Before I get into some new music I am listening to, I found this article on the mp3 generation quite interesting (hat tip: Jason)

New Music that I’ve been listening to:

The Tallest man in the World is a singer-songwriter from Sweden with a certain Dylanesque qualities.  His music hooked me instantly.  I love the lyrics particularly in this song (“The Gardener”):

Horse Feathers is another singer-songwriter that is worth listening to, check him out:

Julie Clawson talks about confession as she heard it first hand at Mars Hill.  Rather than simply being about confessing your sins and feeling badly about it, she makes the point that:

“…for example, when we participate in systems that support injustices in the world we are disrupting Shalom. I would never go so far as to say that buying a banana grown by oppressed workers and with dangerous polluting pesticides is a sin in the traditional understanding of the word, but it is a failure to love and a disruption of the way things ought to be. So we can confess that we have participated in the wrong order of things, failed to support God’s Shalom, and then choose to return (repent) to the order of love and stewardship that God desires. It’s not about acts of individual sin, it’s about an orientation of love.”

I think this is important because repentance is about more than feeling about, it is a turn that we make in our lives.

Todd talks about being sub-contextual.

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.

4.  Colin talks about why he won’t be listening to MacLaren in Scotland.

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.

Brittian said something really interesting over at his blog today:

Walter Brueggemann spoke about in The Prophetic Imagination.  He said that the Empire of control and competition, is constantly co-opting people’s revolutions.  In other words, when was the last time a revolutionary didn’t eventually become Emperor?  Think Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler…but maybe even more unfortunate are those true believers like the French revolutionaries whose ideas of liberty and equality eventually turned into a reign of terror.  Why?  Brueggemann points out that it is because those revolutions and revolutionaries bought into a critical deception.  The immediacy of their hope.  Anytime, he comments, the hope is too “here and now” it becomes prime real estate for imperial control.  The tangible, touchable, manageable realities of linear thought and rational process are Their domain.  Finally he councils us not to be Managers of change but rather to be Imaginers…  Poets, provocateurs, singers of songs, artists, prophets, painters, sculptors, wordsmiths, etc… Envision a new world, live into that new reality…but don’t necessarily engage in the dangerous assumption that CHANGE is the end all solution.

Brittian specifically is talking about the new ‘green revolution’ that seems to be taking place and how the same big companies are changing their marketing tactics to market to this target audience.  Rob Bell and Don Golden say someting similiar about the oppressed becoming the oppressors from Egypt to Jerusalem in their new book Jesus Wants to Save Christians (44-45):

God gives power and blessing so that justice and righteousness will be upheld for those who are denied them…

To forget this, to fail to hear the cry, to preserve prosperity at the expense of the powerless, is to miss what God had in mind…

Exile is when you forget your story

Exile isn’t just about location; exile is about the state of your soul.

Exile is when you fail to convert your blessings into blessings for others.

Exile is when you’re a stranger to the purposes of God

We have to be careful that we do not buy into ‘change’ as an idea simply as a cool ‘alternative.’  Otherwise, when things ‘change’ we will somehow believe we have reached our goal.  This new green revolution has become ‘the norm’ and the world has begun capitalizing off the label.  Ryan Bolger has a good graphic that I would like to borrow.  The image is a table of the difference between the ‘green’ revolution and the way that perhaps we should respond as Christians (labeled as ‘blue’).

He asks the important question, does the church need a color?  Over at Jesus Manifesto as well there has been an important discussion going on about language.  Who are we leaving out and who are we including based on our language?  It is easier than people sometimes think to learn a cultural language or a certain theological bent and to extol that theological bent to your congregation, but the danger is that the theology begins trumping Jesus Christ and the particular plan and revelation of God throughout time and space–the one that transcends cultures.  It is actually very easy for big companies to read this “cultural language” and create products which they can capitalize off of to “co-opt” the revolution (as Brittian said earlier).

The questions then are large: How does Christianity stay focused on Christianity and avoid being eaten up into a larger mass culture created by the media and big business?  How do we deal with the major environmental movements in a way that is true the particularity of Christ?  Which direction is the church going and is it the right direction? Are we following Christ or are we following culture?  If we are following culture, to what extent to we dwelve into it?  Over at emergent village one person argues that almost nothing is off limits.  Do you agree that Christians can go anywhere and do anything in the name of Christ?  Are there limits on our freedom as Paul often talked about, for the sake of our brothers?

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…