Welcome to enCompass for March 2011.

The last few weeks have, of course, been dominated by the catastrophic consequences of Christchurch’s earthquake and now the unfolding disaster in Japan. In Christchurch, the rising death toll and the extensive damage to buildings and infrastructure have stunned us all. Our grief has only been intensified by the news coming from Japan.

This month we borrow some thoughts from Steve Graham, Dean of Laidlaw College in Christchurch who recently wrote on what God is saying to Christchurch. We have excerpts below and a link to the full article.

Our Compass Calendar theme this month is Simplicity and Generosity. Read on and consider adding the liturgical rhythms to your life.

We continue to extend our thoughts, prayers and sympathies to everyone who has been directly or indirectly affected in Christchurch and now Japan.

The Compass Team

What God is saying to Christchurch – "Recovery"

Christchurch has suffered a terrible tragedy – devastation, loss of life, calamity, unbelievable, mind-boggling, mind-numbing. Some of us just don’t know what to think and what the way ahead is. Is it hopeless, just so overwhelming that we cannot actually see a way ahead? Some of us hear the words of confidence and determination but our hearts don’t leap at the words and they fall flat and we feel more hopeless. Such a small community really, we might know one person who died but we know six people who know someone who died. So we know of seven people who died. Two degrees and all that. And so we also wonder, what is God saying in and through this time? What is He saying to the people of God? What is he saying to the city? How should we respond? What should we do? And even if we don’t wonder, others are more than happy to tell us what God is saying. Some claim it is an act of God, of His judgement. I actually do want to claim that I know what He is saying... He is saying “recovery.”

The Bible actually contains lots of stories of recovery. Indeed the whole Bible is a story of recovery for a broken good creation. I want to suggest some lessons from a number of the stories. There is a whole time period and group of books dealing with a time when Israel rebuilt their capital city after it was destroyed; there is the story of one man, Elijah and his recovery from personal trauma; there is the centre of Scripture, the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Continue reading the full article...

Steve Graham
Dean of Laidlaw College, Christchurch

Upcoming Conversation events

Melbourne Sunday 20 and Sunday 27 March
Email vic@compass.org.au for more details.

Brisbane, Wednesday 23 March
Email qld@compass.org.au for more details.

Auckland, Monday 4 April
The first chance for Auckland-based Compass alumni (and interested others) to get together up this year. Join us for a drink and an after-dinner nibble as Andrew Shamy continues the conversation about faith, life, worldview, Scripture, etc.

7.30pm, 49 Cape Horn Road, Hillsborough, Auckland.

For more details, or to RSVP, please email andrew@compass.org.nz

Simplicity and Generosity

Referring to someone’s life as simple could be complimentary or critical. But Simplicity as it is used in the spiritual disciplines does not refer to one’s intelligence, status, or possessions – rather the degree to which we strive for those and other things. Not surprisingly, it does not come naturally to us. Richard Foster describes our condition: “Inwardly modern man is fractured and fragmented. He is trapped in a maze of competing attachments. One moment he makes decisions on the basis of sound reason and the next moment out of fear of what others will think of him. He has no unity or focus around which life is oriented.” Regaining that unity and focus is the discipline of Simplicity and Foster believes we journey there by seeking first the Kingdom of God. It is a matter of trust and of prioritization and two main obstacles lie in the way.

The first is (to borrow the title from Alain de Botton’s excellent book on the subject) Status Anxiety – “a worry, ...that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society… [or] ...that we are currently occupying too low a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.” Not only is this comparison of oneself in terms of position or production profoundly unsettling, it is profoundly dehumanizing. This month we need to be asking whether there are more liberating ways to live.

The second obstacle is Material Anxiety. François Félenon referred to Simplicity as “the pearl of the Gospel.” If we’re honest, most of us would rather have the pearls. And the house. And the car. And the bach. And the boat. Nowhere is our divided loyalty more obvious than in the area of material wealth. Jesus knew it – which is why he warned us that we couldn’t serve both it and him. To try and convince ourselves that we haven’t succumbed, Foster notes that we rename the vices: “Covetousness we call ambition. Hoarding we call prudence. Greed we call industry.” Again, this is profoundly unbiblical and, ultimately, profoundly enslaving.

Sadly, we also live with a remarkable sense of entitlement. We accumulate position and possession because we believe that we’re owed them. By God...and by others. This makes it extremely difficult to address the two obstacles above, and almost impossible to be truly generous. The good news is that this month we will be reflecting on creative ways to introduce Simplicity and Generosity into our patterns of life. The suggestions aren’t sensational or spectacular; instead they are…simple. But don’t let that fool you into thinking they are easy. Status and material anxiety are part of a cultural disease so entrenched, even a small move in the opposite direction will take effort.

But we think the resulting trust in God, and freedom from anxiety, will be well worth it!

You can check out the Calendar at www.compass.org.nz/calendar

Feel free to print out any of the resources that you find helpful, and/or modify and adapt them to fit your situation. Contact us anytime if you have suggestions or queries.

If possible, we would encourage you to use this calendar together with others, so that it becomes not just an individual journey, but a community experience of growth and connection.

You can also sign up for regular emails specific to each month at: www.compass.org.nz/calendar/2011/instructions

Sam Bloore

Download the calendar overview

Download the March study

Premises and Questions

Have you ever had the experience of missing the start of a movie, watching it through, and then later going back and watching those first few minutes? It can be a very revealing experience. In movies, like most narrative forms, the first scenes of the story tend to establish the premise, out of which the story will develop.

The premise sets up the question that will drive the story.

For example, the premise of the TV show Friends is a group of twenty-something (and later thirty-something) friends and their relationships in New York. The premise of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a prophecy to an ambitious noble that he will one day become king. In each episode of Friends, the driving question is, how will the friendship of the six lead characters be restored or affirmed? In Macbeth, the key question is, how will Macbeth’s ambition unfold?

The Bible is a complex interplay of multiple stories, that together to form one big story. It’s major premise is established in Genesis 2 and 3, when humanity rejects God’s blessed way of life in the Garden of Eden. The central question that the Genesis narrative raises is, how will God redeem his broken creation?

We know this premise and this question well. It drives much of our understanding of Jesus, faith, and God’s salvation.

Under this major premise, the Bible is full of minor premises that invite us to reflect on the God who became Jesus on behalf of his creation. Consider the premise of Job, in chapters 1 and 2.

The story bears some remarkable similarities to the account in Genesis, but with strange twists. The key characters are there: God, a deceiver, and a man. But instead of the deceiver asking a question of humanity, God asks a question of the deceiver that sets the drama in motion. In the opening scenes, Job is living very well. By the end, this has all come crumbling around him.

Strikingly, the account at the start of Job doesn’t tell us how we’re supposed to understand what’s going on. Unlike Genesis, where it’s very clear that a ‘good’ creation has become cursed, here we have a series of remarkably un-interpreted events – a chain of events occurs, and ends with Job suffering intensely. This is the premise of the book of Job.

If the question of Genesis is, how will God redeem his good but cursed creation, the question of Job must surely be, how will we make sense of these events?

This is certainly the line of conversation that Job’s three friends pursue once they’ve spent a week (not two minutes) in stunned silence. They offer a variety of categories through which Job’s experience can be interpreted: God is righteous, and Job is unrighteous; God is wise, and Job is a fool; God is powerful and Job is weak before Him.

Job’s despair and his indignation rise and fall, as he disagrees with his friends, and their categories of analysis.

Near the end of the book, God shows up, and now asks questions of Job – “Who is this?” “Where were you?” “Have you?” “Can you?” “Do you know?”

The book of Job does not give a definitive interpretation of its premise, but it does insist on categories in which to think about its core question. Not righteous and unrighteous, wise and foolish, rich and poor, powerful and weak, but Creator and creature, God and man.

The premise of the book of Job may offer a complementary premise to the story of Scripture. How are we to interpret the world? First, by understanding that the most important categories in Scripture are not good and bad, but rather God and Man.

Roshan Allpress