I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of asking a question and it all coming out wrong? I have. I was at a day conference in London where Tim Keller was the speaker. He was excellent. The theme was influencing the city, following on from Mark Driscoll last July talking about the same subject. I suspect Driscoll has borrowed from Keller and not the other way around.
Keller was very balanced, he went out of his way to say that we need churches anywhere there are people, so rural, village, suburban, urban but then went on to argue for the primacy of mission to the cities. But one of his arguments for the importance of the city was because Paul went to the cities. I thought that wasn’t so strong because Jesus hardly ever went to the city, except when he was heading there for his death.
Our movement does bang on about cities (I’ll blog some more on this soon), which is OK because you can’t ignore the cities, but what about the rest of us. I’m not even in the centre of my town, I’m in a working class housing estate, so am I just a passive recipient of culture from the city?
So during the Q&A (and if the audio comes out you’ll hear exactly what I said), I asked a question like, ‘how does what you say fit given the fact that Jesus ignored the city except to go and die in one?’ I might as well have stood up and shouted, ‘Dr Keller, you sir are an idiot and you don’t know the Bible’ the way it felt like it came out of my mouth. I knew instantly I’d got the tone wrong.
He was very gracious and firmly but politely rebuffed me. Quite right too. It wasn’t helped by the questions that followed where Dr Keller helpfully defined city (way more broadly than you might think) and where he clearly affirmed those in village, rural settings.
So a public mistake deserves a public apology, sorry Dr Keller for the misjudged tone of my question. You sir, are not an idiot. I, on the other hand…..
Leave a Reply