Role playing Romans : a 13 week small group course at NVC

Have you ever wanted to understand the Bible better? To go past the familiar verses and learn the background and context? The Role Playing Romans course is thirteen weeks of stimulating immersion in the book of Romans, which will leave you with a new way of looking at the Bible and a much better understanding of Romans, both in terms of its original meaning and its application to the church today.

It’s brain-stretching and involves some reading, but it’s not dry studying. Instead, you’ll be taking on a character in a first century Roman church and have to discuss each chapter of the letter to the Romans through the eyes of your character. Some of you will be slaves, some Jewish merchants, some radical Gentile converts.

The course uses the book Roman House Churches For Today by Reta Halteman Finger. To do the whole course, you will need to buy a copy of the book ($23; we have some extra copies you can buy from us) but you can come along to the first two weeks first to decide if it’s right for you.

“This book is designed to draw learners into the biblical text and the first-century context. What was life like in Rome? for Jews? for women? for slaves? for the well-to-do? for those free but poor? for Christians in households where the head of the household was not Christian? Through action and reflection, learners become first-century persons in Rome and then step outside that world to reflect in our own time and place. Thus we hear and understand the text in and new powerful ways.”
- Linda Vogel, in the foreword to the book.

Where: Hobbys house, 25 Vincent St Nedlands
When: Starting weekly in late July; 7:30pm-9:30pm on a night to be decided

Please register your interest with Nathan or Nicole as soon as you can – nathanhobby@gmail.com / noli_jae@yahoo.com.au / 0405 097 008

The group that came alive

A year and a bit ago, Nicole and I started a small group with some friends. We set out calling it a ‘house church’, because we wanted the group to understand itself as doing all the things a church should do – a gathered body of believers, building each other up and worshipping our Lord Jesus with our hearts and minds and our words and deeds.

We’ve been meeting in East Victoria Park and just lately, the group seems to have come to life! We’ve got eight regulars and several visitors. We now meet on every second Sunday night for a shared agape meal.

Recently, we’ve started breaking a loaf of bread and sharing a cup of wine before each meal, consciously celebrating the shared meal as a part of the Lord’s Supper. This is, we believe, similar to how the early church would have celebrated the Lord’s Supper.

At first, we tried reading a book together – Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. It’s an excellent book, one of those that has changed my life, but I’m beginning to think that reading a book together is not the best way to do things.

Since April we changed the way we do things and I think it’s made it so much better. Now, each person is responsible for organising a week. After dinner, we do whatever they have for us.

It’s unleashed an incredible number of gifts and interests giving people this responsibility. Here’s some activities we’ve done:

• An art night where we drew and painted in response to God
• A presentation about a trip one of our members made to Indonesia, helping women in poverty.
• A sing-along night where everyone who could play brought an instrument and we sang whatever people requested. We had three guitars, a Spanish drum, a viola and a shaker.
• An alternatives to violence workshop.

For me, it’s been a wonderful testimony to the presence of the Spirit in each believer. Everyone has something to contribute, some passion or talent. When we give people an opportunity to express these, the body of Christ, the church, comes alive!

If you’d like to join us, you’d be welcome. You can send me an email – nathanhobby at gmail.com, or talk to me at NVC on Sunday.

- Nathan Hobby

Some thoughts on postmodernism and the gospel #1: the importance of stories

Our life-cell doesn’t have a name or even a place. We’re a nomad people, meeting at the Watsons, the Jumeaux and the Prices, and for the first time this week, Daniel and Christine’s. In our meetings on every second Friday, we’ve loosely been exploring a book by Brian McLaren called A New Kind of Christian. It’s stimulated some great discussion.

McLaren’s book is a good introduction for Christians wanting to understand the implications of postmodernism for the gospel and the gospel for postmodernism. It takes the form of a novel, the story of a disillusioned pastor, Daniel, having conversations with Neo, a science teacher who has grappled with a lot of the big questions and come out with a faith appropriate for postmodern times. As a writer myself, I find the fictionalisation lame, but I think it’s a good approach, an appropriate form for the message. And the message itself is good.

We spent a couple of weeks talking about just what postmodernism is. It’s a big question, and I can’t answer it in one blog post. Or even twelve. But I thought I’d offer a series of short reflections on some starting points people at Network Vineyard should know about postmodernism.

For a start, let go of the idea that postmodernism is all bad! (Or all good.) It’s a shift in thinking, in worldview that reveals a lot of what was wrong with modernist ways of thinking. Evangelicals have been quite captive to modernism and that’s why postmodernism is scary: it confronts the modernism in us.

One of the shifts in postmodernism is the a new importance given to stories. Postmodernism tells us that truth doesn’t have to be propositions about the world, facts outside a time and place. Instead it suggests that truth is also found in stories. Our lives are stories. Our faith is a story. (It also suggests that any statement we make about the world has a story behind it – because it’s expressed in language, which is cultural, and we always have a reason for saying whatever we say.)

When we try to express our faith only in facts or doctrines, we lose something important. Try describing your husband or wife in facts – ‘170 cm tall’ or ‘born in 1981′ – these things are true and necessary, but you aren’t getting to what’s important. The story of how you got together and why and what you’ve done – now you’re on track. The same goes for God.

When we try to read the Bible primarily as doctrines or commands, again we lose sight of the story. A modernist reading of the Bible favours those parts which can be made into commands or doctrines – like Paul’s letters. But even Paul’s letters tell a story. They are about a particular people at a particular time trying to follow Jesus. They are written by an apostle of the Lord addressing particular problems in a church. If we don’t start with the story, if we just try to extract timeless truth, we miss out on something important.

This is where N.T. Wright’s idea of the Bible as a five act story is really important (which Stuart mentioned in a sermon a few months ago).  We find ourselves in the fourth act of an unfolding story. We need to know the story really well so we can faithfully improvise our act – which hasn’t been written yet! We do know the end though – the fifth act. We know that Jesus is returning to bring completion the kingdom of God in the new heavens and new earth.

Any questions? It would be good to start a conversation. I hope to have another post on our journey into postmodernism later.

- Nathan Hobby

A valuable resource for Life Cell leaders

A great resource for Life Cell leaders that I have come across is from the Columbus Vineyard.  You can download all manner of  Bible Studies and sermons.  At the moment the womens group is using the Fatherhood of God series and I can recommend it.  We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  Its all there. See the link under bible resources.