Mon 11 Dec 2006 by Connally Gilliam
A guest speaker reflects on her visit with the Academy Fellows.
Are there any charged discussion topics that you like to avoid? Issues about which you have your secret opinions (or sticky confusions) but would prefer not to visit? I’m thinking of a few doozies like homosexuality, racial identity, the nature of gender, and so on. My October visit with the Trinity Forum Academy Fellows reinforced a growing suspicion that I’ve had: given the urbanizing, diversifying, globalizing, secularizing, twenty-first-century culture in which we live, we need to have the chutzpah to face head on the questions that nip at the heels and oftentimes hearts of the next, twenty-something, or however-you’d-like-to-call-it generation. For when these questions are avoided, perhaps out of reasons as innocuous as social decorum, we can inadvertently castrate the apparent scope and power of the gospel of Jesus Christ and his kingdom. Oh, Christianity doesn’t speak meaningfully to the issues of the real world.
Conversely, when we are willing to go there in all our blind messiness (I’m not saying God is blind or messy, but we oftentimes are), these questions can become portals to discovery. We can discover that the living, triune God is seriously unthreatened by (and quite capable of leading us through if we’ll humbly follow) a convoluted, confusing, cultural landscape.
Thu 12 Oct 2006 • Responses: 3 • by David Norman
New TF Academy Executive Director David Norman reflects on his first month with the Academy class of 2007.
What difference will Christian faith make in the daily lives of the highly specialized, highly trained leaders of the early-to-mid twenty-first century? If you want an honest, thoughtful answer, ask a Trinity Forum Academy alum. As many of you know, for the past five years, the Trinity Forum Academy has attracted some of the finest recent college graduates on the planet and equipped them to embrace more fully the vision of whole lives lived in response to God’s call. This year, by God’s grace, will be no exception.
The TFA class of ’07 has astounded me every day of the past month. Since they arrived on August 30th, I have been stretched, challenged, and uplifted by the countless ways they exemplify deep, thoughtful, all-consuming love for God.
Wed 11 Oct 2006 • Responses: 2 • by Joshua Hordern
“When God calls us and our nations to repentance, do we groan in selfish stupidity? God’s gospel call is both personal and public and commands our attention. How will we respond?” A reflection from a TF Academy alum.
‘When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long . . . Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover up my iniquity.’ (Psalm 32:3,5)
When God calls, men and women groan. In Jesus Christ and by the Spirit, God calls on us to repent and trust Him. Yet we resist God’s call with every fibre of our selfish being, turned in on ourselves and away from God and others. And so we groan, burdened by sinful, silent stupidity.
Tue 10 Oct 2006 • Responses: 0 • by Brad Bell
A journal entry from a 2007 Academy Fellow.
During a recent class, I struggled to define worship. I knew worship should encompass all of life, but I could not explain how. I worried that if I did not thoroughly understand worship, which is the ultimate calling on my life, then I would have serious trouble identifying my vocational calling. In other words, if I have an incomplete understanding of my primary calling, then I cannot hope to grasp my secondary calling.
Tue 10 Oct 2006 • Responses: 0 • by Aaron Isley
A journal entry from a 2007 Academy Fellow.
One’s “Call,” “Salvation,” and “Christian Living” are all essential factors to any believer’s life. However, I would go so far as to say that even non-believers, though they would deny it, either aloof to the fact, or naming it something else, are infinitely affected by knowing or not knowing their raison d’être or calling; having a task or mission, no matter how self-serving, which gives them worth, legacy, or salvation from purposelessness; and a lifestyle that best facilitates establishing this legacy and fulfilling goals.
