Status Updates From Mere Discipleship: Growing ...

finished Part 3 Journeying in Hope Four Sermons

finished Part 2 Growing in Wisdom Four Practitioners chapters 6-9 (Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, John Stott and J. I. Packer)

5: The Balcony & The Road

John Mackay’s framework of understanding Christian discipleship; Fénelon’s “Mentor & Telemachus”; “The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.”—Oppenheimer; the Christian big picture expressed in books, embodied in life

finished Part 1 The Discipleship of the Mind Five Reflections

4: Books & the Discipleship of the Mind

Francis Bacon: “old authors to read”; Lewis … was able to transcend his limits; “capacity of books to break spells & open up new ways of visualizing & inhabiting our world”; classic writers help us to break free from our assumption that the most recent is the best; we read books to put us in touch with a wider world & new ways of thinking: grasping the big picture

3: Habits of the Christian Mind

the church = the community of faith and personal growth; the Christian vision: on seeing things as they really are; Rom 12:2 transformed by renewing of your mind; transformation of reality which allows us to “construct meaning & value”; 3 elements of the discipling of the mind; the church & the world: distinct but not disconnected; the place of worship in discipleship; conclusion

2 Belief: The Place of the Creeds in the Life of Faith

1 The Lord Is My Light

shaping the Christian mind, anti-intellectualism & the “foolishness” of the Gospel, the Gospel & the illumination of reality, the discipleship of the mind & Christian witness, a case study: the natural sciences, conclusion

“For Christianity to be taken seriously in this important area of life, we need committed & competent people who can model prof excellence & personal commitment.”

‘Christianity needs to be explained. The Bible needs to be interpreted and applied. And both involve us, as active agents, doing our best to translate the realities of the gospel into the categories of the contemporary - not to reduce the gospel to contemporary ideas but to allow it to gain access to people’s minds and lives, so that it can begin its work of transformation and renewal'

‘it has always seemed to me that the best way for Christians to enter into a secular mindset is not through reading books, but through encouraging Christians to be citizens of both worlds and thus helping their fellow Christians to bridge the gap between the Church and the world. Someone who is bilingual does not need a translator’

reading in st james’ park on a sunny lunch break>>

‘when rightly understood - and it is so easily misunderstood- theology is about an imaginative enlargement of our vision of God and the corresponding expansion of our mental capacity to grasp and appreciate the rich and rewarding ‘big picture’ of reality that lies and at the heart of the Christian faith’

‘It is not about a quest for exotic or arcane knowledge, or the cultivation of academic arrogance; rather, it is about allowing the light of Christ to shine on our intellects, so that the transforming power of God’s Grace might renew our minds, not merely our souls’

‘Responding to intellectual and cultural criticisms of faith may not lead to conversion and conviction. Yet a failure to response creates the impression that faith is for those who have neither the ability nor inclination to think; that faith lacks any evidential basis; or that the death of faith is the inevitable outcome of cultural progress’