238 Chapter 7 decision to not initially open up to Abimelech and his servants in Gerar ‘blocks the fulfilment of his calling to be a blessing. We conclude that not only steadfastness (faithfulness) but also openness (openness) really belong to the Christian calling’. When looking for references to the Bible and the voice of normative theology in the TAR meetings, three more opening devotions stand out. At the start of the 14th meeting, an insider group member asked for attention to be paid to Psalm 87 as the Old Testament mission psalm, specifically referring to verse 6, which promises that the Lord will make Himself known to people of all kinds of ethnic or cultural backgrounds and reckon them for His own. Afterwards, she read from Matthew 28, the passage known as the Great Commission, where Jesus sends His disciples to teach and baptise all nations, making all people His disciples. The 12th meeting was opened by a Scripture reading from Genesis 21: 14–21, after which the devotion leader underlined that God also has promises for Arab people and promises to really see them— because ‘seen by God’ is what the name of the well mentioned in this passage means and ‘to see the child’ is ‘the thematic this conversational community is all about’. The 18th meeting was opened with several passages from the Apostle Paul on the appreciation of diversity within the Christian church and how Christians can be enriched if they are open to learning from different cultural forms of Christian professing (Ephesians 3; 1 Corinthians 12). During the deliberations that followed the opening devotions in meetings 12–14, several members of the conversational community referred to Bible verses to state what, in their eyes, should be seen as unnegotiable within the Christian faith tradition. At the end of the 12th meeting, while preparing the 13th one, the conversational community looked for Biblical examples to underpin its feeling that ‘exuding that we, as Christians, are truth-holders is something that happens frequently but creates distance and is also unjustified’. Two examples were mentioned. The first was the Apostle Paul and his sermon on the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17), where he adapted his discourse with great respect to the perceptions of the Athenian people and to Greek religion and philosophy, claiming to be able to tell more about their ‘unknown god’ and quoting their poetry. This reference was revisited in the 13th meeting when a student asked how to respond to children who place the God of the Bible on the same level as Allah: ‘The Apostle Paul uses without hesitation the statue of an idol to preach the true God to others. You can do that without compromising the faith, because—in fact—you level with your public: You are a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greek’. The second example was the Old Testament example of Naaman, who converted himself to the God of Israel
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