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WALKING THE
TIGHTROPE
‘AND GETTING TO THE
OTHER SIDE’
CARRYING OTHERS ACROSS
READER MINISTRY
 A servant
ministry
 An equipping
ministry
 A ministry which
earns trust
through personal
example
CARRYING OTHERS ACROSS

FROM CHURCH TO WORLD
 FROM SCRIPTURE TO LIFE
 FROM PARALYSIS TO HOPE
WHAT IS NEEDED
 Is
not more faith
 But restored hope
 Hope includes faith
 ‘Now faith is the assurance of things
hoped for, the conviction of things not
seen.’ Hebrews 11:1
CHRISTIANITY IS HOPE
 'From
first to last, and not merely in
the epilogue, Christianity is
eschatology, is hope, forward looking
and forward moving and therefore
also ... transforming the present.'
Jurgen Moltmann
HOPE MOVES YOU FORWARD
FROM CHURCH TO WORLD
(AND BACK)
GOSPEL AND CULTURE
‘Culture is the context in which
people find their identity....the gospel
judges every culture....challenging
some aspects of the culture while
endorsing others for the benefit of
the Church and the society.’
Lambeth 88
THE GIFT OF REPENTANCE
‘If the decline of the Church is
ultimately caused neither by the
irrelevance of Jesus,
 nor by the indifference of the
community,
 but by the Church’s failure to respond
fast enough to an evolving culture, to a
changing spiritual climate, and to the
promptings of the Holy Spirit

THE GIFT OF REPENTANCE
Then that decline can be addresses by
the repentance of the Church. For true
repentance involves turning around and
living in a new way in the future.
 A diocese or parish which, out of
repentance, grows a new relevance to
the contemporary world, may also grow
in numbers and strength , because the
Spirit of Jesus has been released to do
his work.’ Bob Jackson

DOUBLE LISTENING
 ‘Double
listening is the faculty of
listening to two voices at the same time,
the voice of God through Scripture and
the voices of men and women around
us.
 The voices will often contradict one
another, but our purpose in listening to
them both is to discover how they relate
to one another.’ John Stott
DOUBLE LISTENING
 LISTEN
TO THE
WORLD
 LISTEN TO THE
GOD’S WORD
 BRING THE TWO
TOGETHER
DOUBLE LISTENING
Those involved in the starting and
sustaining of further and fresh
communities of faith – carry with them
an existing understanding of the faith
and of church.
 They do not come with empty hands,
but the next task is to have open ears.

DOUBLE LISTENING
 Attention
to the
mission context,
or listening to the
world, comes
before discerning
how the inherited
Christian
tradition works
within it.
DOUBLE LISTENING
 Listening
to the
context of the
world shapes
what emerges.
DOUBLE LISTENING
 Then
the second aspect of double
listening validates it, through
connection with the Faith uniquely
revealed in the Scriptures.
 Double listening is a process that
enables something to evolve as its
context changes.
 It seeks to hold in tension both a
creative engagement with context and a
faithfulness to the good news in Jesus.
TWO EARS ONE MOUTH
READER
FROM SCRIPTURE TO LIFE From Promise To Fulfillment
FROM SCRIPTURE TO LIFE
 Readers
are
ministers of the
Word.
 A ministry
centred on and
under the
authority of
scripture.
THE AUTHORITY OF
SCRIPTURE
 ‘Is
really a
shorthand for ‘the
authority of God
exercised through
scripture; and
God’s authority is
not merely his right
to control and
order the church,
THE AUTHORITY OF
SCRIPTURE
 but
his sovereign
power, exercised in
and through Jesus
and the Spirit, to
bring all things in
heaven and on
earth into
subjection to his
judging and healing
rule.’
THE AUTHORITY OF
SCRIPTURE
 ‘God
is at work through scripture (in
other words through the Spirit who is at
work as people read, study, teach and
preach scripture) to energize, enable
and direct the outgoing mission of the
church, genuinely anticipating thereby
the times when all things will be made
new in Christ.’ N.T.Wright ‘Scripture +
the Authority of God’
THE BIBLE IS OUR
CONSTITUTION
 ‘The
constitution of an ongoing
community’ Francis Fiorenza
 The way God's people move ahead
into his future while remaining rooted
in and governed by what He has done
and revealed in the past.
THE BIBLE AS THE
CHRISTIAN GRAND STORY
…
the biblical story of the world from
creation to consummation. It is the story
of the Trinitarian God's relationship with
his creation.
 It sees God as the beginning and end of
all things, their source and their goal,
Creator and Lord, Redeemer and
Renewer, the one who was and who is
and who is to come. It is a story which is
not yet completed.
OUR DIRECTION IN LIFE
 The
end of the story is still to come, with
the God who is also to come to his
creation in the end...
 This means that those who live by this
story live within it. It gives us our
identity, our place in the story, and a
part to play in the still-to-be-completed
purposes of God for his world.' Richard
Bauckham + Trevor Hart
GOD’S STORY IN US
 ‘To
enter the world of scripture (is) to
become a part of its story.’
 ‘We are not so much enjoined to get
inside the text, as to let the text get
inside us, so that we are nourished by
its word and enabled to perform its
story.’ Gerard Loughlin
SCRIPTURE AS PROMISE
 They
are Israelites, and to them belong
… the promises. Romans 9:4
 For in Christ every one of God's
promises is a "Yes.” 2Corinthians 1:20
 Thus he has given us, through these
things, his precious and very great
promises, so that through them you may
escape from the corruption that is in the
world because of lust, and may become
participants of the divine nature 2Pe 1:4
.
FREEDOM FOR CHANGE
'The Holy Spirit brings forward a
reality which is grounded in divine
promise rather than in human thought
or achievement.' Doctrine
Commission
 'I am determined by the future God
has promised rather than by the past I
have made.’ Doctrine Commission

DON’T MISS OUT
 For
God is not unjust; he will not overlook
your work and the love that you showed for
his sake in serving the saints, as you still
do.
 And we want each one of you to show the
same diligence so as to realize the full
assurance of hope to the very end,
 So that you may not become sluggish, but
imitators of those who through faith and
patience inherit the promises.
Hebrews 6:10-12
WORD AND SPIRIT
TOGETHER
A MEANS OF GRACE
 'Scripture
is a means of grace by which
God's Word continues to come to us. It is
not so much a static collection of timeless
oracles as it is the place to stand when
one wants to be in God's presence and
learn of him.
WORD AND SPIRIT
 Through
the Bible we can orient
ourselves to the objective revelation
that has been given and through the
Spirit enter into it personally and
dynamically.' Clark Pinnock.
WORD AND SPIRIT
 'The
Spirit acts as a kind of 'time
machine' via the Word, enabling the
believer to travel backward and
forward in salvation history and to
imaginatively participate in the events
that have been and are yet to be.'
Steven Land
TRAVEL IN SALVATION TIME
TWIN TRACK
 WORD
 God’s
gift from
the past
 SPIRIT
 God’s gift from
the future
THE MINISTRY OF THE
SPIRIT
 The
Spirit as 'The
certain evidence
that the future
had dawned, and
the absolute
guarantee' of its
final
consummation.'
Gordon Fee
THE MINISTRY OF THE
SPIRIT
 'The
Spirit has
given both the first
fruits and the
hope of full
liberation, and we
are stretched
between the two.'
Peter Hocken
THE MINISTRY OF THE
SPIRIT
 'The
action of the
Spirit is to
anticipate, in the
present,
and by means of
the finite and
contingent,
the things of the
age to come.'
Colin Gunton
THE MINISTRY OF THE
SPIRIT
 'In
this activity of
the Spirit the new
creation is already
being anticipated in
provisional forms in
human life.'
Richard Bauckham
+ Trevor Hart
THE ANTICIPATION OF THE
SPIRIT
 'It
is a vital part of a Christian
perspective on this world to identify
within it scattered acts of recreative
anticipation of God's promised future,
as the same Spirit who raised Jesus
from death calls into being life, health,
faith and hope where there is otherwise
no capacity for these and no accounting
for them.
FOLLOWING THE SPIRIT
 Christians
are called to identify and
to become involved with God's Spirit
in all that he is doing to fashion a
genuine presence of the new within
the midst of the old, drawing it into
self-transcendent albeit partial
anticipations of what will ultimately
be.
HERALDS OF GOD’S FUTURE
 Such
anticipations are to be found in
this world, but they are not of this
world. They belong to God's future of
which they are heralds and towards
which they direct our hopeful gaze. In
such happenings the power of the
future-made-present is manifest.’
Bauckham + Hart
HOPE RESTORED
 If
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (LZ W) decompressor
are needed to see t his picture.
this Spirit of God
is ‘the Spirit of the
resurrection', then
we are possessed
by a hope which
sees unlimited
possibilities
ahead, because it
looks to God's
future.
HOPE RESTORED
 The
heart expands. The goals of hope
in our own lives, and what we
ourselves expect of life, fuse with
God's promises for a new creation of
all things.
 This gives our own finite and limited life
an infinite meaning.’ Jurgen Moltmann
WHEN FAITH BECOMES
HOPE
 'Faith,
wherever it develops into hope,
causes not rest but unrest, not patience
but impatience. It does not calm the
unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet
heart in man.
WHEN FAITH BECOMES
HOPE
 Those
who hope in Christ can no
longer put up with reality as it is, but
begin to suffer under it, to contradict it