In later clarifying the second mistake (don’t do announcements at the beginning), Easum says:
…announcements at the beginning of a worship service so deadly- because they violate every media tenet as well slap as our culture in the face. Most younger people today do whatever they can to avoid watching a commercial on TV. Imagine what a media savvy twenty-something feels when subjected to five or ten minutes of commercials up front before they have the chance to decide if they like what’s happening in your worship.
And if you say, “That’s tough. We don’t bow to the culture,” you’re missing the point. The way to be counter-cultural is not by intentionally turning people away with your methodology. The way to be counter-cultural is to make the worship so appealing that the Holy Spirit has time to speak into their lives and transform their hearts into followers of Christ. You can’t do that if you run them off at the beginning of the service.
I don’t know Easum personally. He seems to have reasonably valid credentials for talking about church growth and church marketing, but I wonder if we have lost something in this message of making the Holy Spirit “appealing.”
There is nothing all that “appealing” to me about Jesus. He didn’t hold nice services and invite lots of people to hear him. In fact, he tried very often to turn people away or keep what he did a secret. What do we do with this Jesus in light of modern church marketing?
I’m not sure I have the answers, but I would appreciate any thoughts on the matter.
1. The Clawsons both lead me some good stuff. Mike’s blog has a very funny (and sad) story on how Christian Radio has been on a twenty year loop. It is these types of articles that makes me wonder if Christian entertainment and radio is totally out of touch with the world today. As a future teacher, we are constantly being told in our classrooms that high school changes dramatically every year. Each year, we are told, we need to reassess our goals and objectives based on the students. Should this be something the church is doing as well? Julie lead me to a very good poem that should be read to reflect on advent season by T.S. Eliot. I love his imagery in all his poetry.
2. There is a discussion going on over whether or not Rob Bell speaks out of both sides of his mouth. I, apparently, am his sole defender on the largely reformed blog. This should not be taken for a blanket endorsement of Bell by myself. I think that his teaching is inherently one-sided, but I think that we can all be guilty of this in one way or another if we are not careful. My one piece of advice to all ministers is to be careful with the words you speak to your congregations.
Do you find yourself saying the same things over and over again (see this if you’re not sure)? Does your congregation say that you sound like a broken record? One of the main things that pastors are guilty of is “getting off” on a pet doctrine and building a church around that pet doctrine. Granted, there are some things that probably need to be emphasized more based on the context and the community of your church, but there also needs to be a certain amount of challenge and push to your congregations as well. Sometimes congregations need to hear something different and something that may make them uncomfortable. Sound educational pedagogy says that we need to push our audience into a bit of disequilibrium (i.e., make the laugh, make them angry, sad etc.), but not into so much disequilbrium that they shut down and stop listening. Find that balance between raising emotions and keeping your audience engaged is a fine line that any good pastor must walk.
3. How would you answer Andrew Jone’s million dollar question? I would begin a house school where a group of one hundred students learn within the context of their community. They would shadow professionals in the field, learn job skills in relation to their field, and study what they are interested in. I don’t have all the detail worked out, but it would be a place where community service would be part of the curriculum. We would save money by using no textbooks and having the majority of the research done in public libraries. Students would be in charge of making lunches for the students in low-cost fashion. Jones also talks about five ways that churches can overcome the recession we are in. His views reflect many of theings I have said in the past (here, here, and here). If this isn’t enough, also check out Kathleen’s post on this subject.
5. Adrian talks about why Piper doesn’t own a TV, but that he does own a macbook. How are the internet and the TV the same? How are they different? There is a disscusion about this in relationship to education here. Because the internet is much more interactive (especially in a web 2.0 world), many have argued that there really is no comparison between TV and the internet.
I like to be on the cutting-edge of things. To be an effective leader, one must understand the trends of today and follow them through to see what these trends might look like 10 years from now and then again see things 100 years from now. An effective leader will consider how their practices will guide their students ten years from now. With this preface, I ask the question, “What is coming after postmodernism?”
First, a brief look at postmodernism. The philosophy of postmodernism deals with the complex issue of language. Philosphers for the last few hundred years have begun looking at how prior knowledge affects our reading of the materials in front of us. Theorists began noticing that the way we interpret texts seems very bound up in the way that we understand the world. We all come with our particular bias to a document and they suggested that we must admit this bias. As a result, others took this theory to the point of postmodernism which suggests that truth largely eludes us. We can’t know truth because each of us constructs our truth around us in an individual way.
This is postmodernism in a nutshell. What is coming next? We must first consider the virtually unlimited capacity of the internet and social networking and the effect that it will have on education. Watch this video:
Now consider what implications the video has for education. Postmodernism, the idea that truth is elusive and every person must construct their own truth, will inevitably be replaced by what I refer to as color-constructed truth. I can only explain this by way of example. In the future, my projection is that all work will be done online. A student might write an essay and then each person will comment on that essay using new programs like textflow. Program like textflow allow each person to comment on a document created and then to be sent back to the original author. The author can then choose to include or reject these comments in their papers. If you think of each of these comments as additions or subtractions from a paper and think of each other author as a color, you find that each person’s truth is constructed within community with each color a part of that student’s work.
I project work will be done within this color-constructed truth model within fifteen to twenty years. Wiki’s are the beginning of this technology, and more evolved wiki’s will be created within two to three years that allow students to edit one another’s work cross-continentally in real time. Indeed, the beta programs have already come out for many of these programs. For instance, in my high school science classes we conducted experiments, wrote up our findings in a quadrille notebook, and turned them in for a grade. A simple entry might have an hypothesis, a discussion of the experiment and the steps within the experiment, the data, and then the outcome. In a color-constructed truth model, a teacher would input their hypothesis into a wiki database, and then students, using their color and IP address, would input information adding to the hypothesis or beginning new paragraphs where they disagree with or insert a qualifier. Students are required to make the hypothesis paragraph flow together. They are required to construct the hypothesis together and to edit it together until they have come to a democratic decision. Students maintian some individuality in this process, but their thoughts are absorbed into the classroom community.
In the same way, analyzing the results of data used to be graphed in a quadrille notebook and analyzed for patterns, but in today’s wiki world, the same data can be entered in a classroom data table in real time and analyzed statistically for variations and outliers. Statistics will be the new mothermath in this new color-constructed truth model. The theoretical maths will still have a major place to help us make sense of the statistics, but statistics that used to be impossibly large are becoming quite manageable in a world with unlimited amounts of data. It is possible to have a district at all the high schools do the same experiment and to put all the data from the experiment into one wiki where the data can be analyzed on a meta-level. These types of meta-level analyses will become more normal in research at the graduate level and will also trickle down to high school and elementary education.
1. Some thing that Joe Biden will play good cop while Obama’s new chief of staff will play bad cop.
2. One person writes on why Obama should include McCain in his cabinet. I think this is the BEST idea I have head in a while and hope that others will encourage Obama to do the same.
3. Will females be represented on Obama’s Cabinet? This is question we all should be watching closely for in the announcements next week.
4. With the holidays coming up, Jonathon brings up the catch-22 involved with retailers this Christmas. On the one hand, we don’t want to be consumed by consumeristic tendencies, but on the other hand not buying will hurt our economy overall. See the New York Time Article on the economy for more.
5. Over at FP Passport, I am happy that Obama is considering a regional approach to Afghanistan, but am still angry that he is considering a bailout for automakers (Jordon Cooper seems to share my anger…while you’re there also look at what Starbucks would look like if it were a church). I would encourage everyone again to read about the famine in Afghanistan and get president-elect Obama to help fix the conditions which lead people towads terrorism in Afghanistan.
6. Lord, we pray for Wilmington and the 7,000 who have lost their jobs in this unfortunate layoffs at DHL. Please help Clinton County recover this and get them back on their feet.
7. The New York Time also deals with the catch-22 of foreign policy having to do with Pakistan and the Taliban. Now that Pakistan is actually taking action, the times reports that it is much more difficult for Pakistan than they originally thought it would be. They have to destroy elaborate tunnel system to get to the Taliban. This would not be so difficult if they could resort to what the times calls “the scorched early policy,” but this type of fighting alienates the neutral Pakistanis and throws them further into the hands of the Taliban. If we support Pakistan by giving them more resources, they will use it for more money in a war that, even with full sustained military action as in the region they are in now, is much more difficult to “win” because of the elusive nature of the enemy. The soluation? Humanitarian aid and decisions made by non-western leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Taliban. This is the only way to get the aid in to the people who need it most.
9. The president of Iran sent a letter to congratulate Mr. Obama upsetting conservatives and receiving praise from moderate politicians. It will be interesting to see how things turn out for Ahmahenjad in the upcoming election in Iran. Lord, we ask for your divine presence to be in Iran. We ask for your spirit to speak to these people. We ask for your power to present in all of these situations.
10. Father Stephen quotes Kallistos Ware’s Cosmic Christ and it is worth reading to get an Eastern Orthodox perspective on creation.
11. More talk about Shane Claiborne at Evangelical Political Analysis.
12. Alan Creech gives a timely post on St. Martin in the midst of veterans day.
I wrote about this earlier and would like to continue my thoughts here. Noted at Brandywine Books and more fully expounded upon at Reformed Pilgrim, there is a list of five “trends” in the church (these are based on a list by D.A. Carson):
1. It is important to observe contradictory trends. For example, “He said we have a lot more good commentaries available to us than we did fifty years ago. Yet, mainline churches have fewer conversions than ever before.” I especially like Reformed Pilgrim’s thoughts when he says, “Our mainline churches are focusing on the minutia difference between supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism, for example, but are ignoring the call to both know God and to follow his sending us to our neighbor’s house. There should be a constant tension between group Bible studies and sharing of one’s faith. Otherwise we end up in a holy huddle somewhere arguing about non-essentials.”
2. Current evangelical fragments are moving into a new phase — into polarized “clumps.” One way to help break these clumps is to stop the divide between youth and adult worship that sometimes occurs in traditional structure. Clumping is not really a new phenomenon. Ever since the reformation we have been seeing clumps forming and breaking off from state religions. As state religions lost more and more power in Europe, individual communities could build localized contexts to meet local needs. This idea of ‘locality’ was carried nowhere more than in America. With the advent of Luther and ’sola scriptura,’ there have been varying ways in which different scholars have interpreted the Bible. The only ‘new’ thing about this is that, more and more often, more radical or ‘extreme’ views of scripture can gain ground via the internet through blogs and social networking. Recently I was listening to post-election panel discussions on Princeton’s website, and one professor noted that Barack Obama understood something about the world. She said we are not living in a world where America can be at the ‘top’ anymore. America has to, instead, be a central network hub for the world with lots of connections. This shift in policy that will come with Obama’s presidency also says something about the way that church will happen in this new century.
3. The most dangerous trends in any age are the trends that most people do not see. I have quoted one of those trends on my blog earlier from a New Yorker article on sex that needs serious consideration. I would suggest also looking at how the blog halfway to normal dealt with this issue of sexuality. Carson makes the case that evangelical leaders need to stop beating the dead horse of 1920’s liberalism, and according to Reform Pilgrim, “Today’s issues like justification, inerrancy, primacy of family, gender roles, sexuality, pornography, modesty, race relations (very few race-integrated churches), tolerance, consumerism and human flourishing are the current issues at hand.” I like this outlook. On trend that we have to consider is why superheroes have often taken the place of Saints in contemporary times.
4. There is a trend in our churches to be consumed by social concern. David Fitch recently wrote on why full-fledged support of Obama, while not necessarily harmful, sometimes help us miss the centrality of the gospel as small (we so often want it to be something large that we forget it is like a mustard seed…and props to Jason for the link to Fitch’s article). Over at Kingdom Grace, there is also a wake-up call going on asking why we are so involved with social concern (which, seems to be argued there, is only an extension of Christian sub-culture). Social concern is very true of the emergent movement. Jesus himself, however, was quite concerned about social issues. The main question we must consider is how and why Jesus concerned himself with social issues (the answers to this are as many as the books who claim to know the historical Jesus). If you read Crossan, for instance, he says:
…[Jesus sought to] rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenged launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterrean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shae, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish heirarchies, and maintain discriminations.
Is this necessarily the picture of Jesus? Or is it perhaps Crossan’s longing for his own world to see political equality and egalitarianism? The question may not be answered simply. Crossan certainly does make a valuable point about the life and times of Jesus missed by more conservative readers, but he does make a bold statement that the central message of Jesus is about “free healing” that launched a political revolution. Did Jesus really mean to launch a political revolution? How do we put all of this together with his kingdom? These are all central questions that Christian organizations must deal with today.
5. There is a trend in our churches to emphasize discipleship over the gospel. I think that there should be a balance between the two, just as there is with everything else. Gospel should naturally lead towards discipleship.
Mark Driscoll was recently in Australia, and when I listened to what he had to say about the Austrialian church, I was quite alarmed. He prefaced his talk saying that he was going to give 18 points about what was wrong with the church in Australia, but what it turned into as I listened was an American guy beating Australia saying that America knows better than Australia how to do church. I had to stop listening after the fifth point because the points were bcoming redundant and making me increasingly frustrated. Here are the first five points with my commentary on them below.
1. The Bible guys are not the missional guys which leads to irrelevence. In other words, he said that there is a difference between being faithful and being fruitful. He mentioned that there is a difference between knowing “our theological systems are straight” and “to be fruitful.” In the talk, the only way I could understand what being fruitful meant was that you get a lot of people inside a church. The funny thing is that Jesus rarely preached inside of a synagogue, and when he did, it was usually a critique. Second, Jesus pushed more people away overall than he gained as followers. Is Jesus not being faithful to God on earth?
2. The second thing he mentioned is that “socialism is bad” as is the “influence of Great Britain.” His answer? Be more entrepreneruial. Basically he suggesting “cutting” all the weakest pastors. How does he define weakness? Again, I can only gather that it came from above: numbers in the church.
3. The third thing was rewarding “good pastors.” He called it a merit based system. I can’t even begin to tell you what is wrong with this. First, this makes church into nothing more than a business with some guys at the top looking at numbers rather than people and evaluating evangelism based on how many people come into the church. Is anyone else upset by this?
4. Australian young men are immature. How does he define immature? Well, they live with their parents until they are 25. It seems as though I am immature because I still live my parents and I am 22. I am getting my fifth year credential and then I might live here even longer if need be. Driscoll seems to be defining maturity and masculinity with individuality. I would suggest that Driscoll search the scriptures a bit more on this subject and check his cultural and sociological baggage at the door. He is basicallly calling all of Asia immature because their cultural values are different than ours. This is a big problem with Americans going to other countries and “diagonosing” problems there.
5. Church planting is not wide-spread or welcome. He suggested they need more “pioneers.” While this may be true, the way he described again is such an American way of understanding church planting. Certain countries look to their denominations for understanding and this is not bad or wrong, it is just different. Again, he seems to think that “new” is better than established denominational traditions.
All in all, Driscoll needs to be careful how quickly he is condemning things because they are different than America. He needs to seperate his theology from his country.
There is more talk of Amazon Kindle on the web (thanks to Jim West for pointing me to it). I think it is important for people to be up to date on issues of the e-paper revolution (see the BBC’s comments here). Microsoft is no longer in this race to try and compete with google books. Let me make a few predictions based on this latest information:
1) The richest person will be the one who combines the iPhone with the kindle and can do it at low cost.
2) Google and apple will team up to create an online library that can be accessed through their cellular device. There will be previews of books and the ability to buy books online.
3) There will be more decentralized books being written and desiminated via cellular devices than ever before. Writing will become more free-form in nature. Novels will be writen for niche audiences and complex artistic books will be much cheaper to make and print for visual enjoyment (i.e. comics)
4) Just as news has become individualized, books will also become individualized and the amount of books will increase because of the relative decrease in start-up costs.
2) Jesus manifesto is dealing with issues of dispensantionalism and eschatology. Sam argues on there that the dispensationalist view of the second coming holds a paradox: the first time Jesus comes to save the prostitute and the second time he comes to kill them. He struggles with how to make the two different missions of Jesus come together. He brings up the point that our end-times eschatology influences of practice of church (for the intellecutal: ecclesiology). Often a dispensationalist theology, he argues, makes us unconcerned with the present world. Do you agree?
3) Visit here for up to date news on decisions for Obama’s cabinet. I personally would like to see Colin Powell in his cabinet. What do others think about this? Some think John Kerry will be the next secretary of state? Really? What do you think?
4) The New York Times writes on the difficulties Obama will face after his inaguration. What is the main issue that you want to see Obama address in his first one hundred days?
5) FFF argues that education is a socialist regime. I argued in my letter that Obama should provide more reforms and more resources for schools, but do you think the federal government should just take a step back instead and let states deal with these issues?
James once said “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself form being polluted by the world” (James 1:27). This doesn’t seem like such a radical point of view until one considers the way that the Romans viewed religion. Borrowing from Richard Horsley’s Jesus and Empire, we can see just as much Romans viewed religion as an extension of the state:
“The most divine Caesar…we should consider equal to the Beginning of all things…; for when everything was falling [into disorder] and tending toward dissolution, he restored it once more and gave it to the whole world a new aura; Caesar…the common good fortune of all…the beginning of life and vitality…All the cities unanimously adopt the birthday of the divine Caesar as the beginning of the year…who was being sent to us and our descendants as Savior, has put an end to war and has set all things in order; and [whereas] having becoming [god] manifest, Caesar has fulfilled all hopes of earlier times…the birthday of the God [Augustus] has been for the whole world the beginning of good news (gr: evangelion) concerning him [therefore let a new era beginning from his birth).” –OGIS 2.#458
When James says the word “religion” and does not include the word “Caesar,” he is subverting empire and committing a crime against the crown. Not only that, but it is a commentary on the whole power structure of Rome. How did Rome perpetuate the infamous Pax Romana? The ‘peace of Rome’ was sustained by taking money from conquered people’s in the form of tribute to the capital and Rome redistributing that money to Roman legions who would, in turn, protect the crown. While Rome takes from others to protect themselves, the church, as a vital and life-sustaining force for the world, gives to others who cannot protect themselves.
But this is the way that church has always been. We have always been called to give ourselves away and to show God’s grace by helping the helpless. We have always been called to share the gospel to all, even if this means great personal loss for ourselves. We have always been called to carry our cross. We have always been called, even if it is dangerous…
I got a lot of books for my birthday and I am looking foward to reading them (please note that my reading of these books is not an endorsement of any of these authors):
1) The Jesus of Suburiba: Have we Tamed the Son of God to Fit our Lifestyle? – Mike Erre. Mike is the pastor down at Rock Harbor in Costa Mesa. I went to their church a lot while I was down at Azusa Pacific and I really enjoyed it.
2) Jesus wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile – Rob Bell and Don Golden. This was a gift for my birthday from my friend Wes. I have never actually finished a Rob Bell book yet. I started both Velvet Elvis and Sex God, but didn’t have time finish them. Because I didn’t own them, I was never able to come back to them.
3) The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant – J.D. Crossan. Crossan is the most liberal of my authors I am reading right now. I started reading this book at Archives earlier last semester. I really enjoyed the first two pages, and am interested to see where Crossan lands at the end of this book. Sarah was with me when I was first reading it and, as a good girlfriend, logged it in her memory and bought it for me all the way from China.
4) Surprised by Hope – N.T. Wright. I am also interested to read this gift from Sarah (two books must mean that she really loves me). I loved “The Challenge of Jesus” when I first read it.
5) The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation – Arthur Ferrill. I was reading about the fall of Rome on wikipedia and his theory sounded very intersting, so I bought the book.
On top of all my reading for my credential classes, I don’t know when I’m going to have time to read all of these, but I look forward to some interesting interaction with these texts here on the blog…
I sat at a light on the way to work and a group of five stood on the corner.
Another sign said, honk if you support prop. 9. Prop 9 is a proposed law that would make it illegal for homosexuals to be married in California.
Coming into work I say hi to one of the girls.
“Did you see the people on the corner?” I ask.
“No,” she said. “What is going on?”
“There are all these people protesting prop. 9. You know the one about homosexuality and legalizing it.”
“Oh. I think it’s dumb,” she said.
“What?”
“That people are so upset about it. I mean, homosexuals are people too. You can’t legislate morality. They are going to be together whether the law says so or not.”
“Who are you going to vote for?” I ask not really responding to what she said.
“Probably Obama,” she said. “I like Obama.”
(UPDATED): Want more on this subject? An interesting line of logic is used here.
