Dawkins' Dinosaur

It struck me today that Prof. Richard Dawkins is clinging to his Modern worldview with all his might. Whilst he would like to throw all the evangelists out of Oxford with their tails between their legs (I forget where he said that now), quite some of his colleagues over at Oxford are Christians, Muslims or followers of various other faiths.

Prof. Dawkins wants to keep his nice neat and tidy worldview intact, and who cam blame him! Being shifted from the foundations of your world is painful. At least he is being entirely consistent with his worldview.

We see another worldview being gradually eroded at the moment. The worldview of the modern capitalist. Many people were living happily in the world where they could increase their debt safe in the knowledge that their salary will increase, that their bonuses will be paid and that their investments will be safe.

What happened is that they re-mortgaged their houses to fund lavishness, took out loans to pay for stuff they do not need and then lost their jobs and ker-splat, their worldview of stress free debt living crashed around them. They say we have a lot of stress here in the West with our lavish rich lifestyles whereas in poorer parts of the world stress is quite unheard of. Could this be because we have a worldview that just does not work?

When a person is Born Again, something happens to their worldview. They change from being naturalists to super naturalists. They change from unbelief into belief. You could, I suppose, say that their synapses in their brains form different pathways. Their whole worldview changes almost instantly. They will almost certainly retain aspects of their old worldview. I suspect that if Dawkins became a Christian he'd be a great fan of systematic theology and might join say the Metropolitan Tabernacle, where everything is nicely crossed and dotted and just so.

My question to the blogosphere is this. When or if the capitalist worldview finally fails, when big banks really do vanish and people can not get to their money (because it no longer exists), where will the church of Jesus Christ be?

Will we be offering a worldview where your prime reality will not be stolen? When all the idols of the FTSE100 and hedge funds and property fail to deliver, will the church of Jesus Christ be ready to preach Christ, who will never fail?

Brothers and Sisters in Christ, lets make the church of our generation ready to cope with whatever will come next. Every now and again huge paradigm shifts in peoples worldviews occur, WW1 and WW2 were one, the great depression was another, the fall of communism changed the worldview of missions of people. It may well be that we are looking at such a paradigm shift now, so lets be ready in season and out of season to proclaim the gospel.

In Christ.

New Word Alive

My family and I just returned from the fantastic New Word Alive conference (is that the right word for it?) in North Wales.

Thanks especially go to all the childrens workers there, you were all fantastic in taking my three little lads off of me and my wife so we could attend some talks.

New Word Alive is on next year, more info HERE