All posts tagged New Frontiers

Stroud: 1 Samuel 14

by Hugh on July 9, 2008 in Faith with 6 Comments

Day 2. After the seminar stream (I’ll report about that at the end of the week) was the first main session with David Stroud. David is the leader of Christ Church London and head of New Froniters UK. He spoke from 1 Samuel 14:1-23.

His main point was to use Jonathan as an example of a man who had hope in God. He took us to our situation, this side of the cross and gave us 3 reasons to have Hope:

The Resurrection – confirming the testimony of Jesus
Jesus is Alive – He works in the world today
Jesus Reigns – he is in control

David went on to speak about the hope characterised in Jonathan:

He gathered people to him (his armour bearer)
He had the basics sorted
He moved forward, didn’t just do maintenance, ignored the obstacles

The phrase “perhaps the Lord” was used frequently to say that we should take risks, be daring, in hope and faith that God will work.

There are not many notes here, that’s not because it was a short talk, or a boring talk, but because I felt it lacked substance which constitutes good note-taking material. Although David had briefly outlined our reasons for hope at the start (the work of Jesus) it became very man-centred – my hope, my faith, my courage, my work. It was one of those talks where what was said was not unbiblical or wrong, but there was insufficient (not really any) work done on the text to justify what was said. The problem was that the narrative (Jonathan scaling a cliff to attack the Philistines) was used as a principle for us to follow – the classic, ‘What’s your cliff to scale?’ application… to be honest it felt as though David had a message to give about hope and faith, then arrived at 1 Samuel 14 as a related passage.

The second area of concern I had was with the meeting as a whole (going back to my sceptism of New Frontiers). This concern is to do with the use of ‘Prophecy’ – I do not think New Frontiers have fallen into a Charismatic pitfall of elevating prophecy to be equal or near to Scripture, but I fear there are still issues. So a guy from Canada gives a word to say in effect, a time of blessing is coming to the UK, favour in mission, and specifically favour from government. There are five questions I have:

Haven’t prophecies like this been many times before and not come to pass – does that make the givers false prophets?
If prophecies are from God, why are they always so vague?
How often do you hear someone give a prophecy that thing are going to be bad, that God s judging or withdrawing favour?
Does this particular prophecy fit with reality? – I realise that God is sovereign and can change anything, but the reality is that Christians are having less and less favour with the Government.
Does this particular prophecy fit with Scripture? – we are not promised favour from government, in fact surely if anything the opposite is true…

Driscoll: Spirit led Missions

by Hugh on July 8, 2008 in Faith with No comments

Mark Driscoll There are admittedly very few preachers who would have made me come to the New Frontiers conference – perhaps Piper or Mahaney might, but Driscoll certainly sold it for me.

Driscoll opened up with his customary auto-biographical sketch along with some of the background to Mars Hill. The Catholic jokes were particularly good in speaking of his conception (‘Papal Roulette’) and his mother’s experience of Charismatic Catholicism – praying in tongues to Mary!

He went on to praise the work of the New Frontiers movement saying that he had lots to learn, but also to say that he wanted to serve by where necessary correcting. So he began by giving 5 traps which those who hold to Charismatic theology can fall into – he thought New Froniters may be falling into the 5th trap (not the others though):

Too heavy a focus on the person of the Spirit rather than on the One to whom He points, the person of Jesus
Pentecost becomes the main event at the expense of the Cross and the Resurrection
Health and Wealth become focuses
Leaders are held up as examples of being Spirit-filled and led as opposed to Jesus the best example
Mission is not viewed correctly (can’t remember his exact explanation)

So from there Driscoll went on to talk about what Spirit-filled mission is all about. He took us through loads of verses in the first few chapters of Luke’s gospel about the Spirit (1:15, 1:35, 1:41, 1:67, 2:11, 2:25, 3:16, 3:22… and more). He then talked about Jesus’ Baptism, why he had to be annointed by the Holy Spirit, he got into a big theological tangent explaining the Trinity, the 1 Person and 2 Natures of Jesus, the Hypostatic Union…

He came back to the question – How did Jesus live his life? – answer, By the Power of the Holy Spirit. He described Jesus as a missionary, leaving the ‘culture’ of Heaven to come to a sinful world… so the Spirit empowers missionaries. He spoke of two empowering ministries of the Holy Spirit – an active one for service, and a contemplative one for solitude, study and prayer – the active service is preceeded by time for contemplation.

By this point we’d moved from Luke to Acts, picking up on Pentecost and the Spirit empowering the Church as with Christ. He highlighted repentence as the first mark of the Spirit-filled believer (Acts 2:38) and then picked out 3 points of what the Spirit-filled life looks like from Acts 2:42-47:

Devotion to apostles’ teaching
Love for one another
Awe at the Gospel

Driscoll then concluded with his definition of what a church is, stressing that it was important for movements like New Frontiers to keep these definitions to stay on mission. There were 8 points, he only made it to the first:

Regeneration - he stated that often we fight too much to defend the doctrine of Justification at the neglect of the place of regeneration in the believer and in the church community

I presume he will pick up the next 7 points tomorrow – maybe. As well as this I will be reporting from a Mark Driscoll seminar on Planting Radical Churches and on a main session talk by David Stroud.

Van Rhyn: Daniel 1

by Hugh on July 8, 2008 in Faith with No comments

Hey. I’m at the Together on a Mission, New Frontiers conference in Brighton. There have been two sessions so far today, and an evening session later, but I’m not going to be going to the evening sessions, they don’t look as good as the rest.

So this morning kicked off with Stephen Van Ryhn, the leader of Jubilee Church in Capetown – he started with the easy job of trying to persuade the conference to have the event in Capetown in 2010, it looked like an amazing place!

We went to Daniel 1 for his talk entitled ‘Prevailing Under Pressure’ – there were 3 main points:

God is in Control (v.2)

God reigns, He is unchanging – therefore we can be confident in hard circumstances, in mission and in prayer

God is our Redeemer

Israel is under God’s judgement, 15 years before it’s destruction God places 4 men in Babylon to work out His plan of redemption

Be in the world, but not of the world

It is comparatively easy to be faithful if we don’t care about being contemporary. It is also easy to be contemporary if you don’t care about being faithful. It is the search for the combination of truth and relevance which is exacting. – John Stott

Moral Integrity – Daniel didn’t defile himself with food offered to idols
Theological Integrity – Daniel praised God for his gifts, he didn’t revel in his own wisdom
Spiritual Integrity – Daniel prays, he longed for communion with God

Stephen concluded with a challenging call not to compromise, asking us what our price was. He challenged us to be faithful by sharing the testimonies of Eric Liddell and Marie Durand.

Semi-Live Blogging on Mark Driscoll

by Hugh on July 6, 2008 in Faith with 2 Comments

Next week I’m going to be semi-live blogging from the New Frontiers conference in Brighton and the Dwell Conference in London on the Saturday. I say semi-live-blogging, I’ll be at the main events but will be there to soak everything up and will file a report blog at the end of the day… the main talks will be by Mark Driscoll, I suspect something from Terry Virgo too, and then on the Saturday Driscoll will be joined by Scott Thomas of Acts 29, and Steve Timmis.

So if you’re not going to be at Brighton and you want to know what’s going on then I’ll be providing an ‘outsiders’ perspective of a New Frontiers conference, in fact I’d go further and say a skeptics view of New Frontiers (but that’s another story), but I’m a self confessed ‘Driscoll geek’ so there’s no skeptical view there I’m afraid, well depends what he says!

I’m sure the likes of Adrian Warnock, Bish, and other New Frontiers bloggers will be there and sharing their thoughts, I shall be trying to fit in for a week, pretending to be a New-Frontierser!

Interview with Mark Driscoll

by Hugh on March 13, 2008 in Faith with No comments

Terry Virgo (well his son, Joel) is currently interviewing Mark Driscoll in the run up to his visit to the Brighton Conference in July, there’s a few parts coming slowly.

Also, I put the wrong link down for the Text and Context talks… click the image below. Still waiting for the Q&A sessions.