Planting Churches among the City's Poor - Volume 1

P ART II: T HEOLOGICAL AND M ISSIOLOGICAL P RINCIPLES AND I NSIGHTS • 151

I. The Significance of Story: The Story of God’s Glory

The Christian gospel is a narrative. The Word did not become text or a series of abstracted propositions; the Word became flesh (John 1.14). Consequently Christian theology, if it is to be done appropriately, must take the form of a sustained engagement with the story rather then merely an engagement with the Church’s propositional responses to the story. And, since we come to know by indwelling rather than in detachment, Christian theology appropriately attempted will take the form of an indwelling of this story, being drawn into its dramas, identifying with its characteri zations, tracing the movements of its plot. And since appropriate knowledge should be appropriate to its specific object, and since God is the object (or rather the irreducible subject) of theology, this engagement with the gospel story which is the appropriate form of Christian theology is appropriately worshipful and prayerful. And it is precisely this manner of worshipful and prayerful indwelling that is enabled by the liturgy of the Christian Year.

~ John E. Colwell. The Rhythm of Doctrine . Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2007, p. 7.

A. Human beings operate according to their interpretive frameworks: human beings exist as “walking worldviews.”

1. Every human existence is basically a “story-ordered world.”

2. Myth-making as a primary act of human beings

3. The role of culture: enabling us to compose our realities from scratch

B. Integrating the details: story and the need to live purposefully

1. Purposeful mindset: relating all details to the whole

2. Provisional mindset: relating to details as wholes

C. The problem of a reductionistic faith: substituting the part for the whole

1. Reductionism – substituting a comprehensive religious vision of Christian faith for an alternative, smaller, usually culturally oriented substitute notion, activity, relationship, or element