cobusvw's blog

What I’m about to write is not radical. But it’s not ordinary either. There are people doing radical stuff in church today, and I like many of them. But there are some pretty ordinary stuff that we argue away which might be some of the most radical actions to take.

Youth ministry has a way of becoming a kind of barometer for what is cooking within the church. Here is a simple test: In the church we like telling stories of Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Shane Claiborne, and many other radicals. But what would the middle-class church do when we take these examples seriously? How would the average person in this middle class church feel if we suggested or taught that these radical examples should be standard ways of living?

I spent the weekend down in Pietermaritzburg with the steering committee of ANiSA, visioning what the role of ANiSA might be in South Africa today. Coming from the Afrikaans Dutch Reformed church environment (a context to which I declared my love in one of the sessions, admittedly in similar fashion to which Ani Difranco declare love to her country), I found the conversations source of hope. The crowd was diverse in race, language, church background (gender however is a question which I would hope to see more diversity in future).

Let me put one presupposition on the table before I start this reflection: any approach to faith which is personalized in toto, so that it is only about my own personal salvation, and my own personal relationship with what we call God, in whichever way you might understand this, has broken with the tradition of Jesus (as well as the Old Testament). Thus, when I even consider a personal implication of faith, the Bible and theology, it still assumes that my personal faith has implications for the world around me, and this is true when one follows Jesus.