Whole-bible Christianity (Part 2)

Jul 29, 2009


Even though this little wineskin (of creation, redemption, mission and consummation) is limited somehow, I am finding it quite helpful to challenge my own view of God. How much of God do I see?
Whatever we see of God in truth by grace, goes on to change us, and brings a workable, growing Christianity that makes sense of the world around us. Conversely, whichever part of God we choose to ignore, eventually results in a poor view of many other things in life. The knock-on effect is huge, because a simple poverty in the privacy of our thoughts about God surely works out into a chain reaction of other poverties, whether emotional, physical, visional, economical, spiritual or biblical.

Some people are energetic when life is celebrated in colour and flavour, but struggle with the idea of signs, wonders and miracles. Others are eager for masculine strategies, while they feel too much emphasis on preaching pure gospel is for ivory-tower theologians. Still others are desperate for God’s manifest presence, while they look upon artists with a sense that they’re wasting their time painting, composing or photographing.
My big dilemma in this article is that we all lean towards believing we are so balanced, when in actual fact, we are all quite terrible in one or two of these chapters. I, myself, am naturally excited about chapters one and two, Creation and Redemption, but have to meditate upon the others. Just knowing my bent is already helpful.

So, we are developing our property, just launched this new website and populating our calendar with varied forums to care better for our members. We are reengaging our Missional passion as a church.

We are creating a property that will become a meeting place for Pretoria East, complete with different sports fields, a chapel, an open-air amphitheatre, a coffee shop with French baking, a 1hectare play park for children joined to the coffee shop, a jogging track, a forest, multimedia studios, an art gallery, a 400-seat theatre, a solitude room/library to allow silent meditation, a guest house for visitors, a bookstore, a new church building and offices, and a work of art at the entrance to our property, to celebrate God’s glory. Even though it is broken up in phases, we are seeing the future clearly and want to begin with the end in mind.

We are excited about this website, for the sake of increasing our communication and organizing abilities. We want it to grow as a resource of articles and videos, music and sermons, blogs and testimonies.

We have launched many forums for closer shepherding, including training and discussions, groups and gatherings around various needs. For more information, see our calendar.

The ideas of Creation, Redemption, Mission and Consummation outline why we do what we do; We see God as (artistic) Creator, (righteous-merciful) Redeemer, (strategic-detailed-concerned) Missioner and (urgent) Omega of all things, and exactly because of this seeing, we want to be like Him and reflect Him totally.
We are not building this church. Jesus is. We are not building a web-based ministry. (We can’t even catch a cold through the internet, so we certainly won’t catch the essence of covenant either.) We are not developing properties for the sake of developing properties. We are not stuffing a calendar to look busy or be busy.
We are called to be God’s own. We are called to trust. God does the true spiritual work, while we trust through prayer and faith. We have a vision of God, that is causing us to see the world differently. We will work, and give money, and dream, and build and web and care and sing and meet, but none of these are ends in themselves. God is our end, not our means.