Theology

Alternate Cities & Cultures

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Once in cities, Christians should be a dynamic counterculture.  It is not enough for Christians to simply live as individuals in the city.  They must life as a particular kind of community.  Jesus told his disciples that they were "a city on a hill" that showed God's glory to the world (Matt. 5:14-16).  Christians are called to be an alternative city within every earthly city, and alternate human culture within every human culture, to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways.

Tim Keller in "A New Kind of Urban Christian," Christianity Today, May 2006, p. 38.

CTR and Emerging Church

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I've read three articles in the Spring 2006 Criswell Theological Review so far.  Two of them are public and can be found at the CTR website. 

The interview with Brian McLaren, I thought, was great.  As often occurs, I was both very encouraged by Brian's answers and very provoked (and at times disturbed) by some of what he said.  It's a great read and important for anyone trying to understand McLaren or the Emergent side of the emerging church.

John Hammett's "Ecclesiological Assessment of the Emergent Church" (not the CTR site) is just okay.  It's helpful in some ways, but nothing too special.  I've interacted briefly with Hammett about this paper before, and he's a good guy who is trying to understand the movement.  It's a difficult task.

Mark Driscoll's "Pastoral Perspective on the Emergent Church" is really good.  I think he does a good job of taking messy emerging church junk and distilling it until we have some clarity.  Read this article.  It not only helps us understand the EC, it helps us understand the church and our interaction with culture.

This week I hope to read Robert Webber's "Narrating the World Once Again: A Case for an Ancient-Future Faith."  I'm intrigued.  I'm pretty happy with the Criswell Review so far.  If they continue to get this kind of content, it should be a consistently good read.

Theopraxis: Theology of the Suburbs

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Scott Berkhimer of Theopraxis and MereMission is in suburban Philadelphia.  He has written a series of posts on "A Theology of the Suburbs."  I've been enjoying his thoughts and felt I should provide a central location for these links here.  He offers no specific titles, so I will offer a very brief identifier for each post.

Part 1: Pursuit of Happiness; Part 2: Choice & Imagination;
Part 3: Economic Influence; Part 4: Rootlessness;
Summary: Restatement; Part 5: Race & Ethos 1;
Part 6: Race & Ethos 2; Part 7: Imago Dei & Sabbath Keeping;
Part 8: Shaping Imaginations; Part 9: Simplicity & Generosity
Part 10: Hospitality & Eucharist;  Part 11: Suburbs & Gospel

What Culture War Does to Warriors

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CT Online: Furrowed Brows Inc.  According to the article, the culture war's biggest casualties may be Christian joy and hope.  A blurb...

There was violence and disintegration in the day ofJesus, too. Jesus was hardly shy about confronting the patterns of sin in his culture—though he was consistently harder on the pious than he was on the pagans.

But everywhere Jesus went, life blossomed. The sick were healed, lepers were touched, daughters and sons were plucked from the mouth of the grave. Jesus left behind him a trail of leaps and laughter, reunited families, and terrific wine, as well as dumbfounded synagogue leaders, uneasy monarchs, and sleepless procurators. His witness against violence, amidst a culture in rebellion against the good, was neither withdrawal nor war. It was simply life: abundant, just, generous life. And, ultimately, a willingness to let the enemies of life do their worst, confident that even death could not extinguish the abundant life of God.

Quotes from The Missional Leader

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Missional_leader_1I'm reading The Missional Leader by Roxburgh and Romanuk.  If I stopped reading now (not yet halfway through), it's still one of the most important books I've read in the last couple of years.  I'm sure much of that is because of where I am in ministry and the things I need to think about for my local church.  And I don't agree with everything, but I can't say enough about what this book is working in my life and ministry.  Here are a few short quotes...

A missional church is a community of God's people who live into the imagination that they are, by their very nature, God's missionary people living as a demonstration of what God plans to do in and for all of creation in Jesus Christ. (p. xv)

Missional leadership is about creating and environment within which the people of God in a particular location may thrive. (p. 6)

Today, we give up on congregations that we declare are out of touch with the culture.  We run to big, successful places with marquee-name leaders to find out how to be successful.  In so doing we are going in exactly the opposite direction from everything we see in the Biblical narratives.  We have forgotten that God's future often emerges in the most inauspicious places.  If we let our imagination be informed by this realization, it will be obvious that we need to lead in ways that are different from those of a CEO, an entrepreneur, a super leader with a wonderful plan for the congregation's life.  Instead we need leaders with the capacity to cultivate an environment that releases the missional imagination of the people of God. (p. 21)

Lost Art

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I encourage you to read "The Importance of Art When Engaging Non-Believers" by David Fairchild.  Helpful.  A blurb...

Since art is both enjoyableand educating, and communicates a message about itself and about the world that it was created in, we should pray that more and more the Christian community will see the need to engage the arts as the primary way to speak intelligently and truthfully to those who are made in God’s image.

Matthew Smith

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Dsc_00421It was great to have Matthew Smith at the OBI conference on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.  If you don't know about Matthew, he is one of the main guys at Indelible Grace.  They take really old hymns (most are 200-300 years old or so) and rework or rewrite the music.  Fantastic stuff.  I've been listening to IG for 3-4 years and love it.  I've also been keeping up with Matthew's blog for some time.  He is a member of City Church in East Nashville.

While there I bought the new IG CD (their fourth) and Matthew's CD "Even When My Heart is Breaking" which is available on iTunes or you can order it on his website.

Matthew played for over an hour on Tuesday night and for 30 minutes on Tuesday morning.  I also got to spend time talking with him on Wednesday for lunch.  Really good guy who I recommend for his voice, his music, his heart, and his deep love of Jesus and the Gospel.  I have rarely heard a Christian singer who understands the Gospel so well.

You can also read about Matthew from my buddy Wes who heard Matthew in concert on Wednesday night in Lexington, KY.

Post-Reformed

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Growing discussion on being post-reformed.  See The Craw and PostReformed.  Some very good stuff here.  These seven "Being PostReformed..." statements come from The Craw but compiled together at PR...

  1. Being PostReformed means laying aside a dogmatic application of a particular reading of the Reformed Confessions that keeps one from appreciating and fellowshipping with brethren from other traditions outside of Reformedom.
  2. Being PostReformed enables one to see the Bible as God’s grand story of the ages and not to view it as a repository of propositions and factoids. It’s not a Tommy-gun that we load up with pet proof texts…to blast other Christians with. It sometimes gets mysterious and messy but the PostReformed man is comfortable with that and doesn’t feel the necessity to correct God via better formulations and propositions.
  3. Being PostReformed allows one to ask, “who can I work with” rather than “who can I not work with” in ministry opportunities outside of one’s immediate church, denomination, or tradition. This puts things in positive rather than negative terms and frees one to find allies instead of drawing an ever more exclusive circle of “orthodoxy.”
  4. Being PostReformed means that when one arrives at a roadblock in one’s tradition, a roadblock created by traditions that attempt to interpret tradition,     one is free jump into another road altogether. The PostReformed are not afraid to borrow from another tradition’s formulation of an issue, or to leave a particular point to ambiguity. He is able to clearly see he is bound by God’s Word and that tradition must serve it. He is a man in full.
  5. Being PostReformed means that you are sometimes not persuaded when the majority of current scholarship in your tradition agrees on something. They may be blind to the fact that they have arrived in a self-referential cul-de-sac. Jumping out of the cul-de-sac to see what another tradition says or to access earlier formulations from your own tradition isn’t something to be afraid of.
  6. Being PostReformed means you regard Arminians, Emerging Churchmen, and Roman Catholics as Christians…and treat them as such. You work vigorously to build unity, without compromising truth, to demonstrate the visible unity of the Body of Christ, wherever you can, to the watching world. The PostReformed man takes the Beatitudes seriously with great longing in his heart: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God.”
  7. Being PostReformed means having enough confidence in your Reformed theological convictions that you can interact substantively with Christians in other traditions without fear. The fear that often masquerades as dogmatism is replaced by a love for the truth and your brethren.

Keller: Preaching to Believers/Unbelievers

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Tim Keller gave a lecture at Covenant Seminary in 2004 on Preaching to Believers and Unbelievers.  He deals with a few very important points.  One of them is about the power of the preaching event over the moralistic application of the sermon (evidenced by taking notes).  I have quoted Keller on this issue recently.  He also deals with Deconstructing Defeater Beliefs in the lecture.  Give it a listen.

McNeal on Spiritual Formation

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I've been thinking a bit about spiritual formation lately, and this lengthy quote from Reggie McNeal has been helpful.  I am almost done with this book and I've really enjoyed it.

In the modern world spiritual formation was thought to be accomplished by taking a student through a prescribed group of texts that addressed topic in a curricular approach.  This is so deeply ingrained in us that we approach almost any learning experience in the church this way.  Only in the modern world would you find people huddled together reading literature produced by mission agencies as a primary approach to mission "education" or would you convene a conference for people to spend all day taking notes in a notebook on fasting and prayer.  This feels "normal" to us.  In the world that is dawning, the curriculum approach to growing people is increasingly view as a supplemental strategy to the primary approach: learning agendas driven by life issues and informed by life experiences.

Jesus facilitated spiritual formation in his disciples by introducing them to life situation and then helping them debrief their experiences.  He taught them to pray.  He did not lead them in a study course on prayer.  He took them on mission trips (Samaria, for example); he didn't read books to them on the subject of missions.  He sent them on learning junkets and exposed them to situations.  He asked their opinion on what they were hearing and observing ("Who do you say that I am?").  He asked for radical obedience from them.  He asked them to take up a cross and follow him.  He did not send them to school and wait for them to graduate before giving them a significant assignment.  He sent them out before they were ready to go and then helped them to learn from their experiences.  He talked about the kingdom of God, but mostly he lived the kingdom of God, practicing a life in front of his followers that modeled very different core values than those given to them by the Pharisees in the synagogues.

Helping people grow, particularly in the arena of spiritual formation, is about unpacking life: challenging our emotional responses that are destructive (envy, hatred, bitterness); challenging our biases (racial prejudice, social and economic elitism, intellectual snobbery); challenging our assumptions ("my needs are the most important"); challenging our responses; unpacking our frustrations, our hopes, our dreams, and our disappointments; bringing life to God rather than teaching about God, somehow hoping to get him into our life.

Reggie McNeal in The Present Future, pgs 85-86, emphasis his.

Speaking on Love & Sacrifice

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The next two weeks are shaping up to be very busy for me. 

A week from today I start speaking at Oneida Baptist Institute's "Commitment Week."  This is the boarding school in Kentucky where Michael Spencer (iMonk) is campus minister.  I will be speaking six times on the theme "Love & Sacrifice."  Preparing six messages for 3 1/2 days is a bit overwhelming, but I'm totally into it and pumped about it.  The music will be led by Matthew Smith who is with Indelible Grace.  Pretty cool, eh?

Our family of six is taking a rental van and road tripping it.  We think we will try to stay the night in Lexington, KY Saturday night so we can spend some time hanging with friends on late Saturday afternoon and evening.  (If you are in the area and want to connect, or buy us dinner, email me.)  Then Sunday through Wednesday I will be speaking at OBI to a bunch of middle and high schoolers, as well as OBI teacher and employees, about Jesus.  It's going to be a great trip.  If this comes to mind, please pray for the students and for me as I prepare.

Oh, and by the way, I pulled an April Fool's joke on my wife yesterday.  I created a new email addy, internetmonk (at) gmail.com, and sent her a message from "Michael Spencer" saying that our arrangements for housing at OBI have fallen through and that there is no place for our family to stay now, so she and the kids will probably have to stay home.  She bought it.  Sorry honey!  I love you!

Criswell Journal

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If you haven't found it yet, you need to head over to the Criswell Journal site and check out their new issue on the Emerging Church.  You can read an interview with Brian McLaren and Mark Driscoll's article "A Pastoral Perspective on the Emergent Church."  Kudos to Criswell guys like Alan Streett and Denny Burk who obviously know how to draw a crowd to a theological journal site.  Well done, and here's to thoughtful conversation on the Gospel.

Thorn Asks, What Does God Want?

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Joe Thorn starts a four parter on "What Does God Want?"  (Someone needs to tell Joe that God probably wants more than Joe can write in four posts, but Joe is just a simple guy after all.)  In part one he deals with some spiritual disciplines in light of the values Micah 6:8. 

I am not pitting spiritual disciplines against these values, but I ampitting the narrow, hyper-personalized approach to spirituality against what God desires for us. When Bible study, prayer and fellowship for the purpose of personal, spiritual strength are our greatest emphases we are missing the point. What God requires of us is not closet spirituality, but public spirituality.

I'm quite certain that nearly no one will disagree with Thorn on this, but in practice most of us are guilty of "closet spirituality."  Too often our pride will keep us from admitting it.  I've been a member at churches where the first application point every week was, "So first of all we need to read our Bible's more."  Aren't we are known by the fruit we produce?  It's very easy to see that the American church looks more like Job's counselors than justice and mercy workers.

Driscoll Apology

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Remember the whole Mark Driscoll and Brian McLaren exchange a while back?  Remember how Driscoll took shots at McLaren and Doug Pagitt?  Driscoll now apologizes.

A godly friend once asked me an important question: “What do you wantto be known for?” I responded that solid theology and effective church planting were the things that I cared most about and wanted to be known for. He kindly said that my reputation was growing as a guy with good theology, a bad temper, and a foul mouth. This is not what I want to be known for. And after listening to the concerns of the board members of the Acts 29 Church Planting Network that I lead, and of some of the elders and deacons at Mars Hill Church that I pastor, I have come to see that my comments were sinful and in poor taste. Therefore, I am publicly asking for forgiveness from both Brian and Doug because I was wrong for attacking them personally and I was wrong for the way in which I confronted positions with which I still disagree. I also ask forgiveness from those who were justifiably offended at the way I chose to address the disagreement. I pray that you will accept this posting as a genuine act of repentance for my sin.