Those who know me will know that Greg Boyd has been one of my teachers and theological mentors over the years. He continually stretches my thinking and challenges me to wrestle courageously with the Biblical text and not mindlessly adopt the traditional beliefs handed down through church history. Some of his views are controversial and I don’t necessarily agree with him on everything. In fact, I don’t. However, he is a passionate lover of Jesus, preacher of the gospel, and thoroughly committed to the authority of Scripture.

So, it is exciting to find some of the core aspects of his teaching summarized succinctly in one place — his ReKnew Manifesto. What do you think about his challenge found in these crucial areas of faith and doctrine? Enjoy! -JB

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A ReKnew Manifesto by Greg Boyd

As our curious name indicates, ReKnew exists to encourage believers and skeptics alike to re-think things they thought they already knew. We want to promote a beautiful, Jesus-looking vision of God and his kingdom. We want to promote a host of related theological convictions that we believe were compromised or lost in traditional Christianity—especially since the 5th century when the Church first acquired political power and became the religion of “Christendom.” And we want to be a catalytic resource for the new tribe of Jesus-followers who are rising up and re-thinking their faith now that Christendom—which has been dying for over a century—is gasping its last breaths.

This does not mean we aren’t deeply appreciative for the multitude of true and beautiful aspects of the Church throughout history. To the contrary, we believe that all theological reflection should be humbly carried out in a respectful dialogue with the Church tradition. Yet the focus of ReKnew is to challenge those aspects of the tradition we don’t believe are consistent with the movement Jesus birthed, and with the teachings of the New Testament.

What follows is an overview of these core convictions stated in their simplest form. You might think of this as the first draft of a “ReKnew Manifesto.”

1. ReThink the Source of Life

Because traditional Christianity has often held that people get right with God by believing the right things, many Christians tend to get their “life” (their core sense of identity, worth, significance and being loved) from the rightness of their beliefs (as discussed here). Our conviction is that followers of Jesus should get all of their “life” from the love that God has shown them on Calvary. Every other source of “life”—including the rightness of our beliefs—is an idol.

2. ReThink the Nature of Faith

Many Christians throughout history (and still today) have assumed that a person’s faith is only as strong as the degree to which they feel certainty and free from doubt. Likewise, many have assumed faith is opposed to reason, antithetical to historical-critical approaches to Scripture, and at odds with much of the scientific enterprise—especially evolutionary theory.

Our conviction is that faith is not the absence of doubt, but the willingness to commit to a course of action even though one is not certain. However, that is not to say faith is irrational. While faith always goes beyond reason, we don’t believe it should ever go against it. We thus believe Jesus-followers should never be afraid of wrestling with biblical criticism, evolutionary theory, or any other field of rational inquiry.

Along the same lines, we do not believe the goal of faith is to arrive at a point at which we convince ourselves we possess all the right beliefs, and therefore close off further inquiry. Rather, when we get all our “life” from Christ (and not from the rightness of our beliefs), and when we understand that faith is not the absence of doubt, we are free to view faith instead as a process of honest, open-ended inquiry. It’s our conviction that the fearful, dogmatic rigidity that characterizes so much of contemporary Evangelicalism reflects an idolatrous relationship with beliefs, which in turn causes many to become hostile and unloving when debating doctrinal issues. We are convinced God is more concerned with the love with which we debate than the content of what we debate.

3. ReThink Our Picture of God

The dominant image of God espoused in the religion of Christendom has been a composite picture in which the revelation of God in Christ has been fused with violent images derived from the Old Testament, as well as other philosophical sources.

Our conviction is that Jesus is the one and only perfect revelation of God’s true nature(Hebrews 1:3). Jesus doesn’t merely reveal part of what God is like. Rather, the fullness of God is in Christ, and revealed through Christ (Colossians 1:19; 2:9). As Jesus himself tells us, when we see him, we see the very character of the Father (John 14:7-9). Moreover, it’s our conviction that Jesus’ self-sacrificial death on the cross expresses the theme that weaves everything Jesus was about together. From his incarnation, to his ministry, to his ascension, Jesus reveals the truth that God’s nature is other-oriented, self-sacrificial love. We thus believe thatall of our thinking about God, as well as all of our reading of Scripture, must be done through the lens of the cross and with this cruciform understanding of God’s love.

4. ReThink the Kingdom of God

Once the Church was given political power in the 4^th and 5^th century, it has more often than not looked like a “Christianized” version of the kingdoms of the world, often relying on political and military power to advance its own self-interest.

As the one sinless person in history, we believe Jesus is the one and only perfect reflection of what it looks like for God to fully reign over a person’s life. Jesus is thus the perfect embodiment of “the kingdom of God” (the “dome” over which God reigns). We at ReKnew therefore believe Jesus-followers are individually and corporately called and empowered by the Spirit to look like Jesus and reflect God’s humble, self-sacrificial love toward all people. To the extent that an individual or group doesn’t look like Jesus, the kingdom of God is not present—regardless of what the individual or group professes to believe.

Given the massive harm that has been done throughout Church history when the Church has become too closely aligned with versions of the kingdom of the world, and given that the Church continues to be co-opted by political regimes (especially in America), we believe it’s vital that Jesus-followers today strive to keep the kingdom “holy”—which means separate and distinct from the kingdoms of the world. Of course we are called to assume responsibility for poverty, side with the oppressed, and fight injustice as well as all other social ills. But the way followers of Jesus are to do this is not by telling governments what they should do. We are to do it the way Jesus did it—by sacrificing our time, energy, and resources on behalf of others.

5. ReThink Providence

The dominant image of God within Christendom after Augustine (5^th century) has been that of an all-controlling deity. The Church has therefore tended to espouse a “blueprint worldview” in which it has assumed every event that comes to pass conforms to a meticulous “blueprint” God had before the creation of the world. In this view, God wills (or at least allows) every particular event for a specific good reason—including each and every evil.

Our conviction is that the cross reveals the kind of power on which God relies: not powerover others, but power under others. It is the power of self-sacrificial love—which is the greatest power there is, for it alone is able to transform hearts. Along with every church father before Augustine, therefore, our conviction is that “God is a God of persuasion, not coercion”—as Irenaeus (2^nd century) put it. While God remains in control of the big picture, we believe God has given humans and angels free will, which means we have a degree of “say-so” over what comes to pass. We can either use that “say-so” to further God’s purposes, or to resist them. As such, we believe all evil is the result of the misuse of created free wills, whether human or angelic. In place of the “blueprint worldview,” therefore, we advocate a “warfare worldview” in which the creation is viewed as a battlefield between God and Satan, along with all created human and angelic agents who align themselves with one or the other.

Moreover, since creation includes free agents who have the power to resolve possible courses of actions into actual events, we believe the future is partly comprised of possibilities and that the all-knowing God therefore knows them as such. Yet, because God is infinitely intelligent and can anticipate future possibilities as effectively as certainties, we don’t believe God loses any providential advantage. Whatever comes to pass, God had been preparing a plan, from all eternity, on how he would bring good out of it in case it came to pass. So while we don’t believe everything happens for a good purpose, we believe everything happens witha good purpose—namely, the eternally prepared good purpose God had in place in case any given event came to pass.

6. ReThink the Atonement

The majority of Evangelicals today believe that the main significance of what Christ has done on the cross (the atonement) is that he satisfied the Father’s wrath against sin by being punished in our place, thereby allowing the Father to accept us despite our sin. While the Church has always understood that Jesus died in our place, as our substitute, the depiction of the Father venting his wrath on Jesus instead of on us  — the “penal substitution” view of the atonement — originated with Calvin and Luther. The Church has always embraced a variety of atonement theories, but it’s worth noting that the “Christus Victor” view of the atonement was the dominant view for the first 1000 years of Church history. This view holds that “[t]he reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn3:8; Heb.2:14), which in turn liberated humanity and all creation from his oppression and reconciled everything to God.

With the historic-orthodox Church, we affirm that Jesus died as our substitute and experienced the death-consequences of sin in our place. But we do not believe this means the Father needed to “satisfy” his own wrath by violently pouring it out on his Son in order to forgive us and reconcile us to himself. And while we affirm that Christ accomplished a variety of things by his life and death and resurrection, we believe that Christ’s victory over Satan and the powers of darkness lies at the base of them all. We thus consider the “Christus Victor” view of the atonement to be the foundation to all other views.  

7. ReThink Salvation

With the rise of the penal substitution view of the atonement, the western church began to think of salvation increasingly in legal categories. God has thus come to be viewed as the judge, humans as the guilty defendants, and Jesus as our defense attorney who allows us to be acquitted by suffering our sentence in our place. As a result, salvation has come to be thought of primarily as an acquittal (escaping hell) that people receive when they simply believe that Jesus did this for us. Among the many unfortunate consequences of this view is the fact that Christianity has become much more focused on how we benefit from what God has done for us in the afterlife than it is focused on the beautiful things God wants to do in our present life—the relationship God wants with us, the character that God wants to cultivate in us, and the things God wants to accomplish through us now.

While legal metaphors are sometimes used to express salvation in the New Testament, the dominant way of expressing it is as a covenant—like marriage. Salvation, in our view, is not primarily about being acquitted by God, or about the afterlife. Rather, salvation is about becoming part of “the bride of Christ” and participating in—and being transformed by—the fullness of God’s life that he opens up for us in the present. For this reason, salvation is not merely about believing in Jesus; it’s even more profoundly about being empowered to follow Jesus’ example. Salvation thus cannot be divorced from the call to follow Jesus’ example of loving enemies and refraining from violence; of caring for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized. It’s about manifesting God’s fullness of life by cultivating a counter-cultural lifestyle that revolts against every aspect of society that is inconsistent with the character of God and his will for the world. It’s about living and praying in a way that actualizes the fullness of the Lord’s prayer that the Father’s will would be done “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

8. ReThink Hell

The earliest Christians understood “hell” in several different ways. Some viewed it as annihilation, others as eternal conscious suffering, and others redemptive process that will result in everyone being saved (“universalism”). After Augustine however, the view of hell as eternal conscious suffering became dominant. Annihilationism quickly became a marginal view and universalism was eventually officially condemned.

In light of the love that God has revealed for all humans in Christ, we are convinced that if there is any way that God could save all, he most certainly would save all. Moreover, we don’t see how anyone who genuinely loves all people—as Christ commands and empowers us to do—could fail to hope that God’s love will eventually rescue and transform everyone. At the same time, our belief in free will rules out the Universalist’s belief that there will come a time when everyone must be saved. Moreover, we don’t see in Scripture sufficient warrant for being confident that all will be saved.

What is more certain to us is that the fire of God’s love will salvage and purify everything in a person that is consistent with God’s loving character and will burn up (metaphorically speaking) everything that is not. If it unfortunately turns out that people can sink to the point where there is nothing salvageable, it’s our conviction God will justly, yet mercifully, withdraw his sustaining hand, allowing them to return to nothingness – “as though they had never been” (Obadiah 16). When Scripture speaks of hell as “eternal,” we believe this most likely refers to the effect of this punishment, not the duration of anyone’s experience of it.

However, we are convinced that what is more important than the particular views we hold is the manner in which we hold them. Since the biblical material on this topic is ambiguous, and since the witness of the early church is not uniform on this matter, we encourage Jesus-followers today to not christen their own view as the orthodox view, but rather to allow all views to be entertained and lovingly debated.

9. ReThink Humanity

Against the long-standing patriarchal mindset of the Church tradition, ReKnew is passionate about encouraging husbands and wives to assume an egalitarian mindset in their marriages, and passionate about urging local Church communities to empower women to serve in any leadership capacity for which they are gifted and called to serve. So too, against the ethnocentrism of the western Church tradition, we believe Jesus died to create “one new humanity” (Ephesians 2:15) that has done away with the separating walls erected from the curse of Babel. Racial reconciliation is thus not something a church can choose to engage in or not. We believe it is one of the reasons for which Jesus died and that it must therefore be proclaimed and practiced by all followers of Jesus.

Conclusion

This is, in a nutshell, what ReKnew stands for. There are a host of other beliefs and practices ReKnew hopes to challenge people to reconsider that need not necessarily be elaborated in this “manifesto.” We of course don’t expect all who get onboard with ReKnew to agree with each and every particular thing we espouse. But if you’re one of those who believe it’s time to thoroughly re-think the Christian faith—especially our picture of God and our understanding of his kingdom—we are here to help you do that and to help build a network of like-minded, open-minded, passionate disciples.

The scary thing is how “right” I was in my own eyes at the time. Even scarier is how right I would be in most people’s eyes as well. It’s a classic example of how different the “American Way” is from the “Jesus Way.” Here’s the story.

Today I was doing business with someone, and as the customer I was very unsatisfied with the service I received. The service I requested was blundered several times, they made a mess of our place, the product they delivered was faulty and didn’t end up working. I called them to come back and fix it. I also felt that they owed me a refund for the poor service and all day hassle. He would give me a refund, but then he would not finish the job that I needed done for this weekend.

I was wronged. I demanded “justice” or “recompense.” If they want my business again they better make things right. I demand my money back. He owed me. He was in my debt.

Are you with me? Can you feel my righteous indignation?

What was the service and product? I called a local guy who rents out soft hot tubs for our baptism service this Sunday. He brought the tub, and the motor/heater was shot. He went home and brought another back. It worked. So I filled the tub, and then it started leaking!  I pumped it out before it flooded our new sanctuary, and told him to come back with another tub. I also asked for a refund for all the hassle.

I think my exact words were, “If you want my business again in the future, you need to make this right and give us a refund.”

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Business is business. Customer is king. He let me down, and I demanded payback.

Now I was upset because this entire fiasco (which should have taken an hour) had taken over 4 hours of my precious sermon preparation time. This guy’s crumbling tub rental operation was keeping me from crafting a dazzling message on the amazing grace of God and the forgiveness and mercy he extends to us sinners when we were unable to pay him back. “How can this guy still be in business with this pathetic performance today?” I thought. He’s unreliable, his tubs leak, his heaters don’t work, he’s too old and out of shape to deliver and set them up on his own. He made a mess of the church, and won’t give me a refund for the trouble.

I was upset. I had to leave for a bit to blow off some steam and take a deep breath. As I drove to pick up Peter from daycare, the inner voice of Jesus began to whisper. The light of the gospel began to go on and shed light on the state of my heart in this situation. The whisper grew louder and louder until finally Jesus’ megaphone was making plain the gospel truth I was completely missing at the time:

“Jeremy, you are a Christian. Christians don’t demand payback when other people wrong them. They don’t demand “justice” as the world does. Instead, they remember “that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”  Like leaky tubs and broken motors, your life apart from me would be a mess spilling moral failure all over the place.  When a Christian is wronged, they follow my example by forgiving the debt and absorbing the cost onto themselves. Yes, there is always a cost. Either the offender must pay the penalty, or the one offended can absorb the debt themselves and extend grace. Law demands payback. Grace absorbs the cost and forgives the debtor. You set them free from their failure, and don’t hold them in your debt. Why don’t you forgive this man instead? Wouldn’t that be the Christian thing to do?”

[gulp]

I was not a Christian today in my dealings with this man. The Holy Spirit convicted me. My heart was suddenly softened. I began to look at this man through the eyes of calvary. I started to wonder if he was making ends meet with this small and shaky business. I started to feel bad that his equipment was all starting to fail him at the same time. I began to wonder if he could even afford to give me a refund and still pay the bills at the end of the month.

In the end, we got a tub that isn’t leaking (much) and I was able to apologize to him. We laughed it off by agreeing that somedays everything seems to go wrong, and in this life things tend to break at the most inconvenient times. I paid him full price. I chose to forgive him whatever debt I felt he owed me for the 6 hours of inconvenience. And instead of me preparing a sermon on God’s grace to preach to others on Sunday, I was the one in need of a message on forgiveness today. And the Holy Spirit preached a doozy.

While it is usually the waters of baptism that speak symbolically of God’s forgiveness, today it was the leaky tub that spoke to me.

Tomorrow I will try to be more like Jesus. How about you?

-John Wesley, “Preface” to Sermons on Several Occasions, vol. 1 (1746)

“Then Paul answered, “What do you mean by weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” —Acts 21:13
 
The Church at this moment needs men, the right kind of men, bold men….We languish for men who feel themselves expendable in the warfare of the soul, who cannot be frightened by threats of death because they have already died to the allurements of this world. Such men will be free from the compulsions that control weaker men. They will not be forced to do things by the squeeze of circumstances; their only compulsion will come from within—or from above.
 
This kind of freedom is necessary if we are to have prophets in our pulpits again instead of mascots. These free men will serve God and mankind from motives too high to be understood by the rank and file of religious retainers who today shuttle in and out of the sanctuary. They will make no decisions out of fear, take no course out of a desire to please, accept no service for financial considerations, perform no religious act out of mere custom; nor will they allow themselves to be influenced by the love of publicity or the desire for reputation.

A.W. Tozer, Of God and Men, 11-13.

While I have enjoyed this rather faithful telling, I have also been reminded of just how violent and barbarous the OT can be, and some of the acts/commands given by God make me squirm in my seat. What about all those Egyptian babies slaughtered by the Angel of Death because of one pharaoh’s stubborn heart?  How many times do we hear the Israelite men yell out “For Israel” before plunging their sword into an enemy’s heart?  And its hard to watch the Israelites ruthlessly invade city after city as they take the Promised Land for their God.

Now, I am well aware of the many ways evangelical Christians try to soften these stories, or justify the violence. Still I can’t help but wonder how these portraits of God can be easily reconciled with the portrait of God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ who tells us to “love our enemy” and shows us a way of non-violence in dealing with our enemies.

If you share these feelings then I recommend checking out the honest ponderings of Greg Boyd on this difficult subject. No evangelical scholar is more honest and courageous in working through the complexities of this issue than Boyd (and sure to be controversial). Read this for starters. Love him or hate him, Boyd is not afraid to ask the hard questions that many of us are afraid to admit out loud. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, but don’t accuse him of not wrestling with Scripture in a vigorous and Christocentric way.

Peace!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So I won’t try to describe the product of the past seven years of ministry, prayer, obedience to God, relentlessly chasing after a God-given vision and holding fast to a dream for a new venue in the heart of downtown Mound where we can do innovative ministry and outreach.

God said, “Go.” We obeyed. God provided. We said, “Can we really pull this off?” He said, “Trust and obey.” We marched on. People came. People left. More people came. Servants served. Builders built. People gave money. And now we invite you all to come and see what God has done and is about to do among us at MainStreet!

Grand Opening BENEFIT CONCERT for the local Food Shelf Saturday, March 9 @ 7pm.

Grand Opening WORSHIP CELEBRATION on Sunday, March 17 @ 10am.

Enjoy the pictures….and tell me what words they convey to you!

For His Glory and the salvation of the lost!

Jeremy

“Christian Communitas In The Missio Dei: Living Faithfully in the Tension between Cultural Osmosis and Alienation“

“Connecting with the missio Dei, partnering with a cause greater than oneself, and experiencing communitas would appear to be a natural fit for the church. Christian communitas and its byproduct of Christian community is at least an ideal, if not a reality in most churches. Would not the opportunity to partner in God’s greater mission and to deepen relation with God, with each other, and the world be attractive? In his book A World Waiting to Be Born M. Scott Peck shares his experience when he developed the Foundation for Community Encouragement (FCE), an organization dedicated to promoting his version of genuine transformative community.

When we began FCE, we assumed that the church would be a natural market for its services. Christians generally knew that the early church seemed to have had an extraordinary amount of community. . . . Many clergy and laypeople bemoaned the lack of community within their churches. . . . What organization could possibly be more interested in welcoming the presence of God into its midst?

The results within the church were disappointing. Churches showed virtually no interest in building a deeper sense of commitment to each other or their surrounding culture. After analyzing possible reasons for this resistance, Peck concludes:

Community requires a great deal of time and work. The workplace is the center of most people’s lives. Next comes the family. Church, if it comes in at all, is usually a poor third or fourth. Most churchgoers simply do not have the time to “do” community at church. Nor do they want to do the painful work of emotionally stretching at church that community requires. The few whomake attempts to actualize the church as a place of the Kingdom of God on earth may find themselves silenced by the congregation with an enormously powerful, subtle effectiveness.

Communitas, if it is experienced at all in churches, now occurs during short one to two week periods where we are taken out of our comfort zone and placed in a situation where we are supposed to do something. This is also known as the short term mission trip. The glowing reports that come back reflect the changes that have occurred in the lives of the sent. Youth complain that church is nothing like that and wonder why communitas cannot be a regular, rather than a once-in-a- lifetime, event.

According to Peck’s research communitas does exist in Western culture, but not in the church. It is alive and well in the business world. “Here is where a single decision may cost [people] their employment, their livelihood. Here is where millions of dollars may be in play every day—sums of money a thousand times greater than their entire annual church budget. These decisions count.”

If the task is urgent enough, if it is truly life and death, then those involved will be willing to pay the price to experience and become communitas. Otherwise, we sit comfortably and allow the creeping influence of cultural osmosis to slowly do its work. Understanding the urgency of our participation with the missio Dei transforms our cultural blindness to compassionate incarnation and prophetic intelligibility.”

One day Ruth heard that a man named Jesus from Nazareth would be passing by. The miraculous reputation of this Jesus had preceded him so that when he came near Simon cried out, “Lord! Son of David! Please help me to see!” And he was healed.

Turning towards the one he most wanted to see, Simon was disappointed to find that Ruth was nowhere to be found. But what did he see? The filth of a poor Asian market, debris in muddy piles, bodies of animals lying unburied emitting a stench never noticed before, crowds of people bathed in sweat, vendors’ fatigued faces, cruelty, malnourishment, and death.

Closing his eyes he retraced his way home, but the ancient, toothless woman who answered the door praising God for her son’s healing repulsed him. Making his way to Ruth’s home where she was hiding, Simon insisted that she show herself. At last she opened the door, but his joy turned to immediate fear and disgust. There stood his beloved Ruth so hideously deformed by a burn that he could not stand to look at her. Finally he saw Jesus crucified. Falling on his knees Simon cried, “Oh God, give me back my blindness!”

I find Kukrit’s story both jarring and revealing, and frankly I often need that. How quickly I am absorbed by my own cultural environment of comfort and optimism and forget that for many people suffering is their daily reality of life. Culture is where the blind Simons of the world must somehow survive in the contradiction between the promises of a healing Jesus and the present cruelties of the human condition. As Gustavo Gutierrez said, “How do you tell the poor that God really loves them when everything in their life points in the other direction?”

As a Christ follower in a broken world, I live in the tension between survival in the battlefield culture of the street and seeking refuge in the sanctuary culture of the saved. Both can become completely absorbing. Both can prevent me from following God’s priorities in the world. In the words of Lucien Legrand, this is the tension of the “puzzling tangle of intercultural dependence and counterculture, of osmosis and protest.”  I have chosen to call it the challenge of living faithfully in the tension between cultural osmosis and cultural alienation.

If nothing else, my years as a missionary taught me that God had plenty of work to do in my heart as I sought to partner with what God was already doing in the Buddhist culture of northeast Thailand. I found it impossible to live faithfully in the cultural tension between osmosis and alienation on my own or even as a missionary family. With our Thai sisters and brothers we had to become something known in anthropology as communitas, companions together sharing, not the bread but the rice of life,4 and the mutual experience of God’s grace at work in us as we sought to follow God’s leading together. The thesis of my paper is that through Christian communitas the church lives faithfully in the tension between cultural osmosis and alienation and is continually transformed to God through partnership with the missio Dei already at work in the culture wherein God has placed her.”

-Excerpt from Paul DeNeui. Christian Communitas in the Missio Dei: Living Faithfully in the Tension Between Cultural Osmosis and Alienation. Ex Auditu. Vol. 23, 2007, 92-107. 

- Tozer

I just watched “Stranger Than Fiction” again starring Will Ferrell.  I thought the movie and story was alright – nothing too special. But I absolutely LOVE the idea that drives this movie.  If you haven’t seen the movie, here is the summary from the back of the case:

Will Ferrell stars as Harold Crick, a lonely IRS agent whose mundane existence is transformed when he hears a mysterious voice narrating his life. With the help of Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), Harold discovers he’s the main character in a novel-in-progress and that the voice belongs to Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), an eccentric author famous for killing her main characters in creative ways.  Harold must quickly track down Eiffel and stop her before she conjures up a way to finish him off.

The parallels and contrasts between this silly story and the True Story of God and humanity as revealed in Scripture are quite profound.  Let me just share a few observations.

SIGNIFICANT CONTRASTS

1. The author of Harold’s story is evil and seeks to find a creative ways to kill her characters.  In God’s Story the characters tend to find creative ways of bringing about their own destruction, but God in His infinite love and mercy finds a way to rescue them from death!

2. While Harold must hurriedly track down the Author before time runs out, in God’s Story it is the Author who relentlessly pursues His prodigal characters before it is too late.

BIBLICAL PARALLELS

1. We are indeed living in a story driven by a particular plot, with God as the primary author and ourselves as one character among many others.  Waking up to this reality is one of the most significant moments of one’s life.  The sooner we find our place in this larger story, the more meaningful our lives will be.

2.  Far too many people today find their lives as lonely and mundane as Harold Crick, the IRS agent.  Many of us, like Harold, will only find real meaning, significance and purpose when we begin to hear the still, small voice of the narrator trying to get our attention amidst all the noise of our daily shuffle.

3. Harold’s future hangs in the balance and is dependent upon whether or not he can find the author of his story and make peace with her.  Our future hope also hangs in the balance and depends on whether or not we can make peace with our Author.

4. While it is a bit of a stretch, Professor Hilbert plays the role of the mediator who helps the confused, scared Harold make sense of the plot he’s in and connect him with the author of his story.  God’s Story is full of prophets, pastors, teachers and ultimately Jesus himself who function as mediators between lost souls and the Author, unfolding the plot and bringing us back into relationship with God.

If you want to pursue this concept of “Narrative Theology” further I would recommend the small book and DVD called Epic: Discover the Story God is Telling by John Eldredge.  One of his opening lines is that “life often feels like a movie you’ve shown up for 40 minutes late; something important seems to be going on but you’re not quite sure what.”  I am taking our high school group through the Epic curriculum for the next 5 weeks exploring our place within God’s Big Story.  Check it out the trailer below: