Reframe Weekend at Margate

Just spent the weekend teaching the “Reframe” course at Margate in Redcliffe. With 15 members of three missional communities, we explored the ins and outs of developing church in the 21st century. We worked through the concept of being the body of Christ carrying out the mission of Jesus – proclaiming and embodying the kingdom of God.

ReframeWe started Saturday morning looking at examples of world-changing creative innovators, using the Apple “Think Different” television commercial. See my post at Duncan’s TV Adland for the background. It got us thinking about what it was that made Jesus so distinctive. And what make his followers distinctive.

We talked about working as a missional community with a commitment at its core to being mutually accountable for living out the life God calls us to. Interestingly some people are resistant to the challenge of imitating Jesus. ‘There’s no way we can measure up to Jesus so why put the pressure on?” And the word ‘accountability’ is also scary. The Reformed theological response is to remind us that we are saved by grace alone, not by works. Though I would have thought that Paul the Apostle, along with Calvin, would have taught that we are saved for works. This is not just some preparation for life after death. Having Jesus as ‘saviour’ is very much linked with having Jesus as ‘Lord’. After all, Jesus in his teaching talked about action and attitude than cognitive trust in his capacity to pay the price on the cross.

We missed out most of the material on postmodernism and post-Christendom. I figured that the groups I was working with had already worked out a new model of being that was responding to these paradigms. And there’s a limit to how much conceptual work you can do in a weekend without losing relevance to what’s happening the next day.

Leave a Reply