RETHINK CONFERENCE NOTES – January 18-19,2008
(hosted locally by Rosemead United Methodist Church via downlink)
The following notes, with supplemental material in some cases, are a purely subjective
synopsis of points made by presenters at he recent "Rethink" conference beamed from
Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral to numerous download suites, including the one in
Rosemead.
Former President HW Bush –
My parents both attended Church and with others related following the example of Jesus’s life to me as family values. Goal orientation is important but it needs a broader perspective than just ourselves. Philippians 2:19 shows us why God has given us free will and creative powers: they are intended ultimately to achieve His purposes – much of what we do is simply prelude. Faith based values must be treated as more than just clichés and this is what many need to rethink. Credit must be shared with others, there must be delegation, recognition of responsibility, loyalty and a commitment to genuine problem solving. Rhetorical overkill needs to be avoided. This is how faith based values are implemented. Along the way we must expect trials and pain – the loss of his own daughter to leukemia in the early fifties hurt more than loss of his buddies in WW2.
Editor’s Note: in his own administration President H W Bush had the “thousand points of light” program which gave formal recognition to the efforts of selected worthy citizen-based volunteer efforts.
Charles Colson –
Rethinking is a good thing and change can be beneficial if done with fidelity to spiritual values. There are probably over 1000 books on how to “do” church but we need to remember hat we, as Christians, are the Church. Unfortunately many of us would do ell to read a book called “unchristian (What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters) by David Kinnaman (featured at www.UnChristian.com. It is very unflattering but sadly at times all too accurate.
We need to rethink our view of Christianity. It is not an affirmation or a denomination, but a view of total reality. If we are Christians this should include art, music, science, family work etc. We have received and believed a wonderful message – we must now apply it. But one survey showed that less than 1% of professing Christians can explain and expound the baic teachings of Christianity.
One of the basic doctrines – co equal with faith and love – is that of hope, according to Paul. In Greco. He portrayed it, specifically the hope of the resurrection, as the anchor of the soul. In Greco-Roman civilization this was laughable. Hope was disparaged in Greece – when Menninger introduced it as a factor in psychology he was initially ridiculed by his fellow professionals. But Christianity says that if we do not convey hope we have not understood the gospel and are of all men most miserable.
The message of unchristian is that the church needs to rethink and reconfigure the way it represents itself – we need to be not the voice of judgment, but the beacon of hope.
Lee Strobel –
What can we do to bring revival to the 20th century?
True or not, legend says the Ignatius of Antioch was the baby of Mark 9 and was nurtured and raised by the disciples. True or not relative to his origins , history records that by the second century he was ordered to be killed by emperor Trajan for refusing to bow down and worship the emperor. Enroute to his death in Rome he wrote seven letters which were his testimony, the beliefs he was prepared to die for – and did. These beliefs, like Paul, were rooted in the hope of the resurrection.
Like Ignatius our testimony as Christians, the basis of our faith and the source of our love, is based on the hope of the resurrection. This hope is what we must convey to others – not fear or a feeling of judgementalism.
How do we do this? First, by positioning ourselves not as super-righteous but as seekers after truth. We can avoid the appearance of feeling ourselves superior (which in fact we are not) by assuming and acknowledging the equality all persons, regardless of conduct or belief, before God. This has been the premise of the seeker small groups which have had an 80% conversion rate (ed note: for more, Google on the Internet: seeker small groups ),
Secondly we need to emphasize anecdotal personal experience rather than the “scientific method.” We need top tell seekers about ZGod and our experiences interacting with him. The example of Pascal’s Night of Fire shows that xperiential knowledge trumps the academic church.
Truth and experience together work.
Ben Carson, MD ---
America has a problem – we are currently 21 out of 22 major countries in math skills. Our engineering schools are producing 60,000 graduates a years, 30,000 of them foreign born. China and India are each doing over 300,000. Although there is some question as to comparable quality and suitability of the degrees the implications are sobering and ominous
The comparisons to ancient Rome are apt. Theirs was a society which at the beginning excelled at engineering feats when it came to building bridges and road. It then fell into decline as the academicians took over and waxed eloquent in making everything relative. We suffer as a society when perspective is lost believing in God as a scientist comes to be viewed as a sign of a weak mind.
The second law of thermodynamics, called entropy, says that the natural order of things is for all energy in an isolated system to proceed from order to disorder, (or as two other sources put it: in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state”/” The energy available after a chemical reaction is less than that at the beginning of a reaction.”
The complexity of living things defies this principle of entropy. The complexity of the human eye (or of other organs) goes the other way. The geologic record shows organisms maturing from very simple in the moist ancient records to increasingly complex as he era progress. To say that that this all happened all by accident, with no designer or instigator, no intervention by some higher power, violates the principle of entropy and requires more blind faith than any theology.
It is not weak minded for a scientist to believe in God – it is an inevitable conclusion which one can avoid only by willful ignorance, as Paul stated of those in his day. We need to rethink our passivity towards those who insist upon promulgating evolution as the only explanation for the way things are.
I prefer the acronym formula that is illustrated in the the title of my book “THINK BIG” T=Talent, H=Honesty, I=Insight, N=Niceness, K=Knowledge, B= Books, I=In-depth Learning and G=God.
Bishop Charles Blake –
Today the West Los Angeles Church of God in Christ has 24,000 members, 200 employees, 80 ministries, a $65 million campus, and a $15 million annual budget. It wasn’t always this way. In 1969 it was a congregation adrift without its founding pastor, so divided that it had voted in advance 40-11 to reject whomever the presiding bishop designated to be the new pastor. This was the situation into which I was placed 47 years ago – the Bishop introduced me and left the building. We wound up eking our way through the first year on a budget of $12,000.
The congregation and outreaches which exist today are the manifestation of what some mock as “possibility thinking.” We need to realize that if we expect miraculous growth and results we need dreams big enough to require that God give us the resources. If we don’t have problems along the way we won’t need God’s help and we won’t have the faith to stay the course.
Black people in Africa today are in trouble, and blacks around the world have been called to address the question of Africa’s children. The Church of God in Christ is now a six million member denomination headed by a man who started with a divided congregation of just over fifty members – the result of continually rethinking dreams and moving ahead to ever-greater challenges.
Robert A. Schuller ---
Too many people are judged by others according to their ability to fit someone else’s shoes. It is an unrealistic expectation, because everyone’s feet re different – both literally and figuratively. Each person needs to fulfill their own destiny in God’s plan, walking in the shoes God designed for them. Three principles to consider:
Don’t ever g to work just to earn money or do a job – regard it as being part of fulfilling a destiny and calling, no matter how small it may appear at the time.
Don’t fear or anticipate failure – even things that don’t turn out have value in teaching lessons. Instead know that if we have the faith God has the power.
Know that success is always a journey, never a final destination as long as we live. God answers prayers; he is both the engineer and conductor on the trip.
Kathy Ireland ---
My billion dollar corporation is built on the principle of providing solutions. It hasn’t been without adversity – at one point it was threatened with closure when our largest retail customer filed bankruptcy and the contract we thought we had became worthless. But we prospered because our greatest asset was our people rather than our contract.
We need to realize that what we say our priorities are has to reflect what we truly believe for our expectations to be fulfilled.
1) We need to be prepared for success in whatever we attempt Give 100% effort
2) Expect rejection and be able to process it without despair, seeing beauty in ll things. Always thank other for their opinions and distinguish between serious counsel and mere negative voices. Listen to and evaluate all proffered advice, searching for the kernels of truth. See ourselves as a brand and advertise accordingly. Ask ourselves whether we initiate change or are merely impacted by change. Read and consider whether we understand the importance of belief and friendship as illustrated in the Velveteen Rabbit of Margret Williams (written and originally published in 1922).
3) Rethink obstacles as opportunities – recognize that all we ever get is only as good as what we have first given, so give generously, then embrace the good and reject the bad
Gary Smalley --
We are designed to connect to others outside ourselves. This means both connecting to God and connecting to other people. But in reality we only truly connect as we should hen wee feel safe and we feel loved. This is acceptance, but it is not what most people feel when they think of God and others. What most people feel is a need to change others instead of loving and serving them
We need to rethink this need to change others and instead focus on changing ourselves. What ultimately changes anyone is belief, not outside human efforts – and we can only change our own beliefs. If we want to change ourselves to be like God, the new man that we talk about at baptism, we need to ideally first list what we need to change in a journal, then begin internalizing lists of related scriptures.
www.smalleyonline.com has a free .pdf file, Hiding God’s Word in Your Heart designed to help with this process. Every congregation within the body of Christ ideally needs to have a group within it to facilitate the systematic hiding of God in our heats by memorization to truly and permanently set us free.
Why?
Because this world teaches us that ideally life is to be filled with pleasure and free of pain and trials. This is hedonistic, selfish and, as we all learn, totally unrealistic. Yet this is the norm for typical humans. Christians who love God have a different perception. They have changed, and expect trials mixed with blessings as part of a journey towards a goal that will only be reached after this lifetime. Instead of thinking “What about me?” they ask of others “I wonder if they know God loves them, if they are loved by others, and if they love God.”
An economical resource for doing this is the Verseminder service available from verseminder.com for $19.95 (30 day free trial available). Through using either verse packages or groups of one’s own choosing the programs periodically through the day displays and requires the user to fill in using words from targeted scriptures.