Global

City, Global Perspectives, LBA Ministers Conference Jan 2016. Thinking Global.

Session 2: Thinking (& speaking & acting & living) Globally

Our question:

[S28]
What is the impact of global power on local realities including the reality of
our communities and our churches, and how should we respond?
Yesterday, Micahs vision of the day of the lord with everyone sitting under
their own fig tree, each one with their own land, their own place. Today,
another vision with a different scope.

Colossians 1:15-20

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all

creation; 16for in* him all things in heaven and on earth were
created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or powersall things have been created through him and
for him. 17He himself is before all things, and in* him all things
hold together. 18He is the head of the body, the church; he is the
beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to
have first place in everything. 19For in him all the fullness of God
was pleased to dwell, 20and through him God was pleased to
reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by
making peace through the blood of his cross.
Introduction

The two occasions when Jesus mentions church?
Mtt 16 on this rock
Mtt 18 tell it to the church
[S29]
The churches ability to work at different spatial scales provides a
number of models for political organisation from which the socialist
movement could well draw some important lessons. (David Harvey,
Marxist Prof of Anthropology and Geog in New York)
Remember the Daniel Kemmis quote from yesterday:

Global City, Global Perspectives, LBA Ministers Conference Jan 2016. Thinking Global.

[S30]
community is the efforts of unlike people to live well in specific
places
That living well bit will be greatly enhanced by thinking Globally.
The gospel calls us to be committed to and rooted in the local but that is
no reason for us to have an unrealistic, romanticized notion of the local.
Collection for Jerusalem Church the very apostle who argued for the
freedom of Gentile Christians to be Gentiles rather than having to be Jews
is the same apostle who too up the collection for the Jerusalem Church.
The very apostle got angry when the judaisers tried to make Gentile
Christians in Jews also pleaded with the gentile churches to whom he
ministered to remember their indebtedness to the people of Israel, the
branch into which they had been grafted.
The local can be narrow, stifling, bigoted, repressive, patriarchal and much
more that is bad.
Cf Me returning to Barnsley and loving it but finding it stifling too.
This small corner of your vineyard
Racist
Sexist
For much of history communities divided people into neighbours to
whom we owed our primary communal loyalty, or aliens. When
neighbours encountered aliens it was only ever under one of two guises,
an enemy to be repelled or a guest to be hospitably or temporarily
accommodated. As a people seeking to be Holy like God is holy we have
to be inspired by a bigger vision.
Scriputre is a journey from one place (Eden) to another (New Jerusalem)
but it is an eternal journey and a global journey from the beginning of
time to the end of time, taking in every corner of the globe.
[S31]
Great Babylon swallows up the nations; New Jerusalem welcomes
them, renewed and resplendent. Jonathan Ingleby
We talked yesterday about Adam walking on the soil from which he was
made but the other side of the coin is that A&E are presented as the

Global City, Global Perspectives, LBA Ministers Conference Jan 2016. Thinking Global.

shared ancestor of humanity, bestowed with and passing on a damaged
but indelible divine image every time we walk the streets of community
watch news on telly follow the latest meme of FB we are encountering
images of God.
We talked yesterday about the incarnation God contracted to a span with
the dust of Palestine under his finger nails but also the head of a new,
renewed human race. Every time we walk the streets of community
watch news on telly follow the latest meme of FB we are encountering
each person we encounter is someone for whom Christ died..
NB children of God? Yes!
Ref back to Col 1.
Ref Holy Nation 1Peter 2:9
you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, Gods own
people,* in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who
called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.
10
Once you were not a people,
but now you are Gods people;
The church is a transnational nation. Not a theoretical notion the two
20C European wars - conscientious objectors to kill another Christian in
the name of my country is both fratricide and treason.
Im told that one native American way of defining Kingdom is, all my
relations
NB admire Muslims and loyalty to Umma over loyalty to nation me too!
Global because one God. NB one world because one God who is its
source as creator, its hope as lover and its destiny as saviour.
[S32]
Trajectories from Bauckham
[S33]
1. A temporal movement from a beginning in creation towards a
consummation of Gods purposes in a future end. mission is a
movement into an ever new future. (13)

Global City, Global Perspectives, LBA Ministers Conference Jan 2016. Thinking Global.

2. A spatial movement from one place to every place. mission is
a movement towards ever new-horizons. (14)
3. A social (or numeric) movement from a person to persons, from a
people to all peoples. mission is a movement that is always
being joined by others, the movement, therefore, of an ever-new
people. (15)

It is because we are called to embrace these trajectories that we need to

qualify, what we said yesterday or rather enrich it.
Cf Andew Walls indigenising principle and pilgrim principle
Christians are resident aliens, migrants, pilgrims, in but not of When in
Rome, and for Gods sake do please be in Rome, dont do what the
Romans do! Cf Romans 12:1f
Yes seek the welfare of the city but lets also remember Heb 13:14 here we
have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Our loyalty
to our local community is very real, very significant but can never ultimate.
If our Baptist stress on the gathered church leaves us in danger of failing to
touch earth in the local, our emphasis on independency puts us at risk of
forgetting the oikoumene the wider fellowship of church and indeed
humanity to which we belong.

NB God at work beyond the church cf Cyrus

NB church enriched by e.g. environmental movement
NB church enriched by e.g. feminism

[S34]
It was the environmental movement that adopted the slogan, Think Global,
Act Local.
[S35]
I think we should nick it. And then add to it Think Eternal, Act Temporal
Its not just both and

Global City, Global Perspectives, LBA Ministers Conference Jan 2016. Thinking Global.

its because we are rooted in the local that our vision of the global
can never be general, bland and beige.
Its because we are connected to the global that we are never
allowed to think that the local is it, normative, definitive, the only
way, the only proper way.

Conclusion
Legitimising identity which we inherit, when threatened we somethimes
respond by building a resistence identiy (EDL BF etc. // Mile end NF) it is
essential as we live rooted in our local communities that we embody and
express a different way of responding to the unsettling of globalisation
our way forward is not in reactionary fearful bolstering of our legitimising
identity but comes for being both rooted and connected.
[S36]
Your role as local theologians is crucial. But can only fulfill that role to the
extent that as well as being rooted in the local you are also connected to
the global. Rooted to the here and now but not limited to the here and
now.
If pastors are called to be local theologians rooted in the messy here and
now ness of their communities, they must remember that they must also
be rooted in the glories of Christian theology and that this is more than a
local or contemporary phenomenon. It has three thousand year history
with streams and tributaries that rise in flow from just about every part of
Gods world. NB also ecumenical with many rich theological and ecclesial
traditions.
We are called to improvise in this place and at this time but the better we
understand and are soaked in the world of music familiar with its chords
and scales the better improvisers we will be.