Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Part of an article...

I just read an article on three key issues facing the Canadian church. Here is the third and, I find, one that I am most interested and able to put my energy into (I think!). What could we do to see the Kingdom here, now, in new and exciting ways? I know it can happen. I believe it can happen. In fact, I believe it does happen...perhaps just not often enough. What would it look like for each of us who follows Jesus to truly prayer the prayer "Your Kingdom Come" and allow God to work through us to answer it!?

Third, we lack imagination for the future. Our faith has become very private. It is about my life and my future. We are seldom acting out of a deep concern for the welfare of our city/region. Few evangelical churches have even wrestled with what it would be like for the Kingdom to be breaking in here; now. All of us struggle with this disconnect between a desire for a bigger church and larger budget on the one hand, and what the contours of the Kingdom would look like in our location, on the other. Here we will need to open ourselves up to scripture, but in particular, to the role of the artist. In the 21st century the artists will lead us. They are the ones who dream. Dreams and pragmatism are always in tension. Unless we learn how to make this tension more creative we will never be able to see the future for our region. We will always be buying it from someone else. And this is the greatest tragedy of the local church in Canada; when we sing a new song, we have bought it from someone else. When we dream a new dream, we have bought it from another church in another country. God is always doing a new work. Even in Canada. The artists help us to see it. - Donald Goertz, Tyndale Seminary, Toronto

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