Reports have filtered back to me about Mark Driscoll's session with Sydney ministers at St Andrew's Cathedral. Sounds like potent stuff. Mike Jolly reports here on the 18 points of critique Driscoll levelled at us. Hearing criticism is a great opportunity of course, and it will be interesting to see how the debate goes from here. I don't buy the whole Driscoll schtick, but, boy, he has courage.
From my point of view, the most interesting and telling of the critiques was no. 13: "There us a lack of missiologists. Your theologians are poor missiologists. You need more missiologists that evaluate culture and be missiologically aware."
Ouch. But, yes: I think that it is imperative that theology and missiology relate themselves better. Not of course so that missiology completely overwhelms theology, but so that theology is actually true to its own evangelical nature. There's work to do...
8 comments:
Hi Michael
I think the strength of Driscoll's thinking is his drive for missiological contextualisation and you 're dead right - no. 13 was the clanger.
in our drive against relevant heterodoxy there is the equally dangerous irrelvant orthdoxy.
It was helpful to be reminded that we want a ministry of the word that is timeless being coducted in a timely manner.
do you think that all good theology should be contextual theology? I wonder if this might be at the heart of the missiological challenges we face in urban centres.
look forward to hearing more from you
Driscoll's previous session on Acts 17 gave a helpful description of what missiology should look like at a very practical local level
It'd be great if the Cathedral put the mp3 or transcipt up for free download. I'm sure they'd get traffic to their site and start some very helpful conversations
Gordon Cheng has much fuller notes of talk on his site
It may or may not be fair to claim that Sydney's theologians are poor missiologists, but surely the opposite claim is often true, that many missiologists are poor theologians.
- Greg
Yes, Greg, but we in Sydney already know that. If we keep saying this enough, we will talk ourselves into avoiding the question (yet again). Speaking as one of Sydney's theologians, I am happy to see this as a growth opportunity: we really need to do our cultural criticism better. It's a fair cop.
Hi Mike,
As a single Christian guy, I'm getting more and more irritated by Driscoll's comments re single men. I've vented my spleen in full over on the 5 Sola's page, but in summary I find his teaching on single men (as found in points 4 & 14) to be inaccurate, insulting and unscriptural.
Dear Roger, as I'm also single and read 1 Cor. 7 I totally agree. Paul and Jesus were single! Can't Driscoll see the connection between single blokes fornicating in ministry and their youth? I really struggle with his comments about young people being in ministry--it flies in the face of so much NT teaching. The people up the front need experience and maturity, anything less will do great damage.
That said, as per Michael, Driscoll's point about Sydney theologians (and pastors--who are also theologians) are spot on. We need to repent at this point.
Blessings.
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