How Well Do I Know You?

What does it mean to be an authentic Christian friend in a world where we are faced with advertising such as the Shortland St billboard that asks – How well do you really know them? This line hangs above pictures of two of the main Shorty St characters at an intersection where I am often stopped at a red light. I find myself sitting there pondering this concept. How can I know them? They are just characters in a TV show. It raises this question for me -Are our neighbours so lonely that they think their friends are those ‘people’ that they see on the TV screen five nights a week? I am challenged to ask myself -Can we honestly say that we see any of our friends as often as we see the characters in our favourite TV show?

My students were discussing what the implications of being a radical Jesus follower means for our friendships. We are coming together each week to challenge and support each other to live more radically Christ centred lives. We feel that part of this is considering the way that Christian friendships are different from those who are not yet Jesus followers.

One of the challenges for our Christian friendships is how we use modern communication technologies well. Is scoring 10/10 on a facebook quiz about superficial aspects of people’s lives really knowing them? Rather it is through those late night conversations about disappointments, hopes, dreams and experiences or absences of God that we get to know someone. Our friendships now often revolve around communications technology and they can be wonderful ways of connecting us to people in between face to face contact, yet I worry that facebook is taking over from having coffee with someone and that texting is taking over from going to visit someone. The result of this is that friendships are remaining superficial and never getting to the deeper level which enables lives to connect. People are desperately searching for community and friends yet they don’t want or don’t know how to make the commitment and effort needed to reach beyond the superficial.

As Christians we need to be challenged by the action of our God, who loved the world so much that he amazingly chose to become human, to be incarnated, to be able to stand face to face among us, so that the world could see and know God at a deeper level and to connect our lives with his. In turn, how do we live among our friends in such a way that our lives connect with theirs, and in turn we are able to connect their lives with Jesus?


Christina

Leading in Creativity

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to image God, and to be fully alive (inspired from the Leadership block course I did in May). I have been relating this to the creative arts, as our God given ability to be creative comes as part of our imaging our immensely creative Creator-God. Now I have to be careful here as my involvement in the creative arts is mainly as an appreciative audience (our ability to appreciate beauty also images God who was able to look at the world and say it is good). I don’t think as Christians that we are really living up to our full potential in this area. Centuries ago the church was in the forefront of creative arts: “From the church proceeded philosophy, music, art, and literature.” (Robert Webber).

Why are those days gone? As Christians we should be delighting in our creativity and leading the field in innovation in music, art, poetry, sculpture, architecture and anything else. . However our music tends to be boring and derivative. We have a tendency to see that a certain thing is popular and then try and jump into the trend. For example there is a lot of hero worship of Brooke Fraser, (and she makes a strong stand for her faith which is admirable) but frankly girl with a guitar fluffy pop music has a certain following so she has managed to enter that rather safe and dull market but without changing anything or increasing the interest or quality of that genre of music. Over and over I see Christians being reactive instead of proactive, as Christians our call is to set the trends to lead the way in creativity, not to follow the existing trends. Why are we as Christians so often just plain boring? What is stopping us living up to the fullness of creativity that God had placed in us?

Christina

Lighten Up!

Do we have enough fun as Christians?

Sometimes it is hard to have fun as a Christian – I know for myself that as a Christian I am more engaged with the pain of the world than some non-Christians are. Sometimes that can prevent us from having fun. Predominately however I see Christians sitting at one extreme or the other. Either we are too deeply intense and serious, or we come across with a superficial Hollywood style –Christians are Happy all the time attitude.

I have been thinking about this in the context of evangelism. Do we actually have fun sharing our faith or is it something we do because we think we should? Often the people who share their faith are the ones who come across as overly intense and serious. I’ll never forget being out with a Drug Arm team and one of the women that we were serving a hot drink too, said that she never understood the trinity – The body language of the three people I was with changed immediately. I think the best simile would be that they were like a pack of wolves moving in for the kill. How intimidating for the poor woman who had a question about the trinity! Often we talk about challenging people to ‘move out of our comfort zone’ to do evangelism. I think we should be talking more about how we can share our faith having fun rather than scaring people out of where they are comfortable.

I have also being thinking about this in relation to the bible. Why don’t Christians find studying the bible fun? Recently I heard of a Christian who discouraged a non-Christian friend from going to a bible study ‘because studying the bible is boring’. As Christians do we find the bible less exciting than non-Christians? This is a challenge to those of us who teach the bible. How well do we express how exciting it can be to discover things about God in its pages?

Our task then is to have fun with evangelism and the bible, but without going to the other extreme of thoughtless superficiality.

Christina

The Challenge of Our Favourite Things

Fabulous shoes and gorgeous cakes are some of my favourite things, so I was delighted by Sofia Coppola’s latest film creation: Marie Antoinette. It is a visual extravagance of shoes (Manolo Blahniks), cakes and colour. Over the weekend I have been wondering if there is more to this film than first appears. There has been some criticism directed at the film as it treats Marie Antoinette sympathetically as a naïve child, it doesn’t attempt to portray much of the political situation at the time or contrast the poverty stricken situation of the peasants with the excesses of the royal court. Some critics have seen this as a Hollywood celebration of its own excesses. . I don’t know whether Coppola’s intentions were to simply celebrate lavish spending and partying, or whether something deeper is occurring. Coppola’s use of modern language and modern music connected the film firmly into our time and this left me with some heavy questions. It is so easy to be critical of the excesses of 18th Century Royalty because we would never waste money fighting a war overseas when there were people starving around us would we? Even more personally there is a challenge to our ignorance of poverty - are we living in our protected little bubble while people around us are struggling to find enough money for food? Are we more concerned with what is happening overseas and unwilling or unable to see the (emotional and physical) poverty that is closer to us than we think? Just before Christmas I helped deliver food parcels for church and I was struck again by peoples genuine struggle to survive even here is Auckland and particularly how close to me they live and yet how little opportunity I have to interact with them and hear about their lives. The final challenge for me and although amusing is also very serious do I really need another pair of shoes when so many people in the world don’t even have one pair?

Christina

Meditating on Movies.

I spent last week in bed with bronchitis - all I could really sum up the energy for was watching DVDs. Today as I returned the 5 DVDs to the store I was struck by how easily I had watched 4 (one remained unwatched) DVDs in a row. This used to be something I would struggle to do. I think this is another example of how extensive our consumer mentality has become - a movie is something to entertain us in the now, something to be consumed and then discarded. An hour or a day later to be returned, forgotten, leaving us unchanged and untouched.

When was the last time you saw a movie so good that you needed to think about it for a week before seeing another one? Ok - so maybe movies being about image are not designed to promote thinking, but when was the last time you saw a movie so beautiful that you wanted to remember it and appreciate its quality for some time before moving on to the next?

Perhaps our lives have become too busy to appreciate things around us. I encourage you to take the time to appreciate the movies you watch – and if you find there is not much in them to appreciate perhaps we (I include myself in this too) need to be more discerning about what we watch.

Who is the me generation?

“This generation is the most selfish generation – they can have anything they want at the touch of a button”. Three weeks ago a speaker to whom I was listening made that statement. It has been buzzing around in my head causing me to reflect ever since. My initial reaction was the young adults that I work with would say that the baby boomers were the most selfish generation! Of course such generalised statements need to be applied with caution – what do we mean by “the current generation”. When I say the current generation I mean the educated intelligentsia between 18 and 25 years old that I work with – they are not necessarily representative.
Yet I see a reaction against being able to have everything –coupled with a distrust of advertising and the media.

The thoughts I have been having are along a similar line to Paul Windsor’s recent post: peace corps revisited (http://www.carey.ac.nz/pauls_blog/2006/10/peace-corps-revisited.html)
Among the young adults I work with there is a new dedication to reaching out, to being involved in issues of poverty, justice and human rights. When I think back to when I was their age my friends and I had vague hopes of “wanting to help people”. But really we wanted to get great jobs and wear great suits and be yuppies (hey it was the late 80’s). Of course there are plenty of young adults who still have an essentially superficial faith, but those that are concerned with these issues have a level of commitment and passion that leads to action (yes practical application even in the educated intelligentsia). It also leads them to be vocal for their concerns and to try to influence the values of those around them.

I am concerned about what this means for the church. University students have always had a hard time with the church – yet this goes further. Now we have a strong educated dedicated subset of young adults who have different values to the mainstream church that is still primarily controlled by baby boomers. I have experienced two examples of this over the past few weeks. One is the importance of fair trade to young adults. The University of Auckland is all set to become a fair trade campus (in terms of coffee provision) - and yet our church is still not willing to supply and use fair trade coffee in spite of campaigning by the lovely young adults I know. This is a clash in values – fair trade is not seen as an important issue for the Christians who are decision makers, but by the young adults it is an important expression of their faith to care about the exploited workers in developing countries. The other issue is the realisation of young adults that as a church we should be emphasising people over programmes. They are feeling frustrated over the churches current focus on programmes to the detriment of authentic relationships both within the church community and reaching to those around us.

If these young adults have substantially different values to the current church leadership they are going to end up frustrated and disillusioned, where will they go then? I do not think that the emerging church will hold them either it is to full of disillusioned gen xrs (like myself) who are to busy trying to heal the hurts that the church has done to them (please forgive the gross generalisation) to adequately take action on the values of 18-25s year olds.

There is a challenge in this for all of us over 25 – are we still teachable enough to listen and be influenced by the young adults we know. As churches are we humble enough to put them in positions of influence – because they will change our churches and it will be for the better. I trust these young adults because I see in them a new dedication to the Bible, (perhaps that’s just after I’ve had three years with them!) coupled with an authentic desire to not just believe it but to put what they read in the bible into radical action. I’m excited about where the church will go if we place it in their hands and I’m willing to do that, are you?

Christina

Welcome

Hi
Today is the first time I have blogged, how exciting that I now get to share my thoughts with the whole world, rather than just people who I buy coffee for so that they listen to my ponderings!

This blog is called Vision of Christina in tribute to Christine de Pisan who is considered one of the first feminist writers. She wrote an autobiographical work called Vision of Christine in 1405. She also wrote a book called The Book of the City of Ladies in which she details a vision for a "utopian city for women inhabited by powerful, educated, and influential women both of antiquity and of her own time".

My vision is to encourage the growth of powerful, educated and influential christian women.