The Lausanne Global Conversation

New questions are emerging which are different from the older, familiar ones. And the older ones are also taking on new forms. Think, for example, of the issues surrounding the massive rise in people movements over the past 50 years, and of the trends in urbanisation, and of the penetration of other faiths. Christians need to talk, and global issues need global conversations.

The Lausanne Movement is working in partnership with publications around the world in providing the 12 key articles by leading theologians on issues facing the global church. Each article will be published in the same month by everyone, to spark the conversation globally. These articles each have four commissioned respondents from different parts of the world and will be accompanied online by video and photo essays, and responses from people like you.

The Lord gave gifts to his church to share and, through Lausanne, the Africans can share their joy and perseverance, the Indians their wisdom on living in a pluralistic context, the Persecuted Church their precious trust of what it means to share in Christ’s suffering, the converts from other faiths their insights into ways of reaching those whose faith they once shared, the West its scholarship (which we should remember was once found in North Africa), and so on around the world. In ways unimagined, we can share these gifts even across different languages, through automatic translation tools. Those translation tools are not perfect, but, with a commitment of all to the authority of Scripture and a willingness to listen and learn, we will manage to understand one another. The work you put into the global conversation will be richly rewarded.

The Lausanne Global Conversation will include:

a series of 12 articles appearing in Christianity Today (and in dozens of publications around the world), plus parallel articles in the Canadian media and elsewhere

thought-provoking blogs, podcasts, radio programs and video discussion forums

interaction on Twitter and Facebook

advance written and multimedia presentations from CT2010 speakers

connections to related discussions on the web already underway

in-person interaction at Bible colleges, mission agencies, churches and theological institutions through the Cape Town GlobaLink

Here is the very first article to kick off the whole conversation:
Whole Gospel, Whole Church, Whole World by Christopher Wright

Should Christians Emigrate?

Bishop Hwa Yung posted a timely reflection on the moral issue of emigration when the going gets tough... Here is an excerpt from the NECF article:

"Most of the time, we allow the negative circumstances around us to determine the course of action we take in life. Often, we fail to begin with God, with who He is – the Lord of history – and of what He can do through His people who trust Him.

The gospel is indeed the power of God unto salvation to those who believe, as Paul wrote. And this is not just in the narrow sense; God’s salvation will necessarily have socio-economic and political implications for the nation as well.

We need to take our eyes off the negative circumstances around us and recognise that if this is where God has called us to be, then He will also make available to us His power, to proclaim His gospel of salvation, to build His church and to transform the society in which we live into something better. We need grace sufficient to grasp afresh such a vision of God.

If this is the vision that we need, what concrete shape will it take? Dr. Isabelo Magalit, a respected Christian leader in the Philippines once wrote an article entitled, "I have a dream."

In it, he spoke of seeing, coming out from the Christian student world of this present generation in East Asia, men and women who truly know God and His Word and whose lives are fully yielded to Him.

From amongst such men and women, he sees many going into full-time ministry as pastors, evangelists and theologians, labouring to build God’s church in East Asia. Others amongst them would enter the professional fields such as law, business, engineering, politics and government, and journalism, and from within these professions exert a positive and powerful Christian influence in our society in Asia, and turn it towards a more righteous and just and godly direction.

Then he sees Christian homes springing up all over the region shining with the glory and beauty of the gospel in the dark world around them. Finally, he spoke of the pouring forth of the next wave of overseas missionaries from Asia into all the world. Towards the end of Dr. Magalit’s paper, he said, "Share my dream. Take your place in it. Stand up and be counted for Jesus."

This is the sort of vision we all need to recapture today."

The Pressure of Novelty

Stuart McAllister will be speaking at the RZIM Reasonable Faith Training Camp: "Christ among other lords" in Melaka this coming weekend.(I'm looking forward to make a trip there to meet the Agora Spore gang!)

Born in Scotland, he majors in topics like pluralism, postmodernism and consumerism. Check out his interesting mini-biography here which includes some imprisonments in Europe. Two articles from Just Thinking columns called Permanent Things and the church and culture in the 21st century are highly recommended reads.

But here's an excerpt from a favorite of mine called the Pressure of Novelty:

"What disturbs me personally—and many people whom I have talked to across the country and internationally—is the growing trend to ignore Christian history, to devalue Scripture, to reframe worship, and to lessen the role of discipleship, holiness, theology, and content. What matters is whether God is “experienced” (something I also seek), whether worship is compelling (a commendable value), and whether people actually come (a valid desire). However, this tendency and practice of avoiding the past is distracting, and I believe, wrong.

Speaking of this trend, Christian scholar R. R. Reno says, “In all cases we are modern insofar as we will not suffer that which we have received. We must step back in order to unburden ourselves, to lighten our lives so that we can be raptured away from the hindering, limited, ruined forms that the past has imposed on the present. This is the spiritual pattern that makes modernity modern.”

Within the mythology of modern and post-modern society is the deep belief and value that only what works or satisfies in the present is to be allowed. Thus a creeping evolutionary notion is married to an existentialist demand, and then served up with a muddle of therapeutic and marketing requirements, which begins to alter beyond recognition the thing (the Christian faith) that is the target of such enthusiastic revision.

Commenting on what he describes as the breathless pursuit of relevance, Os Guinness writes, “By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.”

Another speaker to look out for is Aussie John Dickson and we could check out his free online resources here.

Here's an excerpt from his award winning book Spectator's Guide To World Religions:

"If Christianity is uniquely true, its beauty will be best seen only when viewed amidst a full and fair account of the alternatives. Let me give you an analogy that comes to mind. Imagine yourself as an art curator who is convinced that one piece in his collection has an unequalled quality. What will you do? Will you dim the lights on the ‘competitors’ in the gallery and put the spotlights on your favourite piece. Of course not. That would be a sure sign you were not actually convinced about the special beauty of your treasured masterpiece. I mean, if you’ve got to obscure the other pieces in order to make your favourite one look good, something is clearly
wrong. A truly assured curator, that is, one with a deep confidence in the excellence of his prized item, would place all the gallery lights on full, confident that as careful art-lovers inspect the whole collection, viewing all the works in their best light, one painting, in particular, will draw people’s attention.

Citizendium – the Next Wikipedia

Larry Sanger, the cofounder of Wikipedia.org has decided to attempt to fix some of the plagues that Wikipedia faces like errors, juvenile vandalism and the sometimes incomprehensibly arcane contribution. Sanger who has a doctorate in philosophy is beginning a new user contributed encyclopedia online much like Wikipedia called Citizendium.org, but with this difference, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names and experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.

Now this goes against the primary mantra of Wikipedia that "anyone can edit" and the egalitarianism that has made it into the colossal giant that it is. MIT reports that in just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone.

But one of the strengths of Wikipedia has also been one of its weaknesses. Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint. This kind of Hegelian synthesis works well on some issues, but not on others.

Some popular issues, have such volume of interest that the nuances and extremes slowly work itself out, much like the free market. Others however, have less interest, and are more susceptible to being hijacked by extremist and special interest groups. Thus, an editor, though not perfect, may be that force of correction, again similar those measures and tweaks we apply to market failures. But the editors themselves have to be in the dialogue, and themselves subject to editing and correction to avoid the single viewpoint paradigm that caused the other encyclopedias to loose out to Wikipedia.

I suspect in time, both of these projects will be successful, both offering a slightly different approach that will be useful under different circumstances.

Bock's Blog for latest Ossuary Debate News

Bock Writes;

"Jim Tabor, the biblical scholar and historical consultant on the Lost Family Tomb Documentary and Professor at the University of North Carolina (Charlotte), and I have been emaling back and forth privately about the evidence for the last few weeks. Today he emailed me his currect take on the evidence for the tomb belonging to Jesus' family which he has posted on his web site."

For the latest on this issue, do check out Bock's Blog.

Reasonable Faith 2007

Reasonable Faith Training Program

Date: April 13 - 15, 2007
Venue: Hotel Puri Melaka, Malaysia
Contact: iching@rzimap.com.sg (IChing) for more details abt registration

Exciting and Relevant Issue: "Jesus among other lords"

The experienced RZIM team will take you on a discovery exploration on Religion roulette: How can we know for sure?, Interactive Movie Discussions, Worldview thinking, How now shall we live?, Postmodern spirituality, Jesus then and now, Ecclesiastes, Communicating the gospel in a pluralistic society and so much more!

Without a firm foundation in Scripture and the uniqueness of Christ, we would risk being captivated by religious pluralism and postmodern spirituality which reduced the gospel narrative as merely one among many religious options in the supermarket. I highly recommend this camp to everyone!

The Economics of Religion?

Russ Roberts of Econ Talk (A podcast by The Library of Economics and Liberty) Interviews Templeton Award Winner Larry Iannaccone of George Mason University on the Economics of Religion. What is the Economics of Religion? It began like many things in Economics with Adam Smith;

Adam Smith ([1776] 1965: 740-766) laid the foundation for the economic analysis of religion in a largely ignored chapter of The Wealth of Nations. Smith argued that self-interest motivates clergy just as it does secular producers; that market forces constrain churches just as they do secular firms; and that the benefits of competition, the burdens of monopoly, and the hazards of government regulation are as real for religion as for any other sector of the economy. (For an attempt to test these assertions, see Iannaccone 1991)

Smith's insights languished for 200 years, but since the 1970's, and especially in the past few years, economists and sociologists have returned to Smith's insights. (Contemporary research on the economics of religion began with Azzi and Ehrenberg [1975].) Viewing religious behavior as an instance of rational choice, rather than an exception to it, researchers have analyzed religious behavior at the individual, group, and market level.

Individual-level research has focused on the determinants of religious participation (church attendance and giving) and religious mobility (denominational switching and religious intermarriage). Group-level research has sought to explain why different types of people are drawn to different types of groups and, in particular, why many high-cost, "sectarian" groups enjoy substantial success, both high levels of commitment and continued growth, in the religious marketplace. Market-level research has sought to determine whether monopoly, regulation, and competition affect religious institutions and religious outcomes in the same ways that they affect standard, markets. (For an overview of this work, see "An Introduction to the Economics of Religion".)

Do listen to the Podcast here and then lets discuss what your perspective is on this as a Christian.

Apakah Itu Da Vinci Code?

Novel Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code telah mendapat sambutan hangat dari pembacanya. Sebanyak 40 juta cetakannya telah dijual serata dunia. Ron Howard dan Sony Pictures juga akan membawa cerita ini ke panggung wayang pada Mei 18, 2006.

Apakah yang kecoh sangat dengan novel ini?

Cerita dalam novel ini bermula dengan pembunuhan seorang pemelihara seni di muzium Louvre. Mangsa jenayah ini bukan sahaja berminat dengan seni tetapi juga mengetuai sebuah pertubuhan rahsia yang dipanggil the Priory of Sion. Pertubuhan ini mengawal rahsia, yang jika terbongkar, akan mencelakan iman Kristian alkitabiah.

Sebelum kematiannya, dia telah cuba memberikan rahsia ini kepada cucu perempuannya, Sophie, seorang kriptografi dan profesor Harvard, Robert Langdon dengan meninggalkan pelbagai petunjuk dengan harapan mereka dapat menemui kebenaran.

Apakah rahsia besar ini? Jawapannya: Lokasi dan identiti Holy Grail.

Tetapi dalam novel Brown, Holy Grail ini bukanlah cawan yang digunakan oleh Kristus sewaktu jamuan terakhirNya. Ia adalah Maria Magdalena, isteri Yesus Kristus, yang menyambungkan zuriat Kristus dengan melahirkan anak! Pertubuhan Priory of Sion mengawal rahsia lokasi makam Maria dan juga berkhidmat melindungi keturunan Yesus yang masih wujud pada hari ini!

Ada sesiapakah yang serius percaya cerita sebegini? Ada. Antara sebabnya adalah cara novel ini ditulis. Dalam muka surat yang tertera perkataan huruf besar “FAKTA”, Brown mendakwa, “Semua huraian mengenai kerja seni, seni bina, dokumen dan upacara rahsia dalam novel ini adalah tepat”. Pembaca biasa yang tiada pengetahuan khusus dalam bidang ini mungkin menganggap pernyataan ini benar. Tetapi sebaliknya ramai cendekiawan telah mendokumenkan pelbagai ketidaktepatan dalam dakwaan itu.

Brown juga ada caranya bagi mejadikan teori novel berkenaan Yesus dan gereja awal seakan-akan boleh dipercayai. Teori ini disokong oleh watak-watak terpelajar dalam novel, contohnya, sejarahwan diraja British, Leigh Teabing dan profesor Harvard, Robert Langdon. Kata-kata dari mulut watak-watak ini memberi tanggapan umum bahawa teori-teori mereka ini betul.



Siri 'blog' Agora ini bertujuan mengukuhkan iman dan melengkapi umat Kristian supaya bersaksi kepada mereka yang melihat filem atau membaca novel tersebut. Saya berharap artikel Probe yang diterjemahkan oleh sahabat Hawariyun di sini dapat menggalakkan anda untuk menyampaikan kebenaran kepada kawan anda serta ahli keluarga yang akan menonton dan membaca buku tersebut.

Pengenalan Kepada Novel/Filem The Da Vinci Code

Pernahkah Constantine mengubahsuai Al-kitab?

Adakah Kitab Injil Sumber Sejarah Yang Sahih?

Apakah Itu Dokumen-Dokumen Nag Hammadi?

Bagaimana Kanon Perjanjian Baru Dibentuk?

Siapakah Maria dari Magdalena?

Siapakah Maria Yang Sebenar?

Pernahkah Yesus Berkahwin? (Bahagian 1)

Pernahkah Yesus Berkahwin? (Bahagian 2)

Adakah Pengikut Awal Yesus Mengisytiharkan KeTuhananNya?

Kalau anda tahu sesiapa yang tertanya-tanya perihal isu-isu di atas, sila berkongsi maklumat ini dengan mereka! :)