t mean it’s important to me. The essential idea here is that new media is selfish and you can’t buy or demand attention, no matter how worthy you believe your idea may be…."

"I'd say you need to concentrate on what's remarkable and interesting and noteworthy and touches my faith, and stop spending time on tasks that don't amplify any of those elements. Doing something because you've always done it isn't an idea worth spreading…."

What do you think? Do we short-change ourselves by taking people’s attention for granted? Do we recognize the selfish way in which people listen to our messages? How can church leaders make the most of insights from the business world?

Check out the full interview on StreamingFaith’s website.

Is Our Gospel Too Small?

I love this cover, don't you?

Be a Clown, Be a Clown, Be a Clown

For those who are interested to be a clown for God, the Holy Light Church (Chinese) in Johor Bharu has started a clown, not clowning ministry. I like their motto

We don't do clown, we deliver joy

For more information read here

Send in the clowns

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