WildOx Blog

The Blog of John K. Baw - Gibraltar

Prepping for Sunday's service

 

Reading the Bible with the damned (Bob Ekblad)

This book has been part of my summer reading.  I am really digging Bob Ekblad.  It reads like a person's struggles to contextualise and incarnate the good news - thank the Heavens it's not another stale volume on evangelism or missional churches!!!

What touched me the most - apart from the obvious fact that this guy is actually out there doing the stuff - is his intentional reading of the scriptures, looking for good news in the biblical narrative.  I found his approach very refreshing, even though at times I was taken aback by the raw presentation of language at the margins of society - expletives included.  I see real possibilities opening up for the reading of the bible in those "damned" places - at the margins, in the outback, among the very least of these.  

Surely this is the place where the bible has belonged all along.

The empowering of the margins

In our midweek meetings we are starting to read through the first few chapters of Exodus. We want to look at the business of liberation, the process of moving from slavery to freedom and the people God chooses as agents of liberation in this narrative. Some of things we are picking-up are awesome. Firstly we are discussing the concept of empire, domination, power and resources, and how God always sides with the downtrodden, the outcasts, the down-and-outs, often in the face of the people who are "with-it" and have it all together.

In the first chapter we picked up on the theme of immigration and how the dominant power's reaction to immigration is one of fear and a consequent reaction that is oppressive. We discussed immigration in Europe in the US and in Gibraltar - how reactive positions of oppression are taken by the powerful state over against the immigrant, and how issues of justice are at stake even as we are called into the gap as agents of healing.