photo by xip

I know the “in a building type” Christian church is unpopular these days, but I just can’t get myself away from it. I love the church. I love it for a lot of biblical reasons, but I think those have been delved into by many books already. So here are the one that are not necessarily biblical reasons.

1. I love that it’s organized.
I know people hate organized religion, but I love structure and organization among people. I myself am not an organized person in terms of things, but when I get people together, I love it when everyone knows their roles. I love it when people work together as a team. I love it when people follow the leader. Which leads me to the next reason…

2. I love heirarchy.
Yes, another really BAD word. I said it. I love heirarchy. I like knowing who is in charge and who is in the middle and who are the followers. When I was little, we made up a “spy” club and assigned everyone in the club ranks. It places responsibility on certain people and defines clear roles for people.

3. I love big groups of people.
Walking into a room where there are 50… 100 people or even more waiting for an event to start is an awesome feeling. It’s even more awesome when you know the names of most of the people in the room. Everyone is greeting each other. Everyone has smiles on their faces, laughing at jokes and is generally happy to be there.

4. I love good worship bands.
Good worship bands make it so easy to get into worship! The music sounds so good! The guitar, drums, bass… every instrument contributes to the wall of sound. The worship leader knows the exact words to say to manipulate the feelings of the congregation into pouring out their hearts to God. I know that it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with God and it’s a superficial thing without true spirituality, but I love the music anyway. Who doesn’t appreciate good music?

[Read more]

Photo by Nicholas_T

Here’s the youtube of his speech… I haven’t figured out how to properly embed videos so that it’ll show up good for both IE and Firefox, so here’s the link:

Obama’s speech on race

Summary:

He basically says that Rev. Wright’s statements (these are my thoughts on his statements) were divisive and were wrong and reflect a wrong way of thinking. He said he could not shut Rev. Wright because Rev. Wright is like a family member to him. Then he identified with both the whites and blacks by talking about their struggles and their way of thinking and then highlighting his own diverse background. He said that we need to talk about race and that blacks need to stop blaming others and focus on working hard and overcoming. Whites on the other hand need to acknowledge that the past has contributed and is still contributing to discrimination. Then we move on by fighting for justice wherever injustice may exist. Providing healthcare, jobs, better schools etc.

Reaction of the pundits:

Most of the mainstream media is basically saying it was an awesome speech. Perfectly delivered and hit on all the right points. He defended Rev. Wright while condemning his words. He identified with all of his constituencies and consolidated his forces while seizing a new issue in the campaign. If you want someone for racial reconciliation, Obama is the candidate.

The conservative blogs and radio basically are saying that Obama sidestepped the issue. He put the focus on race while the focus should be on Rev. Wright’s statements. It doesn’t matter how close he is to Rev. Wright, he cannot associate himself with a person like that as a public figure. They point out that Obama has written elsewhere that he basically agrees with the sentiment that blacks are still oppressed by whites and they disagree with that.

My reaction:

Obama’s speech was really good. I thought he seized a potentially devastating moment [Read more]

Logo for MallChurch … a church inside a mall.

Are we supposed to “market” the church?

Just the initial thought of that is so repulsive. For some reason, when I think of marketing, I think of “flash but little substance.” Things with substance are supposed to market themselves right? We don’t need a smooth talker to “sell” the gospel message. We don’t need fancy ads or great graphic design in order to make the gospel appealing to people. It appeals to the consumerism of our culture. How are we supposed to teach our people that they should not have a consumer mentality with church when we feed that consumer mentality?

Here’s a quote from the website Church Marketing Sucks:

“We love the church, but it needs some help. Typos, cheesy logos, and bad clip art aren’t helping the cause.”

The website helps churches to market themselves, do advertising, networking, public relations, branding and identity.

[Read more]

I don’t know if you guys have seen this… but talk about interpreting the bible in weird ways.

Youtube video on preacher preaching about “pisseth against the wall.”

He’s serious. He is seriously preaching a real sermon in a real church about how to be a man…

photo by Cindy

The Emerging Church is simply the postmodern church.

Of course any definition is a gross generalization and over simplification. Postmodernism resists generalizations and as a result the Emerging church seems to have avoided definition for a long time. They are an eclectic bunch and they define themselves so differently. Some emergents do not want to be associated with the movement when they clearly share so many characteristics with the movement. Some give very biased definitions of the emerging movement.

Examples of this:

Check out this Driscoll video. Some people are emerging but not emergent. Any normal person would assume that the words emerging and emergent were the same or related.

This article lumps Brian McLaren and Erwin McManus together.

Wikipedia says Flood (San Diego) is theologically aligned with the Emerging Church. Their website used to say “Flood is an emerging Christian church in San Diego, CA…” but they have since taken that down. Those words can still be found in google’s cache.

C. Michael Patton writes how McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Dan Kimball and Mark Driscoll all define the Emerging Church differently.

Open Source Theology tries to cover so many aspects of the emerging church in it’s definition, that the definition loses meaning. Would that definition fit in any dictionary?

I think as a result, those outside of the Emerging movement have defined it for everyone else. This is having pretty disastrous effects for the emerging movement as books by highly respected theologians are coming out attacking the movement such as D.A. Carson’s book. Yet those who attack the emerging movement don’t really understand it’s eclectic nature and thus usually focus their attention on one or two major players. For example, Carson and Millard Erikson focus mostly on McLaren.

So the Emerging Church has been mischaracterized. Whose fault is this? It’s because the emerging church leaders themselves have refused definition themselves. Once someone defines McManus as being part of the emerging movement, he denies it because he does not want to be affiliated with McLaren and Pagitt. Flood puts up a statement saying they’re part of the emerging movement, and then takes it down.

I think the leaders of the emerging movement are finally seeing the harm they are causing themselves by dodging definitions. They are finally seeking to define themselves and categorize themselves. This is an example of that where they sub-categorize the emerging church into “Conversational,” “Incarnational” and “Attractional.”

Photo by Cindy

Why should you care about the emerging church? Traditionally there have been two sides to the Christian circle, liberals and evangelicals. Liberals were not orthodox theologically–but the cutting edge of Christian thought has been liberal thought, and they were very active in advancing social justice for underprivileged people. Evangelicals have not been very active on the social justice front, but were active in evangelism and had solid theology. The emerging church is trying to bring Christ to the postmodern world and as a result are encountering a lot of social justice issues. At the same time they are pushing evangelicals to look at theology in a new way while remaining faithful to orthodoxy.

So if you care about issues such as racism, sex trafficking, homeless, starving in children in Africa, women in ministry, homosexuality–a lot of the issues that conservative churches are ignoring–you should care about the Emerging Church

If you are interested in contextualization, postmodernism, ethnic/cultural issues, missiology, and house churches/ecclesiology, then you should be interested in the Emerging Church.

If you want to reach out to your non-Christian friends but don’t know how because they are so different from you, then you should be interested in the Emerging Church.  How many of you have had friends that you’ve grown up with in the church, drop out of church and Christianity?  You should be interested in the Emerging Church.

photo by Kevitivity

Cindy pointed out an article to me in the LA Times titled “Here Died A Homeless Person.” It’s about a man named Ian Brennan who had an idea to put a permanent plaque at spots where homeless people died, in order to commemorate them. The markers wouldn’t look like the marker in the photo above–they would look like a bronze human figure lying on the ground. The City of San Francisco board of supervisors approved the idea. This obviously stirred up a lot of controversy. Some argued that it would be bad for business and tourism to do something so morbid. Some argued that the money would be better spent feeding homeless so that they don’t die in the first place.

I personally was shocked. What if I were to walk down the streets and saw basically gravestones on the street? That would be shocking and disturbing. The whole entire idea of this is shocking and disturbing. But I think that’s is exactly Brennan’s point. He wants to shock and disturb the city into paying attention to the homeless people who die on the street without a single soul to care for them or bury them.

Those who are more privileged have the privilege of ignoring those who are less privileged. We who are privileged even have the privilege of not knowing that we are privileged. Being aware of the problem is the beginning. Being aware and caring goes a long way towards solutions. I am still uncomfortable whenever I see a homeless person begging for money. But it’s better to know about a problem and feel uncomfortable than to breeze along in our lives without a thought to those who are cold and dying on the streets.

photo by purticorico

none.

Absolutely none since it doesn’t give you any skills that you can use in the real world right?

I was a Literature and Writing major with a Writing emphasis. I often think about my education and what practical skills it has given me and has it aided me in getting a job? Am I any better off than a high school graduate? Should I have spent those years getting work experience instead? There are those colleges that espouse the benefits of a liberal arts education (here also)… but are they lies?

[Read more]

photo by g-hat

The race issue has finally come to the forefront. Barack Obama has to answer questions about his pastor’s racially divisive comments and 90% of blacks are voting for Obama whereas 80% of whites are voting for Clinton in the Mississippi primary.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright is Obama’s pastor and is supposedly very close to Obama. He even inspired the title of Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. So the fact that Wright is making racially incendiary comments about Hillary Clinton is quite disturbing.

The thing is, most of his comments are probably true:

Rev. Wright said, “Hillary ain’t never been called a n—–!”

“Hillary never had a cab whizz past her and not pick her up because her skin was the wrong color…”

“Hillary never had to worry about being pulled over in her car as a black man driving in the wrong nei…”

“Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home…”

“Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and culture controlled by rich white people…”

Check out the video on youtube.

What’s so interesting about his speech is that he gets everyone really riled up. Everyone is going crazy resonating with every word this guy says. Clearly it’s not just one man who feels this way. Clearly at least a decent portion of the black community feels this way.

This leads me to believe: Whites do not understand. Black people live a different existence and struggle with more difficult circumstances than white people do. The anger in his voice is because white people do not acknowledge that there IS a difference. “Rich white people” do not acknowledge that they don’t understand. They don’t know that they don’t live the same lives as black people. Black people ARE oppressed and we’re no longer acknowledging it. That’s part of the oppression. Those in control have the privilege to ignore those less privileged. Blacks cry out about police brutality and what does the government say? “It’s rare occurrence.”

So many people today feel like the race issue has been “taken care of.” Clearly it has not. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We choose to ignore it. We choose not to think about it. It’s there. At least we’re talking about it now…

Check it… John MacArthur is now going after Mark Driscoll… who is supposedly very conservative in theology:

http://www.crosswalk.com/11530376/