Desert faithfulness

 Lets agree is that a spiritual desert is an environment which lacks:

 

• evidence of God’s powerful activity
• awareness of his presence
• faith for change

 All these are modelled in the Dry Bone Valley.

Don’t diss the desert!

Charismatics are results oriented.  That’s no bad thing.  God is on a mission and he wants his mission to be successful.  He cares that the death of Jesus pays off.  When things are going well and revival/renewal is the greater flow of what has already been a steady stream of productivity, it is hard for God to get our attention.

Emerging Pneumatology

Since December I’ve been working on understanding the emergent critique in the UK of the charismatic movement and have just about finished writing it up, which means that I should get back to blogging. 

Much of the comment on practice is pretty much summed up in a brilliant video which Paul Roberts linked to. But I think it is possible to see a theological basis for, particularly, the alt.worship angle.  I think its possible to see a strong influence of Jurgen Moltmann’s Spirit of Life. 

Here’s what I have written.  I’ll post my reflections later.

Trying to catch up

I have just started to use RSS feeds.  I wonder whether I will be able to keep up with some of the blogs that I feel are important but never get to use.

Just had a long weekend at Dayspring with Jenny Campbell, who has a prophetic ministry.  Friends had previously noted that often visiting prophetic men, however authentic tend to sideline women when dishing out personal encouragements.  We hoped Jenny would be different and she certainly was–the women members of our team are bouncing around like they have had caffiene to last a month.  One of the other things that was a real bonus was that she a couple of pretty good ways of using alt.worship styles–she may not think that’s an endorsement–for framing manifestation gifts, particularly healing and prophecy. It blended some elements of ritual, meditation, soaking prayer, anointing oil and laying on hands–lots of the stuff that I need with a background of folksy music which is just my kind of thing.  Some people found it easier to get down even when taking notes! See pix.  I found that it jump started my creativity in that area.  If any shape of worship doesn’t allow space for God to do surprises or for people to connect authentically, it don’t work.  I never got chance to ask her much about it, the weekend was so hectic.  I would like to know whether she feels the specific stuff can stay authentic if transferred under the right conditions.  We are just starting to process the stuff she brought.  Interesting times!

Suddenly or slowly?

Well! The session on Sunday was OK.  Not brilliant because I was thinking out loud.  But for those of us in the leadership team, its helped us to get a conversation going.  Revival is one (I hope there aren’t too many) of the elephants in the room.  We have been reflecting on the revival prophecies from round about the time of Diana’s death when we were a really new church.  But more of that when we have some conclusions.  Last night I was in the pub with some really knowledgable and thoughtful guys.  Pete Levenson referred to Steve Hollingshurst who is reaching into the New Age culture.  Steve meets lots of people who are into astral projection and have found themselves having revelations of Jesus.  He wonders whether this could be evidence of revival of a quite different kind. The immediate relevance of this is that it might support a rather different interpretation of the famous Diana prophecies– but that requires a whole other post when we have got further in our reflective process.  Ron Willoughby came and joined us later and spoke to the question of what revival might look like in our culture.  He raised some really interesting questions which centred on the idea that–while our praxis might be moving towards conversion as process rather than single decision point our mental images of revival have not.  He suggested that the Day of Pentecost might have looked very different if, starting from where our culture is today, 3000 people emerged into the light at different speeds over six to twelve months.