Archives for July, 2003
Pilgrimage to the Lady of Lourdes Shrine
I went with fellow bloggers and friends Cathy Johnson and Jeb Runquist to the Lady of Lourdes Shrine north of Saskatoon today. We went down to the “grotto” and walked the stations of the cross. I posted some pictures of our trip here.
Warren Kinsella on
gay marriage. He doesn’t have permalinks which makes it a pain in the neck to link to individual posts but it is the second one down. I am violating his copyright notice but I thought I would post his entire post. It is a good one I think. I don’t agree with all of his theological reasoning but it is worth reading. Let’s hope he takes mercy on me and doesn’t sue me into the next millenium (off topic but I just watched the Simpsons episode where Homer was awarded the church as an injury settlement and an “answer to prayer”)
Along with the obligatory Strolling Bones fellation in today’s paper, there’s also a lot of ink about the usual suspects in the federal Liberal caucus (ie., the ones who typically blame Jean Chretien for every misfortune that has befallen Canada, including rainy days), carping and kvetching about equal marriage. Now, some of these “Liberals,” with whom I have crossed metaphorical swords many times, assert that their opposition to legal recognition of gay marriage is based, bona fide, in scripture. I’m a little suspicious of that.But, being a (sometimes) practicing federal Liberal and a (usually) practicing Catholic, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt - and a little research, besides. Here’s a piddling fraction of what I found, penned in the main by a former Catholic priest. (And Jesus.)
In 1975, the Vatican published a Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics. One of those questions was homosexuality. A principal author of that document was Fr. Jan Visser, C.Ss.R. In an interview published in the January 30, 1976, edition of L’Europa, he said: “When one is dealing with people who are so deeply homosexual that they will be in serious personal and perhaps social trouble unless they attain a steady partnership within their homosexual lives, one can recommend them to seek such a partnership, and one accepts this relationship as the best they can do in their present situation.” So, one of the very men who formulated the Vatican teaching that “homogenital acts” are wrong allows that, in certain cases, we should not only permit - but even recommend! - a homosexual relationship.
That’s not all. Ruminating about Catholics who dissent on Church teaching about contraception, the Canadian bishops wrote in 1968: “Since they are not denying any point of divine and Catholic faith nor rejecting the teaching authority of the Church, these Catholics should not be considered nor consider themselves cut off from the body of the faithful.” Relevant, here, too, is that little bestseller, titled The Bible: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God who he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20) And, of course, “whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16-18) And so on and so on. (Any haters out there planning on quoting Leviticus to me, or something else, don’t bother; you’ll go straight to the delete bin.)
I’ll probably get myself excommunicated from both my church and my party for this, but it seems to me Chretien and Cauchon’s proposed legislation respects the law - but also permits religious organizations to maintain their opposition to equality, however wrong that may be to bleeding hearts comme moi. Liberals - real liberals - are making a big mistake if they ape the Alliance misanthropes on this one. Real Christians, meanwhile, should take a hard look at 1 John 4:20, and consider if some religious leaders are making mistakes, too.
While reading this post, I was reminded of an interview that Professor Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School gave with Cutting Edge…
You recently suggested during an academic debate on homosexuality—in which you take a conservative position—that there are even more central ethical concerns that you think Christians should be concerned about.Yes. I think, in that debate, I said that I found it curious that some quarters of the church have focused so much energy and passion on Scriptural authority as it relates to the issue of homosexuality—rather than issues such as how we use our possessions, which by any measure is a matter of much more central concern in the New Testament. In the case of homosexuality you have three or four New Testament texts that even mention in any way, whereas the concern for the poor shows up regularly as quite central to the teaching of Jesus.
So it seems to me that if we try to have an ethics that is genuinely shaped by Scripture and its emphases, we would be much more passionate about those sorts of concerns. I also suggested in that debate that perhaps it is a bit of psychological displacement on the part of Christians, because we don’t really want to be confronted by the Word on things that would pinch. So we find other things to emphasize that don’t effect most of us so much.
That last paragraph is a killer.
The Purple Bear
According to Joi Ito, Seth is confident that it isn’t a hoax
soulguide: following Jesus as spiritual director
I was in the Christian ghetto yesterday browsing around and I picked up a new Bible and soulguide: Following Jesus As Spiritual Director by Dr. Bruce Demarest. It goes along with a new direction I think God is calling me in my life and that is to start to look at being more of a spiritual director.
Commonly associated with monastic orders and the mystical practices of Roman Catholic saints, the discipline of spiritual direction is one that conservative Protestants have approached with caution and caveats. That may be changing. Well known in evangelical circles, Demarest, a popular author and professor at Denver Seminary, argues that spiritual counselors and “soul friends” are indeed part of God’s plan for the converted Christian. Although comfortable referring to classic spiritual authorities like Teresa of Avila and the Desert Fathers (and Mothers), Demarest believes that “soul-care”-relationships between experienced Christians and those seeking guidance in faith-are driven by the believer’s fundamental need to imitate Christ’s life and character. “In Jesus Christ, then, we find the pattern of spiritual guidance and the qualities of the ideal spiritual director,” he writes. At the heart of the book is a group of meditations on various Gospel passages; Demarest uses an event in the life of Jesus Christ to draw some conclusions about his character and relationships.
Discussion Boards at jordoncooper.com
I thought I would let you know that I brought back my message boards for the site here. I had them a couple of years ago and to be honest I am not sure why I brought them back except I have five times the daily traffic and I am just wondering if you guys and girls who read the site would like a place of your own to talk, chat and post stuff. If you do, head over the discussion boards, post away, and we’ll see where they take us. If it doesn’t work out, then we just won’t tell anyone. If you have any feedback or ideas about this, let me know at coop@jordoncooper.com. Thanks and I don’t tell you this enough, you are the greatest readers in the entire world!
UPDATE: The Boards are down. This is kind of embarrasing. I’ll let you know when they are working again.
Pastoral Softness
I know I am going to get flamed into next Friday over this but there has been a lot of posts and comments that seem to want to blame the churches for spiritual struggles for pastors. I can’t except that for a lot of reasons. First of all there are places in this world which has put a lot more external pressures on believers and pastors than church politics and people find a way to survive. Secondly, churches have been putting pressure on pastors since long before the postmodern reformation and you know what, some caved, some thrived. External pressure is what weeds out a lot of leaders. I got an e-mail from someone complaining about his salary that was three times what I have ever made in Spiritwood. If you are looking for your church to take care of you, you won’t last long. That is why you are called a leader.
Are some churches abusive. According to Lyle Schaller, many churches he has dealt with don’t even deserve a pastor in his opinion. I still remember my first encounter with former Bishop Gary Walsh when he said in no uncertain terms that not every pastor deserves a church either. (I am getting old… I imagine he is too).
What I am saying is that there are a lot of people who have ended up in churches where it is a bad fit and people have gotten hurt. That is the new reality and many people who are postmodern in worldview are going to get killed in modern settings. Dr. Robert Webber said this about the transition in an interview I did with him
The pragmatic churches have become institutionalized - with some exceptions. They responded to the sixties and seventies, created a culture-driven church and don’t get that the world has changed again. Pragmatics, being fixed, have little room for those who are shaped by the postmodern revolution. A clash is emerging. The younger evangelicals will not have a voice in the pragmatic, fixed mentality. Stay there and your spirit will die (there are some exceptions, pray for discernment). Many pragmatic churches, like old shopping malls are dying. Very few people under 30 are in pragmatic churches. The handwriting is on the wall. Leave. Do a start up church. Be a tentmaker. Build communities. Small groups. Neighborhood churches. Be willing to let your life die for Jesus as you break with the market driven, culture shaped, numbers oriented, Wall-Mart-something-for-everyone church. Be an Abraham and take a risk. God will show up and lead the way.
The modern church is not going to listen to us, it won’t affirm us, or give us any of its resources there is no point anymore in letting it get to us. It will be there in decline our entire lives and will probably go down fighting and wasting a lot of lives and money but to let that define us spiritually will be an even bigger loss. We can’t blame it for being what it is and if we are going to have a long term future in serving God, we need to stop looking at our enviroment and instead in our hearts. That is the lesson from the church history that all reformers have learned and we need to also.
IndieAllies
The IndieAllies Meetup is still growing rapidly and at the time of this posting is at 857 members and is now in 247 cities worldwide. If you haven’t signed up, head on over to the website and signup and vote on a venue.
find out more at indieallies.meetup.com
IndieAllies Meetups don’t belong to anyone and were born out of the idea of what would happen if… well… 857 people got together and started sharing ideas and telling stories about what God is doing and dreaming up with them. If you have signed up and there isn’t enough people in your area, don’t wait for them to just discover it, do what I did and e-mail 20 of your friends the link and let them know that something cool is coming. Saskatoon went from Wendy and I to 13 people in a couple of days. It isn’t that hard.
Review of The Emerging Church by Dan Kimball
I wrote this review for TheOOZE but it is still in the que to be posted so I thought I would post it here.
The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations
Dan Kimball (who has the best hair this side of Bill Hybels) has come out with an excellent book called, The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. The book is targeted towards those who are looking at postmodernity from a modern, contemporary church viewpoint and he uses the language, metaphors, and sources that they would understand (Rick Warren, Brian McLaren and others provide commentary throughout the book).
The condition of the book probably reveals my true opinions of the book. My copy of The Emerging Church is dog-eared, written in, coffee stained, and lent out twice. More copies were purchased for my leadership team at Lakeland Church and the sections on worship were important in some of the ideas that lead to the creation of the Worship Freehouse. Even though the book wasn’t written for me I found enough good thoughts to read it through a couple of times and make sure other leaders I serve with read it as well. If you are in a traditional or contemporary church and are asking some questions about postmodernity and the church, you will want to make sure you read this book.
Selected insights…
• Going back to a raw form of vintage Christianity, which unapologetically focuses on kingdom living by disciples of Jesus. A post-seeker sensitive worship gathering promotes, rather than hides, full displays of spirituality (extended worship, religious symbols, liturgy, extended prayer times, extensive use of Scripture and readers, etc.) so that people can experience and be transformed by the message of Jesus. The approach is done, however, with renewed life and is still “sensitive”, clear instruction and regular explanation are given to help seekers understand theological terms and spiritual exercises. - 26
• In today’s world, emerging generations have no anchor or truth to hold onto. So as they hear for the very first time, the hope for the future is incredibly optimistic. - 29
• We need to look into our past in order to understand how we got where we are today. Then we can begin to discern where the emerging church may be headed into the future. - 43
• …in recent years, teens and young adults have grown up in a world of postmodern, post-Christian values and perspectives. They simply have no Judeo-Christian roots to return to. - 58
• I recently talked with a father in our church who described his twenty-year old son as being postmodern. I hesitated to contradict him, but I believed he was missing the point. I know his son very well, and although to some degree he may be influenced by postmodernity, he is modern. He was raised in a Christian home where he was taught Judeo-Christian principles and ethics, and he views the world accordingly. He thinks and learns systematically and is drawn to using logic and reason to prove and understand his faith. It is how one views the world, what one values and thinks about life, that makes one postmodern, not because one falls into a certain age group. - 61-62
• Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself-its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents were born. We are currently living through just a transition - Peter Drucker - 65
• You can’t accurately say that we are a Christian nation anymore, especially when examining the increasing spiritual among younger people…If we break out of our Christian circles, stop the busyness of our church, and take a look at what is happening in our towns and communities, we may be surprised. - 67-68
• If the unchurched population of the United States is so extensive that, if it was a nation, it would be the fifth more populated nation on the planet after China, the former Soviet Union, India and Brazil. Thus, our unchurched population is the largest mission field in the English-speaking world and the fifth largest globally. - 69
• Today celebrities serve as our culture’s prophets and religious philosophers. What a famous actor does or believes much weight with those who look to them for fashion trends, hairstyles, and even religious influence. - 86
• Nowhere in the New Testament does it say they “went to church”…We can’t go to church because we are the church. - 91
• The excellent book The Missional Church, edited by Darrell Guder, makes the case that since the time of the Reformation, the church unintentionally redefined itself. The Reformers, in their effort to raise the authority of the Bible and ensure sound doctrine, defined the marks of a true church: a place where the gospel is rightly preached, the sacraments are rightly administered, and church disciple is exercised. However, over time these marks narrowed the definition of the church itself as a “place where” instead of a “people who are” reality. - 93
• Calling a church service a “time of worship” does not always make it so.-George Barna - 111
• If you are part of a staff that evaluates worship services, what do you base your evaluations on? Do you immediately discuss the music, the video, or the length of the message? Or do you ask, “Did people encounter God here? What Jesus lifted up in honor? What have we trained people to think when they leave? Do they say ‘I enjoyed that,’ or ‘That was a good message,’ or are they thinking, ‘I encountered God today,’ and, ‘I became more of a disciple of Jesus today’?” The emerging church must value worship over the quality of the program or of the “good and service” delivered. - 115
• Talk about changing the way we do things here in the suburbs of America and you may find resistance, usually from older pastors and leaders who have grown attached to the a certain way of doing things. If we were talking about the need for unique approaches to worship in the context of cross-cultural missions, there would be no argument. Remember how Hudson Taylor’s method and approach to ministry in China weren’t understood by his British superiors? In fact, they were rather upset with him for changing the way there were used to doing things. But because he understood the new culture and worldview, he made the changed that worked for those people. I encourage you to take a look around your worship center next Sunday. If you don’t see row upon row of the fresh young faces of people who weren’t raised in your church, you probably need to consider making changes to your approach. - 120
• As churches lost touch with the culture and didn’t connect with younger generations, the seeker-sensitive movement was born. This time, however, it is the seeker-movement that loses touch as it grows more and more disconnected with the heart of emerging generations. - 103
• God’s prophets did outlandish things to communicate his truth with more than words. Isaiah walked around town naked for three years; Ezekiel lay on his side for weeks on end, building miniature villages out of mud. Jeremiah carried around rotten fruit. Even if people refused the prophets instructions, they certainly wouldn’t forget what they had heard, seen, smelled. Teaching as well as worship can be multisensory, as God as clearly demonstrated. - 138
• At our vintage-faith worship service, we try to avoid doing anything that suggests that the band or the speakers are there to perform or that hints that they are “above” those who attend. We try to bring the band and the speaker as close to the people as possible… Why? Because bands increasingly value being with the people instead of being far above them. To take this a step further, who says we even need to see the worship band? Shouldn’t the focus of worship be on God, not on the leader and the musicians? Have we modelled ourselves after rock concerts in this respect without realizing it? - 137-138
• No matter where you gather, if you are creative and value beauty, you can transform any meeting place into a sacred sanctuary or ancient faith. - 140
• …we cannot shortchange the reason we are gathering in worship; we also need to get serious about God. We are seeking his presence, and we had better not take that lightly. We do need to encounter God, to take communion, to sit in the quiet, to hear his voice. - 145
• When I first entered into the evangelical world, I discovered that virtually every pastor I met was into sports. Since most of their sermon illustrations were sports related, I somehow felt a bit lonely and very uncoordinated at church-like a misfit. In staff meetings, as they rattled of names of sports celebrities and teams I had never heard of, I would politely not and smile of as my mind drifted off to think about the latest Brian Setzer CD… I usually felt that I was in a different world in that respect, and I never heard the arts discussed unless someone was thinking of using a Willow Creek drama to illustrate a sermon point. That was about as artsy as the talk would get. It seemed as though churches all across America had volleyball nights and softball leagues but gave little attention to artists. - 147
• The major difference between the challenges Paul faced in preaching and those we face today is that Paul’s Greek audience was interested in listening to him. Christians were new on the scene, and the Greeks welcomed fresh ideas as fodder for discussion. Most post-Christians on the other hand have a vague sense of what Christianity is and represents, and they want no part of it. - 176-177
• “I didn’t come to this place to be lectured at by a Tony Robbins clone. I thought I was going to meet God here.” These rather blunt words came from a girl in her twenties whom I had found pacing the hallway of a contemporary church building during the worship service. She was obviously not happy, so I had approached to ask if she was okay. It turns out that she had come to the worship service at the invitation of a friend but hadn’t realized that “church” was going to be a long talk that reminded her of the self-help motivator Tony Robbins. After about twenty or thirty minutes, she was both bored and disillusioned. I asked here was she had been hoping for. “To pray” she told me. “To hear some encouraging music. To quiet my heart and connect with God”. - 185
• Evangelicals have been criticized-many times rightly so-for being dogmatic and closed minded. For too long we have been doing all the talking, without any dialogue. We are now serving new generations that have serious trust issues, and trust is not earned by talking just one-way. - 193
Even though the book was not written for me, I appreciated it tremendously. If one can judge a book by the amount of people I have asked to read all or parts of it, then this book has been one of the more useful ones I have read in 2003 and I assume I will be returning to it in the future.
International Justice Mission
Rudy Carrasco pointed me to check out International Justice Mission’s homepage. Amazing ministry and one that you will want to check out (and at least link to)
Spam
I am getting between 80-100 pieces of spam for every e-mail I am reading. At what ratio does e-mail become useless (I think I am getting there)
Saskatchewan - President Shrub Relations at a new low
Saskatchewan’s plan to petition the United States to reopen borders to Canadian beef stumbled out of the gate Wednesday when an internal government document flippantly referred to U.S. President George W. Bush as “Shrub.”
“Re: Petition to President Shrub,” is the title of the memo, dated Tuesday, and sent to NDP legislature members and candidates by party researcher Ted Bowen.
The memo was sent to media outlets by mistake.
Smooth, really smooth. Mock the guy we need to help us.
Who ripped off who?
So did internationally known Saddleback Church rip off little known Circle Drive Alliance Church or did Circle Drive Alliance Church rip off Saddleback Church content, graphics, and everything. I find this so embarrasing.
What does it say about a local church that has significant financial and people resources resorts to blatently copying Saddleback’s website? It probaby isn’t positive.
FYI
As a result of Governor Howard Dean being his guest blogger while he was on vacation, Larry Lessig has moved from Stanford’s servers to his own domain name at www.lessig.org. The blog is at www.lessig.org/blog/
Wahoo!
Yesterday was an odd day but a day in which I found a birthday gift for my father. Freeing me from being stressed about it from now until December. Now I only have to stress about his Christmas gift.
First Church of Buckley’s
One size fits all is made into a virtue by those who run solid church. Everything about regular Sunday worship is designed to make us feel that even if we don’t like it, we should still attend because it is good for us. As with cough medicine, we endure the bad taste because we are told that it is doing us good. — Pete Ward in Liquid Church
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Messy Faith: Daring to Live by Grace by A. J. Gregory October 28, 2008
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
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