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On Sunday October 5th, I will be participating in the Cedar Rapids/Marion Iowa CROP Walk to help stop hunger. You too can be a part of this effort by simply supporting me financially as I walk. Click here if you’d like to provide an on-line donation. Thanks for your help!!
1.) The PC(USA)’s General Assembly is just over a week away. There are many things I’m looking forward to and one of them is the Church Basement Roadshow which happens to be passing through town on the first Friday of GA. Check out a preview of CBR here.
2.) While I wait patiently for my economic stimulus check to arrive in the mail, this post on God’s Politics makes me wonder if there aren’t better things that both the government and I could do with the money.
3.) Jan, as always, has another good post. She looks at the difference between two coffee houses in the exact same location, one successful and the other one not, and asks what the church can learn from this.
4.) A while ago, I asked some questions about doing youth ministry. The internet monk has some great suggestions that I think are spot on.
5.) Today’s photo creatively and humorously depicts the current reality of major river flooding in northern and eastern iowa.
1.) Johnny Baker points to some mind boggling images of consumption meant to help us think about the impact of our consumer habits on the world. Be patient, the images take a long time to load, but the wait is worth it.
2.) Tall Skinny Kiwi interviews Brian McLaren about some burning questions related to his new book “Everything Must Change.” I found the interview helpful as I process my own thinking about McLaren’s book.
3.) Here’s more commentary on the Obama/Wright flap. Here is a poignant cartoon and a blog post with some good observations.
4.) Here is a Christian creed that comes from the Massai tribe in Kenya. I’ve seen this before but think its worth linking to, especially since I spent a summer in Kenya in 1990 and visited a number of church gatherings in various Massai villages.
Those of you who know me well, know that my faith was formed within the conservative evangelical church; though always within the context of mainline protestantism. While I no longer consider myself a conservative evangelical, if you were to press me on the core of my theological affirmations, I think I would still come out fairly conservative holding perhaps the Apostle’s Creed as a minimal affirmation of faith.
While I still hold to a fairly conservative theological core, I don’t have a lick of interest in getting bogged down fighting the various theological battles that have consumed our denomination over the past couple of decades. I realize that to those on the right it makes me look like a sell out, while to those on the left it makes me less than useful for the promotion of their causes. It also probably makes my voting record and various political positions objectionable to both sides.
Now, you might ask, why would I want to be in that sort of a compromising position? Well, Merwyn S. Johnson in an article recently published in the Dec 31, 2007 Presbyterian Outlook explained it well for me when he wrote:
By all accounts we are at an epochal turning point in Church and culture, moving out of one era, Modernism/Pietism, into another, Post-Modernism+. The trouble is, the far right and the far left are still in my estimation, largely trapped in the Modernism/Pietism of the recent past. They are so focused on each other that they cannot see how they mirror each other or why the times are bypassing them both.
Lately, I’ve been giving Lori a bit of a hard time since the last Harry Potter book came out a few weeks ago. For those of you who don’t know, my wife has devoured every last one of these books.
While she was looking forward to the release of the seventh book, she was also dreading it, because the timing wasn’t on her side. She was scheduled to preach the day after the book was released.
As I’ve shared before, Lori is one of those ministers who usually waits until Saturday to start their sermons and then stays up late into the night to get it done. On Saturday morning, she ran a few errands and since she couldn’t wait, she also went to Barnes & Noble to get a copy of the book.
As you can imagine - even though she had a sermon to write - she couldn’t keep herself from cracking the book open. At first she just read the first couple of chapters but then – apparently unable to live without knowing who JK Rowling killed off - she skipped right to the end!
Now, given the circumstances, you might think skipping to the end of a book is a rare practice for my wife, but it’s not! In fact, I often find her skipping to the end of whatever book she happens to have in her hand. And of course I tease her mercilessly for this wrong and abhorrent practice.
Mark Scandrette’s book Soul Graffiti is a wonderful and compelling vision for life in the Way of Jesus. He does one of the best jobs to date of constructing a way between the gospel of social justice and of personal salvation. This is a truly wholistic expression of the gospel, and is a beautiful picture of the very best that the emerging church has to offer.
Each point Scandrette makes is woven not only with scripture but with compelling personal stories that serve to capture your attention and drive home his point. These are stories you will not easily forget. They serve to make it clear that Scandrette truly strives to live in the way of Jesus.
If you are looking to understand why simply ‘believing in Jesus’ is so difficult and not enough for us in this day and age, then I think this book will open your eyes and set your feet on a new path, one walking in the Way of Jesus.
Full of echoes of Dallas Willard and NT Wright, the best of thinking from these two contemporary giants of the faith is brought to a very accessible and readable level. From now on, this will be one of the first books I pull off my shelf when someone expresses a desire to explore the faith or to grow deeper in their knowledge of what it means to follow Jesus.
What’s going on in Darfur doesn’t really seem to be on most folk’s radar screens. Thankfully Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hope to change that by teaming up to raise our consciousness.
Check out the Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative for a harrowing look at what’s really happening in Darfur. This is the first effort in the creation of an interactive “global crisis map.”
I was made aware of this by way of the July issue of Sojourners Magazine.
What does a “Church Geek” do on his vacation? He visits other churches, of course…
Over the past year or so, I’ve been immersing myself in the emergent conversation. One of the leaders in that conversation is Doug Pagitt, the pastor of Solomon’s Porch, a holistic, missional, Christian community that meets in the Twin Cities. Over the weekend, my wife and I made a trip up to Minneapolis, and on Sunday evening we took the time to pay a visit to one of their gatherings.
Solomon’s Porch meets in an old Methodist building. When we arrived we scoped out a couch to sit on since there are no pews in the sanctuary. All the pews have been replaced with couches that face the center of the room. In the center is a stool from which the primary leader sits when leading a part of the service.
The service that evening focused on raising awareness about the sex slave trade and exploring ways to join in with efforts to help abolish it. We watched a video that detailed three different stories of women and children who had been freed from such slavery. We also learned about an organization called “Not for Sale” that organizations can partner with to join in abolition efforts.
Julie, one of my favorite bloggers, asks some very tough questions following the VA Tech Massacre. There are no easy answers and it’s my hope that we refrain from such a tendency to provide them. If you head over there please do so with an attitude of hearing her out. (Plus: she invokes Bonhoeffer, who is my personal hero in the faith and is the author of the quote I’ve titled this blog post with.)
This completes my Advent/Christmas sermon series “He came down that we may have life.” about the six streams of the spiritual life.
Sometime this summer, I picked up a little book written by a young fellow by the name of Shane Claiborne. It had captured my attention on previous trips to the store, so I decided to take the plunge. Taking it home, I cracked it open. But I only made it about half way through, before I put it down. To date, I have not finished it.
Many times, I pick up a book, start to read a few pages, maybe a couple of chapters, but then instead of finishing it, I put it down. Sometimes I find it a bit dull or other things might vie for my attention and I forget to pick it back up again.
Not so with this book. It is well written. Shane’s writing is interesting and captivating. It’s not a long book; most of us could probably finish it in an afternoon, or in a day’s time, at the most. It’s even funny; it made me laugh out loud in several places.
All of these things normally make for a good read, and yet I still could not finish the book. Now before I tell you why, I’ll tell you a little bit about what I did read of the book.
My wife sent me a link today to a poem called Being Poor which she found in the recent Magazine of the Heifer Project. Just one line:
Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.
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