Rick @ TED

For all of you having questions about why you're here and and what your doing here (so that 'll be practically everyone...), view the speech of Rick Warren (Author of Purpose-driven life) @ TED.

Rick says: The test of you're world view is not how you act in the good times but how you act on the funeral. There it matters what you believe.

Rick asks: What is it that you believe, what is the good life:

#1
Looking good
feeling good
having te goods

#2
being good and
doing good
giving you're life away

Giving breaks the grip of more through serving. The rest of his talk relates to this question. Just listen to hear more.

TED

I am always looking for new interesting places of information and a good friend of mine emailed me about TED. TED (www.ted.com) is a very interesting one with a lot of good talks about an enormous amount of subjects. From their own site:

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader."

There are speaches of Bill Clinton, Googles Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Wikipedia, Bono, Rick Warren, all just a few clicks away... Subjects are technology, religion, business, science, culture, and much more. There's just too much to start blogging about it, just take a look.

Spirituality @ De Zolder

Yesterday I visited "De Zolder" in Amsterdam. Todd spoke about spirituality. It is good to notice that one can learn so much from the lived through knowledge of non-theologian speakers (No offense to our theologians). He told he visited a trance party and asked the people there why they were going all through the night on this party. The people told him that there was so much pressure in our society to live up to all its norms and expectations that people wanted to escape. That they were looking for a spiritual experience in the trance music and drug using to escape from reality. The essence was that, when thinking about a spiritual experience people do not think about christianity. When they think about christianity they think about personal conviction and living along certain norms and values, but not so much about a spiritual experience. But Todd pointed out having a living relationship with God through the Holy Spirit is a spiritual experience of magnitude. How can it be anything else, if our belief is that God's spirit is in our hart and life.

The difference is, I think, instead of a shortlived spiritual burst, a so called "high", it is a life transforming spiritual experience that touches the roots of your very existence. It can for some people at some time be a very expressive experience visible for others. But it is not, like in trance, a highly expressive experience for all the people all the time. It is this deeper inner drive that is the very basis of christian life. Allthough the expressive forms are there and are valuable and relevant, I believe that in our personal faith it is not about the t(r)ip but about the iceberg.

Great works

Mike Pilavachi spoke at Soul Survivor about calling and it is always a blessing to listen to him. He spoke about hearing God's voice and acting upon it. That often we think we are not good enough to do God's work and follow His calling. He talked about the bible and that God used a lot of people who thought they were not up to the job. He gave three examples:

• Gideon thought he was not strong enough and that his army was nog big enough. He asked God for confirmation for a few times to be sure that it was God who spoke to him and to be sure about what was His will.
• Mozes, when God called him to speak, said that he was a bad speaker.
• Jeremiah, when God called him, said he was too young.

The essence of the story is that God called these three people despite or because of their weaknesses. Our modern world works through our strengths, but God often works through our weaknesses. This way we will be sure that it is His work being done and that we are working through His strength. It also tells us that we do not have to get an extra degree, to be older, to first have practiced more before we can do God's work. We just have to listen to his voice, get confirmation if we hesitate, and start acting on what we believe.

Nothing is totally true: comment on emerging movement blog

Although there is a lot of truth in the emerging movement blog of today, I still found one piece of criticism on the point that it says that people of today are very much interested in spirituality but not in religion. I there is at least a generational difference in this. Since I live among a lot of students in their early twenties and I find that they, maybe in contrast with older generations, have moved beyond spirituality and want to know about religion today here in the Netherlands. And not only religion, but very often are specifically interested in christianity, which they have come to value as at least interesting, valuable roots of our society. Where older Dutch generations were raised in a dominant christian society, their children were raised in a dechristianizing society which was dominantly allergic to christianity. A lot of todays young people are raised in a non-christian society, without much knowledge about christianity and without the allergy. But, very often nowadays, when they come aware of the christian roots of our society they become genuinly interested in what has driven so many people in christianity in past ages.

Emerging Movement

Welcome to one of my first blogs. In this blog I want to make a statement about why I am involved in the emerging movement and why I think it is relevant.

Since there's great material out there i used a statement from Motionsickness which formulates very well why I think the emerging movement is relevant today in our postmodern culture:

Postmodernism signifies the quest to move beyond modernism, specifically, it involves a rejection of the modern mind-set, but launched under the condition of modernity.” Particular is the rejection of the modern notions of knowledge as certain, objective and good. While modernity was a “rage for order, regulation, stability, singularity and fixity;” postmodernism is a “rage for chaos, uncertainty, otherness, openness, multiplicity and change.” Framed in different terms, postmodernism embraces centrelessness, lack of absolute truths, celebration of diversity, movement from an objectivist to constructionist perspective and signals the end of the ‘meta-narrative’ and the end of science. Another awareness is that in postmodernism, there is “extreme openness to spiritual things” - spiritual but not religious.

A recent response to this atmosphere is the emerging church development. Emerging churches, according to Eddie Gibbs, are “missional communities arising from within postmodern culture and consisting of followers of Jesus who are seeking to be faithful in their place and time.” He brings a warning as well. Emerging church seeks to:

“dismantle ideas of church that simply are not viable in postmodern culture. Neither the gospel nor the culture demands these expressions of faith. Emerging churches remove modern practices of Christianity, not the faith itself…many of us do not know what a postmodern or post-Christendom expression of faith looks like. Perhaps nobody does. But we need to give these leaders space to have this conversation, for this dismantling needs to occur if we are to see the gospel translated for and embodied in twenty-firstcentury Western culture.”

The emerging church response has been that:

“if you have a new world, you need a new church. You have a new world.” 

In terms of answering the question of how Christians relate to culture, the emerging church states that there is a place for ‘adapting to’ and ‘arising from’ culture.

“We won’t need a new religion per se, but a new framework for our theology. Not a new Spirit, but a new spirituality. Not a new Christ, but a new Christian.” There is balance of what must change and what must not.

From: Paper from Motionsickness, found on blog of Andrew Jones

Postmodernism

While modernity was a “rage for order, regulation, stability, singularity and fixity;” postmodernism is a “rage for chaos, uncertainty, otherness, openness, multiplicity and change.

Source