An interview with Sam Owes.
Ed: It’s hard to deny that we are living in challenging times culturally. The church’s influence is fading, and we are struggling to find answers to some hard questions. What’s your take on the health of the church today, especially as it relates to our witness?
Sam: It is true that we are living in challenging times culturally. However, challenges like persecution and assimilation have been the fertile soil in which the church of Jesus Christ has been creative and transformational. From a North American point of view, we are experiencing the death of Christendom, which could be turning out for our good. Phillip Jenkins has written about this in many of his works on Global Christianity.
We are in many ways returning to a time similar to the early church in that we are a disenfranchised minority. Religion and monolithic cultural Christianity are powerless without the support of the powers that be. Yet, we are also seeing widespread growth and the spread of Christ followers in Africa, Asia, and South America.
With globalization, we see the phenomena of immigrants taking the gospel back to European countries and North America. Calvary Worship Centre is such a story, too, with people from more than 106 nations worshipping together and seeing people come to Christ every week by the grace of God.
Jenkins proclaims that:
Charismatic people movements that seek to change their world through the translation of Christian truth and the transfer of power. These grassroots movements are a combination therefore of a spiritual factor (the Spirit of God), a people factor (the transfer of power to the marginalized), a truth factor (the application of the gospel to the pressing questions of a people group and culture) and a justice ...
from
http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/yOBqWYVaEdE/preoccupied-with-love-lifting-high-evangelism-again-sam-owu.html
No comments:
Post a Comment