Categories: uncategorized
Date: 16 September 2006 17:46:22
A few weeks ago in church during the sermon a book called Mustard Seed Versus McWorld by Tom Sine was mentioned. Now that is one of those books I bought, following a recommendation at Spring Harvest in 199X, read and promptly put back on the shelf to gather dust, having internalised aspects of the book and the fragments of the message it was putting forward. So anyway, after hearing it mentioned and recommended during the sermon I took it off the shelf and have read it again.
This was an interesting exercise for several reasons:
(i) Tom Sine is a futurologist and so the book written in the late 1990s was actually seeking to address 21st century issues which were then only blips on the horizon
(ii) It showed how ideas that may have been novel and exciting in the late 1990s are now routine parts of our lives
(iii) It shows how little has actually changed in some areas in the last few years and how woefully unprepared many churches and other groups are for the world which is beginning to unfold around them.
Reading through the book there are clearly things that Sine overestimated (such as the threat of the Y2K bug) but there are also things he underestimated (for example when he wrote about the financial implications of the boomer generation he did not have the information which has since become available about pension scheme collapses). Therefore there are situations he refers to which have since become more serious than initially realised. Overall the book makes interesting reading 7 or 8 years on & still presents many challenges for us to change our mindsets and stop superimposing spirituality onto western models of growth, etc.
It is one of those get back to the bible and find out what it actually says and then sit down and see how you can apply it type books which is just totally scary. I have to say that books like that make me realise exactly how poor my discipleship actually is because following a biblical model would just be so counter-cultural. Although I like to give lip service to the principles behind this kind of thinking & on a surface level would love to embrace the principles that Sine and others talk about I don't know if I have either the courage or will to try and do this.