Monday, August 30, 2010

The Story of the American Church

Some of the Christian's most treasured documents are the writings of St. Luke. Because of his incredibly meticulous eye and his dedication to finding the truth, his gospel account and his remarkable work reporting the first years of the Christian church are quite key to understanding this movement that is still happening in the present day.

Luke's gospel is profound and strangely detailed, but Acts of the Apostles is unbelievably unique. It is the most linguistically complex document we have through the entire Bible. Much of the Holy Scriptures are well-written, seeing as they were penned by scholars, kings, teachers, prophets, and other educated historians of the time - and then others are written in the barely readable hand of fishermen or uneducated blacksmiths.

Luke is distinct amongst all of these. The original documented language is mind boggling. During my studies in Greek, we championed and translated Mark's account of the gospel, which was difficult for me. However, when Dr. Wheeler took us over in our Greek New Testament's to Luke's account of the first Acts of the Apostles, we were dumbfounded. Rarely do you see such attention to detail; perfect conjugation, excellent consistency, and astounding vocabulary. Many words Luke uses in Acts are not seen anywhere else in the Christian scriptures. In light of this immaculate document, today's scholars tend to think that Acts was actually a legal document used to defend Paul in court later toward the end of his life. Both books (the gospel and Acts) are written to Theophilus, someone we can only speculate about. Dr. Wheeler sat in the camp that Theophilus had to have supported Luke and the early Christian ministry in some way, and perhaps was involved on the legal side of things.

Furthermore, there are strange details about Paul's life that one can notice in his/her English translation. For example, toward the end of the book, in chapter 28, Luke is telling the reader about their journey to Rome. In this, he tells of "a ship that had wintered in the island, a ship of Alexandria, with the twin gods (Castro and Pollux) as a figure head." Later he records the winds of those three days getting to Rome and staying in Puteoli for exactly seven days.

Ok, ok, ok, there are tons of details...but what's the point? Well, firstly, I love coming across these lines in my Bible because it reminds me that these men, and Luke in particular, were not dedicated to starting the next big religion, but they were dedicated to the truth. Luke's writing is like that of an investigative journalist, which he claims himself (Luke 1:1-4). It must be understood that the Bible is not a collection of good ideas, but there lies much history in it. For all of the "extra-biblical" evidence that is out there, it is also important to keep the Bible's authority as a historical document, especially the New Testament, which has remarkable descriptions of first century cities.

Lastly, I can't help but thinking, selfishly perhaps: is my life worth reporting about? Luke was dedicated to following and accounting the life of Jesus Christ and the church that formed after his death because it was worth reporting. Paul, Stephen, Timothy and Titus were all worth writing about to Luke. Their stories were remarkable. They lived lives that were not just exciting, but impacting and culture changing. Paul's last two years were spend just in his house meeting and preaching with people, something Luke reports in Acts 28. Is my life worth reporting about? Certainly we're hearing much on the church in China and Turkey and India and the lengths they're going for the gospel. But what do we have? What is our story or chapter in the history of the church? The fact that we have video campuses? Our amazingly large buildings?

I pray our story changes. I pray that the American church is a story of a group of people who found a way out of consumerism and material items and into the great reaches of the kingdom of God.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

A Whole New World

I'm not sure if this is a new thing, but restoring old photos or slides into color is perhaps the most baller thing to do. And that's a technical term. I think I've found my obsession.

Remember when I blew your mind with color photos from the depression era in America? WELL PREPARE TO HAVE YOUR MIND MELTED.

The Big Picture, which is the Boston Globe's photo blog, recently posted these restored slides taken in Russia in 1910. In case you failed basic math, that's ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO. Also, it's Russia. Talk about one-upping...Please take some time to see some of the most beautiful portraits and pictures of early 20th century Russia.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Rearguard is All Caught Up Online

The paper has gone through a world of changes this past year including a new editor and a big staff turnover, but apparently that happens every year in small alt-monthlys. Through these changes, the online edition has suffered. We've been understaffed and haven't been able to post much of our content online since April. This sucks because we actually have quite a large online readership due to our small print circulation.

I'm happy to say that we are slowly moving our content back online. Some articles I wrote are now on the website, but I wanted to direct some of you to an article I wrote back in April that I've been asked about frequently.

The article is titled, "A Christian Response to Pat Robertson." In it, I deal with the problems and theological implications of Robertson's comments on the earthquake that struck Haiti. I pitched this story and didn't think much would happen to it, but it was cool to see the paper get behind it and publish it. I don't normally get a whole lot of response for the printed stuff, but I got some good emails about this one. Now that it is online, I'd like to share it with you all.

I know when I told some of you about it and posted about it on Facebook many of you wanted to read it. Well, shut up and get reading! Hey, and poke around the website for a bit...we won't mind.

Few Things Satisfy Me Like This

It's...just...so...perfect...

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Simplest Courage

"God, why are you people so timid? It's no wonder the churches are empty, when you can't answer even the simplest questions. Don't you get it? That's what we want. Answers. If we wanted wolly-minded nonsense we'd stay at home. In our own heads."
-Nick Hornby, How To Be Good: A Novel, page 255.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Good For Something

While The New York Times falls short in many places, it does a wonderful job on a few things. As a nerd, I believe they are perhaps the best at explaining their own grammatical and syntactical errors, of which are many. If you have any interest in the English language, "After Deadline" is solid and, at times, quite hilarious.

The column is written by Phillip B. Corbett, who I believe holds the title "Standards Editor," a very impressive title at the paper. He gathers reader and staff feedback and makes the call on what was OK and what wasn't.

In last week's installment, Corbett calculated the use of the word "hipster," a term he's seen litter the paper. He did some quick calculations and research, which I wanted to pass along because most of you are just about finished reading this:

We try hard to shed our old image as stodgy and out of it. Perhaps too hard, sometimes.

How else to explain our constant invocation of the old/new slang “hipster”? As a colleague pointed out, we’ve used it more than 250 times in the past year.

The word is not new, of course. The O.E.D. dates it to the 1940s and helpfully equates it with “hepcat.” American Heritage offers this quaint definition: One who is exceptionally aware of or interested in the latest trends and tastes, especially a devotee of modern jazz.

Our latest infatuation with “hipster” seems to go back several years, perhaps coinciding in part with the flourishing of more colloquial (and hipper) blogs on our Web site. In 1990 we used the word just 19 times. That number rose gradually to about 100 by 2000, then exploded to 250 or so uses a year from 2005 on.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

They're True

I was thinking of this song today and thought to myself, I wonder what that music video looks like...Ladies and gentlemen, I answer you:

I love how serious they are and I love how popular this was and I love his mustache and I love the bass player's dance moves and I love my life.

Keeping Up With "Cool Christianity"

On August 13th, the Wall Street Journal published, "The Perils of 'Wannabe Cool' Christianity", a little opinion piece by Brett McCracken. McCracken released his book, Hipster Christianity (Baker Books) on August 1st and some of his writing has been sent my way by friends and congregation members.

If you haven't read his editorial in the WSJ, I would certainly suggest taking the time to do so (it's not long at all).

This piece in particular has been linked to me by six different individuals and some have asked what I thought about it all. So, I figured because of the interest generated, it would serve well to just respond to it here.

The author's overall argument is that because 18-25 year-olds are leaving the Western Evangelical church, the response of said church has been to make "a total image overhaul, where efforts are made to rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant." This image overhaul, he argues, is bad news because it hinders the church from being what twentysomethings really deisre: something real.
I can't disagree with that. In general, I like what McCracken is trying to do, but I think that this issue of the church trying to be cool or hip is completely separate from the church fighting to be relevant. Hip and relevant are different to me and I think the separation is clear in McCracken's examples and his charge at the end of his editorial.

In the article, McCracken supports his thesis somewhat awkwardly. Some examples prove well, but they're obvious and peripheral. Like his mention of churches with "iCampuses" that meet online or the one mega-church in Florida who put their pastor's life online with webcams for five weeks in a reality-series-like webcast.
Other than these examples, McCracken surprisingly assails the church's new found love of discussing sex and sexuality. He uses Rob Bell's book "Sex God" and sexual accountability websites like yourgreatsexlife.com and ivescrewedup.com as examples of this image makeover that is hurting the "realness" of the church.

Beyond that, he makes an example of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church's Q&A text messaging on subjects like "Biblical Oral Sex" and "Pleasuring Your Spouse," calling them and others "gimmicks." He goes on saying, "maybe sex sermons and indie-rock worship music do help in getting people in the door, and maybe even in winning new concerts. But what sort of Christianity are they really being converted to?"

He lets David Wells prove his point for him by quoting The Courage to Be Protestant and argues that most of these young Christians are just being won over to a sub-cultured church and not to God himself.

He uses himself as proof that "Cool Christianity" is not sustainable saying, "As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don't want cool as much as we want real."

OK.

Like I said, I love the heart behind it, but it's a lousy argument and I'm not sure his evidence lines up with his thesis. Beyond this, McCracken has a difficult time separating himself from Western binaries.

Look, no one wants a phony church and no one wants "cool" to outweigh "real." But the reality is, that for perhaps the first time, the evangelical church is actually leading the way in some cultural issues and more so, for the first time it seems to me that the church is not ignoring crucial issues in our culture. And who says that we have to either be "cool" or "real?"

The church exists in a culture and we tend to think in these binaries: that we either must be totally into the culture and cool or totally out of it and just do some ominous spirity-thing like a good monk. But being in culture and addressing the cultural issues of the present is one of the most important things the church can do. We move with culture and try and shape certain aspects of culture while staying biblically sound and Spirit led (obviously easier to say than do, but hang with me). Separating ourselves from the culture in order to hold fast to "reality" is actually not reality.

Talking about or writing books on sex is not a gimmick, either. It's actually what McCracken desires: it's real. Certainly it is cool as well to many young people, but it is the best example for showing that you can sometimes have both. Boldly taking on topics like pleasure and oral sex from a biblical perspective is absolutely what the church that once shied away from such things needs.
And why is the web another way the church is trying to be hip? If you're not online today, you don't exist. The church (and what comes with it) must exist in cyberspace to some capacity. I think a lot of those websites and most churches who are involved in technology are just more concerned about being available to people, not trying to be hip. The internet is not innately hip, it's just a part of our world.

The web is the way we now commune and communicate and for the church to be uninvolved in that would be to ignore the world itself. I'm a very harsh critic of online campuses and communities, but that is different than the accountability software that is out there. Accountability software has done nothing but help the two mega-churches I've been a part of and I don't see how it supports that thesis of a phony church. Isn't confessing your sins about as real as you can get? In my experience, those websites are not replacing confession as much as they are a step in the process of real repentance.

There is no sweeping generalization that all of those churches and books are winning young people to another hip thing. My closest friends are members at Mars Hill in Seattle and they're some of the most genuine Christ-followers I know. I've had numerous students read "Sex God" by Bell and be completely shocked and changed by Jesus through its pages.

Are there people who go to these churches and read these books who are still really not converted to Christ? Absolutely. And there are many in my church too.

Young people might want real more than cool, but why is it one or the other? Criticizing the church for colliding with cool is criticizing the church for colliding with the world and culture.

After writing, thinking, and talking a bit about all of this, it only reminds me of our collective need for Jesus. The churches who obsess over being hip need Jesus as much as those who are being as real as possible (whatever that means). Because for as easy as being hip can become an idol, so can our desire to be authentic. In the end, you can be "real" and "cool" or really cool and not be Jesus to people. I want to be less concerned with authenticity and hipness and more concerned with the exploration of who Jesus is and what he has done. If I'm cool or hip, I want it to be just a byproduct of me being Jesus to them.

In the end, we're in need of saving power from it all.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Wordle is Such a Weird Wordle

Every heardle of wordle? (I'm done, I promise).

It's a website that creates free, um, wordle's. I don't know what else to call them. They are totally useless unless you want to find out (in a cool way) how many times you repeat a wordle (last one, I swear) in a paper, speech, or whatever.

Of course this provides us pastors a service. As a minister of the gospel, you would hope to say "God" or "Jesus" a lot of times. Here's a example of their work when I inserted the text of my manuscript from yesterday's teaching. The sermon was an introduction to our new series about living in the gospel and the suburbs at the same time. Looks about right...

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Conquered Words: June/July

This is my monthly post where I tell you what I have read and (ever so briefly) what I thought about each work. If you haven't read these books, then read this blog and pretend that you did!

Well, as promised, I have combined my reading of the last two months to produce this opus. While this may seem like a decent amount, most of the reading was completed just over the last week of July while I was on my honeymoon.

I got married, you see, and that takes a lot out of a man (and a woman, might I add). However, now the wedding is over and I'm back to just one full time job. With the wedding details off of my plate, my new wife and I ventured to Cancun, Mexico where pretty much all we did was sit in beach beds on white sand, read, and play in the bright blue ocean. It was truly the most relaxing week I've ever had. I've never slept so much in my life.

Ali and I are fierce readers and I was able to conquer two books and a New Yorker just while in Mexico. Here's what I've read over the past two months.

1) Columbine by Dave Cullen (Twelve, 464 pages). Perhaps one of the most uniquely written investigative books out there. Cullen's voice is as haunting as it is tender and comforting. He's written for Salon and the New York Times in the past, but is considered the leading voice in the Columbine incident that occurred in April 1999. For the past 10 years, Cullen has been interviewing people, reviewing police records, and just hanging around Littleton in order to accomplish this stack of a book. His tome is extremely thorough, but also shockingly entertaining and well paced. The book is fast and there's no way to quit once you start it. It was simply excellent not only for its dedication to the truth (which is why I love good journalism), but also for its totally honest portrayal of high school youth, specifically the shooters, Eric and Dylan, who the reader feels like they know well after completing the book. I loved the dispelling of the myths behind the shooting as well as his picture of what it means to be a high school kid at the turn of the century. Cullen is bold, but also very honoring to the victims, parents, and suspects behind it all. Now that this is over, a book he spent a decade on, I'm extremely curious what he will do next. He is versed in American suburban life (another theme in Columbine) as well as modern Evangelical Christianity in America. I hope he continues in the investigative track he's on because the guy is dang good at it.

2) My Losing Season by Pat Conroy (Bantam Books, 402 pages). Basketball is my game. But after reading this book it's way more Conroy's game than my own. I've never read better descriptions of basketball. Not even Bill Simmons could capture what Conroy has in this autobiographical piece. Conroy tells of his time playing basketball in high school and runs one season by us over 300 or so pages. The detail he goes into is helpful at the beginning, but gets tiring after a while. This is a book I needed to read, but should have over a whole year. To appreciate this book, you need to not only know basketball, but know the type of people who play basketball and love it, despite their physical limitations. Conroy was never that good, and I appreciated this book because neither am I, but he knew how to articulate it all. Underlying this story is a story about an abusive father, something Conroy unabashedly has written about for years. In My Losing Season, there is not only a story of loving a game, but a story about desiring approval.

3) The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns (Thomas Nelson, 320 pages). Are you a Christian in America? Please read this book. I'm giving away a lot more this next year and have a way better vision for mission trips and service because of this. Richard Sterns is a baller who knows what's what. He was a corporate man who now is the CEO of World Vision, certainly the most productive and courageous non-profits on the planet. They do more things better than most of the huge non-profits and, in my opinion, are way more bold about their visions for the earth. Sterns' book is a reflection on life as a Christian in America and just what is going on in the world. But he's never distant. His writing is close to home and he never sets a picture to high for you to see.

4) Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (Penguin, 192). I read one Steinbeck each summer and I'm very happy I read this one. What a unique book and at the same time, how classically Steinbeck. He is absolutely my favorite writer and this book set in central California, is great because it is entirely a character-focused book. There is such little plot it is astonishing. And yet, my goodness, it's awesome. And funny, which is somewhat new for Steinbeck. The books centers around this little, immoral community called Cannery Row. It's so small that you not only know everyone there, but by the end of the book you know the layout of the town. In his signature way, Steinbeck is also increasingly nostalgic and wise. He is the king of the omniscient, omnipotent storyteller who hovers above the lives and souls of his characters. Steinbeck crafts a fictitious, yet realistic group of characters and you feel the enormous joy of community along with the alarming loneliness felt within that.

5) How to be Good by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Trade, 320 pages). I almost quit this book after 150 pages but by 200 I was unable to stop. Hornby is a writer I've always enjoyed and I've never taken longer than a week on one of his books. He writes with pop and his novels are always filled with dialogue. He is quick and his humor pushes you through the pages. High Fidelity and About a Boy (which are both great movies) are two books I've read by him and adored. His voice is unmistakable and, as I've said before, is our generation's best voice of romance in the 21st century. This work in particular fell a bit short to me simply because Hornby was too quick with his character development that his wacky characters (like the faith healer or homeless teen) became distractions that were far too strange for the genre. The moments that were gold were classic Hornby: lengthy self-reflective paragraphs that almost do too much work for the character. I almost quit 200 pages in, but I had nothing else to read. Luckily I didn't quit, because right after the last third of the book picked up and I was glued, finishing the final 100 pages somewhere between Houston and Portland on my flight home.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

The Strangest Thing

It seems like every six months I take a little bit of time to re-read passages of Marilynne Robinson's masterpiece Gilead. Here's a gem from this time around where she perfectly an beautifully articulates Christian ministry:

"That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either."


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

You Might Need This Right Now

This is Tracy McGrady as a senior in high school reading his Bible, of course. Thanks SI Vault.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Times Like These

Christian ministry is perhaps the most rewarding and challenging job you can have simply because, as a pastor, you help guide and handle someone's journey with something divine. Because of this, there are days where you want to quit and work at Starbucks, and yet the next day you think in your brain: I never want to do anything else, this is the best job EVER.

Last night was a night where I thought that there could be no better job.

Baptisms. For those outside of the Christian faith, it might be a difficult thing to understand. We dunk people in water and then bring them out of the water. It's nothing of extreme spirituality, but rather it is a community experience. We put them in water as a physical symbol that something in their heart has changed. You go under the water as a symbol of death, of the dying of your life without God and you rise up out of the water to show the new life you have in Christ.

For me, the physical act of dunking someone is not special, but rather what it shows me, what it reminds me, and what it tells me is something so close to my heart: that God is still changing lives, that God is not done and has not finished with his work, but rather that this God who created everything good we know and see is still working in his creation for the good of his creation. For all that I do in my job, I continue in Christian ministry because I'm the lucky one who sometimes just gets to see God work. That's what I got to do last night. Here's a great video that recaps our night celebrating what God has done in some students' lives:

(Oh, and go full screen on this ish and make sure HD in on)

High School Baptisms 8/4/10 from WCC Students on Vimeo.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Out From the Ashes

The Denver Post has often been a respectable newspaper, but this was a surprise to see. Their photoblog (aptly yet awkwardly named, "plog") unearthed some of the most remarkable and extraordinary images I've ever seen. Some of the only color images from the Depression era were actually taken by the then-newly-formed government agency, the Farm Security Administration. These rare and strinking photographs were displayed in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color. They are property of the Library of Congress.

I highly suggest taking the time to view them all. It's so weird how much color changed my perception of the time period and how much more emotion is given to the viewer when bright bursts of color are introduced.HT: Scotty

Monday, August 2, 2010

New Life

I got married to my best friend of 10 years and my high school sweetheart, Allison Marie, on July 24th, 2010. We honeymooned on the beaches of Cancun, Mexico and have now returned to life in Portland. I am very, very happy. Now look at this: