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Evangelicals Now – Article April 2007 - Where is God in the shopping mall. Wander through any shopping mall or high street. Look at it, listen to it, and observe it. Hear its sounds and see its colours. Look at the advertising, what is it saying? How does it attract? What hungers does it awaken? How does it distort perceptions of reality? Where do your gut ideas about success come from? To what do you aspire? How much are you shaped by the places you live and visit? By the sights and sounds and smells of daily life or the hidden prompting of advertising world. Do not be a passive consumer. Do not let life just happen.
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The nature of human frailty and our response to everyday annoyances When my son was smaller, I tried to help him understand, when by accident he dropped a cup or broke something (for accidents happen), that people matter more than things. |
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Hunger, war, natural disasters always attract our attention, because these real things have painful and immediate and visible results. We can relate to them when they are described, pictured, and brought into our lives through TV and newspapers. We recognise with horror that people like us suffer enormously. They are victims of war, natural catastrophes or evil governments. Relief and development work is not only concerned with external situations in which human beings live. Much less visible is the fact that people are also affected by the way they see reality, the way they think about life, their loved ones, nature and right or wrong. |
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Did you ever meet anyone who said things are as good as they can be? Our minds and bodies do not work as they were designed. We also have a deep-rooted desire to violate the peace of God. Christians know the deep damage of sin although we all try hard to pretend the damage is someone else’s. Labels like depression, perfectionist, and the judgement of incomplete truths slip from our tongues and with evil ease we become prosecutor of God’s other damaged saints; a sharp word, a judgement or a critical spirit and we face the challenge either to rise above it or to fall down. Either way we are wounded. The struggle to work through anger and forgiveness to love and reconciliation is painful. |
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God is the source and centre of all reality. There is no other alternate autonomous religious reality where we might meet him. We live and move and have all our being in his presence. The God who has called our life into being relates deeply with his creation. Everything that exists does so because God called it into being for his purposes. |
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The purpose of the film discussions at CityGate is to look at visual art and the media of cinema in a Christian context. Christians have shied away from film until recently. Even now, though, while Catholics find visual piety congenial, our Protestant commitment to the word and our suspicion of images has made it hard for us to understand or appreciate the language of cinema. |
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Dr. Reg McLelland is a philosophy professor at Covenant College, Georgia. Excerpts from a lecture on the Incarnation of Christ and it’s importance and implications for us today. |
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Sometimes Christian pastors, parents and teachers are afraid of the questions young people and others might ask. Questions of another generation, or generated by secular teachers and other models can seem rebellious and threatening. Questions arising out of other cultural and worldview assumptions than those of the local church can seem to be coming from another planet. Even if the questions are honest they can be very difficult to understand and the reaction is often suspicion or rebuke. It is known that Jesus is the answer, but there is a strong inclination to limit the questions to familiar ones. This situation is often very stressful and alienating. |
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The modern world for the most part accepts John Locke’s idea, now three centuries old, that the human mind at birth as a blank slate that can contain nothing until sense impressions fill it with data. The Christian version of this assumes that the mind, which has now grown up and is full of enormous data banks, lacks any comprehension of spiritual realities, being "natural," and has nothing to contribute to Christians. |
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