How can theology transform the church?

February 6th, 2009 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (1) |

Here’s a better question: How couldn’t it?

If you could open my brain, peer inside, and see what has been happening there the past month or so, it would be a loop of this video.

The entire video is fantastic, but here are a couple of money quotes:

“[Pastors] are saying, ‘Theology doesn’t preach. And I only seem to connect with my congregation when when I do psychology, contemporary affairs, aesthetics, novels, comparative religion, lectures on this and that topic.’ So the starting point is just to let folks do theology today.”

“If we then can say every one of us who picks up a Bible, or, for that matter a newspaper, and tries to wrestle with the relevance of the Bible for the contemporary world, or a Christian response to the events on the front page of today’s newspaper — that person is already doing theology.”

“Theology is when Christian folks engage the contemporary world in a vital way; when they ask the hardest questions and then they sit down and try to get some answers.”

I think this is what Tony Jones was getting at when he named a chapter “It’s the theology, stupid.” in his book The New Christians.

Theology alone will not save the church, but if it can be wrestled away from the ivory towers of academia, it will undoubtedly have massive transformative power. And my contention is that the starting point for theological thinking is precisely where it has been avoided — youth ministry.

More on that later.