Among great content from the likes of Timothy Keller, D.A. Carson, John Piper, and more, you will find a number of resources from Stephen Um. Today we’d like to draw your attention to his pre-conference plenary session on “Jesus and Justice.” See below for the audio and video:

High quality audio of this session is available here.

The post TGC Conference Media: Stephen Um on “Jesus and Justice” appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

“Why Cities Matter strikes the right balance between social analysis and ministry focus, encouraging readers not just to live in the city but also to engage its people and culture with the gospel.”

“Why Cities Matter is a succinct, helpful guide to understanding and engaging a city’s culture. The authors mine sociology and wed it with biblical theology in an effort to challenge a city’s idols (Stephen Um’s work with Redeemer City to City shines through here) and re-envision urban ministry with a new source of hope. Critics might deny that yet another book on God and the city is necessary, since Tim Keller has rung that bell clearly for a generation. But brief, cogent books on urban ministry are always needed, especially ones that shed light on something as complex as the modern metropolis.”

Read the rest of the review here, and pick up your own copy of the book at Amazon.

The post Why Cities Matter at Christianity Today appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

Just a few weeks ago, New England was graced with yet another stellar conference. We highlighted the “Men and Women of Wisdom” conference here, but are now pleased to point your attention to the FREE conference audio. Thanks to South Shore Baptist Church for making these practical, gospel-centered resources available. Here are some of the “every day life” oriented sessions that are available for download and streaming:

• Ray Ortlund – Wisdom As Gospel
• Ray Ortlund – Two Kinds Of Wisdom
• Ray Ortlund – Wisdom As Foolishness
• Ray & Jani Ortlund – Wisdom In Marriage & Family
• Jared Wilson – Grace Powered Manhood
• Jared Wilson – The Gospel & Marital Sexuality
• Jeramie Rinne – Wisdom For Leaders
• Jani Ortlund – Womanly Wisdom
• Curtis Cook – Wisdom and Our Words
• Matt Kruse – Raising Sons

Access the download page here.

The post Gospel Wisdom – Audio from Ortlund, Wilson, Rinne & more appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

At The Gospel Coalition New England’s 2013 Leadership Summit, it was announced that TGCNE would be hosting a summer conference for congregational leaders (both lay and vocational). We are excited to announce the details of this event as we move toward opening registration soon.

DATE & PURPOSE

On August 9-10, 2013, we invite you to join us for REFRESH: a summer conference designed to encourage, challenge, and refresh lay leaders, ministry leaders, and the pastors who care for them. It is our hope that ministry teams, small group leaders, elder boards, church staff members, ministry leaders, and their pastors will join us for this event, which has been designed to apply the gospel to the specific challenges of service in the local church. The event will begin at 7pm on Friday, August 9, and will conclude by 4pm on Saturday, August 10.

SPEAKERS

Our keynote speaker will be Paul David Tripp, who, at our request, has graciously adapted the best insights from his Dangerous Calling and Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands material with lay leaders and ministry teams in mind. Paul will be leading us through five sessions, covering a variety of topics that are of particular concern to those who faithfully serve the church. During the event, we will also benefit from sessions by Stephen Um and Jeramie Rinne, both of whom will bring pastoral sensitivity and a rich understanding of the New England ministry context to bear.

LOCATION

Thanks to one of our sponsoring organizations, The Ockenga Institute, the event will be held on the beautiful campus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, MA. With easy access from major highways, ample parking, reasonable local hotel rates, and an idyllic campus, GCTS is the perfect location for a brief refreshment retreat.

COST

TGCNE’s REFRESH will be open to all ministry leaders at the cost of $50 per person. This price includes a catered lunch on Saturday, along with all conference materials. However, because we desire to see ministry leaders who are married experience and benefit from this conference together with their spouse, we are providing a significant discount for couples. Couples who register together can do so at the reduced rate of $75 per couple.

We hope that you will consider mobilizing the ministry leaders at every level of your church–whether small group leaders, elders, or church staff members–for REFRESH. Pastors, bring your elders and their wives. Ministry coordinators, bring the lay leaders who are under your care. REFRESH is designed to bring gospel-encouragement to you and those with whom you serve, in order to foster a deeper love Christ that will work its way through your entire church, and ultimately throughout our entire region.

Keep your eye on the blog or follow @TGCNE for up to date information on our registration launch. Space is extremely limited. REGISTRATION LAUNCHING SOON.

The post TGCNE REFRESH :: Tripp, Um, and Rinne :: Aug. 9-10 appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

Over at The Resurgence, Stephen Um has a post on “How to be on Mission in the City.” The short article is ordered around “5 tips for faithful gospel mission.” Here is “tip” number one:

1. GET GROUNDED IN THE GOSPEL

A faithful presence of Jesus’ gospel in the city hinges on his gospel itself. There are great needs in your city, and there are many doing important work, but the gospel itself will be the unique contribution that you bring to your city.

Whether you find yourself working in finance, the arts, health care, vocational ministry, or some other field, your life in the city must be grounded in and driven by the gospel of grace. The gospel is the be-all, end-all of the Christian life in an urbanized world.

Head over to The Resurgence to read the rest of the article and to consider how you can learn, challenge, and retell your city’s story with the gospel. You can also pick up a copy of the book over at Amazon.

The post Why Cities Matter at The Resurgence appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

A reader expects to read a certain type of novel when the opening sentence finds the narrator saying: “How angry am I? You don’t want to know”–perhaps an adrenaline-fueled tirade of a novel, filled with high-octane rants and destruction; or maybe a novel bent on disturbing the reader through violence or depravity resulting from overwhelming anger and despair. When that same novel also features a profane epigraph from Philip Roth, those expectations become even more sure-footed.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, however, seems to exist to defy expectations, both for better and for worse. Despite this aggressive, flippant opening sentence (actually, I DO want to know how angry you are), and a consistent yet subtle undercurrent of dread and gloom, the novel plays out slowly and methodically with minimal incident. This in no way renders the novel a failure, but rather a work often easier to admire than enjoy.

The story is that of Nora Eldridge, a lonely, unmarried elementary school teacher in her mid-30s living in Cambridge, MA. After her opening tirade, Nora takes a step back to describe herself as the titular “Woman Upstairs.” “In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, …and not a soul registers that we are furious…When you are the Woman Upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all.”

Nora’s mother has died before the book begins and her father, old and also lonely, lives across the river in Brookline. Nora speaks with him every day and visits regularly. She has a couple of good friends that live across town, but she rarely sees them. She also has a grumpy aunt that lives north of the city on the ocean whom she visits half-heartedly.

This quiet, seemingly sad life is shaken up when she meets the Shahids, a Lebanese-Italian family that moves to Cambridge and whose son is in Nora’s class. The father, Skandar, is a professor that has come to Harvard for a fellowship, and his wife, Sirena, is an artist from Italy. Once Nora meets them through a parent-teacher event, she is immediately entranced by their exotic and fascinating lives. Over the course of the novel, Nora falls, one by one, into different levels of “love” with each member of the family, including the young child Reza. Throughout, she struggles to wrap her head around how she, a reserved woman who has actively decided to live a reserved life, can have these feelings begin to well up inside of her.

When she was a teenager, Nora was an artist, and felt sure that one day she would grow into a career in the arts. But life had other plans. She moved back to Boston as a young woman after a stint in New York and settled down as a teacher. It doesn’t take long before she and Sirena have gone in together on studio space in Somerville and are working on what they both believe to be their personal artistic masterpieces. Fitting their personalities, Nora’s art is miniature replicas of famous, troubled women in small rooms (Virgina Woolfe, Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick) while Sirena’s project is a more grandiose, experimental, interactive exhibit that is to be shown in New York and Paris.

The novel is so packed with complex characters and themes, it is difficult at times to fully appreciate all that is in front of you. Sexuality, race, class, art, academia, friendship, family, and even foreign relations occupy the pages of The Woman Upstairs. Messud is clearly brilliant and does an incredible job of invoking a variety of ideas while remaining tied to reality; but it can be distracting at times. The story’s undercurrent of menace, which seems perpetually on the verge of consuming the novel, provides momentum, but some of the asides end up hurting the flow of the novel (whose ending is as surprising as any I’ve recently encountered).

While the occasional dramatic moment or phrase appears in the novel, Messud seems more interested in creating a slow and steady trajectory for Nora as she becomes more obsessed with both the Shahids and her own disappointment in herself, measuring herself against her new acquaintances. Are they her friends? Do they actually care about her? Are they simply using her as a pawn in their family drama? She can never be sure–partially because she is such an insecure person, and partially because Messud carefully crafts the Shahids to act repeatedly in ways that cause the reader to wonder about their intentions.

The Woman Upstairs will likely tempt the reader into judgment of its protagonist. As she becomes more and more obsessed with the Shahids, Nora begins to ignore her family and what few friends she has, all while struggling to maintain any semblance of self-awareness. As the story progresses, the opportunities for the reader to look at her and think “how pathetic…I would never let myself act like this” are numerous. How could Nora let herself be so easily captivated by these people and change the way she lives to accommodate them?

But once the novel comes to its conclusion, and Nora’s travails have had time to resonate, it becomes clear how far from unique her behaviors and thoughts are. Nora puts it well: “My heart’s desires: life, art, motherhood, love and the great seductive promise that I wasn’t nothing, that I could be seen for my unvarnished self and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could – that she must, indeed – leave a trace upon the world.” How easy it is to fall into a trap of thinking “I am nothing.” Nora lived a life concerned with caring for her father, caring for the children in her class, and working towards contentment. As soon as she meets people living the way she once dreamed of, who often flaunt their exotic lifestyles, jealousy stirs within Nora’s soul and leads her to sadness, erratic behavior, and even hatred. All she wants is for these people, who in her eyes are special, to see her unvarnished self and affirm her.

All humans are susceptible to these feelings. Our first instinct is often to search for that affirmation from the people and the accomplishments in our lives. When we do, things will often play out as they do for Nora in this novel. The great temptation, especially in a culture obsessed with celebrity, wealth, and the exotic, is to internalize the overwhelming sense that an “ordinary”, unvarnished life is equal to a meaningless life–a life in which you are not loved best of all. At the first sign of potential worldly greatness, we will abandon what was once important to us and seek after an elusive sense of worth. It is only in the gospel that we are confronted with a message that says that nothing we can accomplish in this world will lead to our being loved first or best. Only the love of Christ is great enough to allow us to be our unvarnished selves, and at the same time, to rest assured that we are loved and valued in the highest. The gospel is freedom from the fallacy of human nothingness. And only through this gospel can we find value and hope to avoid Nora’s tragic final thought: “…to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive.”

The post The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud (Book Review) appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

This morning, Crossway rolled out an introductory video for Stephen Um and Justin Buzzard’s Why Cities Matter. The video offers a view into the heart and aim of the book, as well as a look into two great cities: Boston and the Bay Area. Take a minute to watch the video, read Timothy Keller’s foreword, or listen to a recent radio interview, and then consider picking up a copy of the book. And please continue to pray with the authors that the book will play a small role in encouraging the growing movement(s) of the gospel in our world’s cities.

The post “Why Cities Matter” on Location in Boston & the Bay Area appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

Stephen Um was recently invited to be a guest speaker at Christ Central of Southern California. Working from Philippians 2:1-13, his sermon considered the significance of the triumph of Christ for the life of the Christian. The video and audio from this sermon are now available online. CCSC also provides its congregation with discussion questions based on each week’s sermon. Consider using these questions for reflection once you’ve had a chance to listen:

• What is the picture of growth and maturity that Paul presents? How is this different from the way we usually live life? What is the idea of empty-glory that we are to abandon?
• How do you seek your own glory? How and when are you more mindful of yourself than of others? Do you engage in comparative glory? How so? Where does this always end?
• What happens if we have to pursue this picture under our own power? Can we succeed? What if we try?
• What is the power that we are to use to grow? How does our own effort factor in?
• As we actually grow by grace, what does this look like? What are the examples that Paul cites? Is Paul saying we have to totally give up our lives and die in order to be saved?
• Practically, what is one area of your life where you need to demonstrate more humility (think of yourself less)? What is one area where you have the opportunity to think of others more and live out the gospel in serving them?

(Note: discussion questions by Pastor David Choe)

The post The Triumph of Christ appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

Recently, Stephen Um was welcomed as a guest on Detroit radio’s Paul Edwards’ show. For those looking for a basic primer on the ideas behind Why Cities Matter, or an introduction to the discussion on the importance of gospel mission in the context of rapid global urbanization, there may be no better place to start than this radio interview.

Take a listen to the extensive interview here and read an excerpt of the book here.

The post Why Cities Matter – Stephen Um interviewed by Paul Edwards appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.

 
Recently, Citylife Presbyterian Church welcomed Dr. Bryan Chapell to the Boston area for a weekend retreat. Dr. Chapell’s sessions, which emphasized the power of the hope that Christians have as a result of their union with Christ, were profound and practical in their application of the gospel. Media from all four of those sessions is now available for download and streaming. Visit the Citylife website, or click below to listen:

• Hope for the Useless
• Dying to Live
• Union with Christ
• Hope’s Journey 

The post Bryan Chapell on “The Power of Hope” appeared first on The Center for Gospel Culture.