A Theological Analysis of “Teaching Everyone To Live Like Christ”

This article is a theological analysis of the hymn, “Teaching Everyone to live like Christ,” written in support of the 2020/2021 theme of Methodist Church Ghana (MCG). The hymn emerged from the author’s pastoral and theological analysis of the MCG’s theme, “Discipleship: Teaching everyone to live like Christ” (Col. 1:28-29). The hymn touches on two key functions of the universal Church, namely, mission and nurturing of believers. The author brings out the message embedded in the hymn through an expository study of the lyrics together with secondary sources such as books, articles, and others. The paper contends that the survival of the Christian Church now and in the years to come depends on effective disciple-making, which places high emphasis on the teaching ministry. Keywords: Hymn, Christ, Teaching, Church, Perfect, Mature.

Mere Didaskalia: The Vocational Calling and Mission of Christian Teaching Ministry

This article presents the ministry of Christian teaching according to its distinctive vocational calling and mission. The first section contributes a theological meditation on the vocational essence of Christian education (CE), featuring an original proposed definition of “Christian teaching ministry.” The second section of the article contributes an ethical meditation on the vocational endeavor of CE, featuring an original proposed framework of Christian teaching ministry’s mission. For the field of CE and the academic discipline devoted to it, this article represents an appeal to vocational-missional centrality around the redemptive ideal and function of doctrine ( didaskalia) in congregational contexts.

Australia

Because evangelicalism has been arguably the strongest expression of Christianity in Australia, Edwards, as one of its principal founders, has been a seminal presence. The explicit reception of his writings, however, was not extensive in the nineteenth century and was most evident among Presbyterian clergy. In the twentieth century he was central to the ‘marriage mysticism’ of the Reformed theologians attached to the New Creation Teaching Ministry headed by the Rev. Geoff Bingham, an Edwards aficionado. At the end of the twentieth century, Edwards was increasingly cited by both supporters and opponents of the Charismatic movement. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, he has been the subject of increasingly sophisticated academic inquiry. His spirituality and ecclesiology have been studied with a view to benefitting especially evangelical churches, while his trinitarian theology has been quarried by those, not necessarily evangelicals, who have been captivated by Edwards’s thinking on creation and design.

The Mandate Of Making Disciples: Teaching As Incarnational Ministry

This paper discusses how the Church can achieve the goal of discipleship through an “incarnational” model of teaching. It argues that teaching in the Church should be incarnational so as to realize transformation in the lives of people. Incarnation is used in the sense of the word of God which the Christian leader has been commanded to teach, becomes flesh and makes a dwelling among the people so that the learner can behold the glory of the word being lived out in human life. The Pastoral ministry must engage in teaching so that learners can become new creations who demonstrate the nature of Christ. In discipleship, the pastor acts as the teacher of teachers, equipping the laity so that they can teach others. Teaching, a key aspect in Christian education, is at the heart of discipleship. As such, for the teaching ministry to be incarnate, it must identify with Jesus Christ. What is preached and taught must become flesh in the teacher’s own life and help the learner to behold the glory of Jesus the Christ. Keywords: Discipleship, Pastoral ministry, Incarnational ministry, Christian education, teaching

Worshipping the Green God

This chapter begins with a visitation by a great blue heron to the author’s class taught in Swarthmore College’s Crum Woods. Is the Crum Woods holy ground? Some ecotheologians (John B. Cobb Jr., Richard Bauckham) caution against this way of speaking, but this chapter argues that Christianity is a religion of double incarnation: in a twofold movement, God becomes flesh in both humankind (Jesus) and otherkind (Spirit), underscoring that corporeality and divinity are one. The chapter focuses on historical portraits of Jesus’ relationship to particular birds as totem-beings in his teaching ministry; Augustine’s repudiation of Neoplatonism and natalist celebration of the maternal, birdy Holy Spirit in the world; and Hildegard of Bingen’s avian pneumatology in which earth’s “vital greenness” is valorized for its curative powers in a manner similar to Jesus’ mudpie healing of the blind man in John 9. It concludes with a meditation on nature-worship in a Quaker meetinghouse in Monteverde, Costa Rica.

Remembering Lot’s Wife: The Structure of Testimony in the Painted Life of Mary Ward

Chapter three identifies the sodomitical subtext informing a hospitality crisis on a different register, one provoked by the controversial pastoral career of Mary Ward (1585-1645), the early modern “Jesuitress” missionary. The ensemble of commemorative paintings chronicling Ward’s career (the so-called Painted Life) suggestively folds both the scandal and the eschatological resilience of Ward’s public teaching ministry into a forgotten legacy of Lot’s wife. The paintings’ visual testimony achieves this by recapturing second-century church father Irenaeus of Lyons’ intuition of the abandoned woman in Genesis 19 as the spiritually radiant figure of the ecclesial community’s patient dwelling between disaster and redemption. The paintings’ anamorphically transfigured markers of Lot’s wife confirm Erich Auerbach’s cherished hope in the adaptability of figura as a means of maintaining neighborly proximity between past and present in historical realism’s secular grammar. The paintings also anticipate the keen interest that Auerbach’s contemporaries from the progressive ressourcement school of Catholic theology would also develop in deploying figura’s resources as a means of opening up more generous – more hospitable – pathways between Catholicism and modernity.