Today I finished a magazine article called “The Fight of Your Life”. It was an inspirational piece on fighting to build an excellent life. The take-away points were: 1. An excellent life is based on God’s ways, not man’s. 2. Take the time to think about what an excellent life means to you and plan how you will achieve it. 3. Don’t let the barriers … Continue reading Timing is Everything
In my last post I kind of poked at those who use ridiculous notions of socialization to criticize homeschooling. Today, I’m going to sharpen my stick and point it in the direction of some of my fellow homeschoolers. It is my firm belief that an unfortunate number of Christian homeschoolers are putting their child’s future spiritual walk at risk in service to an idea which is not even necessary to the faith. I am talking, of course, about those who are teaching their children a from a creationist, anti-evolutionary POV. (Of course there are parents and churches who are teaching kids who aren’t being homeschooled the same things, but for the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to focus on homeschoolers who are doing this.)
Of course, one of the primary reasons some Christian homeschoolers teach their children that evolution, the big bang and such are wrong, is because they feel an obligation to inculcate a strong faith in their children. However, it is my very strong opinion, backed up by the experiences of many people who have been down this road themselves, that these parents are actually sowing the seeds of the destruction of their children’s faith in the future. Continue reading “Teaching Creation Science or ID? A formula for putting your child’s Christian faith at risk.”
I wrote an article recently for a magazine about “The Jesus Brand”. It basically revolved around our relationship as Christians with Christian retailing, but if I had seen this doozy of a product line before writing it, I may well have gone in a different direction with it: The tagline on the webpage says “Look your Sunday best! Guaranteed to help you be worthy and … Continue reading Jesus, Virtuous Vanilla Lip Balm, and a Prostitute
Come to me all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Matthew 11:28-30
This is one of these verses which sounds nice and for a while you can take comfort in it. Until things really just get pushed too far and you realize that you have no idea what the blazes it’s supposed to mean and it doesn’t even seem to be true as far as you can see. What is Jesus’ yoke anyways? Continue reading ““My yoke is easy and my burden is light . . .””
N.T. Wright is a wonderful Episcopalian bishop (yes there is such a thing). I don’t have time to comment on it now, but he’s just written a book called Surprised by Hope which Scot McKnight over at Jesus Creed has been discussing. Someone there linked to this wonderful interview with Rev. Wright in Time magazine. In his book Wright is looking at how over time, … Continue reading NT Wright
I came across a great quote today from Pope Benedict which presents a way of thinking about living an authentic Christian life in our modern, western world:
We do not know what the future of Europe will be. Here we must agree with Toynbee, that the fate of a society always depends on its creative minorities. Christian believers should look upon themselves as just such a creative minority, helping Europe to reclaim what is best in its heritage and thereby to place itself at the service of all humankind. (See the whole article by Benedict here.)
Toynbee was a British historian who looked at history as a series of rising and falling cultures. In his understanding, cultures are shaped by the particular challenges their culture faced. The role of the “creative minority” was to offer solutions which addressed the challenges of the times. There’s a very interesting and long discussion to be had regarding how this works, however, I have kids to take care of so I’m going to cut it as short as I can. Continue reading “Christians as a “Creative Minority””
As my family and friends who read this blog already know I was raised Catholic. I stopped considering myself Catholic over a decade ago because I believe the RCC to be in error on a great number of issues. However, I do think that the Catholic Church has managed to hold on to some old wisdoms about and tools for the Christian faith which most Protestants aren’t well aware of. An example of this would be some of the old, stuffy prayers which Evangelicals in particular tend to scoff at. While praying from the heart is essential, using a written prayer can be like giving a lover a love poem written by Shakespeare or Elizabeth Barret Browning rather than writing your own. Continue reading “A prayer to begin your day with”
In my last post, I looked at how the emerging church movement is trying to re-construct Christianity in regards to praxis, or the living of a Christian life. Today I’m going to look at the emerging church’s approach to doxology.
To start, I want to acknowledge that I’m using the word “Doxology” in an unorthodox way. Technically doxology refers to a statement of praise and glory to God. The two we are most familiar with are “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen” and the commonly sung:
For my purposes, I am using the word doxology in the sense which Geoffrey Wainwright expresses it in the title to his 1978 book: Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life. Doxology is how we live out our theological belief in Christianity when we gather and worship, pray and meditate and then take that experience out into the world we live in. J.I. Packer in his book God Has Spoken (which I haven’t actually read, for the record) puts it this way:
“Theology, as I constantly tell my students, is for doxology: the first thing to do with it is to turn it into praise and thus honor the God who is its subject, the God in whose presence and by whose help it was worked out. Paul’s summons to sing and make music in one’s heart to the Lord is a word for theologians no less than for other people (Ephesians 5:19). Theologies that cannot be sung (or prayed for that matter) are certainly wrong at a deep level, and such theologies leave me, in both senses, cold: cold-hearted and uninterested.”
So for this discussion I am using the word doxology to indicate those ways that we as Christians practice our faith when we worship, gather together for church, meditate, read scripture or engage in other spiritual disciplines.
One of the features of Protestantism is that it is reactionary in nature. Continue reading “The Emerging Church Promise and Failure Part 2”
Over the last couple of months, I have been looking into something called the “Emerging Church” movement. This movement seems to be seeking to reform the evangelical church in light of the failures of the evangelical movement to bear transformational fruit in the lives of individuals and the larger community.
There are things that are happening, being talked about and experimented with in the Emerging Church movement which I think are very, very good for the church body as a whole. I can easily see a time when the work and ideas germinating today in the Emerging Church movement will become extremely influential in Christianity. However, I am also concerned that ultimately, they are setting themselves up for failure. Their influence, it seems to me, may end up being one of style rather than the radical transformation of the Christian life and church which they seek and which the gospel exhorts us too.
Before I get to what I think are the seeds of their failure, I want to discuss what I think they are getting right. The Emerging Church movement tends to be focused on two areas: praxis and doxology. Praxis being how we live as Christians. Doxology being concerned with how we “do” church through our services, prayers and other communal activities. In Evangelism attention to these two areas of Christianity has tended to be thin gruel. Praxis meant don’t sin and doxology meant sing, listen to a sermon and pass out grape juice and bad bread once a month. As the black sheep offspring of the Evangelical movement, Emerging Churchers are taking these areas apart and trying to completely reconstruct them into gourmet meals using both experimentation and borrowing from ancient wisdoms.
I am going to do a three part series on what I think the Emerging Church movement has to teach us as Christians, what I think the seeds of their undoing are and a new vision which could turn the Emerging Church movement into the transformational power I think the church needs today.
In Part 1 I will cover praxis. Part 2 will be on doxology and Part 3 will cover the flaw and new vision I have spoken of above.
In my experience I think it’s fair to say that conventional evangelism presents praxis as a series of rules for personal morality which we should be motivated to follow out of loyalty to God. Continue reading “Emerging Church – Promise and Failure Part 1”
Over the last few years, I have come to the conclusion that God is probably at work in our world much more than we modern sophisticates realize. The ancients had no problem declaring that an event which effected groups of people and nations – natural or man made – was God’s hand at work. Today we may acknowledge God at work in individual lives, but … Continue reading Hmmmmm . . .
The Upside Down World 