From Ireland to Australia

Just finished up James Joyce's short story classic Dubliners the other day. I was fascinated with Joyce's writing style that seemed to bring his stories to an abrupt and rather anticlimactic end, leaving the reader (at least this one) with a nagging desire to see more of the life (or lives) of the character(s) that had been briefly put on display with varying degrees of drama. At the same time, you realize that it is precisely Joyce's intent to give you a tiny glimpse into the lives of these Irish folk and a few brief stories are enough to cover a surprisingly wide variety of issues in Irish life (including many words and phrases I'd never come across before.)

Admittedly, the issues that are raised in the stories that the characters wrestle with and are often haunted by are elements of early 20th Century life in Ireland's capital city and are not necessarily things that the people of Ireland face today. For instance, issues of national identity, family history and dysfunction, religion, politics . . . . hmmmm. Maybe the categories are the same. Maybe people in today's Ireland are faced with the same things, only with a different set of complexities and evolved nuances. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to asking those questions and being a student of that ancient culture alongside other Irish Christ-followers and church leaders.

Now, onto the next book in the "ecclesiology" category - The Shaping of Things to Come, written by a couple of Australian church leaders/authors, Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. (Click here to check out the leadership training they've developed. I'm looking forward to learning more about what they're doing with Forge.)

So far, in the first chapter, it's been mostly review. Here are a couple of quotes that are good reminders nonetheless.

". . . the problems of the church, like all real problems in any context, cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created those problems in the first instance. In other words, boxlike thinking simply cannot solve the problems of the box. . . . It's time to step out of the box of Christendom in order to take on the problems raised by Christendom." (p. 7)

"Christendom set up a certain correlation, a complex of assumptions, about the association between the realms of politics, geography, church, spirituality, and mission. As a result the gospel was politicized, regionalized as well as racial-ized. There was no longer any real place for the subversive activity associated with the New Testament gospel. The 'revolution' was quelled from the inside." (p. 14)

"The church is worse off precisely because of Christendom's failure to evangelize its own context and establish gospel communities that transform the culture." (p. 14)


Categories: culture, Europe, church, mission