Reflections: Chapter 5, “Creating a Goodness Culture”
This chapter is the seedbed for those that follow. Overlooking the foundational ideas here would turn the whole book into a moralistic to-do manual for well intentioned church leaders and that would be a decidedly bad thing!
We read here that God alone is tov, that Jesus is ‘The One True Man of Tov’, and that the Spirit is the source of all tov. We read that, “Jesus is approachable, willing, compassionate, and humble. He heals, forgives, and restores because he sees and listens” (p.94). Jesus is the embodiment of all of God’s goodness. And His Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is the source of goodness in the church. McKnight and Barringer put it this way:
We don’t create tov churches in our own strength, by grit and determination or by clever programming. Tov churches are the work of God’s Spirit set free to create tov – and the eight other fruitful attributes outlined by Paul in Galatians 5 (p.96).
These foundational truths are worth chewing on. They need to be ingested and digested. The failure of tov in our churches is fundamentally a symptom of our disconnection from our Source who is Christ! Only a culture that embraces dependency and Spirit-reliant living can hope to express the tov that flows from the heart of God Himself!
Reflection from Trevor Seath, Director with C2C Collective
