New - Handbook of Doctrine

What do you think?

There is a new Handbook of Doctrine available either in book form or via PDF download at http://www.salvationarmy.org/ihq/www_sa.nsf/vw-dynamic-arrays/20ED848CF00D99E28025770400056C19?openDocument

We are currently preparing a series of commentaries on the new HOD but in the meantime here is a quick review by an Australian SA magazine:

FIRE AWAY!

by Terry Camsey 
 

“… children are a heritage from the Lord…Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.”

Psalm 127: 3-5 NKJV 
 

I

 am not an archer trying to hit a target or kill an animal (neither of which I have ever tried to do!), but I do feel that this passage has something very important to tell us. 

Firstly, arrows are the tools of a warrior. They can accomplish much if skillfully used…they can accomplish little or nothing if the archer is not skilled in their use, or the target is not in clear sight.. 

So, if the target is missed by the arrow we can conclude that either the arrow was faulty (bent) or that the archer - even with the best bow and arrow in the world - is not skilled enough in using the arrows to full advantage. 

I read of someone who rode into an old Western (cowboy) town and, in passing a barn, noted there were several targets painted on the side wall each with an arrow  in the bulls-eye. He looked across the road and saw who seemed to be the village idiot standing there with a bow and quiver full of arrows. He asked the boy who had fired the arrows dead center into each of the targets. The boy said, “I did!” So the man asked, “How did you do it?” The boy replied, “It’s simple, I fire the arrows first and then draw the circles around them!” 

Does that have a familiar ring? 

This has played on my mind for a long time, it having possibly much to say to the Army in these days: 

The Army “fathers” of today do indeed have a quiver full of arrows…keen, young, energetic, creative young people who know our times better than anyone of a previous generation or two. The question is whether those “arrows” which, hopefully are the “heir force” of The Army’s future, are used to the fullest extent of their capability. Do our “archers” have the skills necessary to fire these “arrows?” 

To be used to maximum effect, our “arrows” need both a clear target to be fired at. In our context that would be a vision of what our “archers” want to accomplish for God through the Army international. Not just a Mission Statement (that is just a purpose what we do) but a stirring vision of what the idea future will look, sound and feel like when being accomplished with excellence.  

It should send shivers of excitement and down our backs when we read it realizing that to accomplish it, if we do our part, God will do his through us. 

Those “arrows” should also be released by the “archer” if they are to be of any use at all. 

Is there such a target?  I’m not talking about “we shall be…” statements but, “With Gods help we shall see…” (followed by a sensual - of the senses - description of it what it will be like when actually being achieved. Just as God’s vision is recorded in Revelation with all tribes and nations worshiping before the throne). What an exciting event that is to work towards. 

Yes, we have, in our quiver of arrows today, our “Sons of Issachar” who know our times, just as in Biblical days the Sons of Issachar knew their times. Since they bring a point of view we sorely need, they should surely be represented in the development of a compelling vision of God’s preferred future. They stand, I am sure, ready to seek and hit the target if and when the archer sets up the target and releases those “arrows” to do so. 

What say you?

Writer: A published and recorded composer; cornet soloist of international fame; Terry Camsey was a Salvation Army officer for over twenty years mostly in the area of Church Health and Growth who in retirement is a church growth consultant. He studied with Carl F George (of the then Fuller Institute of Evangelism) as a church growth “doctor” (Diagnosis with Impact), Lyle E. Schaller, Charles and “Chip” Arne and trained as facilitator with Covey Institute (Seven Habits and  First Things First), and The Edward de Bono Lateral Thinking Course.

Terry has traveled as Church Growth teacher around the world including Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, Philippines, Germany.

He is writer of “Slightly Off-Center” (Crest books) and regular columnist in New Frontier (The Salvation Army USA West’s periodical) for over two decades.

© Terry Camsey, May 2010 (Used with permission of the author)

________________________________________ A new release from PHIL LAEGER

Go to  http://www.phillaeger.com/Home/index.html

The Land of Dragons (Geoff Ryan)

A Parable of Incarnational Urban Ministry (meant to be read aloud).

They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations. (Isaiah 61:4)

O

nce upon a time there was a land people thought was full of dragons. Now, it was mostly people who didn’t live in the land, people from the outside, who told the tales about all the dragons that roamed there. They whispered stories they had heard second and third hand about what the dragons looked like and listened to rumours of how awful they acted, how they breathed fire and ate people and generally trashed everything in sight. They would use these stories of the dragons to scare their children into behaving better, and then they themselves would snuggle down in their warm beds at night, safely far away in another land, and feel deliciously afraid at the thought of the dragons and deeply grateful that they themselves didn’t live in this land.

If any of them came near this land on their travels, they would always find a path that would take them around the borders of the land, for they would never, ever enter in it in case they were pounced on and eaten by a dragon. Otherwise they felt safe enough, for it was a well known ‘fact’ that the dragons never strayed outside the borders of their land.

From time to time the newspapers in those far off lands would report an incidence involving a dragon. If there were too many of these incidences in too short a time, the rulers of the surrounding lands started muttering darkly among themselves about the “dragon problem” and what to do about it and mostly how to ensure that it didn’t spill out and over into the surrounding lands and into the safe lives of their own people. They hired more and more dragon-catchers in an effort to make the land dragon free, but all these dragon-catchers ever caught were little lizards that looked something like dragons, but which everybody knew were not the real thing at all.

Then one day a few people decided that they would move into the land where the dragons lived and live there themselves. Sure they had heard the stories of the dragons but they had also met some of the people who lived in that land and they seemed nice enough so they thought it couldn’t be all that bad. Their friends mostly thought they were crazy while others that they were very brave (though a little foolish). Most agreed that they would surely die or at the very least come to some dreadful harm. But having decided that this is what they should do…they went ahead and did it. In twos and threes the people in this group slipped over the border and settled into the land of the dragons.

And they were in for two of the biggest surprises of their lives.

You see, while they didn’t really go looking for dragons, they did at least arrive expecting to see or encounter dragons. They were prepared to have to run away from a few, if needed. But they didn’t find any dragons in the land. Not one single, solitary dragon. They saw a few lizards and occasionally, a large slouching shadow shifting off to the side and glimpsed out of the corner of their eye… a thing that maybe could be something like a dragon, but they couldn’t be really sure. And little by little as time passed and the newcomers settled down to live their lives in the new land, they stopped worrying about dragons and sometimes even went days without thinking about them at all.

Their second real surprise was the people they met in the new land. They weren’t anything at all like what they expected, though truth be told if they thought about it, they would’ve realized that they hadn’t given much thought to the people in the land at all, busy as they had been thinking mostly about the dragons. The people in the land were…well…nice and friendly and pretty ordinary. In fact, they seemed just like the people in the land they had moved from. Which is to say - they were just like them!

But what about the dragons? What about what the other people in other lands had said about the dragons? How could the truth be so different from what they had thought all along? So, they asked their neighbours what the truth was.

And different people gave different answers.

Some said indeed the dragons did exist. You just had to stay out late into the night and you could catch a glimpse of them because they only came out then. Of course, the people who gave them this answer never went out at night and themselves hadn’t seen any of these dragons, but they knew this to be the truth, nevertheless.

Others answered that there used to be dragons, but not anymore. They had all gone away, moved far, far away and never came round anymore. The dragon-catchers had chased them all away and so things were much quieter now. Dragons were a thing of the past.

Still others didn’t give any answer at all. They just smiled knowingly, looked from side to side, smiled again and then walked away without saying a word.

Naturally it was this latter group that intrigued the newcomers the most. Their non-answer to the mystery of the dragons seemed to hold more truth than all the other answers put together. What they knew, they knew, and not just because someone else had told them it was so.

After a while of living in the new land, about the time it was no longer “new” or even “another land” anymore but had started to become “home”. When the newcomers were no longer “new” and had changed from “comers” to “stayers”. When they were considered by the people of the land to have always sort of lived there and been a part of life, around this time they become close friends and valued neighbours with everyone who had lived there their whole lives.

And when you ask a question of a friend, it is quite a different thing than asking a question of a stranger and especially of someone you’ve just met. So they asked their neighbor-friends: “What about the dragons?”

And their neighbours again smiled knowingly, looked from side to side and then instead of walking away, said the following:  “Yes, there were some dragons around back in the day - and there still are. But not nearly so many as people in the other lands think. And even the ones we do have here are quite different from what everyone thinks. There are many reasons for this but mainly it is because they are our neighbours and friends, members of our community and some of them are even our family members.

“But the reputation of the fierce dragons is helpful for us who live here and useful for those who live outside. It helps keep people away who really don’t want to be a part of our lives. It gives them an excuse to avoid coming here and a reason to fear us and so in this way they can stay safe and warm and happy in their own homes far away and never have to do something they really never wanted to do in the first place - get to know us.

“It keeps strangers out of our community and scares them away so they don’t come down and bother us, because we know that if they did come into our land, they would look down their noses at us because they think they are better than us and they would want to tear things down and build new things and make some of us leave and take others of us away. We are really a small land, not nearly as powerful as the lands surrounding us and we feel the unsettling truth of this in our hearts every day.

“So we pretend that we have these fearsome dragons roaming around our land and the people outside believe that we have these fearsome dragons roaming around our land, and in this way everything stays as it always has and nothing ever has to change and that suits both of us, even if it is just a lie.

“And if the price we pay is that occasionally one of the few real, living dragons who do actually live here decides to eat one of us, well, it seems a small price for us to pay in the bigger scheme of things.

“And even when that does happen, it is hard for us to become too angry or stay too angry at the dragons for eating one of us because, you see, we know the dragons really, really well and we remember when they were young and nothing more than cute little lizards and know that deep down inside, they still are like this.

“It’s just that sometimes when they think dragonish thoughts, then they start to do dragonish things. And it is those things only that the people in the other lands hear about the dragons so they understand them to be this way all the time. They never, ever saw them when they were young and nothing more than cute little lizards and can only see them as scary, fire-breathing dragons. That’s the “truth” that’s most useful to all of us.”

Well, the newcomers didn’t hardly know what to do with this revelation. It seemed to them that everybody had been lying all along - the people who lived in the dragon land and the people who lived outside of it in other lands. And these lies were all fed and kept alive by fear. And even though both groups of people seemed content enough - how happy could they really be when their lives were shaped by fear and lies?

So the small group of people who had ignored the fear everyone said they should feel and moved into the land (who by now had become to a larger group as more people moved into join them and people who had always lived in the land started hanging out with them more and more until they resembled nothing more than one big family) decided that the very best thing that could happen was for everyone - both the people in the land and the people outside in other lands - to simply stop being afraid and stop lying to themselves and others. Because they knew that power of a lie is in its fear and that if you stop being afraid then the lie just fades away and dies. And the best way to take away this power was to start living different sort of lives, lives that no longer hid behind lies and fear, lives that opened up more than they closed off, lives that were free.

So they all started talking more and more about this and spending more and more time together in order to talk about this and it seemed like a new family had taken root in the land - a family that was growing and growing. And the more they talked, the more excited everyone became and the more other people saw this and the more they wanted to join in the conversation and feel like they were part of the family. And slowly but surely the words, “What if…” were spoken more and more in their conversations and eventually they altogether replaced the old thoughts of “What is will always be”, and “What had always been will never change.”

They organized get-togethers that included music and laughter and food. And they cried together and held each other. They started rebuilding the places the dragons has knocked down and restoring the relationships that had been cramped by fear and lies. And some of them taught all the others the truth of who they really were and all of them listened to the truth of who everyone else really was and the more truth they spoke and listened to, the lighter the whole land became - the shadows started to shrink away and become nothing more than smudges and people started to venture out at night (most particularly those who had never gone out at night because they had always believed that this was when the dragons came out).

Some of them ventured out of their land to visit the other surrounding lands and discovered that they had relatives they never even knew existed there. A few people from the other lands even came to visit (not too many and not to move in and live there…just to visit).

But the most amazing wonder of all was that some dragons crept out of their lairs, quietly and warily, not breathing any fire or with even a whiff of smoke and no roaring whatsoever and lay down on the ground a little way off from the loud, happy, laughing, courageous family and watched them, with their heads resting on their front paws and their tails slowly switching from side to side and some people who noticed them swore that the occasional smile lit up their faces and that one or two even snorted as if they were trying to laugh (a difficult thing for a dragon to do, after all).

And the land that everyone used to think of as a place full of dragons, became known instead as the land of light and love and laughter.

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

Writer: Major Geoff Ryan is co-founder of theRubicon and was publisher for three years. He is co-ordinator of the 614 Network and organizes the bi-annual Urban Forum. His interests include writing, politics, coffee and his children. Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto, Canada.

Politics #6 - Love Over This

Look at the earth from outer space
Everyone must find a place
Give me time and give me space
Give me real don’t give me fake
Give me strength, reserve control
Give me heart and give me soul
Give me time, give us a kiss
Tell me your own politik

And open up your eyes,open up your eyes,open up your eyes, open up your eyes

Give me one ’cause one is best In confusion, confidence
Give me peace of mind and trust
Don’t forget the rest us
Give me strength, reserve control
Give me heart and give me soul
Wounds that heal and cracks that fix
Tell me your own politik

And open up your eyes,open up your eyes,open up your eyes, open up your eyes

Just open up your eyes.But give me love over, love over, love over this …

“Politik,” Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head“

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”

Edward R. Murrow

A

s Dr. Campbell has already said on theRubicon “politics happens.”

There are so many images and words that come to mind when we hear the word “politics.” Besides religion, there is no more polarizing or explosive topic for thought and conversation. Everyone, informed and uninformed (I like to think I fall in the middle, but admittedly a little closer to uninformed), has something to say and share about politics.

Politics has to do with people. Therefore, in countries, cities and towns, offices, classrooms, playgrounds, cafeterias, churches, and anywhere else people come together, “politics happens.”  Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad; when “politics happens”  in the church and among believers in communities of faith, most of the time it’s bad.

The political action and drama we see during election season in Canada and the United States has no place in the church and among believers, but we do it. We engage in character assassination, we tell lies and half-truths, we distribute misinformation and spin information to suit our stories and points of view, etc.

Being politically engaged and informed is important (I need to be more informed and engaged). Murrow’s above sentiment is true. The church needs to engage in the social and political issues of our day and be a clear voice for justice and the rights of all humankind. All citizens, regardless of faith, should not allow the wool to be pulled over their eyes.

When “politics happens” in the church and among believers let me suggest we look to our Triune God for a political theology of the Trinity for a political theology for the church.

God the Father, the Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit do not engage in any of the negative political action and drama we have suggested or that comes to mind when we hear the word “politics.”  The three persons in the Godhead are “undivided in essence and co-equal in power and glory.” Love rules over politics in the community of our Triune God. Our Triune God works together to bring about salvation, holiness, the forgiveness of sins and is the power behind and the guiding force for the church, us, the body of Christ on earth. The community of the Trinity works together for the betterment of others. There is no competition among the Trinity. There is no animosity and belittling among the Trinity. There is no character assassination among the Trinity.

Love should rule over the politics in the community of believers. We should be undivided in essence and we are all equal in our need for the love, grace, and guidance found in our Triune God. Let me reiterate the great closing thought from Dr. Campbell: “it’s all level ground before the cross.” We should be working together for the betterment of others.

So, let love rule over when “politics happens.”

Writer: Mark Braye and his wife Nancy are officers in Essex, Ontario, Canada. They have two children, pictured above, Hannah and Micah. The four of them love to play and watch Sesame Street.

Faith in Action

Paper title: Faith in Action
Author/researcher: Jason Davies-Kildea
Country of origin: Australia
Publication/completion date: August, 2007
Length: 35 pages
Keywords: The Salvation Army, social service,
Abstract:
Faith-based organisations right across the world are providing an invaluable role as social service providers with a capacity to reach and engage people significantly beyond that of government and private sector providers. In Australia, the vast majority of non-Government social welfare services are delivered by faith-based organisations, however there has been little local research into how the religious motivations of these organisations shape the character of service delivery.

This report brings together the experiences of staff and service users in almost 50 services across three countries: the US, UK and Kenya. It demonstrates that a critically important factor to the contribution of faith-based organisations is how the spiritual and religious dimensions shape the fundamental values and character of services provided. The capacity of social services to address spiritual issues which may be initiated by service users is an essential component that adds significantly to the range of benefits these organisations provide.

› Continue reading