why can’t we all just get along?: part 3

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Bible study, community, Gospel
• Date: Apr 4,2007

Here is the third installment of my presentation on worship at Missouri Baptist University last month- Why Can’t We All Just Be Reconciliators: A Third Way. It’s looking like there will be four parts overall. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

Up to this point, we have mainly looked at categories. Part 1 looked at the preservationist and innovationist camps. Part 2 looked at the traditional, contemporary, and emerging church contexts. Part 3 brings us to a biblical description of what being a reconciliationist looks like:

So how does this put us in a better position to talk about what being a reconciliationist means?

As a way into this, I would like to look at a couple of scripture passages together in the Gospels of Luke and John. In these two passages, the setting is the Garden of Gethsemane, which sits at the foot of the Mount of Olives just east of Jerusalem. You know the scene. He is about to be arrested, flogged, and crucified in the next 24 hours.

What is interesting about these two passages is that Luke and John record the same event through very different lenses and words. But because both of these passages describe the same story and fit together harmoniously, we need to read both passages to help us as we understand this idea of reconciliation.

Read the rest of this entry »

unraveling the lost labyrinthine

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Gospel, television, theology
• Date: Mar 22,2007

In keeping with the theme of Lost theories from last week – see here - the Jollyblogger himself, Mr. Wayne has offered up what he considers might be another piece of the “labyrinthine” puzzle that is Lost.

In last night’s “The Man From Tallahassee” episode, David parallels a conversation between Locke and Ben and the story of the man born blind in John 9.

At one point during the episode, Locke and Ben are in Ben’s house and Locke tells Ben he doesn’t deserve to be on the island. He then calls him a hypocrite, a Pharisee. As the conversation goes on, it comes out that Ben is intrigued in Locke’s apparent healing ‘by the island’ because, even though he as been on the island since he was born, he got some type of disease of the back and was not healing very quickly after his surgery. David points out that Ben seems to be alluding to the fact that since he had been on this island his whole life, he was entitled to the healing.

As for the John 9 parallel, David says:

So, John is the man born blind and Ben is the one who interrogates him. Ben the Pharisee wants to know how John, the man born blind was healed. John, the man born blind knows he was healed by the island, but he doesn’t know how. Ben the Pharisee appeals to his lifelong residence on the island, i.e. his status as a disciple of Moses, and he knows that John was healed but doesn’t understand. Ben sees himself as the rightful heir of the healing and can’t understand how the island has bypassed him for John, a sinner from birth – i.e. an outsider to the island.

That is a great study in spiritual metaphors. But what does this parallel tell us about the island? David says it may be a ‘shadow’ of redemption:

Maybe the island is akin to the Kingdom of God. It’s a place where its lifelong residents – the others, or Pharisees, live with the sense that they are the heirs of the kingdom. But now, God, or the island is doing a new thing with a new people.

hirsch on the idol of mission

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Gospel, missiology, quotes of note
• Date: Mar 21,2007

…unless our ideas about mission and missional church have validity arising from the revelation of God himself, then they are just idols and they will be sustained, and will only sustain us, only insofar that we give our energies to them. When our energies fail, the idol will fall. If however they are from God, then we don’t have to prop them up with our pathos, even through they ask for our commitment. They are true and exist apart from my trust in them.

-Alan Hirsch from his 04.18.07 blog entry, Missional Thinking: Truth or Idol?

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…

no matter how you dress it up…part 2

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: church, Gospel, pastoring, worship
• Date: Feb 28,2007

I was going through my blogroll shortly after my last post on ‘dress’ and came across this quote from the iMonk himself in a post today [although it isn't on his blog anymore] in which this issue came up:

I have to admit that when the conversation goes to clothes, I get pretty cranked. It’s a Pharisee’s conversation. I work with a lot of kids who have no decent clothes and we have to provide them. There’s some theology in James that applies to the topic. Preachers in expensive clothes don’t fit in well where I minister. We’re a modest operation in terms of budgets and salaries, and that translates into dressing down, though not looking hip hop sloppy. Dress code discussions- and my school has and enforces one- are generally my cue to go get a coke…

Me too…

no matter how you dress it up…

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: church, Gospel, pastoring, worship
• Date: Feb 28,2007

[Cross posted at WorshipHelps].

Victoria Weinstein, a Unitarian Universalist minister [obviously outside of the bounds of evangelicalism] who goes by the handle PeaceBang, has launched a fashion blog to encourage the “defrumpification of the American clergy.” And in a recent Boston Globe story, Weinstein says that even though fashion isn’t the greatest concern for clergy, it still matters.

I read the article and I would like to put a spin on this.

Though Weinstein’s advice is decent, especially to her target group of women ministers, her comments have implications. And I’m sure Weinstein’s aim is not to cause any overt controversy, but it raises some interesting questions…

“Anyone who is in a position of leadership has to consider what image they’re projecting…they will not be willing to hear us in the same way if we look like we walked out of 1972.”

Absolutely. But the underlying statement here is “there is an accepted way to dress and if you don’t dress that way, than you are projecting the wrong image.”

What is the litmus test? Should there be? To me, the only ‘test’ is context. Consider your context and dress appropriately. If you minister in an urban area with neo-hippies, you may need to dress like you stepped out of 1972.

And what version of 1972 does she mean? Frankly, the business casual look of the 80′s & 90′s were the polyester suits of the 70′s.

“…the problem with frumpiness isn’t so much aesthetic as it is a problem of looking as though you are not paying attention to the world and that you are not part of today’s world.”

Maybe if you are dressing like a white collar business person for a twenty-something crowd.

The word ‘frumpy’ gets thrown around with the more casual look young people take. And again, in those contexts, they actually are paying attention to the world they live in.

Isn’t dress a non-essential? And further, isn’t a mandate on what dress is appropriate for worship extra-biblical [outside of the need for modesty]?

I see dress just like I see worship style. If the Bible does not forbid it, we have freedom to choose the best expression of it in our context as we honor the people in that context.

There seems to be an element of elitism related to the idea of one way to dress for worship. And frankly, for those that elevate it as a matter of contention, to me, it masks a deeper problem…they think that God cares about our outer appearance and that that appearance can hinder our worship of Him.

My friends, that is not the Gospel. God cares about our hearts not our habiliments…

[HT: Church Marketing Sucks]

driscolloquial

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Christianity, Gospel, quotes of note
• Date: Feb 22,2007

Sometimes we get angry at the real God because he doesn’t serve our false god.

-Mark Driscoll at the 2007 Creative Church Conference [HT: Tony Morgan]

white as snow

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: Gospel, music
• Date: Feb 13,2007

It’s mid-February and St. Louis is dealing with its biggest winter storm yet this season. My backyard is a winter wonderland. Snow-capped sandboxes and slides.

As I sit and type this entry, I’m reminded of the old hymn, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus. The imagery of ‘white as snow’ has amazing meaning as I look out my window at the beautiful wafts.

Nothing But the Blood of Jesus

What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Oh! precious is the flow
That makes me white as snow;
No other fount I know,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

God’s riches at Christ’s expense

• Author: Brad
• Filed under: communion, Gospel, music, reflections
• Date: Jan 3,2007

We just finished a impactful Communion service and I’m struck by how amazing God’s grace is once again…

First, my pastor said these profound statements:

Justice: Getting what we deserve

Mercy: Not getting what we deserve.

Grace: Getting what we don’t deserve

Absolutely beautiful…thank you God that we get mercy and grace. It makes me think of that old Susan Ashton song “Beyond Justice to Mercy.”

And second, we sang one of my all-time favorite worship songs tonight, “Jesus, You Are Worthy,” by Brenton Brown. The bridge of that song sums up the gospel as beautifully as I’ve seen [next to John Newton, of course]. Let the words seep deep into your soul:

Perfect sacrifice
Crushed by God for us
Bearing in Your hurt
All that I deserve
Misjudged for my misdeeds
You suffered silently
The only guiltless man
In all of history