I enjoyed Diarmaid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity series on BBC 4. Apparently, and presumably because of it’s positive reviews, the series is being re-run soon, this time on BBC 1. So make sure you tune in if you missed it on BBC 4 first time round.

MacCulloch isn’t a Church Historian working from within the Church itself, but he isn’t a secular historian who’s just taken an interest in Church History either. Rather, he counts himself as a ‘friend of the Christian faith’ rather than a committed Christian or a committed Atheist – he’s a rare agnostic I suppose. This perspective is interesting and unique and it comes over in the programmes. Because he stands at arms length from the Christian Church itself he is willing to ask the questions and scratch the surface of subjects some Church Historians would avoid. And because he’s not just another Marxist or other kind of secular Historian he doesn’t just explain deep religious and spiritual movements in history through socio-economic paradigms – he’s willing to see spiritual power at work in history although he himself, at present time, hasn’t found peace in the spiritual sphere.

The television series is a spin off of his recently published magnus opus A History of Christianity. The witty George Pitcher made a good job of pointing out the absurdity of the book when he said in the Telegraph:

I haven’t read this book – but please don’t turn this page yet, because I’m going to provide you with a critique of sorts in a moment. First let me say that I don’t think anyone is going to read this book. It’s 1,161 pages long, for goodness sake. If you missed out the “begat” bits, you could read the Bible in less time.

So just watch the series when it gets repeated on BBC 1 some time soon.

I was kindly invited to speak at Penrallt’s Youth service on Saturday night. The theme of the talk was ‘Will the real Jesus please stand up?’. Most of the material, as faithfull Driscoll listeners will know, is taken from the first chapter of Vintage Jesus.

Unfortunately the first few minutes are missing from the recording but you can pick the thread of the message fine from where the recording starts.

Download MP3 (PC: Right Click+’Save File As…’, MAC: Ctrl+Click+’Download Linked file…’)

Quote of the day from Martin Luther King. Most famous for leading the civil rights movement but also a Minister of the Gospel.

The question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love?

Martin Luther King page on RE:Jesus

Meanwhile, my attention was draw to this superb article by George Pitcher today. George is an Anglican priest and the Telegraphs Religion Editor. He utterly destroys Dawkins and his atheist brigade using a dynamic mix of wit, humor and plain knowledge.

Here are my favorite passages. In this one he points out that Pullman isn’t the radical he claims to be:

Yesterday, it was the turn of the millionaire author Philip Pullman, who’s writing an alternative ending to the story of Jesus Christ. Well, how wacky and daring. “A friend” is quoted as saying: “He knows it will be controversial, but he has some serious points to make.” Perhaps as serious as the scholars and theologians who have wrestled with the doctrine of the atonement since the time of Augustine, or the late, great Oxford don John Macquarrie, who posited a viable alternative ending to the Christian story at the Cross, with no resurrection. C S Lewis was imagining alternative Christian narratives when Pullman – who reportedly claimed in 2001 that his aim was “to undermine the basis of Christian belief” – was just an idea in the mind of God. Do these people actually read any theology before presuming that they’re being envelope-pushingly radical?

In this he points out the hilarity of Dawkins blindness to his own religious prejudices:

But I suppose it’s easier to decide that all Christians are brainwashed, wall-eyed literalists, that there is no catholic tradition of mystery, that the Reformation never happened and that we are driven by the imperative to force our religion on the next generation – a charge I would take a little more seriously if Prof Dawkins hadn’t recently endorsed atheist summer camps for children.

George brings his article to a close by calling on the atheists to “relax, fellas” because “we’re not forcing our faith on you or our children. We’re just trying, like you, to make sense of the world.”

Recently I have been thinking more about the purpose of this blog, and the fact that I have obviously, but totally unintentionally, offended a brother in Christ in my previous post has got me thinking even harder. Originally I hoped my blog would contribute something to the discussion about the future of Christian witness in Wales. This is what I said at the outset:

I hope to explain to those on the outside some of the issues facing Welsh churches and Welsh language Christian witness and mission. I’ll praise and give a shout out to the good stuff that’s going on in Welsh circles; and I’ll try, gracefully, to point out the not so good aspects within the body of Welsh language Christianity.

It seems that I have offended a lot of Christians in the process and that saddens me deeply. One option of course is to keep the blog going but avoid all contentious issues; but I have deep reservations about that. The unwillingness to tackle tough and decisive issues within Christian circles was what sort of made me loose interest in Christianity toowords my late teens. So I know that unwillingness to discuss tough stuff produces victims too. God leading me to meet, mix and share fellowship with Christians in University who were willing to engage in critical discussion about faith and church and it’s implications on culture and politics was what brought me back.

Anyway, here is a pole to my readers to help me decide the way forward with the blog. You vote totally anonymously so I won’t know who voted for what.

Thanks for your help – Rhys x

I came across this article on The Resurgence website this week. It discusses wrong and ineffective attitudes towards mission. The thrust of the post hits on what I have felt over the years about how a lot o reformed evangelicals in Wales see mission. An over emphasis on events and programmes – be they ‘mission week’, ‘tea and tost’ or a ‘quizz night’. This is how The Resurgence describes this mindset:

Their view of the gospel leads them to see social action as optional. For them, mission is synonymous with evangelism, and evangelism is highly programmatic. They focus on training individuals through evangelism training programs, apologetics, and use of evangelistic tracts.

The post on The Resurgence goes on to note some problematic issues with this attitude towards mission. Evangelism-driven mission, it argues, is often answer-based and heaven-centered. For example, this attitude usually leads the Christian to ask the non-believer “If you died tonight and stood before God and he said: ‘Why should I let you into my heaven?’ What would you say?” The questions are answer-driven. The aim is to get someone to say the right answer and to believe the right facts, like “Jesus died for my sins.” The problem here is an over emphasis on belief and hardly any on faith. The post on the Resurgence goes further and argues that this wrong attitude is not only effecting the Church’s mission but it’s started a rot in the Church itself. This is how it’s put:

Many Americans believe that Jesus died on the cross for their sins, but it makes very little difference in their lives. They possess mere belief. This mere belief undermines the gospel. What we need is faith. Moreover, mere belief in the right answer baits people, not with Christ, but with heaven. It is heaven-centered, not Christ-centered. In evangelism-driven mission, Christ is subordinated to the treasure of heaven, instead of heaven being subordinated to the treasure of Christ. The goal is heaven, not Jesus. Answer-driven and heaven-centered evangelism leads to nominalism and distorts the gospel. Evangelism-driven mission can undermine, not advance the gospel.

Sadly I can see and identify a lot of that in Welsh evangelicalism today. It’s primary leaders put all the emphasis on believing the right doctrines and through that demoting the importance of simple faith and Holy Spirit experience. That fact that I’ve just said that now will get the alarms bell ringing in the minds of some and they will be thinking that I have ‘taken my eye off the Cross and the atonment.’ No I havent, I’m just living and discussing experiences in light of the atonment.

The flip side to the problems of Evangelism-based mission is the problems of Social action-based mission which is discussed in a further post on The Resurgence here. I suppose the problem we have in the Welsh language scene is that most Churches fall to one of the two categories and no churches get mission right. Evangelical churches fall away towards Evangelism-based while most denominational churches fall towards Social Action-based. As I have felt for a number of years now both are missing the point and need to rediscover the Christ and Cross centric fusion of the spiritual+social mission which we read of in the Bible if we are to see effective mission again in Welsh speaking Wales.

Tomorrow, Friday November 6th at 9.30 am my friend, Osian Jones, North Wales organiser for Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society) will be sentenced to a month in prison by Pwllheli Magistrates. The magistrates have already warned him that he faces imprisonment because of his refusal to pay fines for his part in non-violent direct action on High Street stores as part of a Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg’s campaign for a comprehensive Welsh Language Measure that would give Welsh speakers equal rights in all spheres of society.

Osian will be the second member of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg to go to prison this year. Ffred Ffransis was imprisoned back in June for refusing to pay fines also imposed for his part in the campaign for a comprehensive Welsh Language Measure.

Osian Jones said:

It’s interesting that both Ffred and I faced prison this year for our part in this particular campaign. What is more significant is that Ffred the ‘offences’ for which Ffred was imprisoned go back to January 2001 which proves that this particular campaign has been long and hard. The sad thing is, that the Welsh Language LCO which is now on offer, and which is the product of all this campaigning is utterly inadequate since it does not give the Welsh people their legitimate linguistic rights which enables them to live their lives fully through the medium of Welsh, nor does it’s powers extend to the private sector.”

“Even though we argued our case with conviction before committees in both the National Assembly and at Westminster it became obvious to us that the legislative process in Wales is both wearisome and defective, and that we have no choice but to continue with our direct action campaign. I hope that my imprisonment will give other people the inspiration to campaign for the language and that we will see the responsibility for legislating on the Welsh language transferred in it’s entirety to the National Assembly in the near future. The Welsh people have had to wait a long time to see their linguistic rights realised. They deserve a great deal more than the LCO which is now on offer.

Please pray that God will grant Osian courage as he faces the next month behind bars in the name of a just cause.

Last Sunday I preached at Penrallt, the English Baptist church in Bangor. I must admit that I was nervous wreck beforehand because my whole spiritual life, except for my regular does of State side MP3’s, is lived entirely through the Welsh language. But I think that the Holy Spirit carried the sermon through in the end. It’s in the reading at the start and the prayer at the end that it’s most obvious that I’m communicating in my second language.

After conquering my nerves the sermon went well. It was nice to preach in-front of a large and young audience and it was great seeing people laughing at my jokes – jokes that just fall flat on their face when I try them out in Welsh churches! But the most encouraging thing was to see people coming to me at the end thanking me and telling me that God spoke to them through the sermon.

Here is the sermon:

I hope I’ll get more opportunity to preach in English in the future but I’m still sure that God has called me to whiteness through the Welsh Churches.

Back in July my band, Society Profiad, went on the Start Something Tour with The Repercussion, Tom Whitman and Steff Elis. Most of the video is in Welsh but the most interesting part of the video is in English – if you skip to 2.30 you can see what we got up to in Casllwchwr the birthplace of the 1904 Revival.

Most Christian music i listen too are not really my kind of music. In other words if it weren’t Christian I wouldn’t listen to it! Matt Redman, Chris Tomlin and Tim Hughes write brilliant worship music but if it were not worship music their musical genre wouldn’t even come on my radar. They’r good at what they do, very good, and I have been blessed through their music but you get my point right? If Tim Hughes was not a Christian he’d probably be James Blunt, and to be blunt about it I wouldn’t buy that album.

But two Christian albums I bought recently are albums I would definitely have bought even if they were’t Christian. The first is the NOOMA Soundtrack, Vol. 001, the second is Mars Hill’s Rain City LP which I’ll talk about in another post some time soon. With Rob Bell’s NOOMA video’s one of the things that first struck me on the production side was the amazing music and the producer/editor’s subtle and effective use of it. The soundtrack, like most soundtracks, is a compilations with a handfull of tracks by two artist; five tracks by Brie Stoner and eight by David Vandervelde.

Brie’s vocals, especially in the opening track Rain Down, are totally mesmerizing. She sounds a bit like Gwen Stefani which you’ll all be familiar with after she sang Don’t Speak with her band No Doubt some twelve years now! Stylistically it’s sort of melodic indy-rock which is cool. The second artist David Vandervelde is a cool guy also. Once again what we have here is indy-rock with slightly less melody than Brie which is satisfyingly replaced with psychedelia. Where Brie is down in LA unsigned looking for the big brake David is based up in Grand Rapids, Michigan home of Rob Bell’s church; but David can be found, according to his wikipedia entry, at Bethel Reformed Church every Sunday – a reality I find hard to conjure in my head but then again who would of thought the U2 rockers would be big mass goers. Hold on… no, he’s based in Nashville according to his MySpace. Anyway, it’s not important!

Here are their MySpaces:
Brie Stoner
David Vandervelde

And the NOOMA soundtrack can be found on iTunes for £7.99 which is worth every penny.