Why is it that those who accuse others of intolerance are so intolerant? Or to put it another way, why are those who accuse others of being absolutist are themselves absolutists? This post-everything world is at times so crazy it can be so absurd. When you have no ground under your feet, then anything goes, and nothing is meaningful or lasting. However, the truth is that there is no such thing as a society without a foundation's story. Even the claim that there is no metanarr

How can we know what is real and how do we know truth in a post-everything world? If truth is not confined to the world of ‘facts’ alone, or of ‘values’ alone but if truth is both objective and subjective, how do the two relate and how can we know anything? How can we bring both sides of the brain together so that we understand truth in a meaningful way? These are matters of epistemology. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind sees total relativism dominating Western

There is a debate happening concerning the emerging church whether we should communicate the gospel in stories or propositions. In the debate, there has been an awful lot of heat and to my mind not too much light exhibit. Do we communicate the gospel in stories or propositions? I would answer: Yes! Yes, we can communicate the gospel in stories and in propositions and in many other ways, but we do so in a contextual manner with our audience in mind. If we are speaking to peopl

The dominant missionary problem of the Church in the West is the cultural captivity of the gospel. In Australia, like other Western societies, the gospel has become absorbed and co-opted into our culture. The result is that the gospel has acquired many cultural accretions so that these can no longer be distinguished from the gospel itself. My PhD thesis was entitled: Neither too Fitted nor Foreign. The church in the West struggles with its fittedness to Western culture while,

While attending a Consultation in Melbourne, a few years ago, I should not have been surprised to discover so many people on the same page with respect to the need to develop post-everything missional communities. In interacting with students, over the past twenty years, I have found that many of them also recognise the need to create such communities. Yet seeing the need and making the transition from the church as it is to a church that is meaningful in a post-everything wo

In the sixties and seventies, the Church in Australia became increasingly isolated and less relevant to mainstream Australian society. It began to move from the centre of society to the fringe so that by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become an insignificant sub-culture of the periphery of a pluralistic and multi-cultural society. The world we now live in has been changing at an alarming rate over the past thirty to forty years. Australian society, like the