Northeastern Seminary and Kingdom Conspiracy

My recent travels have revolved around my new book Kingdom Conspiracy, including some of my speaking to the American Baptist pastors network of northern California (Growing Healthy Churches) and an event with the Churches of God, General Conference event at Winebrenner Seminary in Findlay OH. I have simply not had time to record observations about each event, so I offer some summary observations today.

My most recent event was paired with Missio Alliance and Northeastern Seminary, and I have to begin with thanks to Doug Cullum, Dean at Northeastern, and JR Rozko, director of Missio Alliance, along with Lisa Bennett, for organizing such a fantastic event.

I will be speaking about Kingdom Conspiracy next week (Oct 28) at Regent University in Virginia Beach and the week after that in Wichita Kansas at Friends University (this one is not public), and then we will have a special Kingdom Conspiracy event at Northern Seminary November 15.

So we gathered at Northeastern Seminary Wednesday for four sessions on kingdom and how it relates to church: Is it the same? Is it bigger? Is it better? Is it the ideal while the church is the concrete reality? How do they relate? These are the kinds of questions I set out to answer in the book.

The word is now out, and I will be blogging about these themes in the weeks ahead, that I offer an ecclesiocentric view of kingdom. For many, kingdom refers to what good people do in the public sector (making the world a better place, common grace, common good, etc) while for others it has been reduced too easily to redemptive themes (personal salvation, personal healing, or specific public sector redemptive moments — like redeeming our educational system in some concrete way).

My approach — no surprise here — is to take a serious look again at how the Old Testament uses the term “kingdom” as the context for what Jesus meant, and I take a quick look at Josephus as well to sample what was going on in Judaism with this term “kingdom.” My contention is that kingdom is a complex of ideas and that it cannot be reduced to one theme or extended into the public sector without doing fundamental damage to what “kingdom” meant in the New Testament.

I am convinced American evangelicals, across the spectrum of evangelicalism’s diversity, as well as American mainliners, have been formed into two primary postures: the social activist (progressives) side that extends kingdom ethics into the public sector through political action and the more Kuyperian side (often more conservative but not always; factor in here H. Richard Niebuhr’s transformationalist model) that seeks to change culture through influencing various “spheres” in society (politics, education, family, economics) or through various means of redemption (personal and physical). The former are influenced by the social gospel and liberation theology while the latter more by George Ladd’s view of kingdom. More on this later.