Bread on the Table - Brian Zahnd

The church in Western Europe and North America is struggling with deep disappointment. We are disappointed with the failure of the Christendom project. The grand attempt to produce a continent of Christian civilization through the apparatus of the state is either dead or dying. It appears that secularism has already won in Europe and will win in North America. So we either deny it (more easily done in America), or we angrily blame scapegoats (those we claim have “compromised the gospel”), or we simply trudge along, a bit sad about it all.

The church in the post-Christendom world is walking the Emmaus Road. Confused and disappointed. Just like those two disciples on the first Easter. (see Luke 24:13-35) The original Emmaus Road disciples had misread everything. Their disappointment was a result of their wrong expectations. They expected a conventional king after the model of the Pharaohs and Caesars. They expected Jesus to be a war-waging Messiah like King David or Judah Maccabeus. What they ended up with was a “failed” Messiah — a Messiah executed by the Romans. The movement in which they had invested all their hope had failed. So they walked the Emmaus Road with soul-crushing disappointment. This is when Jesus came and walked with them “in another form.” (Mark 16:12)

When Jesus in the guise of a wayfaring stranger remarked upon their evident sadness, the disciples told how they had hoped that Jesus of Nazareth was the long-awaited Messiah, the one who would redeem Israel. But that was all over. Their hopes had been dashed when their would-be Messiah was condemned by the priests and crucified by the Romans. Their movement had failed and disappointment had settled in.

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Living the Christian Story - W/ Brad Jersak & the faculty of WTC

 OpenWTC (Westminster Theological Centre)  - Theology without walls - is offering a free  10-week online course, TH49X1: Living the  Christian Story.

 This course is designed to be accessed  anytime, anywhere online from 23rd June  onwards. Brad Jersak will be teaching the NT section.

 To register for the course, click here:

 To download the course syllabus click here:

"I haven't seen you lately" by Greg Albrecht

A friend of mine who attends her church on a fairly regular basis missed a few weeks in a row. When she returned, one of the "church ladies" greeted her with: "I haven't seen you lately!" Of course, the "church lady" meant she hadn't seen my friend lately at church, and that was a cause for concern.

"I haven't seen you lately" might include the following thoughts:

• First, let's assume the best. This greeting might be intended to communicate the fact that my friend was genuinely missed, and that her return was warmly welcomed. However, "I am glad to see you. How are you?" might avoid the extra helping of guilt and innuendo present in "I haven't seen you lately."
• On the other hand, religion places a high premium on attendance in a particular building located on a specific piece of real estate at a regular, recurring time. Given the resulting guilt that can affect someone who misses a few services, "I haven't seen you lately" might actually mean "Where the hell have you been?"
• And, here's a loose translation of an even more strident meaning that "I haven't seen you lately" might convey: "I've been at church faithfully, every week. You, on the other hand, seem like you have better things to do with your time. You are backsliding, miserable and not-nearly-as-righteous as I am."

I was once filled with such guilt-laden invective myself. I once believed that warming a seat in a religious meeting was directly related to one's relationship with God. I understand the drill—I've truly been there and done that.

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Armageddon Left Behind - by Brian Zahnd

What’s Left Behind by Nancy Eckels

Jesus is not a conductor handing out tickets to a paradise beyond the stars. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world. Far too many American Christians embrace a faulty, half-baked, doom-oriented, hyperviolent eschatology, popularized in Christian fiction (of all things!) that envisions God as saving parts of people for a nonspatial, nontemporal existence in a Platonic “heaven” while kicking his own good creation into the garbage can! Framed by this kind of world-despairing eschatology, evangelism comes to resemble something like trying to push people onto the last chopper out of Saigon.

Our looming Armageddons are always a possibility but never an inevitability. Armageddon is only inevitable if we listen to the propaganda that comes croaking from the dragons, beasts, and false prophets of nationalism, empire, and war. (See Revelation16:13–16.) Jesus wept over Jerusalem because their fate could have been avoided. If they had believed in Jesus as the messianic Prince of Peace instead of a messianic Lord of War, Jerusalem could have actually become the City of Peace. Instead, they chose the path that led to a hellish nightmare of siege, famine, cannibalism, destruction, and death.

Repairing the world. Healing wastelands. Laboring to make a dying world livable again. This is the vision of the apostles and prophets. This is the prophetic paradigm the people of God are to coordinate their theology and lives with. We are not to be macabre Christians lusting for destruction and rejoicing at the latest rumor of war. It’s high time that a morbid fascination with a supposed unalterable script of God–sanctioned–end-time–hyperviolence be once and for all left behind.

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I Want to See - Greg Albrecht

"I want to see!"

For the last time during his earthly ministry, Jesus was en route to Jerusalem. He had only a few days left in his earthly life—with every step he took toward Jerusalem he knew he was that much closer to the awful pain and suffering that awaited him. The road took him through Jericho, a city located about 17 miles northeast of Jerusalem. It was just before Passover—one of the three times in the year when pilgrims traveled to Jerusalem to celebrate the feasts of the old covenant. So the road was crowded with travelers, and as a result there were many others alongside the road—small businessmen and entrepreneurs, as well as beggars.

Mark 10:46-52 tells us that Jesus heard a cry as he walked through Jericho—"Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" Many who were with Jesus told the man who was yelling to shut up. But the man persistently yelled even louder, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" Maybe these people who thought that they were helping and serving Jesus felt that their Master was far too busy and important to take time for a blind man.

Earlier in this chapter (Mark 10) we read the disciples had previously rebuked people who brought little children to Jesus—again, they assumed that they knew what was best for Jesus but Jesus rebuked the disciples who were misrepresenting him and said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these" (Mark 10:14).

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Understanding the Cross: The Way of Enemy Love, and Why We Don’t Believe in It - by Derek Flood

Click here to watch Derek's lecture on the Cross and Enemy Love

Farewell to Mars - Brian Zahnd

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A Farewell To Mars (excerpt from ch. 8)

Brian Zahnd

Isaiah, in his prophetic poems, frames the Messianic hope like this: A Prince of Peace will establish a new kind of government, a government characterized by ever-increasing peace. Weapons of war will be transformed into instruments of agriculture. Swords turned into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks. Tanks turned into tractors, missile silos into grain silos. The study of war abandoned for learning the ways of the Lord. The cynic will laugh (for lack of imagination), but this is Isaiah’s vision. At last the nations will find their way out of the darkness of endless war into the light of God’s enduring peace. This is Isaiah’s hope. (see Isaiah 2:1-4; 9:1-7)

Christians take Isaiah’s hope and make a daring claim: Jesus is that Prince of Peace. Jesus is the one who makes Isaiah’s dreams come true. From the day of Pentecost to the present, this is what Christians have claimed. We claim it every Christmas. But then a doom-obsessed dispensationalist performs an eschatological sleight of hand and takes the hope away from us. On one hand, they admit that Jesus is the Prince of Peace who has come, but on the other hand, they say his peace is not for now … it’s only for when Jesus comes back again. Bait and switch. Yes, swords are to become plowshares … but not today. For now plowshares become swords; in our day, it’s war, war, war! They abuse Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century by always applying it to the latest contemporary geopolitical events. They replace the hope of peace with an anticipation of war! They find a way to make war a hopeful sign. Think about that for a moment! And here is the worst irony: It was precisely because Jerusalem failed to recognize Jesus as Isaiah’s Prince of Peace right there and then that Jerusalem rushed headlong into the war that ended with its own destruction!

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