Vanguard Church

The Church, Parents, and Training Children in the Faith

2009-11-17T11:09:00.006-05:00

In today’s American culture, in order to give our kids what we feel they need, we send our kids to specialized trainers all the time. Our kids have piano teachers, math tutors, basketball coaches, dance instructors, and the list goes on and on. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with our children specializing in a particular skill by being trained by someone with expertise in that field. There’s no way that I can be an expert in everything! (Not even close!)

However, when it comes to a child’s Christian faith, the responsibility lies squarely on the parents’ shoulders.

Deuteronomy 6:4-5 gives the “Shema,” the central command and creed of God’s people: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” This command, of course, was expanded by Jesus in Mark 12:28–33 to also include “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

What’s important to note about this command/creed is this: That it was to penetrate beyond head and into the heart; it was to be the central aspect of every part of life at every moment. In the next verse of the Deuteronomy passage (6:4), God tells the adults that “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts,” which means it all starts with their inner motivation – will they commit to loving God with all they have?

Then God makes it clear that the matter of raising children in this kind of heart-deep love is the responsibility of parents. “Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 6:7-9).

Parents have the primary responsibility for “impressing upon their children” who God is, why he is loved, and our duty to serve him with our entire lives. This is not just an Old Testament command, in Ephesians 6:4, parents are instructed to “bring (your children) up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”

With teachers, tutors, coaches, trainers, instructors, and other specialists in our children's lives, it becomes increasingly important that the church does not succumb to the pressure to be just another specialist to do the work of faith training and instruction. Instead, the church needs to shift the paradigm so that parents are given not only the lead role in the faith development of their children, but also the confidence to do so.

Many parents are not confident enough to teach their kids how to dribble a basketball or how to find “Middle C” on a piano, so they acquiesce to the specialists. However, when it comes to training children in the faith, the church must give parents the kind of training they need to confidently do what God has called them to do.

Was there Death Before the Fall?

2009-11-09T11:56:00.007-05:00

Death and Decay as a Part of the Good Creation

If you’re like me, you were taught that death was not a part of God’s good created order, but that death came into the world when Adam fell into sin through his rebellion against God. We immediately think of verses like Romans 5:12:

“Therefore...sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.”

However, when we look at the created world as it is before us, we see that death and decay are essential elements of the created order.

Yesterday, I was raking leaves and placed them in our composting bin with the knowledge that as they decay along with the manure and pieces of fruit and vegetables we put in there, we will have a rich fertilizer for our garden in the Spring.

As I watch my favorite Nature shows on TV, I am struck by the incredible design of the hunter animals to be able to capture and eat their prey. I marvel at the delicate eco-system that requires a food-chain for it to function and to even exist. My son Trey and I love to watch "Shark Week" on the Discovery Channel. These animals are amazing. One show called them "incredible killing machines." If death is not a part of the way God created the world, then a child might ask, "Were sharks created by Satan?" The answer is to the child is, "Of course not. Satan does not create." But we still wonder why animals have carnivorous teeth and digestive systems geared for such.

So, this brings us to the big question: Is death and decay a part of the created order?

N.T. Wright thinks so. Wright is one of the world’s foremost evangelical biblical scholars. He believes that the decay we see in the world is not necessarily evil, but a part of the created order.

“Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. The result is that the cosmos is out of joint. Instead of humans being wise vice-regents over creation, they ignore the creator and try to worship something less demanding, something that will give them a short-term fix of power and pleasure. The result is that death, which was always a part of the natural transience of the good creation, gains a second dimension, which the Bible sometimes calls ‘spiritual death.’ In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image of death is exile. Adam and Eve are told that they would die on the day they ate of the fruit; what actually happened was that they were expelled from the garden. Turning away from the worship of the living God is turning toward that which has no life in itself. Worship that which is transient, and it can only give you death… Mysteriously, this out-of-jointness seems to become entangled with the transience and decay necessary within the good-but-incomplete creation.”
-Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church p. 95

Doug Moo also thinks so. Moo was one of my professors at Trinity, and is recognized as one of the top evangelical experts on the book of Romans. He writes concerning Romans 8 in an essay entitled “Nature in the New Creation: New Testament Eschatology and the Environment,” published in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49 (2006) 449-88:

The language of the text before us (Romans 8:19-22) suggests that human sin led to some kind of change in the nature of the cosmos itself. It has been subject, Paul says, to "frustration," or "vanity"; the Greek word suggests that creation has been unable to attain the purpose for which it was created. The "bondage to decay [φθορά]" is also difficult to interpret, but Paul is probably attributing to the created world the inevitable destruction that the Greeks attributed to all created things. And Paul's use of this same language in 1 Cor 15:42 and 50 to contrast the "perishable" body of this life and the "imperishable" body of the life to come points in the same direction. Decay" suggests the inevitable disintegration to which all things since the Fall are subject.

This does not necessarily mean, however, that physical death itself was first introduced into the created world at the Fall. On the contrary, the necessary continuity between the world that God created (Genesis 1-2) and the world that we now observe suggests that physical decay and death – an indispensable component of the created world as we know it – were likely present from the very beginning. To be sure, as Rom 5:12, for instance, makes clear, Adam introduced "death" into the world. But the "world" Paul has in view here is almost certainly the world of human beings (compare the roughly parallel vv. 18a and 19a), and the "death" to which Paul refers here is mainly (though not exclusively) spiritual death (compare again v. 12 with vv. 18 and 19, where "condemnation" occurs). What was Adam's relation to death before the Fall, then? Some think, as Gerald Bray puts it, that Adam was "a mortal being who was protected from death as long as he was obedient to the commands of God: disobedience removed the protection, and Adam was allowed to complete the life cycle which was normal to his physical being" (Gerald L. Bray, "The Significance of God's Image in Man." TynBul 42 [1991] 216). But it is preferable to think of Adam as possessing conditional immortality, with physical death as "a possibility arising from his constitution" (Blocher, In the Beginning, 184-87 [187]).

The main thing I find intriguing is this: Death is a natural part of the good created order, but when sin entered the world, death took on a new dimension: that of being separated from God. Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden was the "death" that they experienced on that day, and then their physical death would come eventually due to the fact that they no longer had access to the tree of life. Death for Israel was exile from the land of promise and from the Temple of Yahweh. And, ultimately, Spiritual Death is eternal separation from God.

Hmmmm....

Oh, Those Stinkin’ Democrats and Their Stand on Abortion!

2009-11-04T10:26:00.003-05:00

Ummm... Wait a minute. This is not the kind of news you hear on Focus on the Family.

Around 40 Dems line up against federal abortion funding in healthcare bill
By Jordan Fabian – The Hill 10/24/09

Approximately 40 House Democrats are prepared to block healthcare reform legislation from coming to the floor should the bill include federal subsidies for abortions, said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) Friday.

Stupak, who is conservative on social issues, told CNS News that he has organized the voting bloc to support his amendment that would strip the abortion provisions from the legislation. House Rules Committee chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), according to Stupak, said that there is "no way" her panel would provide a vote for his amendment.

The group of 40 would join House Republicans in voting against procedural measure that would draft rules for debating the bill on the House floor. Passage of the measure is necessary for the House to hold a floor vote.

"There’s about 40 like-minded Democrats like myself -- we’ll try to take down the rule," Stupak said. “If all 40 of us vote in a bloc against the rule -- because we think the Republicans will join us -- we can defeat the rule. The magic number is 218. If we can have 218 votes against the rule, we win.”

With 177 Republicans in the House, Stupak would need at least 41 Democrats to cross the aisle and vote against the rule. Stupak's amendment was originally defeated by the House Energy and Commerce Committee during mark-up.

Under language in the Energy and Commerce proposal, one health plan in each health care "exchange" that sells public health insurance must provide coverage for abortion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is currently in the process of merging the House's three health bills.

“We’re just finishing our conferencing on this legislation,” Pelosi told CNS. “We haven’t even gone through the procedure as to what we’ll do on the floor, if there even are any amendments on the floor.”

ACTION ALERT from Evangelicals for Social Action and Americans United for Life

Americans United for Life (AUL) is working against time to support the efforts of Stupak and other pro-lifers on the Hill, meeting with Congressmen to ensure they know what’s at stake if the health care reform bill is not amended to protect life. Even as House members express determination to remove abortion from the House bill, AUL has learned that Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic leadership are working hard to convince pro-life members of Congress that the Capps Amendment “compromise” prevents abortion funding and coverage.

Please, call your Congressman and tell him/her that the Capps Amendment is not a compromise. The Stupak/Pitts language must be included in the House bill.

Rock Hall Finally Acknowledges Progressive Rock

2009-10-21T08:16:00.001-04:00

Genesis the first progressive band to be nominated since Pink Floyd and Velvet Underground were inducted in 1996

Last year at this time, I bemoaned the fact that here in my town of Cleveland, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has shown a glaring blind spot. While it has given honors to pioneers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley and to pop acts like Billy Joel, The Bee Gees and Madonna, Progressive Rock acts like Rush, Yes, The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, The Electric Light Orchestra, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer have been shunned. Beyond Pink Floyd and The Velvet Underground, the closest the Hall gets to prog is Queen (who flirted with the genre) and Police drummer Stuart Copeland, who played in Curved Air.

But this year, the Hall may be finally turning the corner. Here is the list of nominees for 2010 induction:

ABBA
The Chantels
Jimmy Cliff
Genesis
The Hollies
KISS
LL Cool J
Darlene Love
Laura Nyro
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Stooges
Donna Summer

Genesis is a leading band of the Progressive Rock genre. The classic line-up of Peter Gabriel on vocals, Tony Banks on keyboards, Mike Rutherford on bass, Steve Hackett on guitar, and Phil Collins on drums led the way for all the other acts.

The new issue of "Classic Rock Presents PROG" (available at Borders) lists the "Top 50 Prog Albums of All Time." Six of them were by Genesis.

Here's the top 10:

10. Porcupine Tree: In Absentia
9. Pink Floyd: The Wall
8. Yes: Relayer
7. Genesis: Foxtrot
6. King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King
5. Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
4. Genesis: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
3. Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon
2. Yes: Close to the Edge
1. Genesis: Selling England by the Pound

Ballots will be sent to more than 500 voters, who will select artists to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the 25th Annual Induction Ceremony on March 15, 2010 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.

Religious Right Admits that Marriage is Hard

2009-10-20T08:30:00.003-04:00

Lisa Miller of Newsweek writes this week in her Religion column that “Marriage is Hard—the religious right admits it.”

I am not a big fan of Lisa Miller; I think that Newsweek could do better with their Religion column, and I’d think that John Meacham (Newsweek’s Editor, and as far as I can tell, a Christian) would be more discerning to see that Miller is not as well-versed as she should be about evangelical Christianity.

But this week’s column landed a sharp jab into the gut. A jab that we should take and agree with. She writes,

"The (John) Ensign story continues to reverberate not because of its delicious best-friend's-girl plotline (for who among us is surprised anymore that politicians sleep around?), but because he said he stood for something else. He is a ‘family values’ Republican who voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and in 2004 lent his support to a constitutional amendment defining marriage, saying, ‘Marriage is an extremely important institution in this country, and protecting it is, in my mind, worth the extraordinary step of amending our Constitution.’ To which the obvious retort is: but not the ordinary step of protecting your wife and children from public humiliation? Ensign has become the latest example of what so many see as the failure of the right to retain any credibility on the marriage question."

While Barak Obama has what Focus on the Family’s president Jim Daly calls an exemplary family life, there have been some Republican conservatives in the Religious Right that have been exposed for less-than-stellar morals when it comes to their wedding vows.

While we Christians are making a lot of noise to “protect marriage” (especially by way of the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA]), the shenanigans of these elected officials keep us from being taken seriously.

Miller writes,

“When evangelicals are leading the charge in the marriage movement (and now, the anti-gay-marriage movement) arguing that sacred unions between one man and one woman are good for society because they're good for children, one would hope that they'd have worked out the kinks a little better than the rest of us.”

The article talks about how Focus on the Family, Rick Warren, and Gary Chapman are all being honest about how hard it is to keep a marriage healthy. Lisa Miller points to Billy Graham as the example that Christians (especially those in the spotlight) should emulate:

"He gave his ministry colleagues explicit instructions: never leave me alone in a room with a woman who is not my wife."

And so, with the scandals of John Ensign and Mark Sanford and preachers like Ted Haggard, Miller ends her piece with,

"Billy Graham, though politically astute, was rarely self-serving. He knew how to protect his children from his chaotic life—and he did."

Uproar: Obama Tells Muslim Nations that the United States is Not a “Christian Nation”

2009-10-19T12:15:00.006-04:00

Obama Says the Same Thing as Washington and Adams, but the Religious Right Do Not Want to Acknowledge It

Many in the politically-motivated evangelical Religious Right have been very upset with Barack Obama’s attempts to build bridges with the Muslim world. Robert Knight’s column at Townhall.com (Obama Nation's Low View of Christianity) is an excellent example. It has been cited by a number of Religious Right websites and blogs. He wrote:

In Cairo, Obama quoted from the Koran, used his middle name of Hussein, and indicated that the United States and Muslim nations have the same commitment to tolerance and freedom. To fathom the absurdity, think about the possibility of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution springing from the pens of Islamic scholars Thomas al-Jefferson and James al-Madison. …

At the Compassion Forum at Messiah College in Pennsylvania on April 13, 2008, he said, “We are not just a Christian nation. We are a Jewish nation; we are a Buddhist nation; we are a Muslim nation; Hindu nation; and we are a nation of atheists and nonbelievers.”

On May 7, Obama declined to hold any White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer, a decision hailed by Barry Lynn’s hard left Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

In his eloquent commencement speech at Notre Dame on May 17, Obama sounded a conciliatory note, lamented, sort of, the abortions that he wants taxpayers to fund, and gave more clues that Christianity will move over and shrink before a universalist moral relativism:

“The size and scope of the challenges before us require that we remake [not “reform” or “restore,” but “remake”] our world to renew its promise; that we align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age.

“Your generation must decide how to save God's creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it….. And we must find a way to reconcile our ever-shrinking world with its ever-growing diversity -- diversity of thought, diversity of culture, and diversity of belief.”

If diversity in and of itself is god, where does that leave Jesus Christ – the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, the Alpha and the Omega, the Way, the Truth and the Life, through Whom all things were created?

Well, the Obama Nation might just ask Him to change his name to … Allah.

Robert Knight needs a history lesson.

And Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden are the perfect ones to provide it. Noll, Hatch, and Marsden are by-far the most respected American evangelical historians alive. Their book, The Search for Christian America is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the true history of the founding of the United States. Check out what they say about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and above all, our nation’s early declaration to Muslims as to whether or not we are a “Christian Nation.”

Here then is the "historical error": It is historically inaccurate and anachronistic to confuse, and virtually to equate, the thinking of the Declaration of Independence with a biblical world view, or with Reformation thinking, or with the idea of a Christian nation. In other words it is wrong to call for a return to "Christian America" on two counts: First, for theological reasons--because since the time of Christ there is no such thing as God's chosen nation; second, for historical reasons, as we have seen--because it is historically incorrect to regard the founding of America and the formulation of the founding documents as being Christian in their origins. Yet this error is one of the most powerful ideas of our day; and on this confusion rest many of the calls to make war on secular humanism and to “restore” the Bible as the sole basis for American law and government.

The Declaration of Independence, however, rests on a different view. It is based on an appeal to “self-evident” truths or “laws of nature and nature’s god.” The reference to God is vague and subordinated to natural laws that everyone should know through common sense. The Bible is not mentioned or alluded to. The Constitution of 1787 says even less concerning a deity, let alone Christianity or the Bible. The symbolism of the new government was equally secular. In fact, the United States was the first Western nation to omit explicit Christian symbolism, such as the cross, from its flag and other early national symbols.

Further incidental evidence of the founders’ views is the statement from a treaty with the Islamic nation of Tripoli in 1797. This treaty was negotiated under Washington, ratified by the Senate, and signed by President John Adams. The telling part is a description of religion in America:

“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen [i.e., Muslims]…, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

Why does any of this make a difference? Does it really matter if people hold to this mistaken view that America is, or was, or could become a truly Christian nation? Yes, it does matter. It matters because, if we are going to respond effectively to relativistic secularism, then we need to base our response upon reality rather than error. This is not to deny the positive influence that Christianity has indeed had upon the American way of life. Rather, it is to take it all the more seriously so that we may respond to it all the more effectively. (p. 130-131)

So what we have in Obama is a return to the original intent of the founding of the nation. Washington and Adams wanted a nation where religion was free without governmental interference. And they were very explicit with the Muslim world that the peace can flourish because we will not enter any religious war because our nation was not founded "in any sense" on Christianity.

After the miscues of the previous administration, where the rest of the world wondered if America was indeed initiating a "holy war" on Islam, Obama's words are much needed.

And, with the U.S. government out of the way of the Christian message, we Christians can go about the work of reaching out with love to the Muslim world. Instead of supporting implications of a "holy war" on Islam, we Christians should do everything we can to make a clear and distant demarcation between American militarism and Christian grace and mercy. Nothing good comes when Muslims make a correlation between American military might and Christian missionary work.
_

Christian Ideas that Create a Better World

2009-10-14T13:20:00.003-04:00

A great new resource for Christians seeking to transform the culture.

Fermi Project is now Q. They've launched a new website at QIdeas.com, which offers free access to a vast collection of 18-minute talks (from their previous Q gatherings), essays, podcasts and blog articles that will further expose you to important ideas and people advancing the common good in our world.

Q was birthed out of Gabe Lyons’ vision to see Christians, especially leaders, recover a vision for their historic responsibility to renew and restore cultures. Inspired by Chuck Colson’s statement, "Christians are called to redeem entire cultures, not just individuals," Gabe set out to reintroduce Christians to what had seemed missing in recent decades from an American expression of Christian faithfulness; valuing both personal and cultural renewal, not one over the other. Re-educating Christians to this orthodox and unifying concept has become central to the vision of Q.

In 2007, the first Q gathering was hosted as an annual meeting place for a select group of young, innovative and influential leaders to wrestle with the biggest issues impacting the church. Since then Q, has become a central convening place where innovators, social entrepreneurs, entertainers, artists, church-shapers, futurists, scientists, educators, historians, environmentalists and everyday people doing extraordinary things can come together to learn and collaborate. Staging Q in major U.S. Cities that represent unique cultural contexts has been a priority of the Q experience. These annual gatherings have become a way for leaders to gain exposure to new ideas, cultures and one another. Following our first Q gathering at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, Q has been hosted at Gotham Hall in Manhattan, the Paramount Theatre in Austin and in 2010, will take place in Chicago’s Civic Opera House April 28-30.

Prior to launching Q, Gabe served on the team that co-founded Catalyst, the largest gathering of young church leaders in America. After seven years of leading the Catalyst movement, he recognized that there was a deep need within the American church for heightened cultural exposure and understanding, Gospel-centered critical thinking, and active collaboration among church leaders who would chart the future of the church in the West.

To that end, in 2003, Gabe Lyons launched a non-profit organization, Fermi Project, and funded a ground-breaking Barna Research Study that reported the negative perceptions that 16-29 year olds have of Christians and the Church. Inspired by the research, Gabe joined with David Kinnaman and 27 other leading voices throughout the church to collaborate on the best selling book, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity...And Why It Matters. Q’s first book continues to provoke earnest conversation, questions of engagement and renewed action among Christians hungry to alter the negative perceptions and has paved the way for a second book engineered by Q releasing in Fall 2010.

As the interest in the content Q commissions and explores has grown, so has their leadership team’s commitment to ensure it’s accessibility. Now, Qideas.org has been launched to extend their reach to church and cultural leaders throughout the U.S. and around the world. Through scores of commissioned content in the form of talks, interviews and essays, they hope to support the church in its recovery and pioneering of new ways to embody the Gospel in our post-Christian setting.

Do you like salt?

2009-10-02T19:55:00.003-04:00

Estimated health-care savings if Americans cut their average daily sodium intake to 2,300 mg per day, according to a new Rand Health Research study, published in American Journal of Health Promotion, Sept/Oct 2009.

Source: TIME Magazine, Sept 21, 2009
HT: MY WIFE, LINDA

Christians MUST NOT Participate in Demonizing Obama

2009-09-30T12:33:00.006-04:00

As I read Thomas Friedman’s column today, chills ran up and down my spine. The Obama hating in our country is beginning to go off into a dangerous zone. Friedman writes,

“I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.

Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin…

…And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble.”

As I talk with conservative Evangelical Christians in my church and in my community, more often than not they quote Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh when issuing their criticisms of Barak Obama. They are in a heated fever of hatred toward our president, fueled by the vitriolic rhetoric of these pundits in the Right Wing media.

As a devoted follower of Jesus, I have to wonder how we have allowed ourselves to be co-opted by the media’s far-right fringe. I wonder where in Jesus’ teaching we are supposed to hate those we disagree with.

As an American, I wonder what is going to happen to our great nation if we do not hold fast to our respectful dialogue in the public square. If we go about seeking to delegitimize the president, how can we possibly deal with the important issues of our day?

What we need is civility – the kind of civility that witnesses to the love of Christ for those we oppose in very real ways. Os Guinness has written a book on it, The Case for Civility: And Why America's Future Depends On It.

In a recent interview, Guinness talks about how William Wilberforce demonstrated civility.

“There are scores of lessons we can learn from Wilberforce, but take just one: his civility. As a follower of the way of Jesus, he loved his enemies and always refused to demonize them. At one time he was the most vilified man in the world, but while he never minced words in speaking about the evils of slavery, he was always gracious, generous, modest, funny, witty, and genuinely loving toward his enemies. When one of his worst enemies died, he at once saw to it anonymously that his widow was cared for adequately. Compare this with the religious right's demonizing of its foes. The latter is not so much uncivil as unChristian.”

We must not participate in the unChristian demonizing of President Obama. If this goes on, how will we not be culpable if some nut-case takes our words and puts them into action and attempts to hurt him?

The Browns No Longer Deserve My Allegiance

2009-09-29T08:32:00.001-04:00

It happened a few years ago. Though I have been in denial for some time. I am no longer a Cleveland Browns fan. There I said it.

My heart was ripped out when Art Modell took the team to Baltimore in 1996. It was stomped upon when that Baltimore team, a mere four seasons later, won the Super Bowl.

It has bled a slow death ever since, as the Browns have consistently put an inferior football team on the field year-after-year.

Rob Oller of the Columbus Dispatch wrote that his son, after the abysmal Browns game and the Bengals' win over the Steelers this past weekend, decided to become a Bengals fan.

"...A 12-year-old boy weighed his options -- continue to call Cleveland his favorite team or switch to Cincinnati -- and chose the Bengals. With his father's blessing. The Browns-fan-since-birth had seen enough -- who hasn't? -- and reached the wise conclusion that when a team doesn't even attempt to accommodate its fans, that team no longer deserves the loyalty it has enjoyed for generations. So he officially died as a Browns fan on Sunday evening, when Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer threw a winning touchdown to defeat the Steelers.

Is that selling out your team? Hardly. Not when you mean less to the Browns than the ground they spit on. Is that hopping off the Cleveland bandwagon? Not when the band on that wagon won't play a single pleasing note.

Many longtime Browns fans consider such talk blasphemous, but their numbers are dwindling as a new generation of followers emerge who know chronic ineptitude when they see it. The old fan base takes distorted pride in hanging tough with a team that tests its patience while mocking its allegiance. I know this because my blood once ran as orange as theirs. I lived through the Mike Phipps years, the 1980s calamities and the early expansion seasons. I understand the culture. Sticking with the Browns through thick and thin is considered a badge of honor. It means you are a real fan.

To which I now say: Baloney. Show me where it says in the Good Fan Rulebook that true fans should stick with a loser who refuses to improve.

Quite the contrary. The stand-up thing is to stop enabling the behavior. The Browns, from owner Randy Lerner to the ball boys, need to know that actions have consequences; fail to put a competent product on the field and risk losing young fans to other teams.

Maybe old fans, too. If you're not wavering in your unconditional commitment to the Browns, then you are the sucker. That's no overreaction..."

Amen!

Sure, these Browns have the same colors and name as the Browns I've followed all my life, but it has never felt like the Browns I grew up enjoying. The new regime has been inept and has not connected with me as a fan. There has not been one player that I can be proud of as a fan. I would never buy a Browns jersey with a player name on it - because the players have been awful and won't likely last on the team anyway.

After Hurricane Katrina hit, I watched as the New Orleans Saints trade for a quarterback I really liked and drafted an extremely talented and flashy running back. So I became a Saints fan.

But not until today have I made it official. I am not any longer a Browns fan.

Go Saints!

Shortcuts for Reading the Bible as Story

2009-09-14T15:36:00.015-04:00

Hangin’ With Scot McKnight in Akron

Scot McKnight spoke to some pastors and ministry leaders in Akron today, and we benefited from his wisdom on reading the Bible. His contention is that the only way to properly read the Bible is to see it as a story. It has a plotline, looking something like this:

We were created as the Eikons (image) of God (Genesis 1-2)
We became cracked Eikons (Genesis 3)
The cracked Eikons make a mess of things (Genesis 4-11)
God creates a covenanted community, the people of God (Genesis 12)
Jesus Christ is the perfect Eikon of God (New Testament)
The new community of God is being conformed into the Eikon of God (the church)
The consummation – when the community is perfected in the eternal dance in relationship with each other and the Trinitarian God

What gets in the way of our rightly reading the Bible is that we stop thinking of it as the story of God. this takes too much time, effort, discerning, so we’ve developed shortcuts to get us to our goal sooner.

Here are the shortcuts that Scot shared with us today. It got us all thinking about how we personally approach the Bible, and also about how we train our congregations in approaching the Bible. These shortcuts are found in Scot’s book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible, chapter 3, pp. 44-54.

SHORTCUT 1: Morsels of Law
The Bible is merely a collection of laws – what God wants us to do or not to do. God is seen as primarily a law-giver, and our relationship with God revolves around our obedience to these laws.

Christians using this shortcut read every passage looking for the commands of God. They become only concerned with being right and ultimately become judgmental of others. The Bible certainly has laws and commands, but these are nestled into the story of God’s redemption, and to divorce it from that does grave harm to the Bible.

SHORTCUT 2: Morsels of Blessings and Promises
Scot talked about Bible-verse calendars that offer a single verse (or just a portion of a verse) for each day of the year. The purpose of such calendars is to provide a little bit of blessing or feel-good promise for your daily Christian walk. He wrote the publisher of one of these calendars, offering that he could come up with 365 days of threats of God’s wrath (they weren’t too keen on the idea).

When we read the Bible as disconnected morsels of truth or blessing or promise, we become disconnected with reality. Life is not made up of single verses that make us feel upbeat. And the Bible certainly is not all upbeat. It is a very real book, with very real hardship and sin and the ugliness of life.

SHORTCUT 3: Inkblots
The Rorschach tests that psychologists give are meant to understand what you project onto the picture (if you see a pelvic bone in this picture, that means they had better send you to the Freudian therapist!)

Many people project onto the Bible what they want to see. Democrats see a liberal Jesus. Republicans see a conservative Jesus. Instead of honestly trying to become more like Jesus, most Christians actually try to make Jesus more like themselves.

“Instead of being swept into the Bible’s story, Rorschach thinkers sweep the Bible up into their own story. Instead of being an opportunity for redemption, the Bible becomes an opportunity for narcissism."

SHORTCUT 4: The Puzzlers
Many of us have been taught to see the Bible as a puzzle, and once you’ve solved the puzzle, you no longer have to deal with the individual pieces. Once you’ve created a systematic theology that connects all the pieces together, you’re work is done.

The first problem with puzzling is that we assume that we already know what the grand system, the picture on the puzzle’s box, really is. The second problem is that once we’ve determined what that grand system is, we end up ignoring the pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit. So, passages that do not fit our categories of theology get swept under the rug as if they don’t exist – after all, they’re not part of the picture that we’ve dreamt up that makes the pieces of this puzzle link together.

However, this is not the Bible that we have – the Bible is not a systematic theology book, it is a story. And that suggests that the best way to systematize the Bible is to keep it the way it is: Keep it as a story.

SHORTCUT 5: Maestros
Scot told stories of eating wonderful dinners in Italy, where “maestros” of culinary skill make the finest risotto. He loves risotto, so he goes back to his home in Illinois and attempts to replicate what the maestro made.

When we approach the Bible, many of us attempt to find a maestro – a master teacher through whom we can make sense of the rest of the Bible. It makes sense, for instance, to make Jesus our maestro. However, there is a lot more Bible than the red letters.

Others make Paul their maestro, but in doing so, Jesus becomes overwhelmed by Paul’s way of thinking. For many evangelicals, Romans is the lens through which all the rest of the Bible is read.

But the beauty of the Bible is that we get to hear many voices, singing their own particular part of the song. We need to hear the whole choir in order to rightly read the Bible, not just a soloist.

Our Ineffective and Bloated Health Care System

2009-09-09T19:56:00.008-04:00

We have incredible waste in our health care system. Up to one third of the two trillion dollars that we spend on it is wasted on overpriced drugs and devices that replace older drugs and devices that work fine and on overused and ineffective procedures that do not actually increase the health quality of American lives.

Elliott Fisher and Jack Wennberg of The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care have studied the data for three decades, proving how much waste there is in the system. They’ve mapped out health care across the country, discovering that in high treatment states, like New York, California, Florida, and New Jersey, Medicare spends 20% more per patient than the average. And in low treatment states, like Iowa, Utah, or North Dakota, Medicare spends 25% less than average.

As Maggie Mahar reports, what the Dartmouth studies reveal is “that in Manhattan and Miami, chronically ill Medicare patients receive far more aggressive care than very similar patients in places like Salt Lake City, Utah, and Rochester, Minn. Their research reveals that Medicare beneficiaries in high-cost states are likely to spend twice as many days in the hospital as patients in low-cost states and are far more likely to die in an intensive care unit. The odds are higher that patients in high-spending regions will see 10 or more specialists during their final six months of life. These facts alone aren't terribly surprising. But here's the stunner: Chronically ill patients who receive the most intensive, aggressive, and expensive treatments fare no better than those who receive more conservative care. In fact, their outcomes are often worse.”

In the 1990s, the insurance industry tried to stop paying for exorbitant procedures. HMOs based these decisions not on medical efficiencies and quality of procedure but merely based on cost. There was a major backlash against this, so by the turn of the century, HMOs stopped managing care and instead agreed to pay for anything that Medicare approves. The higher costs for paying for all these procedures was just passed onto employers in the form of higher premiums. That’s why health care is the mess it is today. The cost for health care as a percentage of our nation's Gross Domestic Product is unsustainably increasing each year. It has not always been this way; there was a time when we were more in line with the rest of the world.

Why does the United States spend so much on its health care? Elliot Fisher and Jack Wennberg of Dartmouth have shown that we have overbuilt our health care industrial complex to the point that it needs to be used – there’s too much profit to be lost if we don’t. We have what Harvard’s Donald Berwick calls “supply-driven care.”

Is Health Care a Commodity?

2009-09-08T20:51:00.001-04:00

As the left and right blast each other concerning health care, a major question remains unanswered.

Clarke E. Cochran, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science at the Department of Health Organization Management at Texas Tech University, will deliver an address entitled "Seeking Justice: The Imperiled Promise of Healthcare Reform" at The Center for Public Justice's 15th annual Kuyper Lecture on October 22 in Washington, D.C.

10 years ago, before all the heated town hall meetings and all the left- and right-wing media pundits started spouting off on this, he addressed health care reform at a presentation given at Calvin College.

In this address, Cochran raised this critical question: Should we view Health Care as a commodity?

"Different spheres of society appropriately employ different bases of distribution. College professors aim to assign grades on the basis of merit or achievement. The same principle is used for prizes in an athletic competition. Parents distribute slices of cake at a child's birthday party according to strict equality, lest fights break out. Numerical equality governs votes in a democratic society. Cameras, blue jeans, automobiles, pencils, and diamond rings are distributed according to the logic of the market.

Need is the proper principle for distributing health care because health is necessary for a community's proper functioning. Good health facilitates social interaction and economic enterprise. Medical care is one of the principal means to preserve and restore physical, mental, and emotional functioning. Therefore, all societies (except the United States) that value health and that have the financial and technical means to develop modern systems of medical care recognize that health care for all citizens is a matter of public justice.

The prime competitor of need as a distributive principle is the market. Commitment to laissez-faire capitalism promotes a vision of the market as the single metaphor for life. Yet the market, however appropriate for the distribution of commodities, depends on an individualistic perspective foreign to commitment to the common good. It treats health care as a commodity like cameras, cars, pencils, and blue jeans. Those without financial resources receive inferior care or no care at all. The American tendency to make health care a market commodity produces very high quality technical care, but at the highest cost and worst access in the modern world."

The flip-side of the argument is this: A market-driven system properly places responsibility on the shoulders of the consumer, rather than on an impersonal bureaucratic entity. Markets produce the best product at the best cost because producers must respond to the demands of consumers. Our health care system must honor the image of God in each human being, meaning that we must care for the needs of each human being while we also honor the dignity of each human being by not robbing them of personal responsibility. Cochran talks about this as well (we’ll look at this in a few days).

So, before we can get into the nitty-gritty of policy, a foundational question needs to be addressed: Should we view Health Care as a commodity?

AHHHHHH!!! Obama is going to speak at my kids’ school!!!!

2009-09-08T09:46:00.004-04:00

Run for your lives! Yank your kids out of that school! He is going to indoctrinate them in some sort of communist, black, minority-lovin’, care-for-the-poor, socialist brain washing!

His speech was released to the public yesterday. Look at the abysmal things he is going to say to our kids! OH! OUR KIDS!!! They’ll never recover from these clear attempts to brainwash them to support Obama’s socialist agenda!!

Now I've given a lot of speeches about education. And I've talked a lot about responsibility.

I've talked about your teachers' responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I've talked about your parents' responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don't spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I've talked a lot about your government's responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren't working where students aren't getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

AAAAHHHH!!! Run for the hills!!
Ummm… wait. That actually is pretty helpful.

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide.

Hey. That sounds like individual responsibility. That sounds like what I tell my kids.

And this isn't just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You'll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You'll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems.

Now, THAT is frightening…
Ummm… Well, I guess it really isn't frightening at all.
In fact, it’s exactly what I, as a Christian missionary to students on college campuses, tell students every week. Exactly.

I get it. I know what that's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn't always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn't fit in.

So I wasn't always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I'm not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams.

Hmmm… Here we have the nation’s first African-American president telling students about how difficult it was to make it in his circumstances. This is a unique opportunity to address a major problem in our nation: Black kids are at a much higher risk of not getting an education than white kids. The “Obama Effect” is already being seen in test scores. “The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes.”

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home — that's no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That's no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No one's written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

Again, that doesn’t sound too socialist. That sounds down-right American! Wave the Red-White-and-Blue!!

Health Care Reform: Subsidiarity and Sphere Sovereignty

2009-09-02T15:28:00.000-04:00

Christians have long taught that social issues are to be handled by the social institutions that are closest to the issue at hand. It’s what the Roman Catholics call “Subsidiarity.”

Also, for about a century (if not more), Protestant Christians have developed the principle of “Sphere Sovereignty,” which states that no single human institution should have absolute authority in society. Each institution is responsible directly to God for its particular area of sovereignty – families, educational institutions, businesses, trade unions, science, art, etc. No human institution owes its existence to the State, but rather to God. Government is not the superior institution, but simply has its own sphere of sovereignty. The key is this: The spheres of society are not subsidiaries of the state. Thus, in Christian social teaching, placing limitations on the power of government is a simple acknowledgement that only God has the right to absolute sovereign rule.

So, as I apply these Christian social teachings to the current health care issue, I wonder something: How is it that families and doctors are not given more responsibility for the decisions made concerning health care?

The most glaring reason that I see is this: The mode of payment has evolved into a third-party system, where employers pay heath insurance companies in order to cover the cost of health care.

The employer only has a stake here if health benefits for employees will also benefit the business (which more and more is not the case, so businesses are increasingly moving out of the sphere of being responsible for health).

The insurance companies’ most pressing issue is profits, not the health of those in their system, so they should not have responsibility for the sphere of health.

So, in our current system, families and doctors are not making decisions on what needs to be done, and at what cost.

My question for debate is this: How does replacing the third party of insurance companies with the third party of the federal government solve this problem? While Health Insurance Companies are definitely huge bureaucratic behemoths, replacing them with the huge bureaucratic behemoth of the Federal Government does not solve the issue that a third party that is very separated from the institutions needing to make the decisions will be making the decisions.

Health Care Justice

2009-09-01T12:33:00.000-04:00

In February 2006, I suffered an aortic aneurysm that nearly claimed my life. After emergency surgery to replace the bursting ascending aorta, I suffered Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome that forced the doctors to place me in a medicated coma for four weeks. After seven weeks in the hospital, and a month of recovery, another aneurysm was discovered that needed a second open-heart surgery. Later that same year, I had my chest opened up again by the world’s foremost surgeon of aortic reconstruction and valve replacements at the Cleveland Clinic. To say that I am extremely thankful for the quality of health care in the United States of America would be an understatement.

The United States is the best in the world in what is called “rescue care.” Not only are there top-tier hospitals like the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and Johns Hopkins, but my local hospital (Canton’s Mercy Medical Center) was able to save my life when I suffered the trauma of my original aortic aneurysm. If you need advanced medical treatment – like cardiac surgery, or chemotherapy, or an organ transplant – America is the place to be.

But here’s the problem: Most health care is not “rescue care.” Most health care is helping people deal with illness on a day-to-day basis – dealing with diabetes or arthritis or a nagging pain in the abdomen, preventing small things from turning into big things, catching problems before they become major issues. This is where we keep people healthy. This is how we keep health care costs down. This is done by primary care doctors, not specialists.

And this is where America is bad. Really bad.

The New York Times reported that “[Nine] years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th. More recently, the highly regarded Commonwealth Fund has pioneered in comparing the United States with other advanced nations through surveys of patients and doctors and analysis of other data. Its latest report ranked the United States last or next-to-last compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — on most measures of performance, including quality of care and access to it. Other comparative studies also put the United States in a relatively bad light.”

Last year, Reuters reported that “France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations… If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.”

The response of Christians in the United States to this must be, “This is not God's will!” In a representative government, we should expect (and, with civility, demand) that our society reflect our Christian values – among these being liberty and justice for all, especially for those who are the “least of these.”

The poor do not have access to quality health care because health insurance has primarily been offered through employment. And if you are not employed, you simply can’t afford health insurance. This is why millions are attempting to live without it. And this is why America is lagging behind the world in quality of health care.

It is an injustice of biblical proportions that a wealthy nation like the United States is unable to offer its citizens quality health care. While the rich have access to primary care, the poor are relegated to the emergency rooms when their symptoms get so bad they can’t stand it anymore.

Hiatus is OVER!

2009-08-31T15:24:00.002-04:00

After a time of transition in my ministry in REAL LIFE, I can now begin to start blogging again. Look for blogs on Health Care Reform and Missional Outreach through MULTI-SITE ministry.

More Mythology about the Founding Fathers: Franklin at the Constitutional Convention

2009-07-29T15:32:00.012-04:00

According to James Madison’s Notes on the Constitutional Convention, on June 28, 1787, the Constitutional Congress was struggling to move forward in developing the United States Constitution. Small states wanted “One State-One Vote,” while larger states wanted “Representation Appropriated by Population.” The 82-year old Benjamin Franklin stood to plead for compromise. He asked why it was that “this Assembly, groping as it were in the dark…(has) not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?” He reminded them that during the war, these leaders had daily prayed “in this room for daily protection.” He then said, “the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see to this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men.” He moved that the assembly institute “prayers imploring for the assistance of heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, (to) be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business.” Roger Sherman seconded the motion.

Mark Noll, in his essay, “Evangelicals in the American Founding and Today,” (in the book Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America, edited by James H. Hutson, 2000, pp. 137-139), explains how Peter Marshall, one of the leading evangelical advocates for “restoring America’s Christian heritage,” moves beyond James Madison’s account of the historical events of the Constitutional Convention.

“Now, however, the story takes on an interesting twist as recorded in two books by Peter Marshall and David Manuel, which in various editions have sold over 850,000 copies in the past twenty years and which have become mainstays in the historical consciences of many evangelical protestants. Their titles are The Light and the Glory: God’s Plan for America, 1492-1793 and From Sea to Shining Sea: God’s Plan for America, 1787-1837.

Franklin’s appeal for prayer “marked the turning point.” It was “clearly the most extraordinary speech anyone had delivered in the entire three months the delegates had been meeting… They immediately declared three days of prayer and fasting, to seek God’s help in breaking the deadlock among them. At the end of that time, all the resentment and wrangling were gone. …Why does [the Constitution] work so well? One reason is that it was divinely inspired. A second is that it was the completion of nearly two hundred years of Puritan political thought. Those early church covenants recognized the sinfulness of man. They anticipated the possibility of human wrong. The Constitution does exactly the same thing. In effect, it documents the Covenant Way on national paper." (From Sea to Shining Sea, pp. 18-19, The Light and the Glory, p. 156).

Much of the force as well as much of the (contemporary) confusion in and about evangelical political mobilization in the United States… is illustrated by the farrago of fact and fantasy surrounding Franklin’s appeal for prayer at the 1787 convention. The facts, as provided by the manuscript resources closest to the incident and clarified by careful historians, are these:

—First, Franklin did make such a motion.
—Second, this same Franklin only a short time later wrote at some length to the Rev. Ezra Stiles about his own religion. Franklin believed in God but concerning “Jesus of Nazareth,” he had, “with most of the present Dissenters in England…some Doubts to his Divinity.”
—Third, Franklin’s motion was not approved but tabled; there was no three-day recess; and the Convention never did begin it sessions with prayer.
—Fourth, the story that the Convention acted positively on Franklin’s motion, that it recessed to fast, and that it was miraculously guided in writing the Constitution was first published in the mid 1820s. Only in 1833, in a tract by Thomas S. Grimké, did this account begin to figure in broader assessments of the American founding. But that tract was explicitly repudiated by James Madison, by then one of the few surviving members of the Constitutional Convention, who told Grimké with great assurance that Franklin’s motion had never been enacted.

It does nobody any good to propagate a mythological history of the founding of our nation, even if the story seems to be for our benefit (and especially so!). If Christians are to have any credibility in political discourse, then we had better steadfastly seek the truth about the history of the founding of our nation. As Mark Noll wrote in a book co-authored with two other top-respected evangelical historians,

“Does it really matter if people hold to this mistaken view that America is, or was, or could become a truly Christian nation? Yes, it does matter. It matters because, if we are going to respond effectively to relativistic secularism, then we need to base our response upon reality rather than error. This is not to deny the positive influence that Christianity has indeed had upon the American way of life. Rather, it is to take it all the more seriously so that we may respond to it all the more effectively.” (Noll, Hatch, and Marsden, The Search for Christian America, p. 131).

Texas Board of Education May Revamp History Curriculum toward Revisionist Christian and Conservative Themes

2009-07-27T09:45:00.002-04:00

Texas is a big state; therefore, their curriculum often affects the nation’s curriculum.

The teaching of Evolution has always been the source of contention for school boards; but now, the Texas Board of Education is making American History the next battle ground in the culture wars. The Texas school board have brought in six outside reviewers to make recommendations on changing the social studies curriculum. Some on the board have bought into the mythology that America was founded as a Christian Nation, so two of their outside reviewers are Peter Marshall and David Barton. Marshall and Barton are not historians; they are Christian activists who feel called to "reclaim America’s Christian heritage." All the other reviewers, including the three appointed by the more moderate and liberal board members, are credentialed historians.

Marshall and Barton are advocates of a revisionist history of America, stating that the aim of the founding fathers was to have a Christian nation. This revisionism severely harms the good arguments that should be made (on solid historical grounds) that much of the nation’s ethos at its founding was influenced by a Christian worldview. For instance, there is ample evidence to suggest that the reason we have a separation of powers in American government comes from a biblical understanding of humanity’s fall and sinfulness, so the Constitution set up the system of checks and balances. This information should not be kept from students being taught in secular schools simply because it mentions religion. That is revisionist history, and does more harm than good.

However, Marshall and Barton continually overplay their hand, making bold and unsubstantiated claims about the history of the nation in terms of Christianity. Mark Noll, evangelicalism’s most respected historian, has lambasted Peter Marshall’s books – pointing out how Marshall actually gets history wrong because he so wants to believe what he wants to believe. (A must read book on this subject is The Search for Christian America, by Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden).

The current arguments in the Texas Board of Education revolve around who should be included in the history curriculum and who should be excluded. Peter Marshall and David Barton have suggested to the Texas Board that certain people should be excluded from the history curriculum: They want Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who argued Brown v. Board of Education and later became the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, to be excluded from First Grade curriculum. They want Anne Hutchinson, who was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for teaching religious views at odds with the officially sanctioned faith, excluded from Fifth Grade curriculum. They want César Chávez, who (because of his Catholic sense of justice) led a strike and boycott to improve working conditions for immigrant farm workers, excluded as an example of citizenship for fifth-graders. "He's hardly the kind of role model that ought to be held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation," Marshall wrote.

John Fea, Associate Professor of American History at Messiah College, has written an excellent opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle this week ("Don't taint teaching of history in Texas"). John and I were dorm mates back in seminary.

In it, John says that the bigger issue at stake in this matter is the purpose of history curriculum in our students’ development.

“The study of history develops civic awareness and provides us with heroes from the past that we can look up to. This is the kind of history that Barton and Marshall want to promote. This kind of search for a useful past makes sense. Our natural inclination is to find something familiar in history — something that affirms our own convictions in the present.

Historians know, however, that not all of the past is familiar or useful. Not all of the past serves our present-day agendas.

Yet we must study it.

Students do not have to see themselves in the past in order to learn from it. The study of history can develop character, the kind of moral and intellectual development that happens when they encounter historical actors who are strange to them.

Real education takes place when students learn to respect the ideas of people with whom they (or their parents) might differ. Historical thinking forces them to lay aside their own biases and enter into the mind of a person from the past who may have views that do not conform to their own.

Such an engagement with the past lends itself to the cultivation of certain virtues — empathy, prudence, hospitality, self-denial — that might just make our students better people. This is the real value of the study of history in schools.”

Coldplay's 42: Those Who are Dead are Not Dead...

2009-07-23T19:30:00.017-04:00

A Christian Interacts with Viva La Vida, Or Death and All His Friends

Fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams chuckle when we hear the number 42.

In Adams’ Galaxy, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the answer to the Ultimate Question of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” from the supercomputer, Deep Thought. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be…

42.

But, ironically, even though the answer is found, the question for the answer was still no known! Deep Thought designs another computer (which happens to be the planet Earth) in order to discover “The Ultimate Question.” It will take another 10 million years to do the calculations to find that! But unfortunately, five minutes before finding the "Ultimate Question," the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons in order to make way for a new Hyperspace Bypass. Ain’t that a bummer?

So, Coldplay’s Chris Martin titled this song "42," which may indicate that he's writing about ultimate questions of life. And interestingly, those questions have something to do with death and heaven.

The song starts out with a melancholy piano backed by orchestra as Martin sings,

Those who are dead are not dead
They're just living in my head
And since I fell for that spell
I am living there as well

Time is so short
And I'm sure
There must be something more

It seems that the character has died and has discovered that death is not the end of existence. People continue to live in some sort of immaterial existence – “they're just living in my head.” And since the singer has also “fell for that spell” of death, he is “there as well.”

Many of the young people who listen to Coldplay feel so young and invincible, and are so caught up in pursuing immediate pleasures, that they rarely contemplate what is sung here: “Time is so short / And I'm sure / There must be something more.” Yes, life is short… and then what? Isn’t there something more? Isn't it fascinating that Chris Martin is asking this question? Will it help his audience to stop for a moment and ask the same?

Then, the song suddenly shifts moods to a driving rock song, where another person sings to the person from the somber section:

You thought you might be a ghost!
You thought you might be a ghost!
You didn't get to heaven but you made it close
You didn't get to heaven but you made it close

The character is informed that his spirit is in some in-between place – he’s not a ghost, but he’s not in heaven either. He didn’t quite make it to that destination (though he did make it close!).

And so the song shifts again to the sad refrain,

Those who are dead are not dead
They're just living in my head

And just trails off.

This is intriguing – No resolution to the tension; no sense that there is victory. Just the resignation of being not dead, yet not alive either. Sad.

When it comes to matters of life, death, and the afterlife, many people are confused. And like the supercomputer Deep Thought, they do not have the answer, and they do not even know how to ask the right question. I understand why; after all, nobody has actually died and come back to explain what happens on the other side, right?

Well, yes…
Matter of fact, somebody has.

One of the most captivating things about Jesus Christ is that he is the one person who has done so, and he has done so in order that we can understand why we die, what the ultimate questions of life are, and what the ultimate answers to those questions are. And the answer is not, alas, 42.

Jesus reveals the mysterious. And here is what the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus reveals:

About death, Jesus reveals that there is indeed “life after death.” And – get this – there is “life after life after death.”

Jesus died but he was raised from the dead. He was the vanguard, the pioneer, the “firstfruits” of a harvest of others who will also resurrect from the dead. Those who “belong to Christ” (in other words, those who have given their lives over to Christ as their Lord) will be raised from the dead.

“Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep… But in this order: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.” (1 Corinthians 15:20, 23)

But what's in between the time of death and resurrection? Are you a ghost? Do you go to heaven? And if so, how do you get into heaven? I’d hate to only “make it close!”

What the Bible reveals is that there is a place for our disembodied selves between death and resurrection. This is what many Christians call “heaven.” But because of this, many Christians get confused about the afterlife. Since they call this place “heaven,” they assume that this is the ultimate destination for Christians. They think that the ultimate goal is the make it to heaven.

Actually, this in-between death and resurrection place is what theologians call the “Intermediate State.” “Heaven,” by definition, is the dwelling place of God, and when Christians die, they are blessed to be with God in heaven. But that is not the ultimate destination - we were not created to live in heaven; we were created to live on earth. Far too many Christians say that "Heaven is my true home;" but, if we are biblical, we understand that "heaven" is God's home, and earth is our home.

One day, those who trust in Christ and his grace of redemption and restoration will experience something truly remarkable: Their disembodied selves will reunite with their bodies and these bodies (yes, the bodies we are in now), will be raised from the dead. The dwelling place for these restored, glorified bodies will not be heaven but earth. God will restore the earth to its original intended existence – absent of sin and decay.

The Bible does not end with us being whisked up into heaven to be with God for all eternity; it ends with God coming down to dwell with us humans on earth for all eternity!

“I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”(Revelation 21:2-4)

N. T. Wright, in his must-read new book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, writes,

“The early Christian future hope centered firmly on resurrection. The first Christians did not simply believe in life after death; they virtually never spoke simply of going to heaven when they died. (As I have often said… heaven is important but it’s not the end of the world.) When they did speak of heaven as a postmortem destination, they seemed to regard this heavenly life as a temporary stage on the way to the eventual resurrection of the body… The early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. (p. 41)
“[Resurrection] was, in other words, life after life after death.” (p. 151)

Those who are dead are not dead...
If they belong to Christ, they are living in the intermediate state with Jesus
And that’s not the end of the story...
They will one day be resurrected from the dead and live on a restored earth, with heaven and earth no longer being two separate dimensions, for God will be with us and we will be his people.

You see, when we get our eschatology right, we are on the proper route to answer the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything. The ultimate questions are (I'm borrowing here from Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton's excellent book, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview):

(1) "Who am I?" Or, what is the nature, task, and purpose of human beings?
(2) "Where am I?" Or, what is the nature of the world and universe I live in?
(3) "What's wrong?" Or, what is the basic problem or obstacle that keeps me from attaining fulfillment? In other words, how do I understand evil? and
(4) "What is the remedy?" Or, how is it possible to overcome this hindrance to my fulfillment? In other words, how do I find salvation? (p. 35)

And the answers, in my short form, are:

(1) You are a person created by a personal, loving God, and in the image of that triune, relational God. The image of God in you gives you purpose and meaning, as you fulfill what it means to reflect God. The purpose for every human is what is called the "Cultural Mandate," to take the raw materials that God has given and continue the creative work of creating culture, working for the good of all other creatures, and reflecting the good creativity of the God who made us.
(2) You live in the cosmos that God created and deemed to be "very good."
(3) But this cosmos has been severely damaged by the rebellion of those created in God's image. Work has been frustrated; our calling to create culture is severely marred by our selfishness and evil desires.
(4) The remedy is found in the person of Jesus Christ, who redeems humans back to the fullness of the image of God, and thus restores the creation that he loves. As we follow Jesus, working out our salvation, we are able to cooperate with God in the redemption of all things.

Death and all of his friends will not have the final say. Those created in the image of God are redeemed, they will be resurrected, and they will live for eternity on a restored earth. All things will one day be put to rights. This is the Christian hope.

And in the meantime, we can participate with God as he is actively bringing redemption to this fallen cosmos. This is the Christian meaning of life.

Coldplay's LOST! And the Proper Christian Response

2009-07-21T09:01:00.006-04:00

A Christian Interacts with Viva La Vida, Or Death and All His Friends

Lost!

The second biggest hit from Coldplay’s album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends is the single Lost! In this song, Chris Martin writes of a character who laments that his efforts often are frustrated by the world around him. In the first chorus, he sings,

I just got lost!
Every river that I tried to cross
Every door I ever tried was locked
Oh and I'm just waiting ‘til the shine wears off

What a great line that is… “I'm just waiting ‘til the shine wears off.” He’s saying that every time things look good, he knows that there will be a time that it no longer will be good. Like a shiny new toy, everything will inevitably end up being a disappointment. Every time he has tried to do something, he ends up lost and frustrated.

This is not just his personal experience; he warns us, his listeners, that it will be our experience as well –

You might be a big fish
In a little pond
Doesn't mean you’ve won
‘Cause along will come
A bigger one

And you'll be lost!
Every river that you tried to cross
Every gun you ever held went off
Oh and I'm just waiting ‘til the firing’s stopped
Oh and I'm just waiting ‘til the shine wears off

The Christian worldview explains why this is so. Everything was created good, humans and creation were in a synergistic harmony, but something awful has happened to this universal flourishing, this “shalom.”

Christian theologians call it “The Fall.”

The deep relationships that humans were meant to have with God, with each other, and with the rest of Creation have been deeply wounded. The Fall explains why we are “alienated from and enemies with God” (Colossians 1:21). The Fall explains why there is “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy” (Galatians 5:20-21). The Fall explains why “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:22).

The Fall is a universal experience. It seems that no matter what we do, we are frustrated by the Fall. No matter what, no matter how new and improved we make things, we end up resigned to waiting ‘till the shine wears off.

What is the Christian response?

There seems to be two differing responses vying for the American Christian’s devotion. One says that since Christ has come and empowered Christians with His Spirit, we can reverse the results of the Fall for ourselves through our God-given ability to think and speak things into existence. The thinking is that since we are made in God’s image, we have the ability to create by way of our words. If we think positively, if we envision a different, better life, if we speak positive truth, then we can reverse the results of the Fall.

The other Christian response says that since Christ has come and empowered Christians with His Spirit, we can reverse the results of the Fall for ourselves and the rest of God’s Creation through our God-given ability to discern how to cooperate with God to bring redemption. This differs from the other in that it faces squarely the fact that life difficult, that there are forces that seek to bring death and decay to the world around us, and that it will be a battle to bring redemption to the world. This also differs because it believes that ultimate redemption cannot be achieved until Christ the King returns to make all things right.

It should be apparent that I think the latter worldview is the true one. It seems to match the biblical storyline and the reality of existence much better than the former one. However, many Christians evidently do not see it the way I do, because they have made Joel Osteen’s book Your Best Life Now a best-seller.

Let’s look at how Osteen feeds the reader lies about how to deal with a fallen world.

After encouraging the reader to “Enlarge your Vision” (Part 1), and to “Develop a Healthy Self-Image” (Part 2), both of which seem pretty nice things for a Christian to do, Osteen goes straight into the Word-of-Faith teaching of his Prosperity Gospel. Part 3 is entitled, “Discover the Power of Your Thoughts and Words.” Osteen tells the reader,

“When you think thoughts of failure, you are destined to fail… But when you align your thoughts with God’s thoughts and you start dwelling on the promises of His Word, when you constantly dwell on thoughts of His victory, favor, power, and strength, nothing can hold you back. When you think positive, excellent thoughts, you will be propelled toward greatness, inevitably bound for increase, promotion, and God’s supernatural blessings.” (p. 104)

Osteen’s biblical evidence that this is true? He cites Proverbs 23:7, which he quotes as saying “As a person thinks in his heart, so he will become.” Sounds like an open-and-shut case… until you look up the verse in the Bible. Proverbs 23:7 does not say what Osteen wants it to say – it is about how we should avoid eating a stingy man’s food because within himself he is not thinking with a pure heart toward you. Not exactly a name-it-and-claim-it formula there.

Not only are you to think positively, Osteen says that your words have actual power.

Sadly, many people are living discouraged lives because of their words. They say things such as:
“Nothing good ever happens to me.”
“I’ll never be successful.”
“I don’t have what it takes. I can’t do it.”
“I’ll never get out of this mess.” (p. 122)

What is Osteen’s biblical mandate on this teaching? He goes to James 3:4.

“The Bible compares the tongue to the rudder of a huge ship. Although the rudder is small, it controls the direction of the entire ship, and, in a similar manner, your tongue will control the direction of your life.” (p. 122)

Now, I know that I went to Seminary and I always have my antennae up to hear these misinterpretations of Scripture, but doesn’t normal Joe Christian not recognize that major leap of logic? Since the Bible warns us that our tongues are evil in that they “boast of great things,” then, according to Osteen, we should use them to not say negative things, but to boast of great things. Hmmm…

Not only are we to stop the negative talk, Osteen wants us to go on the offensive.

“The Scripture says, ‘With the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:10). This same principle is true in other areas… If you are facing sickness today…say something such as, ‘Father, I thank You that you promised me in Psalms that I will live and not die and I will declare the works of the Lord”… If you are struggling financially, instead of talking about your problems, you need to boldly declare, ‘Everything I put my hands to prospers and succeeds!’ Friend, when you make those kinds of bold declarations, all heaven comes to attention to back up God’s Word.” (p. 130)

So, to Chris Martin of Coldplay, Joel Osteen would say,

“Friend, your problem is because you are not thinking positively and saying bold words of prosperity! You must stop saying these negative words! Instead of dwelling on and talking about all the negatives in life, you need to choose to dwell on the positive! You need to sing, Every river that I try to cross I will cross successfully! Every door I ever try will be opened for me!"

So, Chris listens to the advice, but he still feels “lost" - the shine continues to wear off. Things continue to feel fallen and life often feels discouraging: Somebody else gets the promotion, a loved one dies suddenly, the bills continue to pile up, and there is still all the brokenness in the world around him – hunger and disease, terrorism, war, etc.

When Chris goes back to Joel Osteen or one of the other Word-of-Faith teachers, and complains about all this, he is shut down immediately. “Do not speak negatively! Your words have power! Your lack of faith will continue to bring you tragedy! Think and say only positives!”

Hopefully, Chris will see the folly of this worldview.

Hopefully, he come to sober judgment about himself, the world that is in perpetual struggle, and what he is called to do about it.

And Jesus is there, offering him grace to move from being a part of the problem to becoming a part of the solution.

“Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:58)

Coldplay's Viva La Vida - The Will to Power vs. Shalom

2009-07-20T11:23:00.006-04:00

A Christian Interacts with Viva La Vida, Or Death and All His Friends

Coldplay’s latest hit was one of my top ten albums of 2008. In it, lyricist Chris Martin explores the subject of death from different angles. As I listen to this wonderful album, I wish Chris was sitting next to me. I’d love to understand what he would think of my opining about his lyrics. In future posts, I’m going to do that, with you, here in the vanguard.

Viva La Vida

In the most famous song from the album, the main character is a man reflecting on lost power and prestige, a king who no longer rules but rather lives a very humble and humiliating life.

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

This king was able somehow to overtake the previous king, but his power was fleeting –

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

Just as he had taken power, others were seeking to overthrow him –

Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be king?

So now, after the “wicked and wild wind” had allowed him to have power, he finds himself no longer “ruling the world.” And he is now wondering about his eternal fate. What will happen to him? In the chorus the king sings –

I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing
Roman cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
I know St Peter won't call my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I ruled the world

Why does he feel that “St. Peter won’t call his name?”

Throughout the song, there is a clear indication that the character understands what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called “the will to power," that most of us will often allow our need for achievement to outweigh our desire to be good to our fellow human beings. Our ambition and our striving to reach the highest possible position in life often does incredible damage to the harmony and love that should be the standard for our human existence.

The main character understands this. It was not right that he took power; it was also not right that he lost power. It was not right that he once ruled the world; it was also not right that he now sweeps the streets alone. It was not right that there was “never an honest word” while he “ruled the world.” And now, “for some reason,” he knows that St. Peter won't call his name.

This concept of peace and harmony between human beings, where we do not will to have power, but we submit to one another out of love, seeking the very best for others, is an old biblical concept. It was what the Hebrews called “Shalom.”

Nicholas Wolterstorff says that a society characterized by shalom combines peace, justice, and enjoyment of all relationships so that all peoples can flourish in their lives, and that they can also delight in their relationship with God (Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace). Writing on shalom, Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. embraces and expands Wolterstorff's definition:

“We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight…the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.” (Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: The Breviary of Sin, p. 10)

So what the character in the song Viva La Vida is experiencing is this: the lack of SHALOM. Plantinga has it right: Things are NOT the way they are supposed to be. There is evil where Shalom is supposed to be. I like the way Plantinga describes it:

“We might define evil as any spoiling of shalom, any deviation from the way God wants things to be. Thinking along these lines, we can see that sin is a subset of evil; it's any evil for which somebody is to blame – sin is culpable evil... Sin grieves God, offends God, betrays God, and not just because God is touchy. God hates sin against himself, against neighbors, against the good creation, because sin breaks the peace... God is for shalom and therefore against sin." (Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, p. 51)

So why does the character feel that St. Peter won’t call his name? Because he has a deep-seated understanding that his life was full of sin, that he was culpable for his will to power. And, if God is just, there must be consequences to the destruction of shalom.

Fascinating song.

Check out the new Orphan Project

2009-07-16T14:59:00.006-04:00

Review of their debut album, Orphan Found, from the Dutch Progressive Rock Page:

"Orphan Project dub their music "hard prog". It is indeed "progressive" in the sense that it goes beyond the borders of ordinary rock, using different instruments and song structures. And it is indeed hard in the sense that Orphan Project borrow powerful vocals and guitars-with-distortion-wide-open from our tougher musical neighbours. Somewhere between Under the Sun and Threshold, I'd say, Orphan Project show very capable musicianship and writing. Not without reason (band leaders) Shane Lankford and John Wenger credit American bands like Journey, Kansas/Kerry Livgren, and Petra, as well as prog rock giants Yes/Trevor Rabin and Genesis/Peter Gabriel for inspiration. One could safely add Pink Floyd/David Gilmour and Steve Hackett."

From Soundmass.com:

"Orphan Project returns with Spooning Out The Sea, an album that is bound to go down in history as a progressive rock masterpiece! Taking elements of hard rock and progressive rock, Spooning Out The Sea will appeal to fans of Dream Theater, Peter Gabriel, Yes and Kansas!"

Get a Free Review Copy of "The Gospel-Centered Life"

2009-07-05T11:20:00.002-04:00

One of the very best studies I've ever done was when two teachers from World Harvest Mission led the staff of the CCO through The Gospel-Centered Life earlier this year.

Now, for a limited time (until 7/31/09) you can get a free review copy of this study.

The Gospel-Centered Life is a nine lesson small group study intended to help participants understand how the gospel shapes every aspect of life. Each lesson is self-contained, featuring clear teaching from scripture, and requires no extra work outside of the group setting.

Designed for:

Pastors and leaders who want to spur Gospel renewal in their churches and ministries.
Church-planters who want to form Gospel DNA in the churches they start.
Students and campus ministers who are looking to live out the Gospel on campus.
Christians who want to be more deeply formed around the Gospel.
Small group leaders who are looking for content that “works” with diverse groups of people.
Missionaries who are looking for simple material to disciple new Christians.

"This is a rich gospel-centered small group curriculum that I am really excited to see published."
Mark Driscoll, Founding and Preaching Pastor, Mars Hill Church; President, Acts 29 Church Planting Network; President, The Resurgence

"I have not seen a better resource for training people in the implications of the gospel. It communicates both to the new Christian and to the seasoned pastor, much like the gospel itself."
Darrin Patrick, Lead Pastor of The Journey, St. Louis, MO and Vice President of the Acts 29 Network

'With simple and direct language, The Gospel-Centered Life helps people understand and effectively apply the gospel to their lives, regardless of where they are in their spiritual journey. It's one of the few resources out there that explicitly challenges others to reach out with the gospel, even as it is growing deeper into their own lives. I highly recommend it!'
Dr. Steven L. Childers, President & CEO, Global Church Advancement; Associate Professor of Practical Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary-Orlando

"The phrase 'gospel-centered' has become a popular buzzword in Christianity. But just because you talk about the gospel doesn’t mean you’re being transformed by it. I’m familiar with both the publisher and the authors of The Gospel-Centered Life, and I know they are profoundly aware, first and foremost, of their own need for gospel renewal. That’s why I’m so excited to recommend this material to pastors, leaders, and Christians everywhere who long to see gospel transformation in themselves and in their churches."
Daniel Montgomery, Founding Pastor, Sojourn Church, Louisville, Kentucky

Take the Missional Church Assessment

2009-07-03T15:31:00.005-04:00

Milfred Minatrea, author of the book Shaped By God's Heart: The Passion and Practices of Missional Churches from Leadership Network, offers this free assessment tool based on his book.

"A missional church," according to the Minatrea, "is not about programs, but rather is a distinct church culture. Churches, like any organism, adopt and are influenced by culture. Culture can be identified by observing behaviors. In fact, culture is the set of underlying values that drive our behavior. We act like we do, because we believe what we do. The only way to evaluate culture is through analyzing actions." Therefore, the assessment "gauges responses to statements about the behaviors of a church in order to provide a framework for dialogue concerning the compatibility of the church with a missional culture."

The assessment tool analyzes your church based on nine "Culture Checkpoints," and you receive a chart that graphically provides the assessment.

# 1 - High Threshold For Membership
# 2 - Real, But Not Real Religious
# 3 - Teach To Obey Rather Than Simply To Know
# 4 - Rewrite Worship Every Week
# 5 - Live Apostolically
# 6 - Expect To Change The World From Their Own Front Porch
# 7 - Order Their Actions Based Upon Their Purpose
# 8 - Measure Growth By Capacity To Release Rather Than Retain
# 9 - Value Beliefs And Are Passionate About The Kingdom Of God

You can take the assessment for free at XPastor.org.