2. Our Greatest Need  What is the most urgent need of the Church on the West?  What do you see as the most urgent need of Christian Education?  D.A. Carson ‘A Call to Spiritual Reformation’ The one thing we most urgently need in Western Christendom is a deeper knowledge of God. We need to know God better. When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted. So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs – and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfilment. God simply becomes the ‘Great Being’ who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfils our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imaginations, too little of our conversations, too few of our priorities.

3. Our Greatest Need  Ephesians 1:15:19 15 For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, 16 I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. 17 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. 18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe.  We need to recapture the transformational power of meeting with God in his story and allowing him to change us and our students.

4. Our Cultural Wreck  John Carroll ‘The Wreck of Western Culture’ We live amidst the ruins of the great, five-hundred-year epoch of humanism. Around us is that ‘colossal wreck’. Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble. It hardly offers shelter from a mild cosmic breeze, never mind one of those icy gales that regularly return to rip us out of the cosy intimacy of our daily lives and confront us with oblivion. What should be there to hold our hand, is not. Our culture has absented itself. It has left us terribly alone. Humanism sought to turn the treasure-laden galleon of Western culture around. It attempted to replace God by man, put humans at the centre of the universe – to deify them. The humanist endeavour has removed the supernatural from any serious enquiry into origins. After Darwin, all serious Western enquiry into the meaning of things would assume material causation. Humanism says to our world: If you want to know where you come from, go to the zoo, and study that parody of yourself, the great ape. He is your true father.

5. Our Greatest Challenge  Michael Goheen ‘The Urgency of Reading the Bible as One Story’ Christians do not see the Bible as one story. A Hindu scholar of the world’s religions once said: “I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion – and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.”  He goes on to say: We have fragmented the Bible into bits-moral bits, systematic- theological bits, devotional bits, historical bits, narrative bits, and homiletical bits. When the Bible is broken up in this way, there is no comprehensive grand narrative to withstand the power of the comprehensive humanist narrative that shapes our culture. The Bible bits are accommodated to the more all-embracing cultural story, and it becomes that story – the humanist story – that shapes our lives.

6. Our Grand Story  What kind of God do we meet in the Biblical Story? 1 He is a talking God Hebrews 1:1-3 1 In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

7. Our Grand Story  What kind of God do we meet in the Biblical Story? 2 He is sovereign in history Isaiah 10:5-6 “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath! I send him against a godless nation, I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets.” 2 Kings 24:20 It was because of the LORD’s anger that all this happened to Jerusalem and Judah, and in the end he thrust them from his presence.

8. Our Grand Story  What kind of God do we meet in the Biblical Story? 3 He loves the lost and has commissioned his people to reach them Michael Goheen ‘The Urgency of Reading the Bible as One Story’ “A second reason it is important to read the Bible as one story is that it enables us to understand our identity as God’s people as we see our role in the story. The Bible renders our identity as a missional identity, our role to participate in God’s redemptive mission.” “The Church in the West does not comprehend its missionary identity as it should. And we will not recover our missional identity unless, both in the church and in the academy, we recover Scripture as one story in which we are called to find our true place.” “In contemporary Western culture there are “two quite different stories” told as the “real story” of the world: the humanist story and the story that is told in the Bible. A missionary encounter is a clash of stories; it occurs when the church believes the Bible to be the true story of the world.”

9. Our Grand Story  What kind of God do we meet in the Biblical Story? 4 He is the only one who can ultimately change the human heart 5 He is the Divine lawgiver John Lennox ‘Gunning for God’ There is strong evidence that the Biblical worldview was intimately involved in the meteoric ruse if science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. C. S. Lewis summarizes as follows: “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.” 6 His love for his people is extraordinary 7 He uses exceptionally ordinary people to change the course of history

10. Our Opportunity  Our approach needs to be academically and devotionally rigorous  We need to avoid proof texting  We need to be creative  We need to create and foster opportunities for students to live out their faith and see us living out ours