Berlin Declaration Draft Team
Bock

Catching Up, Looking Ahead Sept 3 08

It was a full summer: Israel twice, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sweden, and Germany. Next summer is already coming into focus. I teach during the year so I can rest from the summer!

It was a full summer: Israel twice, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sweden, and Germany. Next summer is already coming into focus. I teach during the year so I can rest from the summer! Next summer confirmed are trips into Italy, China, Australia, and Austria. We will either head to Greece and Turkey with students or possibly help with a tour in Israel. That decision will come in October. Meanwhile it will be Thailand, India, Indonesia and Taiwan between now and the summer. Most of this is for messages on NT issues or apologetics. Denver Seminary and Southern are also on the list for the Fall.

One of the more interesting parts of the end of last summer was helping to draft a statement on Jewish Evangelism in Europe for a task force associated with the World Evangelical Alliance. A picture of several of the Drafting committee is appended. Europe is a post-Christian society. Sharing Christ is difficult, but even more so when Jewish people are involved. We all have the same basic human needs that the gospel is supposed to meet. So this was a statement designed to urge believers to share the gospel with Jewish people, and yet appreciate all that Jewish people have experienced in terms of persecution over the last several decades.  Our tours of some of the Holocaust sites in Germany as part of our meeting reinforced how destructive persecution can be and how poorly we can treat fellow human beings. So our prayer is that this statement will encourage evangelism in Europe with a sensitive eye cast to how sin enhances the need for the gospel, even to its victims.

The pictures below are of the key drafting team: two of us were from the USA and work with outreach to Jewish people (Tuvya Zarektsky, on the right, and myself). Then there is a British member and a member from Denmark (Richard Harvey, on the left; Bodil Skjøtt, second from the right).  Our German member is not pictured (Rolf Hille). There are three messianics in the team and all four of these members work with various outreach ministries, some with more than one (Jews for Jesus, Chosen People, Lausanne Conference on Jewish Evangelism, Mishkan [a periodical on Messianic issues]).

 Berlin Declaration Draft Team

 

 

The second photo is of Dietrich Bonhoffer. His photo is part of the Topography of Terror exhibit in Berlin that walks through the history of the SS and the Holocaust. Bonhoffer was a Protestant pastor who was killed for resisting Hitler and helping to plot the failed assassination attempt in June, 1944. 

BonhofferBonhoffer