Making the gospel for all - Duncan Forbes at Keswick - Part 2

My notes from Duncan's second seminar at week two of the Keswick Convention. Sharply insightful and very practical. Thanks so much for this Duncan. Lord give me the grace to repent and do this.

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Justification by faith – we’re all in the wrong, we’re clothed with Jesus’ righteousness - so we can take a critique, we don’t need to be defensive

1. We don’t need a new strategy – we need repentance - acknowledge the prejudice in our hearts and cry out to God to change our hearts
2. Narratives that we’ve been sold – e.g. middle class parenting better than working class values/parenting or this ethnicity is lazy or people with this accent are less intelligent – need to be challenged by getting to know people
3. Take a missionary approach – rather than a colonising mentality. What are the wrappers of our Christianity that might be putting people off:

• Preaching – instead of alienating illustrations and assumptions we need to: 
• work on thinking through the different groups of people we’re speaking to and what is the Fallen Condition Focus in the passage that will resonate with everyone we’re speaking to
• anchor it in the text - what does the primary source say? – don’t springboard (we think we don’t but we do) or do ‘speeches’ – take people through the text, break it down, let the Bible do the speaking
• Discipleship – is it done in a way that everyone can get it and pass it on? Urban Catechism - e.g. gun picture
• Not potted plant church / cookie cutter church - "Do not bring us the Gospel as a potted plant. Bring us the seed of the Gospel and plant it in our soil.”(Murthis, Indian Evangelist)  Allow the gospel to answer the questions the particular culture is asking – e.g. crying out for hope, crying out in lament – actually emphases in the Bible that majority British culture has ignored. Be particularly sensitive to clothing and music
• Growing together – Heb. 3:13, Eph. 4:15 – we need spaces for people from different cultures to speak the truth in love to one another – e.g. re. blindspots of self-importance, entitlement/victim mentality, success-orientation, materialism, comfort, anger, authority
• Understanding worldview – ask people so you start to understand their ‘worldview tree’ (Ted Turnau) and do the work of understanding your own – roots (deeply held beliefs), trunk (the story of your people), branches (how do you learn stuff), fruit (how do you live and operate)
• Contextualisation – Dean Flemming, Contextualisation in the New Testament – e.g. Luke's Gospel - identificational (making the form fit with what is familiar and accessible by the surrounding culture) and transformational (takes people from where they are to somewhere else) – are we doing this in our church practice?

Essential reading:

• 3 elements of council estate preaching
• Ways we make minorities invisible
• A Wilderness of Mirrors (Mark Meynell)