Blog - Page 70 of 318 - John H Armstrong

The Babylonian Captivity of the American Church (5)

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:57-05:00January 11th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Church History, Church Tradition, Culture, Current Affairs, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, Politics, Religion, Renewal, The Church, The Future|

Hope Floats

A 1998 movie starring Sandra Bullock bore the title: “Hope Floats.” The movie features an unassuming housewife who learns of her husband’s infidelity on a national television talk show. In shock she returns to her small home town to try and put her life back together. She eventually discovers that only “hope” can float her life again.

Hope sells! Our president ran on hope in 2008. In 2012 he told a new narrative but it was still rooted in the premise that what he hoped for in 2008 would still come if we would trust him with four more years to finish what he had begun. It was a much harder political sell in 2012, but in the end a significant number of people believed him and heard echoes of hope again. Seemingly that’s what made the difference in the end.

I am inviting you to join me in a new kind of hope, a hope that is not found in the policies of the left, the middle or the right. (Once again, I am not calling you to withdraw from society or public life, as some […]

The Babylonian Captivity of the American Church (4)

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:57-05:00January 10th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Church History, Church Tradition, Culture, Current Affairs, Emergent Church, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, Politics, Postmodernity, Religion, Renewal, The Church, The Future|

A Colony of Heaven

James Moffatt’s translation of the New Testament translates politeuma, in Philippians 3:20, as: “We are a colony of heaven.” The Jews in the Dispersion, and living in Babylon, understood this very well. They knew what it meant to live as “strangers” in a strange land. They understood that they were aliens trying to live on someone else’s turf (Resident Aliens, 11).

In the first century Jewish believers in Jesus as Messiah understood what it meant to gather in the name of the Lord and sing the praises of the slaughtered Lamb in corporate worship of the triune God. They understood that they were a colony, a beachhead, an outpost in the middle of a foreign culture. When they gathered they did not seek to shape the culture so much as to encourage one another and catechize their new converts and children. Their calling was to learn the lifestyle of faith and to live it in a way that was countercultural. Rome was full of gods and many kinds of spirituality and worship. These Christian believers were seen as a sect of the Jews who […]

The Babylonian Captivity of the American Church (3)

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:57-05:00January 9th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Church History, Church Tradition, Culture, Current Affairs, Emergent Church, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Politics, Religion, Renewal, The Church, The Future|

Waking Up Is Hard to Do

Sometime in the late 1980s, or early 1990s, I began to realize how profoundly we had moved away from “My America.” Whatever my parents believed about America and our culture there were fewer and fewer people who believed it and the social and religious tide was clearly moving in an entirely new direction.

Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians began to realize that people were not becoming Christians by simply growing up in the neighborhood and being brought to church to follow Christ. They began to “fight back.” They demonized the secular society, especially the courts and the politicians on the left, and launched an attack mode that had a significant impact until 2008. In 2012 we saw the fading glimmers of this public and political movement come to large scale ruin. (I know, there will be more of the same to come but you can take this much to the bank–this movement is dying and will be of no significant importance in future national elections. Furthermore, those Christians who fight to transform the culture by these means will only spend more money and […]

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2014, Part Two

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:57-05:00January 9th, 2013|Categories: Church History, Current Affairs, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, Prayer, Roman Catholicism, Unity of the Church|

In 1935 Abbé Paul Couturier, a priest of the Archdiocese of Lyons, sought a solution to the problem of Catholics and non-Roman Catholics observing the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity together. He found this solution in the Roman Missal as the Association for Promotion of the Unity of Christians had done seventy-eight years earlier in England. Couturier promoted prayer for Christian unity on the inclusive basis that “our Lord would grant to his Church on earth that peace and unity which were in his mind and purpose, when, on the eve of His Passion, He prayed that all might be one.” (cf. John 17:21-23). I think one of the most significant statements written, at least up until this point in the history of this week of prayer, is the expressed hope that this time would unite Christians in their prayer for that perfect unity that God wills and by the means that he wills. Like Fr. Paul Wattson, Abbé Couturier exhibited a powerful passion for unity. He sent out “calls to prayer” annually until his death […]

The Babylonian Captivity of the American Church (2)

By John Armstrong|2013-01-08T04:00:17-06:00January 8th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Church History, Church Tradition, Culture, Current Affairs, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, Politics, Religion, The Church, The Future|

The Babylonian Captivity of the Church

Luther’s work was a sustained theological argument, thus it was published in Latin. But it was originally written in German, the language in which most people read it and began to discuss it.

Luther’s primary concern was to examine the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church in the light of his understanding of the Holy Scripture. He urged, to give just one example, that the cup in the eucharist should be restored to the laity. He further dismissed the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation while still affirming the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist. These were primary points in his argument.

To follow Luther’s argument a bit more carefully you need to understand that he believed the “captivity” the church had begun in the Middle Ages with something as simple, but profoundly important, as the withholding of the cup from the laity in the Lord’s Supper. This was radical stuff at the time! (It seems so tame to us five centuries later.) Make no mistake about this context, Luther said a whole lot more, some of which was […]

The Babylonian Captivity of the American Church (1)

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:57-05:00January 7th, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Culture, Current Affairs, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Politics, Postmodernity, Religion, Renewal, The Church, The Future|

If the Bugle Gives an Indistinct Sound, How Will We Be Awakened?

Over the last month or so I have done a series of twelve blogs on the “The Spiritual State of the Nation.” I wrote these after reading the results of several exit polls following the November election. I sought not so much to explain the political landscape as to ask what was happening to the spiritual life of Christians in 2012? My desire, in these articles, was to reflect on our present spiritual state and what we can and should do about it. Now I would like to propose an adequate theological and social model for how we should live in these very different times.

Lessons from the Protestant Reformation

Scholars and students of the Protestant Reformation know that Martin Luther wrote three important polemical books in the second half of 1520. These books, all quickly printed and distributed quite widely, helped to fuel the growing Protestant movement. They were equal parts prophetic, provocative and bombastic. Whatever he wanted to accomplish in writing these books, the result was that the church could no longer retain its cozy […]

The World Is Flat – What It Means for Mission

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:57-05:00January 4th, 2013|Categories: Culture, Current Affairs, Emergent Church, Evangelism, Leadership, Missional Church, Social Networking, Web/Tech, Weblogs|

Thomas Friedman, in his best-selling book The World is Flat, provides an incredibly compelling overview of how advances in modern technology, communication and marketing have flattened our world. He explains that the world is rapidly shrinking and shows how geographical, language and cultural barriers have become increasingly blurred by the day. Never before have we had the resources, technology and accessibility that is now available to us to effectively and instantaneously communicate and connect with people all over the world.

Just yesterday I had lunch with a friend who related a story to me that is now quite common. He was at a Christmas gathering with his “god-daughter” and asked her if she could function in the world without her “smart phone” in her hands? She looked at him incredulously and said, “No, I do not know how I would function without my cell phone/device!” I asked my friend, a few years older than me, if he could imagine functioning in his world without his automobile? He immediately saw my point. Of course you can live […]

ACT 3 – Our Vision for 2013 and Beyond

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:57-05:00January 3rd, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Unity of the Church|

In the final month of 2012 the mission of ACT3 made some significant shifts in strategy and vision that I hope readers of my blog will note in the coming weeks.

First, we added the word “network” to our public name, thus becoming ACT3 Network. The name “network” has become popular in the age of the computer because it describes what happens when you connect two or more computers together so that they can share resources, thus creating what we call a computer network. But the word network has been around much, much longer. Traditionally, social networks were made up of people who might gather face-to-face, forming social units and human groups or communities. Today’s social networks are increasingly online but I am convinced these networks will never replace the traditional forms of people making networks that are non-virtual. I see this as a both/and, not an either/or. ACT3 intends to be a social, spiritual and viral network, both online and in person. We believe the two will grow more accustomed to one another over time […]

Payback: How We Understand Debt and Revenge

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:58-05:00January 2nd, 2013|Categories: Culture, Current Affairs, Environmentalism, Ethics, Film, Politics, Wealth|

The famous Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood defines the subject of her book “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth” — which originated as the 2008 Massey Lectures in Toronto — as “one of the most worrisome and puzzling things I know: that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.” In a wide-ranging history of debt Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood investigates the many meanings of debt through the ages, from ancient times to the current global financial meltdown. With all that has transpired in the United States in the past few decades many of us wonder: how could we have let such a collapse happen? How old or inevitable is this human pattern of debt? Payback is an imaginative, topical and insightful reconsideration of our ideas of ownership and debt.

Ms. Atwood is a brilliant writer and this particular work is filled with insights that I found most unsettling when I saw Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary version of the story, also titled Payback, which was inspired by Ms. Atwood’s book. (The film and book title should not […]

The Spiritual State of the Nation (12)

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:58-05:00January 1st, 2013|Categories: America and Americanism, American Evangelicalism, Culture, Current Affairs, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Politics, Renewal, The Church, The Future|

Our Image Is Bad

The recent election underscores a huge image problem that the church has in this culture. In this case image is like a huge picture and it is more powerful than a thousand words of explanation.

Christianity, especially Protestant evangelical Christianity, is associated (wrongly it should be noted) with white, middle-class, right-wing beliefs and politics. I say this image is false because there are large numbers of Hispanic, Black and Asian evangelicals in the United States and the majority of them do not see the recent election the way most white Christians do.

While large number of white evangelicals have been fighting “culture wars” for several decades other Christians are not remotely interested. These wars have sapped our missional energy, taken millions of our dollars and have very often led us to follow a “road to nowhere.” If anything was made profoundly clear in November of 2012 I think this had to be it. The “culture way” is over!

The way to change our bad image is to learn from the millennials. They are deeply interested in compassion for the poor, for widows, orphans and the most […]