Fostering

Browsing through my journal and came across Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water (Harper San Francisco: 1998), another cracking good book, in which he writes my quote for the day:

Emil Brunner put it well: “The Church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.”(As quoted in D. Elton True blood, The Validity of the Christian Mission (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) The mood of contemporary culture is not congenial to the missionary mandate. This lack of receptiveness has its roots in the modern absolutizing of tolerance and relativizing of belief. Every lifestyle is to be tolerated. Every belief is to be accepted—unless, of course, it is an exclusive-truth claim that challenges the beliefs of anyone else. 226

Absolutely! Relatively speaking in a tolerable kind of way, of course...