Memories of my youth

When I was little my dad would visit me every Tuesday and take me, my brother & my sister to his house for dinner. For a solid year every Tuesday night we would pick up Little Caesars, "pizza pizza," and watch this:

Still Learning from Hume

God has used many books and people to shape me. One teacher who was influential in my spiritual development was a Hume Speaker, Mike Devries, who spoke at camp the first year I was youth pastor at OVCC. On Mike Devries blogsite, he quote's a friend's posting that I have already verbally shared with many, and that I have found tremendous in helping me to understand church.
In it, Peter Rollin's book, How (not) to Speak About God, is quoted, and I must confess, I started the book years ago, but was never able to finish it. After reading this excerpt, perhaps I'll add it to my summer reading and give it another go.


We Teach Others How to Treat Us
2009 June 8
by Rustin

I’m a fan of what Peter Rollins does with his Ikon ‘community’ in Belfast. This section (below) of a recent interview caught my attention.

I have seen too many people I love get upset at ‘the church’ because, after they withdrew from involvement and disappeared for weeks, ‘the church’ didn’t call them. I could write all day about the consumeristic assumptions behind those kinds of sentiments that I simply don’t share. But more simply, that view lets ourselves off the hook for building authentic relationships and puts all the accountability on others.

The fact is (rightly understood) we teach others how to treat us. We actively receive care and concern from others. We communicate that we aren’t interested in receiving concern and care when we don’t participate, don’t show up, don’t take responsibility, and don’t ourselves call to show concern about others. How others treat us is often an accurate reflection of our own commitment (or lack thereof) to the community.

Here’s Peter Rollins:

Paradoxically, I say, “Ikon doesn’t care about you. Ikon doesn’t give a crap if you are going through a divorce. The only person who cares is the person sitting beside you, and if that person doesn’t care, you’re stuffed.” People will say, “I left the church because they didn’t phone me when my dad died, and that was really hurtful.” But the problem is not that the church didn’t phone but that it promised to phone. I say, “Ikon ain’t ever gonna phone ya.” Pete Rollins might. But if he does, it will be as Pete Rollins and not as a representative of Ikon. Ikon will never notice if you don’t come. But if you’ve made a connection with the person sitting next to you, that person might.
Ikon is like the people who run a pub. It’s not their responsibility to help the patrons become friends. But they create a space in which people can actually encounter each other.

Jesus and Economics

While listening to Donald Miller's book, Searching for God Knows What, I came across the story of "Supply Side Jesus." When I got home I googled it, and found this video: (click here for the comic version)

Excerpt:

Shouldn't you feed the Lepers, Supply Side Jesus?

No Thomas. That would just make them Lazy.

Then shouldn't you at least heal them, Supply Side Jesus?

No, James. Leprosy is a matter of personal responsibility. If people knew I was healing lepers there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy.

Obviously there are political overtones here, but I still like the point, Jesus wouldn't be near as popular today as we would hope.

From the lips of a five-year-old

Sage:

Dear Jesus, please help all of the kids without mommies or daddies, and please help them to if they ever see a coyote to run and run and run, and not stop even if they get hot, and if they get to a house to knock and the door, and to tell the person, even if they are a stranger that they need to get away from a coyote. And please help kids that see mountain lions to go into the house. Amen.

Gospel-less, really?

Now really...I don't go looking for this stuff. I'm actually a little bit bummed out that I found it.

The internet gives a voice to anyone, and occasionally I come across these "Christian" web pages that are devoted to telling its audiences why every popular Christian leader is somehow a false leader.

James Choung, a graduate of MIT, and now a divisional director for Intervaristy, has popularized a diagram for evangelism called, "the four circles." Here it is, read below for one website's critique:



So what's your response to the diagram?

The authors of "a little leaven" wrote:

Not too long ago Christians used the "4 Spiritual Laws" to explain the Christian faith. Today we now have an Emergent influenced witnessing tool that utilizes 4 circles to try to explain the Christian faith (this 4 circles presentation is all the rage among college students). The big problem with this new tool is that it completely misses the point about Biblical Christianity and sinful man's need for a savior and Christ's death on the cross for the sins of the world. Instead, this is some squishy eco-friendly Jesus presentation where you can choose to make Jesus the leader of your life so that He can work through you to bring healing and restoration to the world.

And one of their readers surprisingly wrote:

All I could do was yell WHAT???...WHAT???...WHAT??? at the screen. Excuse me, I have to go pick my chin off the floor.

Did this diagram really miss the point about sinful man's need for a savior? Is a diagram meant to exhaust the entire conversation about a relationship with Jesus?
Which diagram, if any, would Jesus have been able to recognize?

Regarding the four spiritual laws, James Choung writes:

Well, what was missing from the diagrams I had learned was anything substantial about one of the most important themes in Jesus' own preaching: the kingdom of God. I was reading a lot about the kingdom of God, in the Bible and in recent scholarship, but when it came to sharing the core message of the faith, I'd always fall back on an evangelistic diagram that didn't include it. And it dawned on me: Even though there are tons of books out there about the kingdom of God, very few people will be able to share it with their friends unless they are given some tool or aid—some icon—that will help them remember the key points. So even though I'm not a fan of canned presentations, I felt that creating a diagram was essential to help us understand a bigger picture of the gospel that Jesus taught.

You can find an interview by Andy Crouch with James Choung here,
and the Christianity Today article, "From Four Laws to Four Circles" here.

Not For Sale...For Free!

Every month christianaudio.com offers a free book for download. This month the offering is, Not For Sale, a book that I was made aware of at a conference on human slavery a few years ago. If you have a road trip coming up, or some room on your ipod, get a $24 download for free!

What a difference a street or fence makes.

Venezuela

Brazil

I wonder how much control one has over the variables that determine what side of the fence they live on.