Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Four Things We Must NOT Take As Primary Objectives in teaching for Christian (Trans)Formation:
External conformity, profession of perfectly correct doctrine, encouraging faithfulness to the activities of a church or other outwardly religious routines and various “spiritualities”, the seeking out of special states of mind or ecstatic experiences:“Special experience, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation.


Two Primary Objectives of the Course of Training:
...to bring apprentices to the point where they dearly love and constantly delight in that “heavenly Father” made real to earth in Jesus and are quite certain that there is no “catch,” no limit, to the goodness of his intentions or to his power to carry them out…to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom of God, to free the apprentices of domination, of “enslavement” (John 8:34; Rom. 6:6), to their old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action.



Dallas Williard. THE DIVINE CONSPIRACY: REDISCOVERING OUR HIDDEN LIFE IN GOD.
Arranged and quoted by Jim Wilhoit & Dan Haase in TEACHING FOR CHRISTIAN (TRANS)FORMATION.

Monday, February 05, 2007

...to be a follower of Christ does not mean to imitate him literally by mimicking, but to express him through the medium of one's own life.

Alan Hirsch. THE FORGOTTEN WAYS.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

"Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done," it suddenly occurred to him. "But how could that be, when I did everything properly?" he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.
Leo Tolstoy. THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH.

Friday, February 02, 2007

I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism....in consumerism we are now dealing with a very significant religious phenomenon. If the role of religion is to offer a sense of identity, purpose, meaning and community, then it can be said that consumerism fulfills all these criteria.

Alan Hirsch. THE FORGOTTEN WAYS.
I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption...

Ivan Illich. DESCHOOLING SOCIETY.
We can only live changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Each one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create.
Ivan Illich quoted by Alan Hirsch in THE FORGOTTEN WAYS
When a liquid or gas moves smoothly, it's easy to go with the flow. But change certain conditions--speed, viscosity, surrounding space--and the orderly current dissolves into whirling chaos....The trouble is complexity.
"Why Don't We Understand Turbulence." What We Don't Know in WIRED. Feb '07.