Posts by David de Bruyn
African Christianity and Christian Culture
In Africa, particularly where black nationalist sentiments arise, it is not uncommon to hear the term “African Religion” thrown around in conversation. Similarly, half-formed sentiments are uttered about missionaries who replaced the harmonious earth-religion of the peaceful indigenous people with their foreign religion, so as to steal their land and subjugate them. The saddest irony…
Read MoreThinking About Revival (4): Reverence and Revival
Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 When we first hear that revival is when the fear of the Lord comes upon us corporately or individually may not sound like good news. After all, fear does not sound like something we want. We work hard to escape our fears, alleviate our fears, remove our…
Read MoreThinking About Revival (3): The Character of Revival
If I told you that there would be a worship service for the God of Scripture, to seek His blessing on us, led by a well-known preacher, with many churches working together, at great expense and organizational effort, and the music and the preaching is going to stir us up to intense zeal and passion,…
Read MoreThinking About Revival (2): A Test Case
The Bible does teach the need for God’s gracious intervention to change the spiritual apathy in His people: sometimes individually, and sometimes corporately. Revival is the reawakening of God’s people, the repentance of spiritual dullness and laziness and disinterest and renewal of love for God. It is needed because of inevitable decline, because of sins…
Read MoreThinking About Revival (1)
Right now,1 something is happening on the campus of Asbury University in Kentucky. What began as a chapel service has now turned into a several-day worship service of singing and prayer. People from other universities have been busing in to see and to participate. People are queuing up outside the chapel. There are both people…
Read MoreAI, ChatGPT and Ministry – 3
Artificial Intelligence content creators such as ChatGPT will certainly revolutionize almost every kind of work that relies on writing of some sort. But how will it change Christian ministry: particularly sermon creation, essays, articles and even books? We have already said it will tempt some to cheat, and to do a more sophisticated form of…
Read MoreAI, ChatGPT and Ministry – 2
AI will transform how many jobs are done, and will completely replace many others. Tools like ChatGPT will reduce the task of writing to command-line prompts for professions ranging from medicine to law to office administration. The heavy lifting of writing will be done by an increasingly smart machine. How will this affect ministry: those…
Read MoreAI, ChatGPT and Ministry
We have always produced machines to reduce our labour. These machines are necessarily stronger than we are. The Industrial Revolution produced machines that could build bigger, better and faster than human hands could manage. In the 20th century, we produced machines that could calculate more and faster than we could, machines that could store and…
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