Around Town: Re-Enchanting Culture, Marpole housing, Missions Fest . . .

James K.A. Smith will be the keynote speaker at Re-Enchanting Discipleship.

James K.A. Smith seems to be on something of a roll, so I expect his day-long seminar (Re-Enchanting Discipleship: Christian Life in a Secular Age) and free evening lecture (Re-Enchanting Culture) – both at Southridge Fellowship Baptist Church in Langley this Friday (February 9) – will draw good crowds.

Why a professor from Calvin College trained as a philosopher with a focus on contemporary French thought should have hit a public nerve is, possibly, a mite hard to explain. But in an interview with Justin Taylor on The Gospel Coalition website in 2016, Smith took a shot at explaining the phenomenon, while also outlining some of what motivates him:

Here is some of the discussion about two of his books:

What is the relationship between your earlier work on Desiring the Kingdom and this new book arguing that You are What You Love?

When I wrote Desiring the Kingdom, I thought it was a ‘popular’-level book. Turns out an academic philosopher is a terrible judge of what counts as ‘popular!’ I guess the hundred footnotes per chapter with references to German philosophy and neuroscience was considered a bit of a hurdle for most readers. Go figure.

Yet the argument of the book got attention from a wide range of places and I was invited to talk about it with a remarkable variety of audiences. . . .

A key demographic for your book seems to be younger Christians who hope to be a change agent for good, seeking to usher in greater human flourishing in the world through faithful service and the pursuit of justice. What encourages you and what concerns you about these aspirational culture makers?

I’m deeply encouraged by developments in evangelicalism over the past generation that have recovered a ‘holistic’ sense of the Gospel and have realized that God is in more than just the soul-rescue business.

In a sense this is something that my friend Rich Mouw was working almost 50 years ago. He and his Kuyperian friends had an impact on the young Chuck Colson, whose influence reached another generation, and then caught the imagination of folks like Andy Crouch and Gabe Lyons and others.

At the same time, lots of young evangelicals have come to a new appreciation for the Bible’s emphasis on justice; they’ve become reacquainted with God’s persistent concern for widows, orphans, strangers. In short, there are now all kinds of evangelical Christians who are invested in engaging, influencing and ‘transforming’ culture.

What concerns me is kind of the shadow side of this encouraging reality. Too often, in the name of ‘transforming’ culture we end up becoming assimilated to the culture. Or in the name of ‘relevance,’ we just end up mimicking the dominant culture.

I suggest that this happens, in part, because while we enthusiastically ‘engage’ culture equipped with a ‘worldview’ and a message, we have completely underestimated the power of habit and the (de)formative power of cultural practices. That’s why I call these cultural practices cultural liturgies – because they are heart-shaping rituals that actually shape what we love. So what I’m trying to do is to help people see that these cultural liturgies aren’t just something that you do; they do something to you.

Smith has gone on to complete his Cultural Liturgies trilogy: Imagining the Kingdom, Desiring the Kingdom, Awaiting the King. He is an engaged public intellectual and cultural critic who writes for a wide range of magazines and newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Slate, First Things, Christianity Today and The Hedgehog Review. He serves as editor-in-chief of Comment magazine.

He will be joined by several other strong speakers, including Hans Boersma, Bruce Guenther, Paul Chamberlain and Grant Havers.

Editor’s note (February 14): This insightful interview/assessment of James K.A. Smith came out just after I posted this story. Well worth reading.]

Marpole housing welcomed

The Vancouver Courier has written another upbeat article about churches and members of the Marpole community welcoming the homeless people who will soon move into temporary modular housing. The 78-unit complex will be the first to be completed since the provincial government promised 600 modular housing units for Vancouver last fall:

Nizar Assanie’s dining room is filled with household items: toothpaste, tooth brushes, shaving foam, shampoo, conditioner, soap, socks, razors, chocolate, hot chocolate, food, as well as dishes, glasses and plates.

“Basic stuff that you and I would take for granted – that you and I would need,” he told the Courier. . . .

Assanie, who lives about five blocks from the site, said he wanted to take a positive approach. So did his neighbours, as well as members of West Side Baptist Church and Granville Chapel, who “from the very beginning thought [modular housing] was a positive initiative to tackle one of the biggest social issues that is facing the city,” he said.

They approached Community Builders, the non-profit association that will manage the complex, to ask for a list of what residents might need when they moved in. With the list in hand, the group had no problem collecting more than enough donations. . . .

Assanie also joined the community advisory committee for the Marpole complex, as did Paul Williams, a neighbour and one of the pastors from Granville Chapel, because they consider homelessness such an important issue to address.

For the full story go here.

Missions Fest reports

Alycia Wood

More than 10,000 people attended Missions Fest 2018 this past weekend, where one of the main speakers shared about the devastating effect that a popular atheist book had on a young Christian student.

Alycia Wood, a speaker with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, spoke with theologian and church planter Michael Goheen on Friday during the opening session of Canada’s largest missions conference.

Wood reflected on a story of a young man, Jesse Kilgore, who had given up his faith in college after he was encouraged to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

“It broke him so much he decided it wasn’t worth living anymore and he took his life,” she said.

Go here for the full story.

* 10,000 Christians reached in Muslim-majority country within years: church planter

David Cheung

Canada’s Evangelical population has been growing while other denominations have been losing nearly 80 percent of their flocks over the past few decades.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, according to David Cheung, senior pastor at Richmond’s Immanuel Christian Reformed Church.

“God is still working in Canada,” Cheung said during his seminar at Missions Fest in Vancouver on Saturday.

“What we see across Canada is there is a majority population of youngsters who are not going to church but, there is a significant vibrant minority who are committed to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“The future depends on how we respond.”

Go here for the full story.