irrelevance

Today I was struck with several glaring examples of irrelevance in the Church. I know there is a lot of back and forth about being "relevant" and "contextualizing" the message, and I get both sides. Some people say "your message is always contextualized whether you know it or not, so I might as well be aware of how you're coming across to others" and the other side basically says "to contextualize the gospel is to give room for relativism, and ultimately to the erosion of absolute truth." I can understand both sides, but here's my point: if you're not going to be "relevant" at least don't be irrelevant.

We watched a video where Bill Hybels explained in under 8 minutes how to present the gospel in three different ways using only a sharpie and a restaurant napkin. come on... seriously? The sad part is that it probably was their attempt at being relevant. I'm not saying I've never drawn a napkin diagram to explain something to someone, I just think we're looking for more than napkin theology. Although that would make an interesting Christian spin off of indexed, which is one of my favorite blogs.

Earlier today was St. Luke's (presumably) first-ever "healing service" we put a sign out front, a note in the bulletin, and I think people came with mixed expectations. I think they were probably all disappointed. Here was the message, summarized as best I could (I took notes)

Three signs of Abundant Life:
1)if healing doesn't come it's because you don't have enough faith
2)healing will always come for everyone in death
3)therefore, abundant life is all about life after death, not before.

a direct quote: "The secret to good health is knowing that Jesus loves you"

summary thought (paraphrased, but pretty close:) sure you can pray for healing, but you won't be really healed until you're dead and gone to heaven, but we can all get together and pray anyway because it might make us feel better.

THAT is the kind of genuine spiritual truth our generation needs someone to speak to us. THAT is a message of hope. I think sermon time should always be followed by "question time" and in this case maybe even "rebuttal" time.

for more on my thoughts on the issue of prayer and healing, you can check out my other blog.

ALSO, I am still working on my post about time. It's turned out to be a little harder to nail down than I originally thought it would be, so it might be a few more days.

Time MetaBlog

I had a really good talk with some guys this morning that made me want to really nail down some of my more "unorthodox" (in the common sense, not the literal sense, I hope) views on time. I'm going to do this in three ways:

1) First I'm going to read through Scot McKnight's extensive blogging about the use of the word "Kingdom" in the N.T. looking at the ones that use the word in the "future" sense rather than the "now" sense.

2) I'm going to go through each use of the word Eternity in the new testement (70 in ESV)

3) For each of these references (probably around 100) I'll rate whether or not time is an inherent aspect of the Biblical description of the next life.

we'll see what happens I guess.

Ideas : actual writting

So those of you who know me know that I have a very skewed ratio of ideas to actual writing. So the other day I got an idea for a story and decided I was going to just do it.

here's the result.

being my first short story I've actually finished and posted for people to read, I would love your feedback! i.e. when you read, don't just say to yourself this stinks, post it in the comments (I fixed them so people can comment now, I hope) and tell me why it stinks so that the next thing I write doesn't stink so bad.

Two Ideas I'm thinking through

I've been doing some reading today that was probably a little out of my league. This morning while I was getting my car not fixed I started "Escape From Reason" by Francis Schaeffer. Then this evening I read a post by Stanley Fish which you can find here (good luck understanding it...) So these are two thoughts that are going through my head after reading those two things. I post it here mostly because this is how I process information, but also because I want to see what other people think. (i.e. am I that crazy?)

1) truth is a word; it describes other sets of words. It's a tool rooted in language, but in the absence of words what becomes of truth? Is truth something, as Derrida might put it, exist outside the text? And by that, I don't mean is there reality outside the text. I mean is there truth apart from language, or is truth simply a measure of words in the right order. Makes me want to stop blogging and start doing some form of visual art that has no words attached.

2) When I think does my mind actually create new realities of consciousness? These mental images and events floating like dreams, do they have real existence in some dimension, the way God exists even though we don't see God? When God thinks, creation happens; matter and energy are formed in our world. When we think, do new spiritual realities exist in the realm of God? Do we, in the image of God, have the ability to think things into spiritual exisitance?

OK so there you go. If you've known me for a while you may know I have a tendency to try to think about "theories" like these. My wife knows I've always imagined being some sort of theoretical physicist. I think it has to do with the fact that I read some really interesting books about theoretical physics when I was in college. The best by far was called "Einstein's Dreams"

So no, I'm not on drugs. Other then Mucinex for a bad chest cold I've been fighting. And Claritin. maybe that's a psychoactive combination, I don't know...

Evangelism 1

Tonight at our New Hope small group we started a church-wide study about evangelism. These kinds of studies aren’t really my kind of thing, but I think there is a lot to be said for doing something as a part of the larger body of Christ, even if it is just the larger body of our (other) church. It’s a series from Willow Creek called Just Walk Across the Room, a four week series of DVD’s about relational evangelism. As long as I can be at each week’s lesson, I plan to blog about it here.

Tonight was called The Single Greatest Gift. In the video we were introduced to a man named Brian, to whom Bill Hybels just walked across a soccer field. Brian eventually converted to Christianity and is now an active “creeker” (Bill’s word, not mine).

yadda yadda yadda skip to the conversation... Me and Billy are worlds apart in the way we see the Church, so I mostly just want to share about the conversations we have around the subject.

We started out just discussing the idea of “walking across the room” by which they mean starting casual friendships with people, presumably with the intent to convert them to our religion. It seems to be a sort of post-modern idea, but the B.H. version looks a little one sided; meeting someone so you can change their life. We talked about seeing it as a little more two sided –meeting people to talk, listen, and learn.

This illustrates what I see as a central difference between the conservative evangelical perspective and the postmodern “emergent” perspective. The former see relational ministry as a means to an end –the old “meet a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ” paradigm. The latter see it more as a part of the end- the atonement as restoration of relationships between people, not just between God and us.

The key scripture for this section of the study was Luke 19:10, which I think puts the two perspectives into a good scriptural context. It’s introduced as a statement of Jesus’ mission, but different translations encourage significantly different understandings.

in the NIV it says “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost”

Tim pointed out something about this and I liked the way he put it: he said this could be a reference to the idea of God recovering the broken image of God in humanity. “That which was lost” is “the image of God” and the mission of Christ is therefore framed more as a restoration of humanity than a conversion of individuals. That seems to me to fit really well with the rest of scripture as well as my experience with “evangelism.”

But the other way to look at this verse is what the ESV says: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” which doesn’t specifically refer to “lost people” but seems to have that implication. (I talked to my resident-Greek-expert-wife, and she said that it’s kind of ambiguous about which is more true to the Greek, though the ESV seems to be closer to the original sentence) This perspective seems to promote a kind of penal-substitution type idea that Jesus’ mission was to pay the price for each sinner who believes. While I don’t dispute the truth of that statement, it doesn’t seem to be the focus of Jesus’ ministry.

It seems to me Jesus’ ministry was much more relational and less entrepreneurial. The language of restoration makes a lot more sense to me than the language of commerce when we’re talking about the work of God.

That led us in to a little bit of discussion about our language and the way it frames our belief about an issue. When God is leading a person to reach out to someone, I think their response is shaped by the language with which they frame evangelism. For example, if I felt the Lord leading me to “walk across the room,” I may go and start a conversation, talk about life, ask some questions, learn about the person, and go from there. However, someone from a more solidly conservative-evangelical background might approach the situation differently. Feeling that same call to “walk across the room”, the conversation may quickly lead to something like “if you were to die tomorrow, do you know where you would be?” or maybe four spiritual laws, or the sinner’s prayer.

Granted this is not what B-Hizzle is advocating. He seems to fall somewhere in the middle, admitting he felt an urge to keep bringing up Church but at the same time feeling a need to let the relationship run it’s course and let the Lord work.

So after week one I have to say, I got more out of it than I thought I would. Although I feel like we pretty much got our collective head around the idea of “Just walking across the room” so it will be interesting to see what the next 3 weeks are about.

Ideas

I walked to work today, which takes me 30-35 minutes depending (today it depended on the WIND! took me 10 minutes just to go the last 3 blocks the wind was so strong!)

anyway that's a lot of time to think, and for some reason today I was thinking about some of my favorite movies. I realized that 3 of my all time favorite movies have a very strong common theme. The movies are (in no particular order) V For Vendetta, The Dancer Upstairs, and Stranger Than Fiction. The common theme is this: Ideas can be more powerful than even the people who thought them. This is a desire for my life- to have ideas that are bigger than me. Here are the ways this theme plays out in each of these movies (in case for some reason you GASP! haven't seen them!!)

V for Vendetta- The Ideas V lives and dies for are powerful ones, so much so that people put on the mask and overthrow the government, even though V is dead by that point. V also talks quite eloquently about the power of ideas.

The Dancer Upstairs- One man's ideas about government turn into a grass-roots revolution to which he is only very loosely connected. He has an alias ("Ezekiel") but most people have no idea who "Ezekiel" is, saying things like "he is the wind in the trees" "he is every tick of every clock" or something like that. In the end... well, I won't give away the end. GO RENT IT! I can let you borrow it if you want (might not find it at blockbuster...)

Stranger Than Fiction- Karen Eiffel is an author, and her ideas have power over the life of Harold Crick. The theme is much more of a metaphor in this movie, whereas the other two are more overt (talking about revolution and power) but it's there, and it's great.