Nomad Extra: Christmas Special

Our final podcast offering of 2009 is now online for your amusement (or bewilderment!).

Join us for some after dinner chat, as we reflect on a year (nearly) of podcasting and missional engagement.

Laugh with us as we recall how Hannah told one of our neighbours to “GO AWAY!!” at the end of a house party (she thought he was Michael. Not that that’s any excuse!) . Cry with us as we hear how Lora nearly threw up before interviewing Rob Bell. And stand amazed at the shocking revelations of the lengths Tim went to, to cover up the amateurish quality of his first interviews.

As some of our longer serving listeners may recall, we used to have an unsigned band slot on the show. Well, as it’s Christmas, we thought we’d revive this feature, and give a new up-and-coming artist some exposure and a shot at the big time (and, oh how we regretted it!)

We hope you all have a great Christmas. See you in the New Year.

From all of us at Nomad

Rediscovering Christmas

My enthusiasm for Christmas first began to wane when I started to receive socks and handkerchiefs for presents, rather than the year’s must have toy. Then, some years later, I discovered that Jesus wasn’t in fact born on Christmas day, and that the church didn’t celebrate Jesus’ birth until the emperor Constantine ‘Christianised’ the festival of the Unconquerable Sun god, in order to try and unite his empire. On top of all that, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the consumerism that surrounded the festival. Consequently, I’d pretty much given up on Christmas. Over the last couple of years, however, I’ve rediscovered it!

It’s true that Christmas isn’t a biblical festival, but Paul is clear that we have the freedom to observe special days if we want, as long as we dedicate them to God (Rm. 14:5-6). And it seems to me that Christmas is a great time to demonstrate two key elements of God’s kingdom.

Christmas is the time when we’re encouraged to reflect on the incarnation, when ‘the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood’ (Jn. 1:14). Through the incarnation God had radically changed the way he related to the world, he was no longer an invisible, transcendent God, instead he was like us and lived with us. I believe the incarnation is a model for the way we should relate to the world. God is calling us not to just go about our lives in the area where we happen to live, but to truly move in the neighbourhood.

If Christmas is going to be a festival dedicated to God, then surely it’s got to practically reflect its main theme, that of incarnational love. I read recently that approximately 1 in 3 people experience depression, loneliness and anger as Christmas approaches. So Christmas seems like a pretty good time to bless those people around us who are in need.

I always thought it was strange that Jesus began his ministry by miraculously producing wine at a party which the guests had drunk dry (Jn. 2:1-11)! Before he healed, delivered, or had forgiven anyone, he used all the power invested in him by the Spirit to save a party! It seems then that another key feature of God’s kingdom is having a good time. I think partying is a prophetic sign of the way the world should be. It points to a future where` every tear will be wiped away. So Christmas can also be a great time to show the world how to party.

So me and Hannah are trying to shape our Christmas around these two themes, incarnational love and celebration. We started last night by throwing a party for our neighbours, and blessing everyone with mulled wine, mince pies and presents, and we’re trying to make time for those people we know who are in need.

I’m not suggesting that your Christmas should look like ours, but I do think that if our celebrations are to be meaningful, then we have to demonstrate the festival’s central theme, incarnational love.

Tim

Steve Chalke, mission and the cross

On this month’s podcast we spoke to Steve Chalke, the founder of a number of highly influential social action projects in the UK, and founder of the Oasis church network.

Steve has become quite a controversial figure among evangelicals in the last few years due to his rejection of the penal substitution model of the cross (i.e. that God punished his own son for our sins, so that we could be forgiven).

While I don’t agree with Steve on this, I do share one of his concerns, that on its own this model of the cross leads to an unhelpfully individualistic understanding of salvation.

I was brought into the faith on the idea that ‘Jesus died for my sins’. While I do believe this is true, in recent years I’ve come to realise that Jesus achieved more than this on the cross. Paul understood the cross to have cosmic implications. He told the Colossians, for example, that:

‘God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross’ (Col. 1:19-20)

So through the cross Jesus began a work of reconciliation with everything, all of creation, not just me. He ‘disarmed the powers and authorities’ (Col. 2:15), he destroyed ‘the devil’s works’ (1 Jn. 3:8), and he was ‘reconciling the world’ to himself (2 Cor. 5:19).

Because we play the key role in ordering God’s world, the fact that the cross has reconciled us with God and freed us from the power of the devil, means we are able to join God in the restoration of his creation. Just as our sin led to the fall of creation, so our reconciliation should lead to its restoration. As Paul told the Romans, ‘creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed’ (Rm. 8:19).

So while I do hold to the penal substation model of the cross, I’m glad that Steve Chalke and others (most notably Greg Boyd) are reminding us of the cosmic significance of the cross.

If Jesus only died for my sins, then my response need only be personal faith in him. But, if Jesus died to reconcile all of creation to himself (of which I am a part) then my response needs to be faith in him and a commitment to joining him in this work of reconciliation.

So the cross should inspire us to mission. It should inspire us not to a privatised faith, but to a comprehension of our place in God’s plan of salvation for all creation. It should inspire us to join him in his work of cosmic reconciliation.

Tim

Network Church

When I started out on this journey of thinking through what Christian community and mission means in my context, I found myself becoming increasingly critical of ‘traditionally structured’ church (and on many occasions, with good reason!). But one of the unexpected blessings of making more of an effort to get to know the people in my area has been discovering other Christian who are involved in a variety of different expressions of church. One of the things I’ve discovered as I’ve got to know these people is that God isn’t limited by our ecclesiology.

The thing is, I keep bumping into Christians from all sorts of ecclesial backgrounds, who are being used by God to impact their communities and who have really blessed me.

The trouble is, I’m the sort of person who wants to find the definitive answer to a problem and invest all my resources there. I then tend to dismiss everything else. The same has been true of my attitude towards church, and as a result I’ve found myself becoming quite judgemental and dismissive of people who are doing things differently.

Don’t get me wrong, I still firmly believe that we need to wrestle with issues of ecclesiology and missiology so that we can shape our churches in such a way that allows us to love God and our neighbours in the particular context we find ourselves in. It’s just that I’d forgotten how graceful God is. God isn’t waiting for us to discover his divinely approved ecclesiology and missiology; he’s just waiting for us to get stuck in as best we can.

This has impacted me in a number of different ways, but most significantly I’ve begun to see that I’ve had a very limited understanding of what it means to be part of God’s church. Over the last few months, as I’ve met, prayed and shared with Baptists, Anglicans, Methodists, people who go to Vineyard, New Frontiers, simple churches and Christians who don’t go to ‘church’ at all, I’ve discovered a much broader sense of community.

So, while I’m still committed to the idea of a local community of believers, I’m increasingly seeing myself as part of a network of believers across the area. I’m not talking about formal ecumenical gatherings, but organic, relational connections that have formed as God has criss-crossed my journey with the journeys of others in the area.

As I’ve allowed myself to be drawn into this informal network, God has used people with a variety of understandings and ways of doing things to challenge and inspire me and to keep me committed to the task of figuring out what it means to love God and to love my neighbours.

Tim