Executive Summary 1

14th May 2020. I am doing something new.

God speaks about His creativity in day-sized chunks. While each day is a new day, we have to consider how today will be like yesterday, filled with the streamlined products of good habits, or how it will be creatively different, perhaps completing and fulfilling some prior life work, or preparing for the emergence of enriching novelty, after the pattern of Genesis 1.

This approach moves the focus of attention away from the category mistake analysis of the meaning of the Hebrew ‘yom’ (‘day’) towards the more fruitful application question, “What shall we co-create today?”

15th May 2020. Introducing myself as a ‘Common or Garden’ Theologian

The names we give to one another, to ourselves, and to roles, and the circumstances in which we meet and relate- our environments and contexts- all determine the bringing into being of who we are and what things can be. My varied experiences as a teacher demonstrate this. Past saints and witnesses are teachers whose being is described and manifest through the context of the Word; the revelation of God creates an enduring yet under-determined environment for us to meet them in God’s Spirit, such as Stephen in Acts 6 and 7. Even the Spirit-filled apostles did not fully understand what they were creating when they appointed the first deacons in the ekklesia. In striving in partnership with God to be good disciples and good theologians, we can all become well-adapted to our context, environment and be fully released under God’s anointing to be His Word in Every Season. The common people are the mass of people, and all potentially have a place in the complete Body- not merely elites or an exclusive class. To be a ‘common’ or ‘garden variety’ Christian theologian is to be perfectly suited to the time and place in which we live, and therefore to reproduce with fecundity and great fruitfulness. Tomorrow’s common people, like garden-fruitful varieties, thrive in every season because they are hardened through nurture in challenging seasons, familiar use, training through partnership and embedded habits that stand the tests of time. This hardening comes through adapting to the benign changes in our environment, as well as more aggressive assaults of the trials of life, including persecution.

Any and every minister in the Spirit is like a totipotent cell; while specialised, having the potential to express the life of God in any way required.

The significance of naming is thus explored; a thing or person is both what it was created as and what it is in the process of creation to become; being AND becoming. Through naming we are brought into contact with the past purposing and the present will to be; and also with the potential future beyond current realisation. Elsewhere I will explore the propensity for God to rename God’s people, in order to continue the process of creatio continua. There is a spectrum of co-creation to be elucidated, for example, in the spiritual activities of prophetic life and ministry.

21st May 2020. Unlocking potential. Gen 39-41

As a boy, Joseph’s dreams resonate with the progressive picture of completed functional relationships depicted on a cosmological scale in Genesis 1. The experience of broken family relationships bring him down to earth with a bump – not least due to his own ambiguous role as ‘dream teller’, and then into an unexpected exile that God does accompany him into, just as God gracefully accompanied Cain into his life world outside God’s garden in Gen 4.

Because of the continuing covenant Presence of YHWH with him personally, Joseph is blessed, and brought, even as a slave in a foreign household in a foreign and distant nation, into God’s ‘very good’, personally becoming the blessing of God in the ‘alien’ environment. This is still God’s good earth!

As Joseph was tested in relation to his words and deeds with his own parents and brothers, now he is tested again in relation to his master’s wife: he shows himself a covenant-keeping Hebrew man under Authority. The episode with Mrs Potiphar is backdropped by the marriage encounter of Genesis 2 and shaded by the grasping desire of the temptress, who acts like Eve in Genesis 3. However, Joseph’s response shows his inward heeding to God’s warning regarding what is forbidden.

Joseph’s unjust but surprising ‘lockdown’ is connected with out current circumstances and the testimony of Terry Waite. In these ways I claim that the Joseph account is, unexpectedly, a pattern for us. Waite’s experience shows that the ultimate constraints of a confined cell need not be seen as a complete obstacle to the child of God filling each day with good as co-creator. [The whole universe is mostly nothing, but God has set a transformative creation in process in one minuscule corner and this little seed is continuously nurtured through God’s watchfulness, though surrounded and immersed in the blackness.]

Following testing by the lustful Mrs Potiphar, Joseph is again tested in his apparent though limited responsibility in prison by the arrival of elite dreamers from the highest class of society. Joseph’s faithful and exceptional management is shown to function at the deepest levels of his character, as he represents God in whose image he is made and according to whose Word he speaks, completely without bitterness. He is, nevertheless, still honestly conscious of his own humanity and plight. And yet again, without explanation, Joseph is left abandoned, surviving to thrive, like a buried seed, for an unknown future day.

The engineering imagination of Henri Giffard is paralleled with the mental life cultured in solitary confinement by Terry Waite. The harnessing and control of potentially fatal forces is used as a parallel to the challenges to our mental and spiritual health in trials. Understanding of the ‘scientia of God’s gift of life’ is that it is nurtured by God’s Word within us- and we have to continually feed on it to receive this gift.

God does care about us and the principle of justice, but His larger purposes entail mysterious priorities. Joseph may have dreams, and Pharaoh’s servants may also hear from the true God, but God’s own dream, God’s greater dream is unveiled in God’s good timing, and may be revealed even to pagan rulers.

In God’s very good timing, the faithful servant will be released into the flow of breath of the wind of God’s Spirit, and we must be ready to go with that mysterious flow- nevertheless: UP into God’s greater opportunities which will require and demand BOTH our nurtured human and anointed spiritual qualities , if we let patience and faithfulness have their perfect work in us.

24th May 2020. Interpreting troubled times.

Like global society and our own experience, we are in troubled times in this pandemic; significantly, this is a mental test, and so Pharaoh awoke from his double dream. He rejects the opinions of his people and his management team because he is looking for deeper meaning and significance in his dreaming, not because the nation is yet in trouble. There is an active deposit of the image of co-creator within even him, a pro-active urge that trumps tradition and habit, a super-adaptive bent toward the Transcendent- a specific connection to the One covenant God Whom he does not yet know.

So Joseph is summoned in his readiness, and he brings God’s revelation perspective on society as a whole and the far future. Everyone is included in the concerns of the revelation, and everyone’s role is scoped out. Economy and community, farmers, managers and court; the present, the future, plenty and want, life and death. All is put into its place in this vision of non-exclusive co-creation. This everyone looks on the plan and on Joseph who conceives it with unexpected and unpredicted favour. This extends to the fact that the whole world is brought to Joseph’s table and the entire nation expresses gratitude when all challenges and trials have finally been resolved.

While born of revelation, Joseph’s interpretation is realistic and scientific, engaging with the nitty-gritty of farming and food storage, of person management and vital coordination of the division of labour. It is not a vision of religious hegemony but an evangelistic vision of blessing and invitation; after all, death will still come to all who are fed through the famine. Theology ought to bring an overarching view to life, and this account encompasses the full expression of life and talent, rather than being one that negates human work or faithful stewardship.

Such a theologically informed overview is the antidote to the division between the Two Cultures that is presently playing out again so tragically in this pandemic, where wise men are treated sceptically and too much attention is paid to the pagan gods, especially mammon and pride, and this sadly applies inside the church as well as among global leaders and communities around the world. The scientific and medical realities cannot be ignored, just because there has been a significant elapse of time since the lessons of hygiene and immunisation were learned in generations now mostly past. Wisdom is wisdom rather than simply knowledge because it should outlive fads, fashion and passing ideologies. Ignorant and immature leaders of weak character may sneer at wise counsel, yet wisdom remains within reach, through repentance and a humble willingness to learn.

The prophetic voice of the theologian who is alert to the revelation of God’s Word and the revealed reality-in-being of God’s world must be spoken to all parts of society, for power lies in every part, and so Truth must be spoken to Power in all parts. This truth speaking, true-life-living witness surely ought to come from the ekklesia as a whole, not from an elite, and not offered exclusively to any elite. The leaders who are in post only represent the body of people that put them there, after all- both in the world and in the church. God’s love for all the world is meant to come through us to the world known by science, and in which we do our business, though science itself does not have the capacity to know the love of God. That is in the gift of the people God has created to live and work on this earth, and this gift must be theologically taught so we are enlightened, empowered and fully understand our mandate to discharge it.

To put it as my manifesto: God wants us to create the future with Him. Right now, the nations are looking for Joseph-like image-of-God-like overseers. Who will they find? Will you get ready? For us as for Joseph the young dreamer: God’s creation is waiting for us.

29th May 2020. Obadiah, God’s secret leader in crisis. 1 Kings 18.

My thesis is that God wants our partnership as co-creators of His future, using our creativity in harmony with His creativity. That’s a bold job description. There are scriptural candidates popularly considered to be ‘great men of God’, but reflecting on Elijah and John the Baptist provides a more sober assessment of the boundaries of that category.

God’s co-creators should aspire to being God’s vessel(s) to impact society at even the highest levels and in the most challenging circumstances. However, we will certainly not be protected from the worst consequences that others face, whether ‘natural’ disasters or the oppression by the powerful.

Obadiah, the keeper of Ahab and Jezebel’s royal household, may seem to have been a competent ‘Mr Average’ but is painted by the text to be God’s co-creator of God’s Shalom community directly in the face of idolatrous oppression. He succeeds through a quietness which conceals considerable cunning and radical action. I imagine what the business and managerial implications for Obadiah’s leadership would have been, and couch them in modern terms which help relate his lessons for us in a pandemic, Brexit and general post-industrial economic development. Obadiah shows how to straddle the so-called ‘sacred-secular’ divide, doing his best to sustain the whole of the royal household of God’s nation, in the face of challenges on all fronts that would reasonably seem impossible to overcome.

Thus I consider the long term and daily challenge posed to a leader who finds themselves trapped in oppressive circumstances, especially those seeking to be faithful to God and continue working and leading with spiritual integrity in a hostile environment.

God sees his secret servant, and now Elijah is coming to confront Ahab: God has also determined that this showdown will include Obadiah having to ‘blow his cover’ to declare the justice of God:- obedience will require Obadiah to be prepared to die. Such may be the faith stance of God’s co-creating leaders.

In his human frailty, assailed by natural fears, Obadiah discovers that God – even incarnated in God’s ‘elite’ servants- will keep his life as He wills. Co-creation of justice is a joint enterprise to which God is committed, though we may well not see how this will be accomplished. In God’s timing, Elijah’s words and actions come into lockstep. So Obadiah’s integrity must also be expressed in public words, as it was in his secret scheming. God’s Word and Actions will also be seen to be One, just as they are in His co-creators. This is the mandate for co-creation and co-leadership!

This is the narrow prophetic road trodden by the first believers, by Bonhoeffer and the disciples in Nazi Germany, and today in China. We may not see God’s victory while we endure national and international crises today, but it will come in God’s Tomorrow.

9th June 2020. Creating community with concrete. 1 Kings 8

Sermon celebrating the opening of the new community building by Rahema Church, scheduled for 6-8^th April 2019. (written on 17th Jan 2019)

Celebrating and examining the vision and motives for building a community meeting place after the vision of David and Solomon’s temple. Treasure should be invested, but with the right intent, to facilitate servant leadership, not self-glorification or denominational domination. Inspiring a better pattern of joint leadership by ekklesia and community to set a prophetic example to the religiosity common in Kenya and across Africa.

Connecting the vision for chimneys and cook stoves with the health implications of smoke, by which God drives out the priests and worshippers from His Temple! The kitchen at Rehema is developed at the same time as the community building, showing the connection of spiritual worship with practical lifestyle issues, impacting the complete health of the community and setting a holistic example.

Impart the new vision of co-creation of community after the Pentecost pattern, where the Spirit of God rested as flame without smoke on each and every one of the saints of God.

12th June 2020. Which comes first, the wine or the wineskin?

The Genesis 1 creation account breaks and rebuilds our understanding of God’s nature and creative action. God’s Speaking is ultimately creative, and the claim of Genesis is that God’s Voice-Word is the fundament of all creation and being, expressed through the priority of light as light over any specific natural source of light in this text. This is also the prelude to the Exodus creation of Israel- a community in becoming- the family people of God demonstrating the generational covenant of God, which begins with Abram and Sarai. [This People is (to be) YHWH’s light in YHWH’s world.] [The fact that Gen 1ff is a polemic refutation and corrective thesis is perhaps to be taken as a caution against alternative human rationalisations on the question of ‘how’ God did it.]

In Exodus, Moses is called, charged and mandated to become God’s creative mouthpiece; lead discipler of a not-yet nation and speaker into being of God’s not-yet but soon to be People. If the gift to humanity of the seven day cycle is the idealised framework presented in Genesis 1, then the ten principal deities of Egypt are the contingent and necessary context for Moses’ voicing of God’s will into being on God’s behalf- as the imager of God in human Word on God’s behalf, as mandated by God. This is a prophetic birthing creation of God’s Kingdom People for all time: the Father’s will, gestation and birth pangs mysteriously bring order over and above any opposition [such as the false worldview and ideology of Egypt]. Israel is finally brought to birth and freedom though the Red Sea baptism, delivered through the intertwined co-creating of Moses with YHWH God. Moses’ popular reputation is as the receiver and giver of God’s Torah Law; but this is preceded by the creative word of deliverance. Truly, Moses’ words in God’s Name to Egypt are words of judgement, but they are also fundamentally creative. What is more, these words that God is pleased to be spoken by us on God’s behalf are creative tools that manipulate the most fundamental elements of God’s cosmos; even with principalities and powers, as exemplified by the pantheon of Egypt, presided over and manifest through the person of Pharaoh and the cultural apparatus of the state of Egypt.

We have been misled, or lulled into a false sense of security, by the conceptuality of God’s sabbath rest on the seventh day, and the projected sense that whatever God has been doing- that God is doing since the creation week, is somehow of lesser significance than that of the initial creation. This is certainly a product of the position of the Young Earth Creationists, on which I speak from some significant experience. The initial creation is important, of course, but not that important, and the imbalance is exemplified by the anthropocentric concerns of salvation, local church and discipleship, and the narrowly constrained priorities of world evangelism. All of these things are important, but they have been elevated above the fundamental question of what we are here for. Is the earth and our current lives on it merely a cosmic waiting room, in which there is an advertising campaign for the main event which follows? Is this life really of no consequence for the hereafter, or is it a potentially distracting prelude in which whatever we make is likely destined for fire and destruction; is it really only the binary destiny of our souls that is at stake? And if we have been missing something, what is the nature of the relationship between our creativity and God’s ongoing creativity?

I ask again: Is the only significant creative act after the expulsion of the first couple from Eden’s Royal garden the resurrection of Christ? And the birth of His Church Corporate at Pentecost, in which my part is simply to serve the collective whole, and in which my most significant contribution could be to suffer persecution and death for the sake of the Name of Jesus, and thus to feature in the sacred scene in Revelation, where the martyrs call out to God for the consummation of all things from beneath the heavenly altar?

If the dying of the seed of Christ is a sowing of a dream into the ground- the best dream of God, then surely it should have much fruit- not just one fruit. ‘Many sons’, the scripture says. And all of these children of God have a voice, and God’s Voice can be heard through them all. What varieties of ‘calling things which are not as though they were’ might thus be heard in the far reaches of the realm of creation?

The profound claim of the Bible; its Word of creation, is that we continue in the mode of God to create one another through the words and lives that we create-speak. This is fundamental education-parenting. “It takes a village to raise a child,” and how much better if God’s Voice is listened for, facilitated, imitated and modelled in that Village, even on this Earth in this tiny corner of God’s cosmos. Such is the dream of Resurrection and New Creation- God’s very dream. This encompasses and exceeds evangelism and discipleship, small group life in local church and more besides.

Mark 2 and Matthew 9 show that we must take a double view on the co-creation of the New Life of God: it is both about the new life within us which we each receive from God, and also about us taking responsibility for the necessary context in which that life is held and grows. To put it technically, we are responsible to receive God’s freely bestowed ‘top-down’ influence, which is a partnership, and also to be responsible for our ‘bottom-up’ agency in shaping the environment in which everyone lives, at the community level, which is the Church AND its outworking influence into and with society at all levels, as far as possible.

If Mars is indeed OUTSIDE the Goldilocks zone, regarding physico-chemical criteria, perhaps it is yet properly INSIDE if those criteria are extended, bio-theologically, by the arrival of the imagers-of-God. Individual flesh becomes resurrection body (individual) AND collective Body of Christ! Married in this life- yet whose husband shall she be? As the angels… yet One. So why did God create this universe, as second prof asked me at induction. Hide and seek… found… and then…

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Genesis 1: Exemplar narrative of God speaking into being, freely turning Divine Dream into reality of human becoming. Let there Be!

Genesis 37-50 Joseph, the pattern of co-creator made good through God’s blessing even on a willing child. Steady growth in character enables us to receive the grace of God in order to pass the tests that we would otherwise fail.

Exodus. Let my People Go! The co-creative speaking-into-Being of Moses, who will meet the Christ-Head of His New Body at the Transfiguration.

1 Kings 8 The nation of God and the children of God follow God’s instructions, timing and Way to bring God’s Presence back into God’s creation, prefiguring the life of the Body in the Spirit. God’s transforming and prophetic Presence is indeed Here With Us, not far off in some Platonic ideological utopia.

1 Kings 18 The prophets of God co-create the justice of God, prefiguring the complete surrender of the suffering servant, God made flesh, Incarnate, to carry the consequences of our iniquities. The prophets co-create this salvation in a significant measure as God directs. Elijah is the prophet of God’s justice through suffering, who will meet the Christ-Head of His New Body at the Transfiguration.

[The various episodes featuring Elijah lead us to reflect on the challenges posed by a human monarchy -even in a theocracy- that exercises ego rather than servanthood under God. This becomes all the more tragic when the king falls into overt idolatries.]

Mark 2: The parable of wine and wineskin, prefigures the church, and it hints at the way in which our discipleship in the Spirit is seamless with our environment and the church; co-creation is an holistic and all-encompassing process in which our agency is given priority in the grace of God.

Acts 2 The Church-Body-of-Christ is now the imaging likeness of God corporately; the co-creator with God as the Body of Christ, resurrected to New Life in His recreating image, second-fruit of the resurrection, now and not-yet co-creating the future even in the reality of murderous persecution, such as through the deaconate of Stephen, servant and teacher.

Rev 21. I am making everything New! The partnership of co-creation continues, embodying the dream of Sabbath rest working.