The words ‘believe’, ‘believes’, ‘believing’, and ‘believed’ occur more times in John than in any other book in the bible; in fact they occur more times in John than all of the other gospels together.  John starts by telling us:

After 4 years and 3 months of gathering and meeting on a Sunday in the Jurys Inn, Croydon, we are moving...

From this Sunday, 20th November 2011, we will be gathering at:

Taylor Road Day Centre
Taylor Road, Mitcham, 
Surrey, CR4 3JR

Our gathering on Sunday will be at the same time, 12 noon to 1.30pm, and also we will having various activities on a Tuesday, and we will give you more details on this in due course.

Come and celebrate with us this Sunday....

http://www.regenerationproject.com/gatherings

In his introduction to John’s Gospel in the Message Bible, Eugene Peterson writes:

“In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God is presented as speaking the creation into existence. God speaks the word and it happens: heaven and earth, ocean and stream, trees and grass, birds and fish, animals and humans. Everything, seen and unseen, called into being by God’s spoken word.

In deliberate parallel to the opening words of Genesis, John presents God as speaking salvation into existence. This time God’s word takes on human form and enters history in the person of Jesus. Jesus speaks the word and it happens: forgiveness and judgment, healing and illumination, mercy and grace, joy and love, freedom and resurrection. Everything broken and fallen, sinful and diseased, called into salvation by God’s spoken word.

For, somewhere along the line things went wrong (Genesis tells that story, too) and are in desperate need of fixing. The fixing is all accomplished by speaking—God speaking salvation into being in the person of Jesus. Jesus, in this account, not only speaks the word of God; he is the Word of God.

Keeping company with these words, we begin to realize that our words are more important than we ever supposed. Saying “I believe,” for instance, marks the difference between life and death. Our words accrue dignity and gravity in conversations with Jesus. For Jesus doesn’t impose salvation as a solution; he narrates salvation into being through leisurely conversation, intimate personal relationships, compassionate responses, passionate prayer, and—putting it all together—a sacrificial death. We don’t casually walk away from words like that.”

One of the key themes in John is the idea of God’s Word. For John, the Word is not abstract or conceptual. It is concrete, it is living it is actual and personal. For John we do not simple hear God’s Word we meet and encounter God’s Word. We do not simply know God’s Word by rote we know God’s Word through personal and profound experience. We to not recite God’s Word as scholars, we recall and recount our experiences with the Word as witnesses. God’s Word is not simply lessons to be learned but truth to be lived out in real life relationships and experiences. The Word must become flesh.

“God’s speaking is never idle chatter, it is speaking with a purpose and it has power to effect that purpose. God’s word has the power and the authority to make what it says happen... God’s word is never just a set of truths or ideas it is always an event, which on the one hand it brings us into personal contact with the one who speaks and on the other hand works its will on the persons and situations to which it is addressed. By it God creates and re-creates, judges and forgives... [God’s word] is a life changing and history making event that provokes a crisis, a decision, a parting of ways where ever it is spoken...”

It is interesting to note that when God comes to fix humanity he comes to us in the form of the Word; and it is this Word that must be believed, trusted, obeyed, lived out and enfleshed in our day to day experiences and encounters. The Word is the very stuff of life: from turning water into wine, to giving living water at wells; from being the bread from heave to serving five thousand bread from lunch box. Everything we need we encounter and experience through the Word. The challenge is for us to believe the Word, abide in the Word and ultimately live the Word, so that in us and through our actions the Word of God is made flesh again and again. In doing this we live out the meaning of Jesus’ Words to his first disciples: “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.”

Discussion Points

1. How can we make our faith less conceptual and more concrete; less religious and more relational, less about knowledge and more about experience?

2. John writes: ¹⁴The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.  We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.  How do we ‘enflesh’ the Word and allow God through us to move into our neighbourhoods?

3. Within the context of John teaching about the Word being God in person, what does it mean to believe the Word? What does this look like in real life?

4. Thinking about your life, your relationships, where you work and where you live, what would the ‘Word made flesh’ look like in your world?

5. In John we see the transforming power of the Word in way concrete ways is God’s Word changing your life.

Happy New Year.

I know it has been a whiles since the last blog - I think things just got very busy for all of us and I certainly havent found the time for blogging on this site.

Anyway, I just want to give God thanks for 2010 and what the things we done and achieved as a community, some of the memorable and notable thing are:

• The Freedom Programme.  We give thanks for the work that Maureen and Dorlisa done with those women that enrolled in the programme, and the relationships that were built and the impact that was made in those women's lives.
• The Summer Thanks Giving Celebration and Summer BBQ.  We give thanks for those days which we really special for us as a community.
• The Love, Care and Support.  This has been a trying year for many of our members, and we want to give thanks for being there to support and strengthen each other.
• Our Journey through the Writings of John.  The journey we have been taking through the book of John has been really  enlightening and life enriching, we give thanks for the teaching team that has shared throughout the year.

2011 awaits us and calls us continue to love,  hope and pray with others, sharing the good news of the kingdom of God, inviting others to join us on this journey of following Jesus.

This year is going to present us with a whole lot of new challenges, call us to change, and ultimately live out our commitment to Jesus.  A big change for the community this year will be moving the venue for our main Sunday gatherings - please pray about this as some opportunities are presenting themselves to us and we hope that they materialise.

I look forward to the journey that we will take together, and whatever 2011 throws at us, may our lives be filled with love, faith and hope.

May you find the courage to face your fears...

The wisdom to see new opportunities...

And the tenacity to stand against the wind!

As always...

Stay Cool!

Phil

:-)

Here is another interesting quote from another fiction book I am reading, in fact a sequel book to the last one I mentioned:

When a farmer seeds his field with corn he knows that the weeds will grow also.  They will grow faster than his crop, the roots digging deep, drawing the nutrients from the land.  Therefore, if he is wise, he patrols his field, uprooting the weeds.  Every human heart is like that farmers field.  Evil lurks there, and a wise man will search out the weeds of evil.  Beware the man who says, 'My heart is pure', for evil is growing within him unchecked. (The Wisdom of the Deacon, Chapter XIV)

This quote is from David Gemmell's Bloodstone, which is a sci-fi fantasy tale, set in a future where the world has experienced a global disaster , which has basically rendered the world a cold and inhospitable place.  The book is not important but I think that this quote interestingly mirrors what the bible teaches us about the human heart and our ability to commit great acts of evil.

I believe in each one of us is the potential to love in amazing ways, to do great acts of kindness and compassion, and an amazing capacity to live in a selfless and sacrificial life - the seeds of love and good live in each of us.  However, by the same token there is also a great potential for evil that lives and resides in each of us.

Sometimes we like to blame our evil on external forces and things we can not control, but the truth is that the capacity or seeds of evil live in each of us, and the whilst we think that we are not capable of doing certain evil acts, given the wrong situations and circumstances, this preconception is easily challenged.

I think ultimately what we live out:  love or evil; is a choice of who we chose to serve and why.  When we chose to serve ourselves and our own agendas we will ultimately cross lines that we know we shouldn't and make decisions that will cause us to live contrary to the values we consider true, just and noble.  When we choose to serve and love with others, although the path is not always easy or simple, we will ultimately make the choices that will mirror that love.

The choice to live for Jesus, is and should ultimately be a choice to love and serve others, it is a choice to not serve the gods of this world and live for just ourselves.  However, in choosing to serve Jesus, we must also be aware that the seeds of evil still live on the inside of us, and therefore we must make sure we plant good seeds and weed up the roots - Jesus tells us his word is good seed!

It is arrogant to think that we are pure and that we do not have to check the attitudes and emotions that build up on the inside of us, an unchecked heart is a place where all kinds of evil can thrive.

Stay Cool!

Hey there...

He is an interesting exert from a fiction book that I am currently reading:

'What is the book?'

'It is the history of a people long dead, and it is the Word of God through the ages.'

'Does it give you peace, Shannow?'

'No, it torments me.'

'Does it give you power?'

'No, it weakens me.'

'Then why do you read it?'

'Because without it there is nothing but a meaningless existence of pain and sorrow, ending in death.  For what would we strive?'

This is from a fiction book by David Gemmell called Wolf in Shadow.

I find this interesting and it speaks to me on a deep level.  Sometimes we want the bible to give us strength, power and all of the answers but more often than not it doesn't.  It teaches us to love and struggle with difficult issues, and pray when we can't make any sense of things around us.  It teaches us to give away power, to offer ourselves as a sacrifice, it takes away our ability to do what we know and teaches us to follow his ways and not ours, to trust rather than try and work things out ourselves.  It challenges us to love when it is near impossible, and confronts us on our wrongs and short comings - it sometimes does not give peace but does torment us.

Peace and Love

It as been a while since I last blogged, partly because I have been so bogged down with work, and partly because every time I sat down to write a blog I just couldn't string my thoughts and words together in any sensible way... and I know I probably don't make much sense most of the time, but I do like to try and make sense when I do Regen things! ;-)

Anyway the thing that has been on my mind over the last few weeks can be summed up in the following, us being light, love, and hope and not just saying it!

I dont know if you watched the Channel 4 Dispatches television programme on 'Britain's  Witch Children', it was a very disturbing documentary on some of London's 'churches' and 'pastors', and the perverted and disgraceful activities of a few people and groups that are done in the name of Jesus, things that have nothing to do with what Jesus taught or commanded us as followers, and nothing to do with the Church or God's Kingdom.  What I saw was not light but darkness, not love but manipulation, not hope but despair , to put it bluntly it was evil!

I have also been doing a lot of thinking and reading on Christians response to the LGBT community, and Christian-Muslim relationships recently over the last few weeks.  A group of Christians recently decided to go to a Gay Pride demonstration in Chicago, and instead holding up hateful placards, or watching it in a judgmental and condescending way, they wore t-shirts saying 'We are sorry' and they choose to engage people in a positive way by acknowledging that the Christian community has not always been loving or helpful in the ways they have engaged the LGBT community.  In fact our engage as Christian has at times been hateful and judgmental.

The debate happening in NYC, on whether a Mosque should be built a few block from Ground Zero, is also interesting to me - it never ceases to amaze me that we want one thing for us as Christian's but are not willing to offer the same liberties to others that think or believe differently.  Thanks God for Evangelical Theologian John Stackhouse and his blog (Ground Zero Mosque - Its a Simple Question).

Tonight I watched the Rachel Weisz film 'Agora', which is a historical drama set in the 4th century in Alexandria, Egypt, it tells the story of the female philosophy professor and atheist Hypatia of Alexandria, and her life and death.  The sad thing is that the film is centred around the influence of the Christian Church, and instead of being light they became darkness, instead of love that demonstrate hatred and intolerance, and instead of hope they show despair.  In fact the Christian Church was the embodiment of evil!  Now, I know the film has probably been fictionalised and embellished a bit, but we know from the historical account of the crusades, this film is a lot nearer the truth than we may want to admit.

Let us be light, love, and hope and not just say it!  Let us watch out for extremism and fundamentalism, let us explore the teaches of Jesus again and shake off some of the dogmatic teachings that Christianity has adopted, and lets us get back to the core of what Jesus taught!  Let us be a conspiracy of little Jesus'.... that bring good news to the poor, broken and captive.... that go to those living in the margins and on the edges of society and show them love and hope.  Being judgmental and hateful has nothing to do with Jesus or his kingdom... exploiting and manipulating has nothing to Jesus or his kingdom....

Being light, love, and hope has everything to do with Jesus, so lets be it and not just say it!

One Love!

Every now and then the thought enters my mind "What if money didn't exist and everything was free?"  We would all have access to the best of everything; food, medication, clothing, housing, education, travel, entertainment, to name but just a few.   Everything would be created just for the joy of it and shared with others in order to share that joy and great ideas would gain the interest and effort of all, in the shared interest of making life more enjoyable for everyone.  Work would no longer be motivated by money and hence, all labour would be free as would all materials and tools. We would all live healthier lives and there would be less crime as there would be no need to steal, and relationships would be better as we would each be valued and celebrated for our unique contribution to the joy of others. You may say that those who didn't share free  would be marginalised, but who wouldn't be willing to share in a world where everything was freely given? There would be no lack at all.

John Lennon asked us to Imagine no heaven, no countries and no posessions, but can you imagine a world without money? ... sounds like heaven to me ... (italics added for emphasis)

Imagine there's no money
It's easy if you try
No debt of hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no money
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no false religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no concept of possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

So the question remains, if the currency of life was love, would we be rich or poor?

Here is a question... What does forgiveness look like???

We often say things like 'forgive and forget', or alternatively 'I forgive you but I will never forget', but what does real forgiveness look like?

I am not talking about forgiveness for little things that do not really matter in the grand scheme of things.  I am talking forgiveness for things that are painful, things like injustice, betrayal, abuse, prejudice, racism, hurtful words and actions, violation of a deep trust - things that leave scars in our memories, things that affect our future relationships, things that hurt years after the event.

One of the things we are challenged to do through the teaching of Jesus is to forgive others, it is the kind of forgiveness that enables us to do what Jesus says in Matthew 5...

...Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

It is easy to tell people to forgive, especially when you are not dealing with the emotions that they are dealing with, and we all know that we should forgive because a lack of forgiveness cause us to seek revenge and retribution and breeds anger, bitterness, and hatred, but how do you forgive when you feel like you can't?  \

I am reminded of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that happened in South Africa following the abolition of apartheid, where witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings, also perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.

All I can say is that I think it must of taken great courage for those who were victims of hatred and racism, to find the grace that began that process of forgiveness, and ultimately reconciliation.

Here is a quote I posted on the Regen Facebook status last week (and I didn't get any 'likes' on this one!):

The same love that motivates forgiveness pushes it not just from exclusion to neutrality, but from neutrality to embrace.  Miroslav Volf

What des this quote mean to you?  And how do those who are finding hard to forgive to start to forgive?

Without a vision the people perish (waste away, live without discipline are unfocused and drift).  Proverbs 29.18,    Vision is defying the status quo.  It is refusing to believe what you see because of an overwhelming faith in the unseen realities.  It is a total confidence in God's future.  George Barna writes

“Vision comes in the form of a “mental portrait,” indicating this is a picture in the mind’s eye of the [person]. Vision focuses on what does not yet exist, but should- a “preferable future”. Vision, then, is a view of the kind of world God wants us to live within, a world he can create through us… Once you grasp the vision, you will never be the same. …Vision is a clear and compelling picture of a better tomorrow that inspires people to change, to get involved, to care and to do things that contribute to the common good.” (George Barna, Leaders on Leadership, pp. 47-49).

Listen to the last sentence, "Vision is a clear and compelling picture of a better tomorrow that inspires people..."  What is inpiring you?  What dreams and visions are calling out to you and are motivating you to get up and get involved?  When it comes to visions the question is what is God's vision for our world (with a small 'w')?  What difference is he calling us to make?  A few weeks ago Michael Ampadu preached about seeing a vision of rivers of repentance.  Imagine that! Rivers of personal transformation of the God-kind.  Now that makes my heart beat faster.  It keeps me up at night dream and scheming with God.  Seeing more and more people come to know the saving love of Jesus brings tears to my eyes.  It makes me call out to God in unknown languages.  It compels me to love and to stetch myself out.

"Where there is no vision the people perish..."  Howeve,r Kirbyjon Caldwell says "Without people the vision perishes."   If  The Regeneration Project is to be all that God wants it to be each person who is part of the project must see what God sees.  We must pray that God opens the eyes of our hearts to see, to hear and to experience the needs of people all around us and then we must be filled with God's love and courage to speak up and share the good news about Jesus and his Kingdom.  We cannot simply drift through life hoping that people will get it because we are nice, and we care.  We must speak up and tell our family and our friends about Jesus' amazing Kingdom movement.

Folks this is my prayer

Love, Peace and a heart burning with a vision of God's tomorrow,

Paul