» What would Jesus do?

5 Responses to “What would Jesus do?” »»

1. Bruce
   Comment by Bruce | 08/03/05 at 12:58 pm

   I would like to think he’d be writing a blog! More likely he’d have a few of His disciples doing that instead. I think though the pattern of life we see in the scripture – with ‘strangers’, with his disciples, with a handful of the disciples, with the crowd, and alone with the Father (not in that particular order) – would be what we would see in Jesus if he walked the earth today. Thinking about it is refreshing, but it’s so hard to contextualise given the diversity of life on the earth in 2005.

2. Steve
   Comment by Steve | 08/03/05 at 8:37 pm

   Bruce, I don’t think he would be writing a blog. I think you’re right, he’d get one of his disciples to do it. Jesus didn’t leave any writings behind except indirectly through the rememberances of his disciples in the Gospels. I guess he was too busy doing ministry to write about it!

3. Brigid Walsh
   Comment by Brigid Walsh | 08/04/05 at 11:10 am

   Steve, he would have done as you suggested – some of the time. I believe the flaw in your statement is one into which so many of the free churches have entered into – a quietism, a pietism which remains in the private sphere for so many members of their congregations, in the sphere of the domestic and of the individual. There is, as a generality, a lack of recognition of the public sphere – in which people and institutions and policies impact across large geographies and populations. If it were not so, why is the church in the West barely visible? You see, Jesus led a very public life. He impacted on populations and institutions and policies. What Jesus was advocating was more than the impact on an individual life, his was a very public impact. I think it noteworthy that Jesus did not write a book nor establish a rabbinical school. These are the nuts and bolts of dogmas and isms which were the opposite of his methodology and teaching. His was a circle – a most inclusive circle – that widened like ripples in a pool: personal impact that exploded into action. As a postscript, I would ask Christians to imagine a Christian leader going into Hillsong in Sydney or St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne and knocking over and about the shop fittings and using quite condemnatory language about the presence of moneymaking within the walls of a house of worship. My guess is that such actions would not be well received and neither would they or the language be understood. Yet this is what our Lord and Master did – and we are expected to follow him.

4. Andrew M
   Comment by Andrew M | 08/04/05 at 5:16 pm

   Good conversation folks. Here’s my two cents worth. I think that there is truth that Jesus’ ministry was focussed on impacting ‘the few’ who he chose and who were around him (a la Robert Coleman’s Masterplan of Evangelism) but where that line can fall into what Brigid nicely terms quietism and pietism is that it can lead one to think that he did nothing else. Which he clearly did not. He didn’t aviod making political, religious and prophetic challenges in very public forums also. And he did have some rather large crowds at times come to hear his teaching also! But he never bragged about the crowd sizes (and used them as a good chance to take a ‘love’ offering!).

   A part of Chistology is this incarnational aspect which we often focus on (from one of these angles or another) but leave out the Divine Trinitarian role that he was also fulfilling and to us Gentiles, (vis the HS in Acts 2) introducing. That’s why we should attempt to follow Jesus but realise that it gets very hard to do literally when we find that we are not a member of the Trinity and can’t quite fulfill all he did! So, yes we should ‘go for’ each aspect of the conversation (prophetic, priestly and pastoral to quote Avery Dulles) but we should probably realise that are a multiple ways of expressing this and blogs (and wide forms of communication in a flattened-structured media driven world) might be a part of it (I mean technology enabled us to print Bibles which was a bit of a help) but we can’t do that at the expense of being in a close group of people’s lives where we and others are known and formed into Chritslikeness also.

5. alan hirsch
   Comment by alan hirsch | 08/08/05 at 10:44 am

   Stevo, WWJD? Well he first spent about 30 years in his home town pretty much underground—busy incarnating I suppose. We always seem to focus on Jesus’ public ministry, but this is presupposed by many more years of relative, and real, obscurity. I reckon he would have blogged in this period

   Seriously though, God was in the neighbourhood for 30 years and no-one noticed!! The Incarnation (and by extention, incarnational practices) are the most radical aspects of missional activity.

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