Monumental Change

- by Major Stephen Court  in JAC online -

 God has put eternity in our hearts – it’s an internal inclination to aspire to the optimal.  It plays out in Christianity in different spheres in predictable ways.

In our personal lives, we seek improvement by applying more spiritual disciplines and developing new habits, by borrowing better devotional books and testing different Bible versions.

It is commendable to want to improve our relationship with God personally in these and similar ways.
Corporately, we look to optimize public gatherings.  Within our local expression of the body of Christ that can mean tightening up the order of meeting, upgrading the overhead and sound technology, hiring people to professionalize the music, cleaning up the kids room…

But for those of us who feel such ‘freedom’, it can mean shopping for the most entertaining preaching, the most anointed worship, the most spacious parking lot, the best-equipped children’s programs, and more.

While the local approach commends itself to a limited extent, the latter epitomizes a consumer Christianity at odds with the Biblical version.
This book is going to offer definitions from the Greek language.  Here’s one to kick us off – “paradigm: a typical example or pattern; a model; a worldview underlying the theories and methodologies of a particular subject.”
The worldview implicit in these personal and corporate approaches to optimizing our Christian experience is the conventional paradigm.

The conventional paradigm is characterized by incremental change. 

Read more HERE.