What have you been up to?

Val Goold asked this question of the TSCF Ministry Interns at the second MINTY training conference.  The session was about ‘understanding the gospel’.  It was a brilliant and incisive question because she’d already asked them to write down a short summary of the good news about Jesus.

It was brilliant because she asked them to make the connection between what they do in everyday life to the gospel outline they had just scribbled down.  It was brilliant because she helped them see that for many of our friends who aren’t Christians (and many who are) this is a major leap: Jesus and ordinary life are a million miles from each other.

If the news about Jesus is to be truly good news then it must fully address the whole of life, precisely because Jesus is the LORD of all Life and there is not once centimetre (nor one quark) over which Jesus does not claim ownership.

This is one of the reasons I love working with and for TSCF: we are really serious about applying the Lordship of Jesus into every area of life. It is challenging, it really is, but it excites my heart and sees lives (including my own) transformed.

I’m here at the conference and it’s the first conference I’ve been at since last May.  I’m not in charge and I’m only doing one teaching session, ‘studying to the glory of God’, as I’m still on reduced hours (22 hours this week!) but I’m here catering for the 10-12 people who are here through the week. I’m enjoying it immensely: mostly because I’m getting to serve, getting to be useful, getting to enjoy the company of colleagues and MInters and getting to think about how Jesus is Lord, even when I’m cooking chilli-con-carne with sweet corn cous cous for dinner rather than teaching the Bible.  What have you been up to?