Friday, January 17, 2014

A sure-fire way to shrink the church

First, I suggest that we bring the biblical worldview of the spirit world to the forefront of our conversation in hermeneutics since trends in global Christianity suggest a link between this worldview and church growth. The emphasis on prayer, spiritual warfare, and healing in non-Western Christianity is rooted in this world concept. Western scholarship is losing credibility in this regard as our scholarship is increasingly perceived as “peer talk” with no substantial contribution to faith in the transcendent. Even our foreign students who return home are sometimes branded “evangelical without power” and portrayed as a threat to church growth due to the “misguided” notions of scholarship and “Bultmannian” readings of biblical texts. Global Voices, page 97

<idle musing>
That is a convicting paragraph! "...foreign students who return home are sometimes branded “evangelical without power” and portrayed as a threat to church growth due to the “misguided” notions of scholarship and “Bultmannian” readings of biblical texts." Something is wrong! We need to recover the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives! We need to cease being practical atheists and start expecting God to be present in our daily lives!.
</idle musing>

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