Monthly Archives: September 2007

“I wasn’t always ugly.”

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I read the following tonight in Philip Yancey’s excellent book Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference?:

Prayer, and only prayer, restore my vision to one that more resembled God’s. I awake from blindness to see that wealth lurks as a terrible danger, not a goal worth striving for; that value depends not on race or status but on the image of God every person bears; that no amount of effort to improve physical beauty has much relevance for the world beyond.

Alexander Schmemann, the late priest who led a reform movement in Russian Orthodoxy, tells of a time when he was traveling on the subway in Paris, France, with his fiance. At one stop an old and ugly woman dressed in the uniform of the Salvation Army got on and found a seat nearby. The two lovers whispered to each other in Russian about how repulsive she looked. A few stops later the woman stood to exit. As she passed them she said in perfect Russian, “I wasn’t always ugly.” That woman was an angel of God, Shmemann used to tell his students. She opened his eyes, searing his vision in a way he would never forget.

“Love his wife”

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Now, let me say that the church is not the center of God’s plan. Jesus is. But, the church is central to God’s plan. Jesus places the church in a position of great importance…

If you claim to be a disciple of Jesus, then love his wife. Don’t be guilty of going to great lengths to show your love for Christ while ignoring, marginalizing, or attacking the Bride.

– Ed Stetzer

[Hat Tip: Provocations and Pantings]

“We say that Christians are different . . .”

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Jollyblogger nails it:

We say that Christians are different, and we are, and one of the main ways we are different from the world is that we don’t take offense at offensive behavior or treatment. We are the people who love our enemies, who bless when cursed, who pray for our persecutors. We follow the one who only wanted forgiveness to be shown to those who crucified Him.

May this be the mark of the church. Amen.

[Hat Tip: Transforming Sermons]

Theodore Dalrymple on good and evil

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Theodore Dalrymple, a non-believer, writes of both some some very good and some very bad people he has known. Many of the most admirable souls he recalls here were people of faith. It’s an interesting piece, with a balanced feel and a final paragraph that I think is tremendous. The article is excerpted below:

I met other nuns in remote parts of Africa who seemed completely happy in humbly serving the local people: a community of Spanish nuns whose cheerful and selfless dedication caused to the ill, the handicapped and the young caused them, rightly, to be loved and revered. In Nigeria, I met an Irish nun, in her mid-seventies, who was responsible for the feeding of hundreds of prisoners who would almost certainly have starved had she not brought food to them every day. In the prison, a lunatic had been chained for years to a post; many of the prisoners had been detained without trial for a decade, the files of their cases having been lost, and they would never leave the prison, even when a judge ordered their release, unless they paid a bribe to the gaolers which they could not afford. They believed they would spend the rest of their lives in detention, seventy to a floor-space no larger than that of my sitting room.

The nun moderated the behaviour of the prison guards by the sheer force of her goodness, It was not a demonstrative or self-satisfied virtue; one simply would have felt ashamed to behave badly or selfishly in her presence. She is almost certainly dead now, forgotten by the world (not that she craved remembrance or memorialisation). I sometimes find it difficult, when immersed in the day to day flux of my existence, to credit that I have witnessed such selflessness.

. . .

I once made the mistake of writing an article in [a] left-wing publication saying that, in my experience, the best people were usually religious and on the whole religious people behaved better in their day to day lives than non-religious once: and I wrote this, as I made clear, as a man without any religious belief.

As a frequent contributor to the public prints, I am accustomed to a certain amount of hate-mail, and can even recognise the envelopes that contain it with a fair, though not total, degree of accuracy. Of course, e-mail has made it far easier for those consumed with bile to communicate it, and on the whole it exceeds in vileness what most bilious people are prepared to commit to paper. I don’t think I have ever hated anyone as much as some of my correspondents have hated me.

Suffice it to say that I have never received such hate mail as when I suggested that religious people were better than non-religious in their conduct. It seemed that many of the people who responded to me were not content merely not to believe, but had to hate.

. . .

Perhaps one of the reasons that contemporary secularists do not simply reject religion but hate it is that they know that, while they can easily rise to the levels of hatred that religion has sometimes encouraged, they will always find it difficult to rise to the levels of love that it has sometimes encouraged.

[A clang of sword against shield to Lars Walker of the excellent Brandywine Books]

“Oh, we don’t need a teacher, we need a facilitator”

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The quote that makes up the subject of this post is not a verbatim quote. It is rather an amalgam of various similar quotes I’ve heard in church culture throughout the past decade or so.

As a great fan of discourse and dialog (for me, the comments threads on most blogs are often the most interesting parts of them), and as someone who enjoys a good discussion in the GAP on Sunday mornings, I somewhat understand the sentiment in the desire for “facilitators, not teachers”. In addition, I’ve seen facilitation work wonders, at times, in brain-storming and design sessions at work. And, finally, we’ve all been held a captive audience to teachers in the past who probably, um, shouldn’t be teachers.

All that being said . . .

The church needs gifted teachers. If gifted teachers are hard to find, the church must redouble its efforts to find or (preferably) train them. The intrusion in church teaching efforts by facilitat-y “there’s no such thing as a wrong answer” philosophies has been a bad thing.

And that’s all I’m going to say (for now) about that.

By the way, this post was inspired by Jared’s latest missive (and, yes, I’m an unashamed Jared Wilson fanboy. Can you tell?). Sample this:

. . . as a community of believers seeks reform, as we seek the face of God and push, urge, inspire, train each other to exalt Christ and focus on the Gospel, it has become more and more urgent that we not abandon the monologue sermon, but reform the monologue sermon to greater Gospel-centrism, to a greater submission on the part of the preacher (and by extension his community) to the authority of Scripture.

And none of this is to say the community should be passive receptors, containers to be filled with information. None of this is to say we shouldn’t test what we’ve been taught, talk it out, use the community as the context for “field testing” theology, work at iron sharpening iron, hold our teachers accountable, etc. It is only to say that the worship gathering is not the right forum for the discussion.

A bit later, Jared quotes from Mark Driscoll, who recounts the velvet way he dealt with the teaching paradigm conflicts at his church:

We continued to meet on Sunday nights until Christmas, when some of the arty types started complaining that there was a preaching monologue instead of an open dialogue, as would become popular with some emerging pastors a few years later. This forced me to think through my theology of preaching, spiritual authority, and the authority of Scripture. I did an intense study of the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament commands regarding preaching and teaching. In the end, I decided not to back off from a preaching monologue but instead to work hard at becoming a solid long-winded, old school Bible preacher that focused on Jesus. My people needed to hear from God’s Word and not from each other in collective ignorance like some dumb chat room.

“Like some dumb chat room” . . . heh.

Update: Oddly enough, I just looked and the latest post on the GAP website that I linked to above is a Jared Wilson quote. And, yeah, I’m the one who posted it.

People are going to start talking . . .

Holding aloft the 3-cent candle of hope

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I’ve got lots of post ideas. I just haven’t found the time (or the guts, frankly) to post them. But here are some thoughts and links while I while away my lunch hour.

Remember the old cliche’ “it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness”? My candle is not that bright and I feel sometimes that I’m walking through the inky-black darkness of the blogosphere holding aloft one of those little sparklers you find on a cupcake. But, doggone it, I’m going to grit my teeth and continue to do so. Yes, we need our Jeremiah’s, our weeping prophets. And, of course, all is not well, in our country or in our churches.

But sometimes I think people can’t see the light of hope for the darkness they’ve chosen to focus on.

Maybe I’m wrong. But, for those of us living in the western world at least, we live in an age of unparalleled material blessing and freedom. Even our poorest are rich by history’s standards. And, if that wasn’t un-PC enough to say, though the church in America is badly in need of reform, discipline, and a re-focusing, it is also full of some very, very fine Christians and some brave, stalwart pastors and leaders. And many churches are holding onto the truth, while simultaneously doing honorable work among our poor and dispossessed.

Am I whistling through a graveyard? The Bride is beautiful. And much maligned, even by those who are part of her.

There’s a balance to be achieved. I’m not speaking against Godly criticism of our church culture. I have recommended (and heck, I will again) Gospel-Driven Church as an example of how to do this right. The Internet Monk is also a site I highly recommend, though he is no stranger to dark nights of the soul and confessional blogging (and getting mercilessly slammed for both). Yet he tenaciously holds on to the truth, to orthodoxy, and hope.

So I’m reading this passage in a new way today. Do you see it too?:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died–more than that, who was raised–who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;

we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

– Romans 8:31-39

Also, apropos of (almost) nothing, check out this quote by J.D. Hatfield:

The New Testament is centered on Christ, and its exhortations on the holiness of believers. This is not a simple call to obedience, but to holiness. Holiness is not righteousness, righteousness flows from holiness. Holiness isn’t simply obedience; it is being set apart for God and depending on God by drawing your boundaries, as God would have them. Obedience flows from holiness, and holiness is cultivated by a right understanding of God and what He has done for us in Christ. To understand Christ more fully is to be made more holy in practice.

That’s something for me to chew on, definitely (HT Transforming Sermons).

Finally, from the aforementioned Gospel-Driven Church, It’s Not About Programming; It’s About Culture. The final few paragraphs are below:

It is wearying trying to sell our churches on the notion that what they’ve been selling for so long doesn’t work. It is difficult suggesting that the service-centered approach to reaching the lost has failed. It is a delicate thing to suggest that we have not exalted Christ and we have not glorified God and therefore we haven’t really served the people we’ve claimed to.

And yet for some of us inside this culture, slogging away at discipling the culture into a more vital discipleship, it is incumbent upon us to, in our hearts and minds, say “Here we stand. We can do no other.”

I rather like that, and I’m inspired by efforts to change the church that flow from sincere love and concern for the Bride and devotion to her Lord.

So I’m going to hold my candle aloft. And you can blow it out, but it’s the frustrating kind that bursts back into flame without having to be relit [Bill makes his “booyah” face].

And I’m also going to attempt to start policing what I read on the Blogosphere and who I link to in my Bloogroll.

It’s either that or Prozac . . .

Meandering . . .

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It’s Saturday night, and I need to be preparing for my lesson tomorrow. It’s going to be a good one, because it’s about Jesus.

And I’m not kidding about that. I need every lesson to be about Jesus. He is the way.

I pray I’ll do it justice. I’m behind at this point, but there are still some hours left in the evening (and tomorrow morning).

On another note: I’m adding Letters from Kamp Krusty to my Bloogroll (thanks to Bob for hipping me to this blog). This guy’s a great writer. And he’s honest and straightforward, without (and my next statement might seem a bit out of the blue, but it’s coming from somewhere, and I might explain later) being in the T.M.I. realm of honesty and creepily bordering on the apostate, which is something I’m seeing more and more in the Christian blogosphere. That troubles me.

I may write more about that later, when I’ve got words to write. In the meantime, yes, life is hard. But Jesus is good. And we are more than conquerors, because of Him.

Now go read some Letters from Kamp Krusty. I recommend these two posts:

Preach the unpreachable, Star and Wanted: Some Awesomely Hip People to Pose With

Here’s a snippet (heck, it’s almost the whole post) from Preach the unpreachable, Star:

I was kicking lunch salad-style with this pastor-friend of mine, today, at this salad-bar place. I opted for a mix of lettuces. And I had the spicy croutons and the little meat sprinkles.

He was telling me about a cool idea for a teaching series he’d been doing. I liked it, then challenged him to do a series called, “The Verses No One Ever Preaches About Because, Frankly, We Don’t Like Them.”

I suggested starting with the part where Jesus says if somebody takes something from us, we’re not supposed to even ask for it back. Jesus even says it right smack in front of the Golden Rule, so you’d think that there would have some prime real estate, and get preached on all the time. But, even growing up fundamentalist, I never once heard a sermon on that one. Never.

I think it’s the Most Willfully Ignored Saying of Jesus.

My pastor-friend said maybe it’s because we haven’t developed an understanding of that verse yet.

Awkward pause.

Laughter! But seriously, folks. Oh, we understand it. It ain’t complex. It’s just that, you know, nobody likey. C’mon: Let’s say someone shorts you payment of something, knowing full-well what they did. You’re not even going to ask for it back? Let’s not take this too far, here, folks.

Can we do another series that sorta ties in with the “Transformers” movie?

(BTW, I was reading one commentator on this scripture. He says we’re not supposed to take Jesus literally here, because if we took his “also give him your shirt,” teaching literally for when the guy who takes your coat, we’d be supporting “nudism”. Nice effort, there, commentator-feller. The Message takes a crack at softening it here.)

So, anyway, if you’re a Christian teacher-type, you’re a star in the Krusty-book for going with that series idea sometime.

Double Krusty Points for keeping it as understandable as Jesus did. Krusty Points are irredeemable for prizes.

Double-NEGATIVE points if you twist it to retrofit our lifestyles and make it less threatening than it obviously is.

Move two spaces forward, and take another turn, if you have the innards to try this, without watering it down, and telling people to actually do it. (“The goal is…what, comrade?”)

Miscellany

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Sorry for the long absence. Everything’s been very good, just busy.

A few quick notes:

What do you think of the new theme? It is a port of a WordPress theme called Red Train. I’ve been working on new Bloo themes lately. If you’re a Bloo blogger interested in spicing up your blog (or if you’re just interested in seeing the available themes), you should check out the Bloo Themes site.

Also – happy birthday Andrew!

And, finally, Jared suggests 11 church innovations:

1. Sing hymns.

2. Preach through a book of the Bible.

3. Talk about sin.

4. Celebrate the Lord’s Supper more frequently.

5. Have a Scripture reading in the service.

6. Transition creative content from aping popular commercials and other media to creating your own, wholly original content.

7. Read, study, and teach theology.

8. Put as much effort and resources into men’s ministry as you do women’s. On the flipside, pair up younger women with wise, older women in mentoring relationships with the same conviction you have about men being in accountability and mentoring partnerships.

9. Hire from within.

10. In promotional material, use actual photos of actual people in your community.

11. Preach the Gospel.