Skip to main content

Utumishi wa Neno launches!

Praise God for a good day with 80 vicars and evangelists from the ACK Diocese of Nairobi - the first of three and a half days together. All of us on the staff team were very much in fear and trembling but soon reassured and encouraged by a warm welcome (we were hosted wonderfully well) and by the privilege of sharing quality time in the Word with brothers and sisters who call with us on the same Lord Jesus Christ.
Bishop Joel Waweru welcomed and reminded us from 1 Kings of the importance of setting ourselves to build the kingdom.
Then we were into 1 Corinthians - a letter we'll be looking at through the next few days in the morning expositions. We were all struck by how bitingly relevant and 'close to the bone' the Corinthian context is to ours. There was some lively debate later about the language of "dragging Christ into the brothel" (cf. 1 Cor. 6:15-20). The main thing that came out of chapter 1 was that elevating leaders gives you a divided church; elevating Christ crucified gives you a united church.
Harrison gave us an overview of preaching in Kenya today noting that preachers are, paradoxically, both honoured and dishonoured in our context. We face temptations to adapt to the desires of our age for novelty and pragmatic solutions and the verbal equivalent of junk food. With the result that the church becomes just another human organisation, competing with other organisations; and the sheep end up malnourished or wandering away.
From Matthew 13 we were struck not only that it is 'The Word that does the Work' but also that it is the Lord's work to open hearts to the message: we can't do that with music or oratory or our 'anointing'. We are just driven to the Word and Prayer.
Through the next few days we'll be particularly focussing on OT narrative and it was good to spend a bit of time in Genesis 1 - seeing particularly that we have a speaking God and that he speaks before we do. We hear the Word even before we come to prayer.
Sammy finished the day for us with a call form Genesis 3, Isaiah 66 and Acts 17 to be servants of the Word. It is not about "my message"; it is about "God's message".

Please pray for tomorrow:
  • James preaching from 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:5
  • Andy teaching on 'Preaching Christ from OT narrative' and 'Getting to the heart of the story'
  • Fidel teaching on 'Spirit-filled preaching'
  • And for our first two major group work sessions - pray that we would really enjoy getting stuck into a passage from Genesis and work hard at reading and listening humbly to the text.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Everlasting gobstopper theology

The idea here is that there are layers to Christ's fullness and when the biblical authors present Christ to us they might only explicitly refer to one layer but as they do that the underlying layers are also implied. Or to put it another way, the glory of the underlying layers shines through the layer that is presented to us. That might sound strange, abstract and not particularly helpful but let me try to explain.  The incarnation implies the pre-existent Word When John identifies "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh" as the key test of orthodoxy, Augustine asks (Homily 6 on 1 John) how can this be when so many heretics happily affirm the humanity of Jesus but deny his deity? Augustine then asks us to dig a bit deeper and consider: From whence did he come? "Was he not God?" Simon Gathercole demonstrated (in his 2006 book, The Pre-existent Son ) that Jesus' phrase in the synoptic gospels, "I have come", implies divine pre-existence.  So whenever we ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A prayer for the summer

LORD God, our God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, our Father, as your children in the northern hemisphere enter this season of the academic year, please give us fresh grace to walk, stand and sit aright. May those of us who enjoy running and walking in your creation give thanks to you for that privilege but not be as concerned about the daily step count on our trackers as in taking practical steps this summer in kindness, in compassion, in forgiveness, in building others up, in pleasing the Lord - steps of progress in gracious, sacrificial, Christ-like loving (Ephesians 4-5).  May those of us who look forward to getting out of the city give thanks to you for the privilege of travel but not ultimately be as concerned about the physical location in which we stand (whether "beneath the boughs" or on a hot and sweaty tube train) as about our location "in Christ" - the address of every spiritual blessing, complete forgiveness, intimate sonship, total security (Ephesians ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Holding together restlessness and optimism

Piper has a great section in his Marks of a Spiritual Leader  where he holds together two vital biblical leadership virtues: 1. RESTLESS Spiritual leaders have a holy discontentment with the status quo. Non-leaders have inertia that causes them to settle in and makes them very hard to move off of dead center. Leaders have a hankering to change, to move, to reach out, to grow, and to take a group or an institution to new dimensions of ministry. They have the spirit of Paul, who said in Philippians 3:13, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Leaders are always very goal-oriented people. God’s history of redemption is not finished. The church is shot through with imperfections, lost sheep are still not in the fold, needs of every sort in the world are unmet, sin infects the saints. It is un...
Post a Comment
Read more