I have thought for a while that if you want to reach people, you have to talk to address the world they live in. The Message should be brought into their lives be leaders who discuss what is happening in the lives of their followers, using the Bible as a source of inspiration.

I imagine a Church where the members can write down questions or problems and drop them anonymously into a suggestion box. And that will become the subject of future services. I also imagine a Church where the local newspaper is a source of inspiration for services. I think if Christians want to be relevant to the world around them and reach the people around them, they must look at the problems and situations that face those around them and talk about those things openly and honestly.

Those are my two cents.
Thomas

The challenge is always to find our story, our stories, within the Biblical narrative. So when Paul addresses a particular issue or question, he often does so by retelling his readers’ story within a much larger story in which Jesus is restoring heaven to earth. For example, when he wants to talk of the human condition in Romans 1, he craftily employes stoic philosophy in such a way that it fits within the narrative of the Fall, so that we all know the truth, having it in our nature/image and in the world/garden around us, we all reject it in favor of false knowledge, thinking ourselves wise we worship created things, and we end in abandonment by God, broken human relationships, and death. Adam and Eve’s story is more than just a story, more than application and understanding; it’s my story. McLaren and Sweet were right: the Bible taught plainly is neither inductive nor deductive, but abductive. Can you help TOH find themselves and their city within the stories of the scriptures?

It concerns me when we put too much emphasis on “[our] personal interpretation of life.” Perhaps my concern is from my own experience of being consistently wrong. I need to have something to gauge the decisions I make. I like how NT Wright speaks about the Bible as being authoritative in the Last Word and I think a big challenge of the postmodern generation is to get past our authority issues and trust that the Bible even plainly taught has a lot to offer in the “how to” aspect of our lives.

At the same time. The Bible taught plainly is full of practical theology.