Running away...

Spencer started school this week! On picking him up from school on the second day, he promtply informed me that he would not be going to school tommorow. "Why?" I asked, "Don't you like school?"...what followed was a small saga.

The teacher had taken her preps to the playground and had stayed with them for ten minutes. Spencer would run and play with his friends then run back to the teacher, after doing this a few times he was heartbroken to discover that his teacher was no longer there. "I am lost" he said. He moved from sad to scared as he realised that he was in a big playground and his teacher wasn't there to look after him. Thankfully one of his little girlfriends came to the resuce and found another teacher, who took Spencer to the staff room to see his teacher eating her lunch...

He didn't like the feeling of being lost. It reminded me of how often can we be much like Spencer, running away from, and then back towards God till we get ourselves completely lost. However just as the teacher was easily found so too is God, if you seek Him with all your heart.

The comparing game...

I have just been on face book (A great thing to do on your day off??) and I discovered that I have 86 requests. (No reflections on the amount of friends I have had, but rather the lack of time I spend on face book!) As I was sifting through and pressing "ignore" I found an intriguing request. "Compare me", ordinarily I would have hit the ignore button except that it came from a friend of mine who I care about, so, ok...I hit the accept button. Then came the "game". Two friends were placed alongside each other and I had to chose which I thought..."Was a better friend", "was funnier", " I would rather hang out with"...you get the idea. Again and again through the questions I hit the "skip" button. How do I say to one friend I prefer another??? Again and again I thought, should I be playing this game and yet how often do we as Salvationists play the game of let's compare. Let's compare appointments, let's compare talents, let's compare looks, (Interestingly I don't often hear played the who is more prayerful game) let's compare who our friends are....let's compare!!!!! Not only does out faith and ministry become a competition but it takes our focus off following Christ. (Incidentally I think there have been times that the Salvation Army itself has played the comparing game with other churches and have forgotten our distinctive calling and ministry) Our eye's are no longer firmly fixed on Jesus, but instead of everyone else. It's no wonder that we wander off from the path of Christ...and he calls us to catch up and stop looking to the side. I have selected the "delete" on the compare game on face book, and it is my prayer that you(if anyone is reading this) will hit the delete button in their life of Comparing themselves to others...but Jesus

"Let's fix our eye's on Jesus the author and perfector of our faith!"

14But you must cling to the things which you have learnt and have been taught to believe, knowing who your teachers were, 15 and that from infancy you have known the sacred writings which are able to make you wise to obtain salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 Every Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for convincing, for correction of error, and for instruction in right doing; 17 so that the man of God may himself be complete and may be perfectly equipped for every good work.

I have been talking with a few people recently about their views on the reader response theories, and it is at that point I find that I depart from the traditional worldview of a Gen X’er and perhaps become a touch modernist? While I understand that we cannot help but bring our own experiences and context to the passage, and even this colours the questions that we ask of the text, to what point do we indulge this idea of meaning coming from the contemporary reader. (In school when looking at historical documents you are taught about the context it comes from, why then when it comes to scripture should we ignore this in preference to our own ideas?) One of the gifts of the bible is that we see the people of God growing in their understanding of who God is as He reveal’s himself. Are the reader response theories then, just an extension of the way in which we understand who God is, or are they merely anthrocentric (man-centered). If this is the case how do we deal with the reality of our fallen nature, and oftentimes our desire to read what we want to read? One of the amazing gifts of the bible is that through prayer and study I am challenged to change who I am. This is occurs through the work of God and my study of various Historical, contextual, literary, etc… criticism’s and what they have to say. (For the scholar who is pushing us forward in our thinking it is legitimate to isolate their use of the analytical tools, and thankfully since the discussions regarding bias or “context” of the scholar their presuppositions are more explicitly stated in their work.) What “controls” are in place to stop us from making the text say whatever we want. For the preacher and teacher it is dangerous to fall into one particular area of criticism and respond in mission, pastorally and preaching only out of this one framework. While I like Child’s canonical approach which seeks to reorient the critical tools in the context of biblical theology, I am hesitant to place too much emphasis on early church fathers interpretation of this. Which leaves me then, with the desire to engage with as many of the tools which seek to bring life to the passage being read, and not devise meaning for myself.

Is it enough that we acknowledge the context which colours and reading or should we then try to overcome our bias?