Utumishi Blog

Praise God we got off to a good start on the first day of the Raising the Bar conference. Pst Ken Mbugua kicked us off with a great start in 1 Corinthians: A Church Divided by Leaders Idolized called to Unite around Christ Crucified. We saw how Paul, completely differently from how we might write to a church riddled with serious problems, chooses to start his letter (1:1-17) by:

• rubbing their faces in the gospel indicatives (you are the church of God, you are holy in Christ);
• declaring his massive confidence for their future, not in his clever plan for church revival, but confident in Christ’s grace;
• addressing the big issue of disunity – remove the gospel and you get personality cults, centre on the gospel and you have a glorious unity.

Philip Sudell led us through group work digging into Philippians where we found the great apostle Paul defining himself first and foremost as a servant of Christ and where we found a church without spiritual hierarchy – where everyone is a saint, equal in Christ, where the overseers and deacons are just fellow members with a different role (and that one of servants).

With Harrison we looked squarely at the massive challenges facing expository preaching in our context, especially the temptation to popularity rather than faithfulness. We saw the priority of preaching for Jesus (Mark 1:32-39), the apostles (Acts 6:1-7) and the early Church (1 Tim. 4:13). And we saw the wonderful model of Jesus’ ministry as a servant preacher from Luke 4:16-29…

• anointing does not rule out expository preaching – Jesus, more than any other, is anointed (v18) but he submits himself to preach from the Scriptures (v17-21), ‘anointing’ is no excuse for neglecting the Word written;
• expository preaching is Christological preaching – Jesus interprets the Scriptures here (v20) and elsewhere ( Luke 11:29-32; 18:31; 20:17-18,41-44; 24:25-27,44-47) as pointing to the Son of Man;
• the proof of successful preaching is not in a good reception – Jesus is not a populist, he doesn’t entrust himself to men, the early applause is shallow (v22), masking a deep rejection (v28-29).

Finally we looked in the afternoon at the story behind the New Testament letters – both the story of Acts and the story of the whole Bible, told as Two Men or as Two Exoduses.

If you are a praying person, please pray:

• that the 40 or so pastors and teachers who came today would return tomorrow and that the several more who have registered but didn’t get there today would also land with us.
• for Greg and Philip as they take the major burden of the teaching tomorrow.
• for the group work in the afternoon as we really start to dig into some passages from 1 Peter.