Josh Mounce - October 14, 2018
Private Disciplines
Most of us groan when we hear the word 'discipline' - especially when it comes to faith. Spiritual disciplines seem so often like chores we have to do to earn God's favor. But God invites us into these disciplines to create space for us to discover the Holy Spirit at work in our lives, and grow our faith.
From Series: "5 Things God Uses to Grow Your Faith"
How do we discover life-changing faith What would your life look like if you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt God was real? How would your relationships be different? How would your job be different? In this series, we'll explore the five things God uses to take our faith to the next level. We'll learn how we can partner with God to have the kind of faith we thought was only for spiritual giants. God wants you to have big faith. Saying YES starts here!
More From "5 Things God Uses to Grow Your Faith"
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One of my favorite movies of all time is John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror film THE THING, starring Kurt Russel. It’s actually a remake (see, Hollywood doing remakes isn’t new!) of a 1950s movie, which is, in turn, based on a short story by sci-fi author John Campbell. Campbell is a huge name in the science fiction community. He was the editor for the famous Astounding Science Fiction magazine that discovered such notable talents as Isaac Asimov. It’s not an exaggeration to call Campbell the grandfather of modern science-fiction.
If you’re a science fiction geek, you’ve probably heard of the Hugo Awards – they’re sci-fi literature’s version of the Oscars. And it’s probably not a big surprise that the Hugo Award for Best New Writer is called the John W Campbell Award.
Or at least it was until last year.
Last year, a Chinese-British woman named Jeannette Ng won the award. When she got up to give her acceptance speech, she was gracious and grateful. Then she pointed out something the science fiction community has long known and has been wrestling with: John Campbell was deeply, virulently and unapologetically racist. You can see it in his fiction, in his personal correspondents and in the way he edited his magazines – who he let in, who he kept out.
Ng’s speech sent shockwaves through the science-fiction community. Not because she was saying anything new, but because she was saying out loud, in public, at an awards ceremony, what everyone had been saying in private:
The way this community continued to revere one of its founders was wrong.
For all the good Campbell did, he did more wrong. The very stories that are celebrated today would never have made it past his desk.
So the team in charge of the Hugo awards changed the name of the award. This year, they awarded the Astounding Award, after the magazine, rather than the author.
This is no small thing. The John W Campbell award was designed to celebrate the best new authors of science fiction. But because so many of those authors are persons Campbell himself openly derided as less human than him, the award was tainted. It was an artefact of the worst parts of the sci-fi community, one that they were glad to shed.
Renaming the award was a movement toward justice. It was a step to change the artefacts that comprise their culture.
We’re going to talk about the physical components of our culture today. And we’re going to talk about them specifically with regards to race. Because, believe it or not, God cares deeply about the material stuff of our faith. Those material markers, the artefacts of our faith, are how we tell the story of who we are, and where we’re headed.
