“Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognised that they had been with Jesus” (Emphasis Mine) Acts 4:13
There is a story to tell.
As the Founder and Lead Pastor was working his way through the goals of the RELOVUTIONARY Philosophy, which could easily be read as rather emphatic, these words about the impact of Peter and John’s witness in a first-century cultural context, became representative for our very own, in the West.
As you will be able to ascertain with the words in bold, it is especially these that stand out from this text. However, because popular culture will often interpret, and then characterise, the Christian view of ultimate reality as being anything from weak, weird, naive; even stupid; those who represent Jesus often have to deal with the presumption of the initial portion. This means, the purported uneducated sense of including (fundamentally this is about the supernatural elemental) what seems crazy in a still-Scientism-dominated world, tends to leave the Christian-accused, as guilty.
While RELOVUTIONARY will seek to model a reasoned and informed Christianity, in the fullest and best sense of these terms, we also understand that the content of our view of the world, will often be characterised as the antithesis. The too-often-evident anti-intellectualism of modern Evangelicalism has not offered anything much in the positive to challenge this perception. There must be a continued push to reverse this curse, especially in a cultural day where the priority of being informed, is ever-increasing.
RELOVUTIONARY will seek to fight this funk.
Biblical Christianity should never be conceived as an either/or between depth of ideas and extent into practice. One must work meaningfully through the other to existentially thrive into flourishing life. While the fatal flaw in a purely materialistic view of the world is a denial of a supernatural foundation, which distorts the content platform of experience, and is unable to appropriately categorise the totality of data, because it reduces reality to only what is seen, and so eliminates God from the picture.
There is much more to say on these subjects.
RELOVUTIONARY hopes to provide more than reason, and a little Jesus-astonishment of true living substance.
For the Fame of His Name