Headline speakers anti-slavery campaigner Christine Caine and technology and culture author Andy Crouch demonstrated how Christians can rely on Scripture at the first Bible conference run by Bible Society Australia (BSA). The conference is anticipated to become an annual event.
A mixed online and in-house audience at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum heard Grant Thomson, BSA CEO call for unity at the “pro-Jesus and pro-Bible” event.
Caine recounted the hostile environment for Christians in the West,
“People think like you’re a Christian, you’ve gotta be an idiot or a bigot, surely in the world in which we live….When people think that what you’re actually saying is dangerous, hypocritical, untrue, or offensive, who wants to talk about the authority of the Bible?”
And contrasting that hostile environment with the great commission.
“We cannot, we do not have the option of sticking our head in the sand in Matthew 28, verses 18 and 20, we all know the great commission …
“Christianity is undeniably missional by its very nature. God said, go into all the world. We are sent. Once. Mission is intrinsically connected with the Christian core experience of Jesus and his story that you can’t separate these two things.“
Caine brought these thoughts together using Peter’s description of Christians as sojourners and exiles in this world.
In a powerful part of her talk, she urged the rising generation that she was calling into mission not to make the older generation’s mistakes.
Describing herself as running A21 as “one of the largest anti trafficking organisations in the world” and a “full-on evangelist, unapologetic because we must proclaim’” she urged Christians to resist polarisation.
“I believe that missional engagement in the 21st century is not like the old paradigm of either/or this binary world that is ripping us literally apart, but it’s both/and…
“So in the old days, it was kind of like, is it faith or works? Well, you know what? It’s both faith and work. Why would we separate those things? We need faith without faith. It’s impossible to please God. And it’s by faith. The evidence of things hoped for, and, and things not seen it’s by faith, that mountains move, but we also need to do the work. We are his work, which it created in Christ Jesus for, for good works that God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. So we don’t separate what God brought together.”
Caine criticised the use of the quote misattributed to St Francis “Preach always. And if necessary, use words” saying she was “old-school” and words are necessary.
“You don’t have to stop evangelism because you’re doing social justice. You don’t have to cringe at evangelism because of social justice. It is Jesus that fuels the justice works that I do.”
Technology and empire
Andy Crouch challenged Christians not to live a liturgy of technology, waking up to their devices in the morning and reading them at night. Simply not charging our phone in the bedroom will mean we can’t reach for it first thing.
Technology, a concept “invented” recently reaches back into the “dominion” God gives humankind over the earth.
“But something has gone wrong with the dominion story,” Crouch says “And the Bible is very concerned with a second kind of making, and this is not making for dominion, but making for domination, which is different. I’m gonna use the word dominion, at least for the proper superintendent of the world, including the use of the resources we find. But domination is very closely linked to what the Bible calls idolatry and the Bible pays a lot of attention to false making, making of false images. Making in a false image and idols are ways basically to try to get out of the image-bearing assignment.”
The tower of Babel is an example of this false making, humankind seeking domination, to be like God. Crouch traces the desire for dominance, for empire, from Babel to Babylon to Rome and to the present day.
“And I think this completely maps onto the world we live in now. We live in it’s not a geopolitical empire in the way that those ancient empires were. I really think the empire we live in is the empire [of] technology.”
“Technology wants to be always on – domination – wants to be always on, but dominion has this beautiful pattern of six days of work. And one day of rest.”
The sabbath principle runs in the Crouch home. “I can give you all kinds of tips, but the most important thing you could do for your family is [to] have one hour a day, one day a week, and at least one week a year where you turn the devices off and what you will discover in that hour for our family.
“It’s dinner time and that day for our family it’s Sunday. And in that week for us, it’s our summer or August.”
Crouch links to Caine’s call for Christians to follow their mission when he points to how we can resist being dominated by technology.
“The intensely personal things that I do in a world of dominating power, are the most powerful form of resistance to the story of idolatry. The things I do that will matter most in my life, are not visible, not mediated, not technologically enhanced, [but is] that passing on this story, handed to us … in the Bible to the next generation. And that, in a world of empires is actually enough.”