Saturday, October 18, 2008
The Closeness of Holy Spirit
This time I sense that have to go back to Kuala Lumpur. A busy life with certain mission.
I ove my wife because God has provide me a way to.
Monday, August 4, 2008
derek vreeland's blog: The Holy Spirit as a divine person
The Holy Spirit as a divine person
In my previous post I expressed my dislike for the age-old theological position that the Father and Son have this great relationship and the Spirit is merely the bond of love between them. I think this depersonalizes who the Holy Spirit is.
Both the Scripture and tradition hold to the full personhood of the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit is not like Yoda's force. He is not a divine energy. He is not merely the power of God. He is not the bond of love between the Father and the Son (even though I have great respect for Augustine, who made the point orginally).
The Holy Spirit is God.
"Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." (2 Cor. 3:17 ESV)
"We believe...in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified." (Nicene Creed 381AD)
The Holy Spirit is a mystery....a sacred mystery....
Below is my half of an email conversation with a friend on this subject.
Most of the theological world lacks in developing a solid, historical
biblical pneumatology that lays out the true personhood of the Holy Spirit.
And I agree that persona (person) cannot be defined in modern
terms. We need to step back and let the Church Father translate that word for
us. It seems from my limited review on the subject that the Western Fathers
including our friend Augustine – focused more on the Spirit as the love. The
Eastern (Greek) Fathers have written more on the personhood other
Spirit.
While I have not looked at this book, Colin Guton’s The Promise of Trinitarian Theology is supposed to deal with that subject. I have yet to tackle Gunton.
The best book I have read on the Holy Spirit / pneumatology is Come Creator Spirit by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa.
http://www.amazon.com/Come-Creator-Spirit-Meditations-Veni/dp/0814628710/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6694551-4086467?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184249074&sr=1-1
RC was the preacher of the papal household and theology professor. He has also been apart of the Catholic charismatic renewal for years. He is still writing in the area of charismatic theology. "Come Creator Spirit" is the only hymn sung by both Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians. It is a hymn sung to the
Holy Spirit.
RC took the hymn and used it as a guideline to lay out his pneumatology. The reason I like the book is that it is not only theological but it has a liturgical (worshipful) rhythm to it. I was re-reading parts of it last night. Here are some excerpts…I would add commentary, but I got to get back to sermon prep.
Liturgical rhythm…sacred mysteries…
________________________________________________________
Come Creator Spirit
by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa
(Translated by Denis and Marlene Barrett)
Pgs. 69-73
“Paraclete” is the title that most clearly expresses the personal character of the Holy Spirit. Using that title, the author of the hymn (“Come Creator Spirit”) takes us a decisive step forward in contemplating the Holy Spirit. If by the term “Creator” he affirmed that the Spirit was by nature divine, now by the term “Paraclete” he affirms that the Spirit is also a divine person.
In John, the relationship of the Spirti to Jesus is modeled on the relationship of Jesus to the Father. The Father is the one who testifies to the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the one who testifies to Jesus (John 15:26)… On this point Paul is in total agreement with John, and we cannot afford not to listen to his testimony as well. For him too, the Spirit is nor merely an action but also an agent, that is, a principle endowed with intellect and will, who knows what he is doing and chooses freely
to do it.
These terms (“person” or “hypostatsis”) mean something distinct from “substance,” they did not exist in any culture until Christian thinkers began reflecting on what Jesus had revealed of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and discovering what this revelation implied….The Greek Fathers would later give expression to this discovery of faith, saying that the Holy Spirit was not merely a “divine energy,” but an “active substance” or a “substantial agent” possessing will and intellect.
When we use the term “person” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we have to be careful to free the word of the meaning we commonly give it. Applied to the Holy Spirit, the term “person” does not mean a center of action complete in itself, an agent independently conscious of self, in the modern sense; it signifies only the relationships-of-origin that “contrast” or distinguish the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as among themselves….if a person in the Trinity is not simply an autonomous center of action and of will, he does participate nevertheless in that unique center common to the Three Persons, and in that sense is capable of acting and willing.
What a wonderful mystery, a sacred mystery...in a world where "not much is really sacred."
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.
Bob Dylan 1965
Source: http://www.derekvreeland.com/2007/07/holy-spirit-as-divine-person.html
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Relationship and service
God as a being who would like to give the world to His children. He categorized us a his children. Not a slave, not an employees, not maids, nor servant. The relationship, through Jesus, that God desire from us is fellowship with Him in love and openness. It is like mother and daughter, and father and son.
He care about your willingness to experience his reality more than your service to him. If he already own and created the world, if he thousands of Angels, why does he care to need your so called "ministry" or "service"?
Reasons
What He wants from us, in my finite mind, is the constant flow of love between we and God. This is the relationship that motivated him to create us who has the image of him. Focus your energy in experience his love, protection and guidance. Focus on receiving blessing from him. Focus on the fellowship of agape among the brothers and sisters in Christ.
WHEN HIS LOVE OUTFLOW IN YOUR LIFE. And, WHEN HE CALLS YOU TO SERVE. Then only you involve i the service to others. This is essentially important. If you do it this way, then your service is full of joy, energy and miracle because he will transfer his love through you.
My Early Experience
In my early days of church life, many people calls to be volunteers to provide service to other members of the organization (church). These are the people who seem to be "superhero" and higher class. But many of their private life and conducts do not reflect their position in the church.
If you do not serve, the people would look down on you. Seeing you that you are not "Christ" like. The peer pressure to serve is always there. They want to involve in cell group, Bible study, evangelism, hospital visit etc. Sunday becomes the busiest day of active Christian.
My New Understanding
As I seek God more, and as I read books more , pray more and do more soul searching. I realize that God the concept of service and relationship.
Tell you more next time....
A freedim of fellowship: House Chuch
House church
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
House church (or "home church") is an informal term for an independent assembly of Christians intentionally gathering in a home or on other grounds not normally used for worship services, as opposed to a church building, due to specific beliefs. They may meet in homes because they prefer to meet informally, because they believe it is an effective way of creating "community" and engaging in outreach, or because they believe small family-sized churches were a deliberate apostolic pattern in the first century and intended by Christ.[1]
Some churches meet in houses because they lack a conventional church building; these are not normally regarded as house churches as their intent is to move into a larger more conventional facility.
Cell churches are an appendage of conventional, institutional churches that meet in homes and share some characteristics of house churches, but are not normally considered house churches due to their institutional church hierarchy and association.
Some within the house church movement consider the term "house church" to be a misnomer, asserting that the main issue for christians who practice their faith in this manner is not the house but the type of meeting that takes place; other titles which may be used to describe this movement are "simple church", "relational church", "primitive church", "bodylife", "organic church", or "biblical church".
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Scriptural basis
Christians who meet together in homes or rented or independent halls usually do so because of a desire to return to the simplicity and purity of Church meetings as found in the New Testament. The New Testament shows that the early Christian church exhibited a simplicity of fellowship and interactive practice that is typically not the case in conventional denominations. Christians walked closely with each other, in close fellowship, sharing their lives in Christ together. This is expressed well by over 50 examples of the phrase "one another" found in the New Testament starting with the words of Jesus in John 13:34, "Love one another." Some Bible passages that indicate the atmosphere of early church life include:
- Lifestyle
- "They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer." (Acts 2:42 NASB)
- Participatory meetings
- "What is the outcome then, brethren? When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification." (1 Cor. 14:26 NASB; see also Colossians 3:16, Hebrews 10:24-25)
- Meeting in homes
- "Aquila and Prisca greet you heartily in the Lord, with the church that is in their house." (1 Cor. 16:19 NASB; see also Acts 20:20, Romans 16:5, Colossians 4:15, Philemon 1:2).
- Networking through 'Extra-local, Itinerant Ministries'
- "After some days Paul said to Barnabas, "Let us return and visit the brethren in every city in which we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are." (Acts 15:36 [NASB])
- Occasional Large Group Meetings
- "I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you publicly and from house to house" (Acts 20:20 [NASB])
[edit] Structure and organization
- Leadership
Some assemblies have a very conventional leadership structure, others have none. A commonly held belief in the modern day house church "movement" is that the Protestant Reformation did not go far enough to demonstrate a New Testament belief in the "priesthood of all believers" and that Jesus Christ alone is the Head of the Church, and the believers the body. The absence of hierarchical leadership structures in many house churches, while often viewed by the Protestant church at large as a sign of anarchy or rebelliousness to authority, is viewed by many in the house church movement to be the most viable way to come under true spiritual authority of love, relationships, and the visible dominion of Jesus Christ as Head of his own bride (i.e. the church). This does not mean that they reject all leadership, however. Many house churches develop elders and deacons who serve the members. Some house churches also accept ministry from church planters and itinerant workers they consider to be apostles.
- Meeting format
Many house church gatherings are free, informal, and sometimes include a shared meal. Participants hope that everyone present will feel free to contribute to the gathering as and when they sense the leading of the Holy Spirit to do so. Leadership structures range from no official leaders, to a plurality of appointed elders. There is a deliberate attempt within most house churches to minimize the leadership of any one person, and so having one lone pastor is generally considered unscriptural and an openly plural responsibility of leadership is preferred and sought.
- Networking
The house church movement today also owes much of its networking and exchange of information to the use of the Internet; HC is generally used as an abbreviation for "House Church" and IC is used to designate "Institutional Church" which is the generalized term for more traditional church structures, including a church building and/or sermon-centered church services directed by a pastor or minister. More recently local networks of house churches have begun to form with gatherings of house churches in an area getting together periodically for celebrations.
[edit] Origins and history
The first house church is recorded in Acts 1:13, where the disciples of Jesus met together in the upper room of a house. For the first three centuries of the church, Christians commonly met in homes. Clement of Alexandria, an early church father, wrote of worshipping in a house. A private house in Dura-Europos (near Baghdad) was excavated in the 1930’s and was found to be used as a Christian meeting place in AD 232, with one small room serving as a baptistry. [2] Throughout history, various Christian groups worshipped in homes, often due to persecution by the state church or the civil government.
After being freed from prison by an angel, the apostle Peter went to the house of Mary the mother of John Mark (where believers were gathered for prayer) so that they might spread the news of his escape. Since Mary is the only name mentioned in the Bible in reference to a house church in Jerusalem (where the church was then being persecuted), and since Peter made this his first stop before moving on, this may indicate that the church that met in Mary’s house was a notable assembly.
The origins of the so-called house church movement are varied. In North America and the UK particularly, it is often viewed as a development and logical extension of the 'Brethren' or Plymouth Brethren movement both in doctrine and practice where many individuals and assemblies have adopted new approaches to worship and governance, while others recognise a relationship to the Anabaptists, Quakers, Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, Moravians, Methodists, and the much earlier Waldenses and Priscillianists. Another perspective sees the house church movement as a re-emergence of the move of the Holy Spirit during the Jesus Movement of the 1970s in the USA or the worldwide Charismatic Renewal of the late 1960s and 1970s. Others see it as a return to a New Testament church Restorationism paradigm and a restoration of God's eternal purpose and the natural expression of Christ on the earth, urging Christians to return from hierarchy and rank to practices described and encouraged in Scripture.
The house church movement has been more recently encouraged by the church planting and publishing initiative of writers like Wayne Jacobsen,Robert Fitts, Frank Viola, Tony & Felicity Dale, Wolfgang Simson and Gene Edwards. The Internet itself has contributed to the phenomenon's exponential growth in the past decade, networking many previously unconnected individuals.
In addition, house church discussion lists such as Home Church Connection, HCDL, and New Wineskin have had a huge influence on the growth of the house church movement for the past decade. People, who might otherwise have remained disconnected prior to the internet, have met online to form house church fellowships throughout the U.S. For many, these discussion lists are the first taste of relational body life outside of the traditional church.
[edit] House Church Movement
No single factor can sum up the emergence of the contemporary house church movement, but a confluence of all the threads noted above have contributed to the growth of house churches in the West.
Today, the spread of house churches is largely found in countries like China, Vietnam, India, Cuba, Brazil and African nations[3], but they are also seen in small, but growing, numbers in the Philippines, Europe, and North America[4]. House churches in Saudi Arabia have experienced raids by the religious police, often resulting in the arrest of the leaders of the assembly.
[edit] Relationship to Established Churches, Missions Groups and society
Historically, there have been tensions between house church movements (along with other restoration and revival movements) and traditional churches. Therefore, many house churches do not have formal links to larger Christian organizations as a matter of principle. More recently, a number of established Christian denominations and missions organizations have officially supported efforts to develop house church networks. These include the following: The Free Methodist Church in Canada, The Foursquare Gospel Church of Canada, The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, Partners in Harvest, The Southern Baptist Convention (USA), Dove Christian Fellowship International, DAWN Ministries (Discipling a Whole Nation), and Youth With A Mission (YWAM), Eternal Grace[1] [2], and the recently launched Underground Churches among others.
In a social sense, the movement towards house churches may be linked to other social movements as well, such as the "emerging church movement", missional living, the parachurch movement,[citations needed] and perhaps even larger social phenomena such as panocracy and intentional living movements.[citations needed]
[edit] Statistics on the House Church Movement
(Statistical Sources: Rad Zdero (2004), The Global House Church Movement; Rad Zdero (2007), Nexus: The World House Church Movement Reader; Dawn Friday Fax, www.jesus.org.uk/dawn; Wolfgang Simson (2007), The Starfish Manifesto; Wolfgang Simson, EaSi Newsletter, July 2007; Wikipedia)
- Bangladesh: 500,000 new believers in HC's
- Cambodia: 1,000 new HC's in 10 years (1990 to 2000)
- Canada: as many as 2,000 HC's in Canada in the last few years
- China: 80-100 million believers in HC's
- Cuba: 6,000-10,000 HC's since 1992
- Egypt: 4,000 HC's
- Ethiopia: growth from 5,000 to 50,000 believers in HC's during the 1980s
- India: approx. 100,000 HC's started in 5 years (from 2001 - 2006)
- Latin America: 1 million HC-type groups known as 'Basic Ecclesial Communities'
- Sri Lanka: Kithu Sevena church movement started 131 new HC's in 7 months (in 2004)
- Vietnam: one church planting team start 550 new HC's in 2 years (1997 to 1999)
- U.S.A.: 1,600 HC's on internet alone (as of 2003) with possibly as many as 30,000 HC's (according to the American pollster George Barna)
[edit] Recommended Books
- Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church.
- Steve Atkerson (ed.), Ekklesia: To the Roots of Biblical Church Life.
- Robert & Julia Banks, The Church Comes Home, Hendrickson Pub.
- Robert Banks, Going to Church in the First Century. Seedsowers Publishing
- George Barna, Revolution.
- Gilbert Bilezikian, Community 101, Zondervan Pub.
- E.H. Broadbent, The Pilgrim Church.
- Neil Cole, Organic Church
- Graham Cooke, Gary Goodell, Permission Granted: To Do Church Differently in the 21st Century (Destiny Image Publishers)
- Albert James Dager, The House Assembly. Sword Publishers
- Felicity Dale, An Army of Ordinary People
- Tony & Felicity Dale, Simply Church
- Dale, Getting Started: A Practical Guide to Planting Simple Churches (Karis Publishing)
- Gene Edwards, Beyond Radical. Seedsowers Publishing
- Gene Edwards, When the Church was Led by Laymen. Seedsowers Publishing
- Robert Fitts, The Church in the House.
- David Garrison, Church Planting Movements.
- Roger Gehring, House Church and Mission (by far, the most comprehensive scholarly work on house churches in the first century)
- Wayne Jacobsen, The Naked Church.
- Wayne Jacobsen, Authentic Relationships.
- Clifford James, The Blueprint (read online at [3])
- Larry Kreider, House Church Networks.
- Jaeson Ma, The Blueprint
- Charles Newbold, The Crucified Ones.
- Hope Ovwah, God's Pattern Church. (read online at [4])
- Rutz, James, The Open Church
- Rutz, James, Megashift
- Wolfgang Simson, Houses that Change the World.
- R. Maurice Smith, A Kingdom A People & A River
- Terry Stanley, Home Church.
- Frank Viola, Bethany.
- Frank Viola, Reimagining Church.
- Frank Viola, Pagan Christianity.
- Frank Viola, The Untold Story of the New Testament Church
- Rad Zdero, The Global House Church Movement. Get it here [5]
- Rad Zdero (ed.), NEXUS: The World House Church Movement Reader. Get it here [6]
[edit] References
- ^ Simson, W: "Houses that Change the World", pages 79-101. Authentic Media, 2005
- ^ http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/s06020076.htm
- ^ Garrison, David "Church Planting Movements". January 2003, Wigtake Resources.
- ^ Ibid.
Osiek, C., and Margaret Y. MacDonald. A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.
MacHaffie, Barbara J. Her Story. 2nd Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.
Friday, May 30, 2008
The Reality of Life: Matrix
Google Search
