novus•lumen

National Emerging Church leaders and authors Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and Mark Scandrette are crisscrossing the country in a bio-diesel RV to visit 32 cities with a message that combines old time revival flair with a 21st century gospel on a tour called the “Church Basement Roadshow,” and I was able to snag them and set them up at the church I’m interning at during seminary.

Taking a page out of the Billy Sunday playbook, the authors will spread the emergent message of a generous, hope-filled Christian faith in the style and cadence of the tent revival preachers of a hundred years ago. They plan to have fun with it, wearing frock suits and selling “healing balm,” but the goal is, as in the revivals of yore, to preach the good news. “This will be unlike any book tour people have seen,” says Jones. “We’ll be barnstorming the country, shaking the rafters with our ancient-future message of hope.”

The second to the last stop on their journey is Grand Rapids, MI and Fellowship Covenant Church is hosting that stop on Sunday August 3 at 7pm. If you live in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, or Indian (and EVEN Canada!) and are interested in dreaming of an alternative Christianity and following of Jesus, please come to what should be a rockin’ good time! Also, if (somehow) you read this blog and live in the area I’d love to connect during and after the show, so please try and make that Sunday evening.

ps-show up early, cause we’re expecting a big crowd and our capacity is 200ish!

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TOWARD A POST-COLONIAL BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW

Abraham Kupyer gave the Church a beautiful model for understanding the biblical worldview: a Creation-Rebellion-Rescue-Recreation paradigm. As the Western Church re-thinks how She should approach global missions in the 21st Century, She should use Kuypers paradigm to construct a post-colonial biblical worldview of global missions.

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The first miracle of Jesus that is recorded (and presumable the first one of His ministry) occurs at a party. Actually, the setting is more a banquet, which was given in honor of newly wed couple. What is striking about this initial miracle are the clear eschatological implication that would probably have been evident to the hearers of the miracle. At this banquet for a bride and groom wine runs out…but Jesus provides the wine so that the banquet can resume. The prophetic texts of the Hebrew Testament that testified to the coming Messiah all had banquet overtones that described abundance and the flowing of wine. So symbolically this pericope is laden with eschatological overtones.

The second passage is Messianic and in large ways foreshadows the work of the Messiah Jesus on the cross. The original point at which heaven and earth over lapped was the Temple. It was the physical focal point for the Jews. The thought of it being physically destroyed was unthinkable, yet Jesus both foreshadows its actual destruction and spiritual destruction. For through Him, heaven and earth met, and through him all people would find connection and access to God.

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THE POST-COLONIAL ERA AND ECCLESIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

While post-modernism is the condition of the West, post-colonialism is the condition of the South and East; the West is grappling with an existence beyond the values and metaphysics of modernism, while Asia, South America and Africa are all dreaming of an existence outside and beyond their collective colonial history and colonizers. Most non-Westerners prefer to use the term post-colonialism to describe their struggle for identity in the aftermath of the colonial experience. Postmodernism deconstructs the dominant narratives as being simply one of many competing reality-defining stories, hence Jean-Fransçois Lyotard is incredulous towards metanarratives. Furthermore, Michael Foucault’s critique birthed the deep hermeneutic of suspicion of institutions that characterizes our postmodern culture. Consequently, any institution that attempts to control belief and behavior is viewed as repressive and domineering. In fact, there is a deep sense that institutions in and of themselves are structures of domination. Thus, postmodernism is an ally of sorts of post-colonialism; those who seek to come to terms with the experience of colonization and its long-term effects see in postmodernism not only the possibility of an alternative discourse that affirms and celebrates Otherness, but also a strategy for the deconstruction of the concept, authority, and assumed primacy of the category of ‘the West.’ In other words, just as postmodern thought disrobes the differing values and authorities within the West as simply one story over another, post-colonialism asserts that the West itself is one narrative among many, a narrative whose authority and primacy is no longer simply so. That the West does not exclusively define reality is a seismic development, indeed!

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Tomorrow, churches all across America will incorporate the Hymns of Americana into Her worship hour. “My Country Tis of Thee,” “America The Beautiful,” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” will all be sung with as much gusto as “How Great Thou Art,” “Amazing Grace,” and “God of Wonders.”

Worship of God will be replaced by worship of America.

Rather than affirming our commitment to God and our faith in Jesus Christ by reciting the Apostles Creed, we’ll seig heil to the American Flag and renew our commitments to Empire.

Worship of God will be replaced by worship of America.

Rather than praying to our Father who art in Heaven that His Kingdom will come, His will be done on Earth as in Heaven, we’ll ask God to bless our Kingdom and the fruits of Americas labor.

Worship of God will be replaced by worship of America.

Rather than confess our collective sins as a nation, we will ask protection for our troops as we wage an unjust war and seek relief from the pump so we can return to serving Mammon with glee.

Worship of God will be replaced by worship of America.

This Sunday morning, rather than bearing prophetic witness to the values, authority and Way of God’s Reign as an eschatological community by calling on Empire America to atone for its flagrant abuse of Eikons of God through torture in the name of a pseuro-war on terror, Her mass exportation of a culture of smut, Wall Street’s mass economic exploitation of the Global Brown Man, and our collective flagrant abuse of God’s Creation, the American Church will bow before Lady Liberty once again, kissing her ring, suckling her bosom. She will split the fattened calf over The Table, burn the required incense, and break bread at basement potlucks festooned with Red, White, and Blue, thus making peace with god Americana until next July 4th…

“Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.”

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One of the reasons I’ve been so MIA in writing lately is because I finished up a two week intense class on the Gospel of John. One of the project was to complete a journal of the book, with 1 paragraph per chapter. I thought I would post those 200 word entries over the course of the next several weeks. I hope the few sentences both encourage you in your life with the Messiah and spur you to read this amazing Gospel.

CHAPTER 1

At the beginning of his gospel, John firmly plants his witness within the larger Jewish story by deliberately using “in the beginning…” and also using the Greek word LOGOS. Rather than being a contetualizatin technique for the Hellenistic culture, it is a depictin of the Word of God and used to link Jesus to both being WITH God AND God. Its was emphasized right in verse 1 that Jesus was God, not simply divine, of which he could have used THEOIS to indicate divine. Rather, he stretches the boundaries os 1st century Jewish monothesism to declare Jesus with God and God. And in continuing to emphasize and equate God with the Word, he declares himself as Creator; all things have their Being, all things are made in Him. This again emphasizes the transcendence of the Word/Jesus

What’s more: Jesus is the source of Life itself. “In him was light” is a universally religious equation with Life. Light = Life. This again is in keeping with the Jewish Story which saw the Messiah as the Light entering the darkness. And it is in this “Light of Men” that John testifies so all men may believe/trust in Jesus.

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In the Fall of 2006, I had the opportunity to work for a national upscale department store after working for over four years on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.. Our store was located in one of the wealthiest and diverse counties in the country, resulting in a mosaic tapestry of tongues, tribes and religions. My department alone included six Muslims, an Orthodox Jew, a Sikh, a Buddhist, a few non-Western Christians and others who were spiritual, but non-religious. Ethiopia, Morocco, Somalia, Gabon, India, Afghanistan, Japan, Columbia and Pakistan were all represented, creating an amazing work environment and cross-cultural learning experience. It was in this context that a clash of national heritages occurred. One afternoon my Gabonian co-worker asked me, “Is your name African?” As a thoroughly white midwestern American (in the strictest WASPian sense of the description) I could not help but laugh out loud at his question! Obviously, my African co-worker got a kick out of it, too. He was curious about my family heritage, because he came from a part of the world where my ancestors were apart of something I could only touch and feel at movie length. You see, my last name, Bouma, is Dutch and the Dutch Empire used its naval and military might to colonize parts of western and southern Africa, including Gabon where my African friend was from. Through such trading companies as the Dutch East Indies Company and Dutch West Indies Company, the Kingdom of The Netherlands used its might to leverage trade in newly discovered lands outside of Europe. And it was through the Dutch West Indies Company that my family name spread from European to African. Thus began my introduction to the realities of colonialism.

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