Tony Payne and Gordon Cheng report from Hillsong Conference, 2006.
The sound hits you like a wave. The bass is throbbing. The drums kick through your diaphragm with each beat. The guitars thrum and swell. The lead singer is a good-looking guy with unkempt hair and stubble. He stands, arm raised, head thrown back.
In the first part of this article (in our last Briefing), we looked at the pluses and minuses of pragmatism. We saw that ‘doing what works’ is a quite legitimate path to follow in one sense, because God has created an orderly world. Yet pragmatism has its limitations, as a result of the complex and flawed nature both of the world and of ourselves. We ultimately need a revelation, a word from outside, to guide us.
But how does the Word guide us? In our last article, we looked at one approach, the so-called ‘Hooker Principle’. Let us begin Part II, by looking at a related but much more recent way of using the Bible.
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