“We who live as the church between gospel and culture must say what we mean, what Jesus means, with the testimony of our lives. There is really no shortcut. There is no program, no meeting, no study, that can take the place of saying what we mean with our lives. Only our lives give weight to our words. Still a question remains. How can we sustain a gospel sense of happiness, of meaning, and of purpose in this culture? It’s not good enough just to make these assertions.

“I have found the writings of Miroslav Václav Havel extremely helpful as indicating a way, not an answer, but a way for us to live in the situation we now find ourselves within in North America. Havel, as you may know, was a dissident playwright under the communist rule. Under that regime, he was jailed. Now he is the president of the Czech republic. He has written a book called Living in Truth, in which there is a wonderful essay called “Power in the Powerless.” He analyzes how the people in his country learned to live in the dominant materialistic culture of communism before it fell.

“He says that during the 70s and 80s it seemed to them, the dissidents, that the system would never change. It seemed impermeable and immutable, an iron curtain, a system that dominated every aspect of people’s lives. It wasn’t just “out there,” it was also “within”— within their heads, within their hearts, within their spirits. It looked like it would never change, even though it was a system based on a lie. The lie was quite simply, “You’ll be happy if you have enough things.”

“So Havel and other dissidents began to ask, “How can we live the truth in a culture based on a fundamental lie, especially since the lie is in our heads? How can we begin to live into the truth? We desire so much more than just things. We want something to hope in, a reason to believe.”

“So in his country, as in other iron-curtain countries, people began to set up what he called “parallel cultures.” They had underground study groups. They studied Plato. They had drama. They had music groups. They wrote novels and poetry, and published them underground. He called this a “parallel culture.” It was not a counter-culture because, he said, it was impossible for us to live totally outside the system. You cannot live outside a culture. But you can create within it zones and spaces, where you can become who you really are. It is in such places that one can speak the truth, where one can gather with others who share that truth.

“This went on for years, not without difficulties, but for years. Over time, the truth became stronger and stronger, and at a certain point people began to walk in the streets and to say to the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.” And the system fell. It fell, not because of the power of Western nuclear equipment, but because the people said within the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.” It was a vision that had been nourished within those parallel cultures.”

Mary Jo Leddy, GOCN, June, 1999

Or you can just download the entire sermon here: Duane Haggans - Tomorrow

Impacting The City

A new book release by our friend Martin Scott.

Martin’s previous book, Gaining Ground, focused on the development of strategic prayer, examined possible new shapes for the 21st Century Church and looked at how churches can join together in a unified prayer initiative that will reach their community.In Impacting the City Martin breaks new ground and takes these concepts further to look at how God’s people can reach their city.
Martin Scott unfolds a fourfold City-reaching strategy and contends that wherever these four elements are combined, the Church will make a great impact.

To purchase or for more info. Check the LINKS PAGE in top menu. And click on Martin Scott to view his website.