Category Archive

Thanks for a great conference Life Bridge Church and all the many volunteers that made it happen. As a pastor over community groups and mercy ministries and youth I leave encouraged and equipped…

Externally Focused Church Conference

Well here goes, no gripping pictures or other media to supplement things unless I find a way to work them in. I’m not sure how many rooms will have power plugs but I’ll post what I can.

First impression of the host church - I was welcomed ten times in the span of 15minutes by volunteers and non-volunteers alike…the facility has excellent media and the setting in front of it (Denver snow-covered mountains) is amazing (not sure why they didn’t build their facility with more windows…well maybe sense I know my preaching can lag I am sure, just kidding).

Catalyst 08′ Conference site is up, click here to check out the line up. I’ve never been to one of their conferences. I read their blogsite a good bit and catch up on their mags everyone once in awhile  but that’s about it. They always have great stuff. I think I’ll go this year since its literally 15minutes down the street from me. Seems like a pretty eclectic, strong lineup; I wouldn’t expect anything less from these guys.

If you’re a reader here and you’re going to be there let me know and we can grab some coffee…

One of the youth I serve showed my his new Chronicle Book on the “E Street band and Bruce Springsteen”. I don’t know if you’ve seen these books yet or not but the way they do history is by getting the rights to reproducing memorabilia from the band’s personal life as well as things that concert goers of the period would have seen like posters or would have held onto like VIP back stage passes. Its a really cool way of doing history, that keeps you interested from the first page to the last.

I couldn’t help but think that this style of doing history needs to be adopted by our mainstream companies like Zondervan or Baker or IVP. Imagine a New Testament intro book with reproductions of ancient manuscripts or reproductions of wax tablets, etc. How cool would it be to pull out a tin coin as an exact replica of a denari. Or move it further back and do some really neat ANE replica’s. I mean lets face it if we’re paying 50$ or more it would be nice to walk away with some really neat replica’s…

Chronicle Books has a blogsite that’s worth checking out if your in the printing industry or if you’re a hobby scrap booker of sorts.

I broke down in tears as I watched it I know that means my ‘man-card’ is up for question because the myth out there is that real men don’t cry (”and Jesus wept”, need I say more!) but I just thought it was so beautiful. Here’s the write up on it at youtube;

heima’ is sigur rós’s first ever film, filmed over two weeks during the summer of 2006 when the band undertook a series of free, unannounced concerts in iceland. they hauled 40-plus people round 15 locations to the furthest flung corners of their homeland for their debut venture into live film, to create something, well, inspirational.

on their way they went to ghost towns, outsider art shrines, national parks, small community halls and the absolute middle-of-nowhere-ness of the highland wilderness, as well as playing the largest gig of their career (and in icelandic history) at their homecoming reykjavik show.

‘heima’ (icelandic for “at home” or “homeland”), truly, shows sigur rós as never before. whereas seeing the group live is normally a large-scale and sometimes overwhelming experience, making full use of lights and mesmeric visuals, ‘heima’ was always intended to reveal more of what was actually going on on stage. it does this via long-held close-ups and a rare intimate proximity, without ever once breaking the spell.

loosely based on a documentary format - and including personal reflections from the band - ‘heima’ also serves as an alternative primer for iceland the country, which is revealed as less stag destination-du-jour and more desolate, magical place where human beings have little right to trespass.

‘heima’ features performances of songs from all four sigur rós albums, many radically reworked, as well as two exclusive new songs in ‘guitardjamm’, which was filmed inside an abandoned herring oil tank in the far west of the country, and the traditional ‘a ferd til breidarfjardar 1922′, performed with poet steindor andersen.

‘heima’ was directed by dean deblois, a long-time fan of the band and director of the oscar-nominated animated feature ‘lilo & stitch’, using an icelandic crew.

Purchase this film here at Amazon.com.

Intermission - to be in-between journeys or missions…

Does life ever feel like that, like you’re always moving from one journey to the next, one mission to the next. As if there is never enough time just to stop, take it in, and enjoy where you are. As if all your relationships, all those moments you’ve invested with invaluable worth is in the end just a series of clips. Kinda like the Johnny Cash hurt video, kind of like the pieces coming together in “Gone Baby Gone”…pieces spinning by, passing…

…would that kind of life be a ‘tragedy’ or a ‘comedy’. I imagine it would depend on whether you were setting in the amphitheater or the main actor on the screen.

If your life feels like a continual stream of intermissions let me assure it isn’t and yet it is. It isn’t because the journey you’re experiencing right now, glorious or not, is the journey God has intended for you for now. And YET it is because the author of Hebrews says that all of life is sojourn, a journey between journeys, between times, in the middle time. We are just passing by, passing by it all.

 Life is the trailer, life is the epic, life is the intermission, life is the climax and falling action, life is the credits…..life is the light that gives the screen color…He is the light of the cinema without him there would never be an intermission…think about it.

Click the pick and check it out!

Jess is away at Hilton Head with her sister this weekend which affords me with two things, loneliness and time to remember things. One thing in particular I remember is a coffee I had with a professor at Westminster Seminary before I left. The professor shall remain nameless. We spoke about the current situation between faculty departments, the things I’d experienced while attending the seminary, and whether or not I’d open up and share about them here after I graduated - my answer was I probably wouldn’t speak of the things that involved me more personally. There are bigger things at work in the community at WTS (administrative and faculty), larger than individual names and deeds that need healing and just raising the flag on one group wont help in the long run. One of those things is ‘memory’…

Its a beautiful day here in Flowery Branch we have an apartment on the third floor with a balcony overlooking a wooded trail run. The air is cool today. The only noise I hear are the sounds of the freeway running about 2 miles behind us. Kona is doing his usual guard dog games, standing at attention watching the joggers beneath, making sure they know this balcony belongs to him. While he is in his element here I’m elsewhere in my memories. I’m with my friends on the benches outside Montgomery Library, or maybe I’m running out to the Wa for a quick soup or sub with a car full of starved and mentally glutenous students before next period…I’d say I was at Westminster cafe having some of Aundre’s wonderful Kalbasi but due to infrastructure issues the cafe was closed long before I left…perhaps its open again.

Volf understands memory, he understands reconciliation, he understands the gospel probably more than I ever will; I wish I was Volf, but then again he doesn’t have a Kona and he doesn’t have Jess

Volf says remembering rightly is challenged by two things (actually much more than just two things, but for space sake here they are); “First, the experience and memory of serious wrongs challenges some basic common assumptions about the character of the world, its order and justice (just as, inversely, our deep convictions about the world shape how we experience and remember wrongdoing)…Second, with a wounded self and a moral world in ruins, we sometimes seek to heal ourselves by harming others.”

First as this applies to me: when I receive injury from another person I often don’t care because I just expect it because people are a mess, but when I receive injury from another person in either an environment I wouldn’t expect to see or receive it or from a person I wouldn’t think would commit it the character of the world I believe I’m living in gets shaken - order & justice seem less solidified than I expected. And I usually return injury for injury, vengeance is my M.O. more than I’d like to admit it is.

Second as this applies to Westminster Theological Seminary in Phily: I’ve often thought that the faculty communities (the Church History and Systematics and part of the Apologetics; and the Biblical Studies and Missions communities) are like two parents trying to raise children, each with their own memories of how they viewed their parents principles and values. But here’s where the analogy gets weird, each of them either had the same academic parents or at least maintain they are carrying their spirit on. They often get in feuds, non-verbal but nevertheless real and ‘tactical’, about who’s being genuine to their parents desires and dreams and who’s the rightful bearer of the family emblem…missing the point that Tim Keller has made so well, that when we leave our homes to marry to one-another we start anew, and the inherited values of our parents or ‘percieved’ parents must be weighed afresh in light of the new relational commitments we’ve made to one another. Of coarse their tension between departments involves more than ‘values’ but also the divergent cultures within the Presbyterian worlds that bear out those values…

Moving past this analogy I want to suggest that what’s happening at WTS is more about hurts not being Remember Rightly than it is about the frequency and currency of everyday hurts accumulating between the two communities of faculty. Memories are being used as a weapon in a war that cannot, because of policy, be fought verbally and openly. And this war is carrying over into the learning environments of students…I didn’t notice the feud at first, to be honest it didn’t touch me - how could it I was buried beneath thousand’s of pages of work and two dead languages. But I saw it pretty clearly toward the middle of my first year, and at the turn of my third year I noticed it creating even communities among the student body of supporters for either side.

So how can healing come to the community, well its certainly not all a matter of ‘Remembering Rightly’, there are some significant issues to work through in terms of hermeneutics and polemic, hermeneutics and apologetics, and hermeneutics and mission. But Remembering Rightly must be addressed. And if you’re a non-alumni or prospective student I have a bit of repenting to do before you. I said in my exit interview that I wouldn’t encourage people to enter WTS until five years had passed and the feud had been reconciled, honestly that was immature of me. WTS is the perfect place for you because it embodies in the lives, relationships, and conflicts being worked out in its community a glimpse of what the church is like, of how conflict, identity, and ‘rightness’ work themselves out in human relationships. And it does so with very fine and godly people; mature but flawed, honest but angry, passionate but despairing - people of the cross…

For alumni please let me know if you think this post is appropriate and fair and whether or not this is an appropriate medium to share it through and venue for its hearing…

The Museum of Flickr Fine Art is my choice for this artist of the month. If you haven’t already picked up on it, MoFFA is not an artist, its an art gallery. Click the link and check it out…

The picture above was taken in Sarajevo, and is titled “Sarajevo - the wounded city”. My wife spent a year there with Campus Crusade for Christ reaching out to Muslim campus students.  She always tells me about the stories her friends had about running across ally ways that were painted with bullet holes, and how some of them were snipers themselves. Young adults our own age…this picture captures well why I appreciate Flickr so much, its a group site that captures real pictures from real people about real life issues. Some are artistic and some are just ‘chance’ shots but they all represent the sojourning, stories, and at times tragedies of those involved…

“Why, if we have the timeless truth of the gospel, do we need to concern ourselves with culturally relevant ministry? Because if we don’t, the message of the gospel gets confused with the cultures of old. The unchurched think that Christianity is a retrograde culture rather than a living faith. Our job is to remove the “extra” stumbling blocks of culture without removing the essential stumbling block of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:23). Unfortunately, the stumbling block of the cross has too often been replaced by the stumbling block of the church. Most people aren’t being recruited by other religions; they are being confused by the practice of ours.” Ed Stetzer, Why is cultural relevance a big deal?

Being contextual, relevant, ‘cool’, isn’t intended to remove all the barriers between faith and unbelief, between acceptance and rejection for a non-Christian. What it is intended to do as Stetzer says so well here, is remove the un-necessary stumbling blocks of culture so that people can see the real stumbling block - the cross (1 Corinthians 1:23). If we don’t remove the stumbling block of culture, particularly Christian sub-culture, we’re likely to never allow our non-Christian neighbor the opportunity of being confronted with the cross.

Traditionalism for traditionalism own sake spells the end of meaningful, chatachesis; which spells the end for vibrant, life transforming liturgy. Its not a question of stumbling blocks being entirely removed, only a question of which stone they are going to be tripped on, and which stone for that matter our own ecclesial cultures are tripping on - one hopes daily…

Thom Notaro is famous in his own right among the Westminster Theological Seminary student body in Philadelphia. Famous largely for his ability to make the somewhat cryptic and cumbersome writing of Van Til on the nature of apologetics approachable and intelligible. Well Notaro has done it again with his contribution in Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics. Here’s Notaros’ brief explanation of the nature of apologetics;

“The covenantal context of apologetics clarifies the persons involved in any apologetic encounter and, implicitly, their roles. There is the clearly revealed covenant Lord, opposed by the covenant-breaker. The apologist, in himself a covenant-breaker, is now by grace Christ’s ambassador, with a ministry of reconciliation. Though apologetics is ostensibly an encounter between believer and unbeliever, it is more importantly an encounter between covenant Lord and covenant-breaker. The object of apologetics is to reintroduce people to the God they refuse to see, in places they refuse to see him. We live and move and have our being not in a random, impersonal environment. There is a basis for human person-hood and dignity, for purpose and value, for beauty and creativity, for love and community, for unity and diversity - the tripersonal God (LC 9-11) who is there, and here, and in whose image we are made (17). Apologetics is about inviting people to look into the face of this absolute, personal God. It dares them to see him for who he i and what he means for the world. It calls them to meet the Creator and covenant Lord on his holy and gracious terms.”

Thoughts, opinions, criticisms…

(For Non PCA Readers: Forgive the temporary denominational interruption, your TV show will return shortly…)

THE CULTURES OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF AMERICA (PCA)

This article is split into two parts: the first half is dedicated to charting the different cultures in the PCA in order to do this Keller identifies three main groups - Reformed-historicals (TR’s, strict subscriptionist, or old schoolers), Reformed-Conservatives (mixed bag of small church focused people, old line fundy’s, and recently emerged folk from the baptist or dispensational communities), and lastly the Reformed-Evangelicals (missional, broadly evangelical, or even called liberal by opponents).

The latter part of this piece is dedicated to outlining a vision for the future PCA’s direction. Keller does this in three larger points: he urges them to not split off from their current denominational affiliation, to work through the structure using the political ladders in place; he encourages them to be more than denominational but also build intra and inter denominational alliances for mission; and he tells them not to be satisfied with church renewal alone but also plant churches.

THE MISSIONAL CHURCH

This article breaks down into three main segments: the need for a Missional Church; The Elements of a Missional Church; and a Case Study. The need for a Missional Church is due to the Post-Christian shift the larger society around our churches have gone through, though it may not be as felt by our churches in America as much because there’s still a remnant of the Old Christendom society.

Keller gives five elements of the Missional Church: 1) they discourse in the vernacular; 2) they enter and re-tell the cultures stories with the gospel; 3) they theologically train lay people for public life and vocation; 4) they create Christian community which is counter-culture and counter-intuitive; and they practice Christian unity as much as possible on the local level.

The case study involves Keller outlining what a ‘missional’ small group would look like.

THE CENTRALITY OF THE GOSPEL

This is the longest of the three articles and is broken into two parts with a summary statement at the end: part one deals with the implications and applications of the gospel, with an addendum section for discussion; part two explores how the gospel is the key to everything by looking at the gospel and the individual, and the gospel and the church. Keller closes it out with a brief summary.