02/09/2016 Image

2016 RCSA multi-cultural church planting conference

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Save the date & spread the word —

Healthy Kingdom Growth through Multi-cultural Church Planting: Principles for Reformation and Renewal

RC Randburg :: Saturday, 24 September :: 8am – 4pm

RSVP: Jane Korevaar (janekorevaar@gmail.com)

SPEAKER – Rev Thomas Dreyer

1) Challenges to church planting in the RCSA:  an “Afrikaans” perspective

2) Why Church planting?  Church planting as a catalyst for repentance, renewal and growth in the RCSA

3) Gauging success in terms of fruitfulness

SPEAKER – Rev. Simon Jooste

1) Challenges to church planting in the RCSA: a “Gentile” perspective

2) Cultivating a Reformational vision for fulfilling the Great Commission: defining mission in terms of “keys” and “marks”

3) Gauging success in cruciform terms

10/08/2016

A tale of two kingdoms

Michael Horton writes: DVD Pop 2K

“When Jesus Christ arrived, He did not revive the Sinai theocracy as His contemporaries had hoped. Instead of driving out the Romans, He commanded love for our enemies. Gathering the new Israel — Jew and Gentile — around Himself, by His Spirit, through Word and sacrament, Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of grace that will be manifested one day as a kingdom of glory. In this time between His two comings the wheat grows together with the weeds, the sons of thunder are rebuked for calling down judgment here and now on those who reject their message, and the faithful gather regularly for the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of the bread, and the prayers (Acts 2:42). Through its administration of Gospel preaching, baptism, the Supper, prayer, and discipline, the church is God’s new society inserted into the heart of the secular city as a witness to Christ and the age to come when He will be all in all.

In our Christian circles in the United States today, we can discern a “Christendom” view, where some imagine America to be a Christian nation invested with a divine commission to bring freedom to the ends of the earth. Of course, Christians have an obligation both to proclaim the heavenly and everlasting freedom of the Gospel and the earthly and temporal freedom from injustice. But they are different. When we confuse them, we take the kingdom into our own hands, transforming it from a kingdom of grace into a kingdom of glory and power.”

For the rest of the essay, go here.

For a fine introduction to the contemporary Reformed recovery of the doctrine of two kingdoms, see David VanDrunen’s Living in God’s Two Kingdoms.