June 15, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Good Reads
- Becoming Well-Spoken: How to Minimize Your Uh’s and Um’s: Using uh and um too often takes away from the forcefulness and eloquence of your remarks. So while it’s not as big of a deal when used in conversations with friends, when meeting people for the first time and during job interviews, business presentations, formal speeches, and the like, you want to minimize your use of fillers as much as possible. If curbing your ummm-ing is something you struggle with, read on to learn why we all “um” and “uh” and what we can do to curb this tendency.
- I’m a Mormon, Not a Christian: This is the so-called Mormon Moment: a strange convergence of developments offering Mormons hope that the Christian nation that persecuted, banished or killed them in the 19th century will finally love them as fellow Christians. I want to be on record about this. I’m about as genuine a Mormon as you’ll find — a templegoer with a Utah pedigree and an administrative position in a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am also emphatically not a Christian.
- Hopeless without the Spirit: The early church was alive and active because of the Holy Spirit. There is no verse—not even one—that relegates the importance and vitality of the Spirit only to the New Testament church. That’s the key: We have to believe the Holy Spirit is present for us today.
June 13, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Best knife block ever (HT 22 Words)
Good Reads
- St. Paul, Theologian of the Trinity: Should we think of doctrine as a grimy residue that has to be scrubbed away before we can really see the vibrancy and vividness of Paul’s letters? It’s a hard question to answer in the abstract, once and for all, but at least with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, a growing chorus of scholars is responding with a resounding, “No.”
- Why Boredom Is Good for Your Creativity: Like most creatives, you probably have a low boredom threshold. You’re hardwired to pursue novelty and inspiration, and to run from admin and drudgery. Boredom is the enemy of creativity, to be avoided at all costs. Or is it?
- In Defense of Sarcasm & Humor: A Response to the Earnest: Even within our desire for earnestness, we could acknowledge a time for sarcasm and a place for exploring the paradoxes and follies in our faith and in our lives. Instead of cloaking them or tailoring them to fit the conventions, we could laugh at them.
June 11, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Good Reads
- The Five Myths about Small Groups: Discipleship manifests itself in the local church most often through small groups. But building effective small groups takes a lot of work, and can be difficult to implement. They often struggle to be successful and transformational because of wrong expectations, beliefs, or myths about how they work best.
- Old Testament Law and the Charge of Inconsistency: I find it frustrating when I read or hear columnists, pundits, or journalists dismiss Christians as inconsistent because “they pick and choose which of the rules in the Bible to obey.” What I hear most often is “Christians ignore lots of Old Testament texts—about not eating raw meat or pork or shellfish, not executing people for breaking the Sabbath, not wearing garments woven with two kinds of material and so on. Then they condemn homosexuality. Aren’t you just picking and choosing what they want to believe from the Bible?”
- People Will Actually Sing If You Let Them: One of my non-negotiables going in to starting a church was that congregational singing be the primary musical expression of the gathered people of God. Not a band. Not an organ. Not a singer-songer writer strumming guitar chords. But the congregation itself.
- The Dirty Little Secret of Endorsements: But here’s a dirty little secret of publishing. When you look at the back cover of a book and see a list of commendations, it is possible—likely even—that the majority of those people have not read the book or have not read it carefully.
June 8, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Good Reads
- When Is the Gospel at Stake? I’m bouncing off a post that claims too many Christians are Chicken Littles because they run around claiming and worrying and showing their faithfulness by saying the sky is falling down all the time. That is, they think the gospel is at stake in every conversation.
- Decentralized Preaching: In no way do I want to limit the ministry of the best and brightest men we have available for gospel ministry today. Please don’t hear me saying that. But I do think that in most “normal” churches and church plants, it is wise to have more than one regular preacher and deliberately to raise up cadres of preachers and teachers that can rightly handle the Word in all situations where it should be proclaimed.
- If Only Our Leaders Had Mariam’s Guts: Once again, in Sudan there are starving children, tens of thousands of refugees, rapes and racial epithets, a spiraling death toll and passivity in the White House.
- It’s Not True: American Evangelicals Do Not, in Fact, Behave as Badly as Everyone Else: Evangelicals–and here’s the key point: according to any definition that John Wesley or Billy Graham would recognize–do not, in fact, behave as badly as the American population at large. They do not, in fact, have extramarital sex as often or abort babies as often….They do not experience the same levels of marital unhappiness and divorce. They do not give to charity or volunteer at the same low levels as the population at large. And so on, and so on.
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June 6, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Transatlantic Steretypes
Good Reads
- Christendom Isn’t Dead: Given the dominance of Christianity in the United States, we ought to rethink using the language of “post-Christendom” to describe our time and place.
- Let’s Get Our Theological Priorities Straight: And so all theologians must prioritize. Certain doctrines have greater significance than others for the whole of Christian theology. The deity of Christ is more consequential for the Christian faith than the timing of the millennium. The latter is still important, but it is not “of first importance,” to borrow the apostle’s phrase. But how do we get our doctrinal priorities straight? How do we know when to place special priority on a particular doctrine and when to avoid overstating the significance of another?
- The Gospel of Stephen King: “People tend to think that Stephen King is anti-religious because he is a horror writer, but that’s completely mistaken….Several of his books are parables of grace in action.”
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June 4, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Good Reads
- Christian Leaders Are Powerhouses on Twitter (NYT): Joyce Meyer, Max Lucado and Andy Stanley were not well known inside Twitter’s offices. But they had all built loyal ranks of followers well beyond their social networks — they were evangelical Christian leaders whose inspirational messages of God’s love perform about 30 times as well as Twitter messages from pop culture powerhouses like Lady Gaga.
- Ten Reasons to Attend Seminary: Let’s face it, to develop theologically as a minister you need time, and that’s what seminary does. In sociological terms, seminary can be a time of encapsulation: you are isolated from your work, your church, and you are holed up in a class with other students and a professor, and you wander into quiet libraries and you study — it is that dedicated time that seminaries can offer. Most pastors aren’t afforded the luxury to study in big chunks of time, so going to seminary, even if it is as a commuter, offers dedicated time. It probably won’t happen without dedicated time.
- Faith, Science, and the Resurrection: Did the cosmos prior to the Fall also function entirely differently than the cosmos we now experience? Was the Fall, in keeping with our metaphor, the restructuring of the cosmos from a diamond into a lump of graphite? Do we inhabit the same universe created by God in the beginning, but now utterly transformed in quality and behavior?
- 6 Myths of Success: I grew up in a performance-centered community. I was affirmed and valued at the level of my performance. The better I performed, the more others loved me. I worked hard at athletics to be of some value to someone—to anyone. I worked hard in ministry for the same reason. My parents are hard workers. My dad is 82 and still employed. I asked him why he didn’t just quit since he didn’t need the money. He said, in his gruff voice, “A man isn’t worth anything if he doesn’t work.” That illuminated a lot of my own proclivities for me.
June 1, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
HT Oliver Crisp via Facebook
Good Reads
- Timeless Wisdom for Seminary Graduates: Theological seminaries, no doubt, afford important facilities to humble and diligent students in making their preparations for the gospel ministry; but it is very possible for a person to enjoy all external advantages with very small improvement. More depends on the student’s character and disposition than on all other things.
- When the Church Lost Its Voice: A friend of mine, a church-planting pastor, when he and his core group planted their church, told me one of their aims was that the community would come to respect them enough that whenever major community decisions were made they’d want to know what the church thought. Their aim, then, was to become a faithful witness that formed the core of the community’s conscience.
- Do You Really Want to Live Forever?: Imagine you are offered a trustworthy opportunity for immortality in which your mind (perhaps also your body) will persist eternally….Would you take it? Metaphysician and former British diplomat Stephen Cave thinks accepting such an offer would be a bad idea.
- Scholarship as a Way of Life: The scholarly life is its own reward: it is a good life–it is the sort of reflective pursuit that has been valorized by the ancients. It is also the sort of life that is increasingly difficult to sustain in a sound-bite culture of perpetual distraction. In the age of the Kardashians and iPhone Twitter feeds, finding joy in the slow-food of scholarly reflection is a counter-cultural pursuit.
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May 30, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Good Reads
- Welcome to the Multiverse: The latest developments in cosmology point toward the possibility that our universe is merely one of billions.
- My Solution to the Same-Sex Marriage Debate, with an Ecclesiology of Exile: We are subversive ideological terrorists because we order our lives according the story, symbols, and sovereignty of Jesus Christ, all of which stands in violent opposition to the values of the secular order. We Christians represent a clear and present danger to the very edifice of secular pluralism because we refuse to believe in it and we tell a story that undermines it – and some people believe us not the powers that be, that’s the problem.
- In Which I Ask Ann Voskamp’s Forgiveness: Tim Challies offers a powerful reminder of why we need to be careful with how we say things online. I was particularly struck by this line: “Would I have said that to someone I had planned to share a meal with a few weeks later? Probably not. Why, then, would I say it at all?”
- Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Woefully and Tragically Fallen: counselors should acknowledge that sometimes life is not easily reduced to choosing. If we treat people only as volitional beings, we fail to relate to them based on the full theological narrative of the imago Dei and the fall from grace. We must consider matters related to nurture and nature when addressing complex issues of life in this world.
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May 25, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Good Reads
- The Battle among Catholic Bishops: There is a healthy struggle brewing among the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops. A previously silent group, upset over conservative colleagues defining the church’s public posture and eagerly picking fights with President Obama, has had enough.
- ‘Twilight’ Stands in for Religion for Some Teens: ”Twilight” and other supernatural tales may give some non-religious teens a place to grapple with the big questions of life, according to a Danish researcher.
- An Open Letter to Young, “Post-Partisan” Evangelicals: It’s that time again — the time when the younger evangelical generation surveys our damaged nation, observes the terrible reputation of leading evangelical “culture warriors” in the pop culture and with their peers, and says, “You guys blew it. It’s time for a new approach, for a post-partisan approach. We’re not in anyone’s political pocket.
- The Unteachables: A Generation That Cannot Learn: And that is perhaps the real tragedy of our education system: not only that so many students enter university lacking the basic skills and knowledge to succeed in their courses — terrible in itself — but also that they often arrive essentially unteachable, lacking the personal qualities necessary to respond to criticism.
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May 23, 2012 in Flotsam and jetsam with
Good Reads
- If Christ Is Lord, Everything Matters: a common temptation is to view life as split into two areas: spiritual things that matter and that have eternal significance, and everything else, which does not. This perspective is not true to Scripture, and doesn’t honour the confession that most Christians—despite the glaring inconsistency—are eager to make: that Christ is Lord over all.
- 5 Ways to Keep Moving Forward When You Hit a Wall: I suspect I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed at times by excellent advice, helpful strategies, and enlightening insight. To be candid, sometimes I feel like a deer in the personal-growth headlights. I’m often paralyzed by the possibilities. It’s easy to see where I want to go. It’s figuring out how to get over the walls between here and there that creates the tension.
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