relevintage on librarything.com

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: books, relevintage, web
• Date: Mar 21,2007

This popped up on my incoming links this week…

LibraryThing is an easy, library-quality catalog that also connects you with people who read the same things.

They have compiled/aggregated glowing comments from its happy online ‘customers’ on their Buzz page. The entire Buzz page is overwhelming with hundreds of comments. You can see the Buzz page here. I have cropped out where my comment is on the page in the pic above…my comment is the 4th down in the 2nd column.

I still am a big fan of LibraryThing, although I am getting close to the threshold of having to pay for the service – after 200 books, its $10/year. I have another 25-30 books I need to put in the mix.

Just call me an armchair librarian…

the 7

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: books, church, community, emerging church, environment, Gospel, music, pastoring, social justice, the 7, theology, worship
• Date: Mar 16,2007

The 7 are seven blog entries that stood out from the past few weeks [usually it's just from the last week but I'm behind] in the blogosphere.

The scope of this feature is to highlight posts for those who are ministering to the ‘younger evangelicals.’ This ultimately echoes the theme of this blog: the rules of postmodern engagement. Enjoy…

1. Do you fear not having it together might lead people to jump ship to places [other churches] that do? The ultra-honest Bob Hyatt lets us into his pastoral soul and describes the all-too familiar pressure of feeling like the ‘experience’ has to be right.

2. It’s not easy being green. Bob at Puritan’s Sword suggest we resist reactionary hostility and see environmentalism as a moral issue, not a conservative vs. liberal issue. And Andy Crouch, editorial director of The Christian Vision Project reviews A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future by Doug Gottlieb, professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He says that books like Gottlieb’s “are likely to be remembered as the salvos that awakened a sleepy and complacent American evangelicalism to its responsibility for God’s good earth.”

3. How do we resist the temptation to turn justice into a church program? David Fitch, once again, challenges the status quo and gets us to consider how not to do justice from a distance, but rather let it become a “virtue of a people that gather there…not something we do, but rather something we are” and a “face-to-face embodied presence of Christ that isn’t afraid to touch.”

4. Asbury’s Ben Witherington III continues his review of Rob Bell’s ministry in reviewing the Grand Rapids pastor’s new book, Sex.God. Provocatively titled, Witherington does an exhaustive analysis of Bell’s book and reveals why it is called what it is. In Witherington’s words, he believes Bell is trying to state that “…the oneness experienced in sex points beyond itself to the oneness that exists in God.”

5. What does “being saved” mean? David P. Gushee, Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy and Senior Fellow, Carl F.H. Henry Center for Christian Leadership at Union University, says we tend to confuse the beginning of the faith journey with its entirety. He goes on to say, “If Jesus is to be believed, inheriting eternal life involves a comprehensive divine assessment at every step along our journey, not just at its inception.”

6. At a recent Calvin Institute of Worship Symposium on Worship, Argentinean minister and composer, Pablo Sosa talked about why he thinks congregational singing is important. In his own words, “Songs put words in people’s mouths, knowledge in their bones, and conviction about whose voice counts. Songs shape how a community lives out its faith.” We should ask ourselves: can we even hear the congregation sing in our churches? Are the decibels of our worship overshadowing the importance of the congregants hearing themselves?

7. I couldn’t help but feel drawn to this entry. In a sense, it is what I have a special interest in as I look to future ministry. Eric Bryant, elder, speaker, and navigator at Mosaic in Los Angeles talks about an overlooked people group in ministry: the ‘Intuitives.‘ According to Bryant’s research, 75% of persons who have taken the Myers Briggs Temperament Indicator are ‘Sensing’. That’s potentially a large percentage of ‘Sensing’ pastors and congregants. As I look at evangelicalism, in my estimation, the 25% that’s left, is what is making up much of the emerging church scene…

bringing wisdom to our words

• Author: Henry
• Filed under: blogging, books, community, quotes of note, the art of...
• Date: Jan 29,2007

Scott McKnight has been doing a brilliant series on Bennedetta Craveri’s book, The Age of Conversation.

IMHO, we don’t converse the way we should. Most of us talk to hear ourselves talk and/or fight for fight’s sake. Unacceptable.

Proverbs says, “Well-spoken words bring satisfaction; well-done work has its own reward” and “Rash language cuts and maims, but there is healing in the words of the wise.” (both passages from MSG)

Scott helps us on the journey to improve the way we talk to one another. Here is an example of his insight:

Let us say that a person wants to converse about world religions, about the presence of “silent Christians” in the Islamic world, about the issues surrounding eschatology in the New Testament, about how to “do church” in a postmodern context, about preaching in today’s world, about homosexuality, about the church and the poor, about the gospel and social justice, about marriage, about rearing children… any topic that matters and any topic about which a person has concerns and wonders what is the best way to think about. Bring into the mix a person who is young or a person who really has serious and good questions about traditions … and you create the only kind of conversation that really can a conversation. Something important, a couple of people, and a desire to learn from one another. But, often mutual exploration is not what happens.

May his words of wisdom bring wisdom to our words:

The Art of Conversation 1

The Art of Conversation 2

The Art of Conversation 3

Scott is inspiring me to do a series on a book that transformed the way I communicate in my marriage, parenting, ministry, etc. called Core Communication.

Though not inherently Christian, the themes of the book echo much of what the Bible says about communication. Stay tuned…

blogging, books, community, quotes of note, the art of…

the definitive book on corporate worship

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: books, humor, worship
• Date: Jan 8,2007

No need to buy another book on corporate worship.

Here is the coup de grâce to any and all attempts by any and all authors to make sense of the current worship debate:

Here are two other books you might be interested in from ysmarko and Ragamuffin Soul.

joining piper in a new year’s resolution

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: books, Christianity, pastoring, reflections
• Date: Jan 2,2007

This comes from John Piper’s 12.13.06 Taste & See email entitled “Christmas, Truth, Christ and the Mile-Long Buffet of Worldviews” on 12.13.06.

…when Noël and I went to Barnes & Noble on Monday to buy a birthday present, I had my usual coldwater bath of awareness that there are thousands of voices competing to be heard by the world. Miles, it seems, of shelves with every imaginable worldview, all clamoring for the mind and the heart (and many other parts of the human body and soul). The God Delusion, You on a Diet, Jim Cramer’s Mad Money: Watch TV Get Rich, He-motions: Even Strong Men Struggle; The Machines of War—a tidal wave of titles.

So as we walked out, I said to Noël that makes me want to work around the clock for the rest of my life to spread the truth. Jesus was born for this. “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth.” Let’s join him in it. Let’s make Bethlehem a living truth-spreading organism. And remember: We know no truth aright, if we do not know and love Christ himself as the ground of it and the goal of it and the way it looks in true life. So we exist to spread a passion for Christ, not just ideas about Christ. That’s more, not less.

He was born to bear witness to the truth.

Devoted to spreading the Truth, with you,

Pastor John

Amen!

book review: confessions of a reformission rev by mark driscoll

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: books, church, culture, missiology, pastoring, review
• Date: Jul 13,2006

to prune or not to prune
It’s time to follow up on a promise.

About three months ago, I received, for free, a pre-release of Mark Driscoll’s [Mars Hill Church-Seattle] new book, Confessions of a Reformission Rev: Hard Lessons From a Emerging Missional Church.

The pact was: get a book for free from Mark, review it and post the review online. I, of course, jumped at the opportunity to get a free book [who wouldn’t] and now, three months later, find myself needing to report on Confessions.

But first, my confession is that I did not read it until a month after I received it, a week after the Reform & Resurge Conference at Mars Hill in Seattle in May. But I did read it. In a couple of days. And frankly, I couldn’t put it down. But some have. See this.

Over these last few months, individuals who also received this book gratis have posted reviews on their blogs. Most have been positive, but a growing number have shown serious reservations about one particular issue that has seemed to overshadow the book’s underlying brilliance: Driscoll’s, at times, uncensored verbiage. See this and this and this. Because of this, I have been reticent to enter the fray.

Personally, I like Mark Driscoll. A lot. Maybe I shouldn’t. But I liked this book. [I'm not alone. See this.] And I guessed I feared that liking this book meant liking how everything was said in this book.

More on that later…

Okay, on to the review.

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gettin’ down with dewey

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: books, technology
• Date: Jun 20,2006

I have stumbled upon something that has become somewhat of a magnificent obsession: LibraryThing. [HT: Steve McCoy]

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. Because everyone catalogs together, you can also use LibraryThing to find people with similar libraries, get suggestions from people with your tastes and so forth. I have cataloged all the books in my library in just a few days.

LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and over 45 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, “tag” books with your own subjects [which I've done], or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.

Speaking of ‘tagging’ your books in LibraryThing, I thought I would show you my tag cloud for my book catalog. If you’re wondering, a tag cloud is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website where the frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font and are displayed alphabetically. Enjoy…

maier in real time

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: apologetics, books, movies
• Date: May 31,2006

The critique tonight by Maier is called: The Da Vinci Distortion.

Here we go [times are in the p.m.]…

7:14: There have been various attempts by authors through the centuries to ‘caricature’ the person of Jesus

7:18: On the first page, Brown makes the statement that he is keeping ‘faith’ with his readers that the information in the book are ‘authentic’

7:20: Maier says he liked how the book started, but once Teabing opens his mouth, there are 6-8 bald face lies per page

7:23: The main premise of the book is the Priory of Sion. It is a hoax. The creators of this organization were found guilty in a court of law for forging the documents that supposedly ‘proved’ its existence

7:25: The NY Times when reviewing the book, called it The Da Vinci ‘Con’

7:29: The primary answer to why sales of the book skyrocketed: controversy. But not controversy alone, but controversy with the largest phenomenom in the history of the world: Christianity

7:30: The Passion of the Christ shows what ‘controversy’ can do to box office sales

7:33: If we would have not reacted to the lies, the book and its momentum would have been over in three weeks

7:40: Each of the falsehoods in the book are easily refuted-the Gnostic gospels in particular, which are late, derivative, and packed with absurdities

7:50: Offering time

8:03: Novelists can do whatever they wish with the foreground, but always offer an authentic background. Brown has fictionalized the foregrounded and he has falsified the background and many readers don’t know this

8:05: Who is responsible? The publishing industry more so than the sensationalist authors

8:06: The paradox is that as more caricatures of Jesus are being written, we are discovering more hard evidence that proves Christianity than in previous times and gives us an opportunity to witness

8:14: Our faith is based on innerant fact. which overwhelms all other world religions

8:14: Be sure to respond to counter-arguments with gentleness and respect [1 Peter 3:15]

filling in the blanks

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: apologetics, books, movies
• Date: May 31,2006

In about an hour and a half, my church, Grace Church-St. Louis, is hosting Paul Maier.

Maier is the Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University. He is also a vice president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Maier also, interestingly, studied under famed scholar Karl Barth.

Maier has recently surfaced on news programs because of his book, The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction?, cowritten with Hank Hannegraaff and the recent release of the movie, The Da Vinci Code.

I am going to try to blog real-time tonight.

In my previous post, in the year 2036, I stated that learning is good if it helps us ‘fill in the blanks’ for culture and give them the full Gospel. I no doubt will walk away better by being here.

But I’m not listening with ‘reactionary’ ears tonight. In other words, I’m not looking for ammo to use against those who are vehemently non- or anti-Christian. I’m looking for truth to elucidate the Gospel for those who are in dire need of it.

I hope Maier teaches us with that heart as well.

in the year 2036

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: books, movies
• Date: May 27,2006

Watch it or watch out?

A week has passed since the release of the much-anticipated movie, The DaVinci Code, the controversial Dan Brown New York Times bestseller that has been adapted into a film. And an interesting week has been.

The reviews have been underwhelming [see Rotten Tomatoes; movies.com], yet the movie is an early summer blockbuster. Some have even said that because of the eruption of discussion about the controversial plot, it has actually given the movie a spike in the box office, where it otherwise might have not [see Mark Lee]. Intriguing��

Not since The Passion of the Christ [except for maybe The Last Temptation of Christ] has a movie spawned so much discussion in the Christian community and society at large.

Books have been written to refute its claims [see this]. News programs have been done [see this]. A website has been created for noted evangelicals to dialogue [see this]. And the internet and blogosphere has been a flurry of discussion about whether we should boycott [see this], �other�cott [see this], or actually watch it [see this].

Who cares, right? It is just a movie. Movies are meant to entertain, not educate. We watch many movies with subtle and overt historical and religious revisionist theories.

Remember Raiders of the Lost Ark with Indiana Jones and the Ark of the Covenant? Remember National Treasure and the fine print of the Constitution? And in the end, we just simply enjoyed those movies instead of changing our minds about the past.

So what�s the big deal? And further, what else can or should be contributed to the conversation?

It�s a little presumptuous to join into the discussion when folks like Paul Maier and Lee Strobel are involved. But really, presumption is what gives the blogosphere its power. Let the audaciousness begin…

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