The Exodus Story on Facebook
Check this out: what if Facebook covered the Exodus story?
Yes, it is officially the funniest thing on the Internets.
[[wipes water from keyboard]]
Hat tip: Blake Huggins
Sunday is for Star Wars
What do these three things have in common?
(1) Albert Einstein: "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
(2) Church ministry and publicity ideas that haven't changed since the 1970s.
(3) The Empire's plan involving the Death Star approach to all its problems. (sorry for the one instance of language)
That's right. Insanity!
I think some churches are in the Death Star Mode, trying the same thing over and over and expecting it to blow things up. It doesn't, so you just put more money and more effort into antiquated forms of ministry while the avenues of communication and socializing have shifted...and you get burnout like someone launched a proton torpedo into your chest.
Change it up. Try something new. Listen to this generation and be relevant. If it fails, pay attention to why it failed and try again. But be innovative like our connectional church is built to be, and ministry will turn a corner.
And for goodness sake, seal off the thermal port.
[/metaphor]
Terrible Church Sign [bad.hack]
What is this, the Dark Ages? Seriously. (hat tip: Pharyngula)
I'll take reason with my faith any day. In fact, I do.
Praise Songs Snark
Snark brought to you by ASBO Jesus
(ASBO = anti-social behavior order...which sounds perfect for Jesus!)
What are YOU actually singing in church?
Dangerous Church: Not FAIL but WIN
From the FailBlog, this is not FAIL but WIN:
I yearn for the day our churches are so dangerous...
that the powers want to keep people away.
On that day, and only on that day,
Constantine's imperial church will be finally buried.
Do you yearn with me?
Why the Church is Slow to Change
Why is the church slow to change? One form of an answer may be found in the political realm. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers took a class in Political Innovation and offers a thought on American v. European implementation of change:
[O]ne of the things we discussed is that America's system, due to federalism, local and individual autonomy and other factors, is really great at producing innovation. At the same time, the system is set up to resist change. In Europe, on the other hand, the system is not very good at producing change at all, because those ingredients are not present. But because the bureaucracy has more power, and because there are fewer levels of government, it's much easier to implement change.To me, this precisely describes the tension built into the United Methodist Church (along with other connectional churches).
So what you have, ironically, is American innovators coming up with brilliant ideas, and overseas countries being the first to implement them--which explains why, for instance, the rest of the world is now ahead of us on gay rights even when America played a huge role in creating the movement in the first place.
A Blueprint for Discipleship [review]
Recently I was asked by a 10 year old parishioner “What is the difference between Catholics and Methodists?” and I asked the facebookosphere for thoughts. Most of the responses focused on doctrine and tangy grape guice.
Watson, a United Methodist minister, hacks the traditional question of “What do Methodists believe?” and turns it into “How do Methodists believe?” By outlining the method of discipleship and discernment that John Wesley created, Watson offers support to the claim that it is not the “what” that defines Methodists, but the “how.”
In this way, Watson's book fits nicely into “Hacking Christianity” principles and is worthy of a review.
Full disclosure: I received a free copy of Kevin's book by being fast on the submit button. Again, yes, I can be bought.
Joys & Concerns
Watson and I both hail from Oklahoma, so I resonate with many of the examples he uses in the book: the “two by two” evangelists roaming the dorms looking for sinners to convert, off-the-beaten-path idiotic biking, and such. So I felt an immediate kinship with his examples that paralleled the books' content.
Watson articulates the "Bad News" for Christianity in this way:
- We live in a culture where people are turned off by a church that doesn't practice what it preaches. (page 8)
- [John] Wesley saw the main challenge not as getting people to come to a moment of conversion but as helping them live out the decision to give their lives to Christ (page 38)
Finally, Watson is very pragmatic and offers pages of support organizations for "how to put faith into action," which is super-helpful and relevant...today, at least. In 10 years, maybe not as much! As well, the Appendix shows how to use the book in small-group study.
On the concerns front, most of them will appear in a forthcoming post tomorrow about the relationship between Rules, Law, and Love. It's not specific to Watson's book, so it's another post.
However, my biggest concern is Watson's condemnation of door-to-door fearmongering "if you die today will you go to heaven" while he articulates a nicer version of the same. He articulates people losing salvation here:
- "if we accept the gift of salvation but refuse to allow God's grace to transform our lives, we put our very salvation in danger." (page 64)
So it's an interesting question: does "not participating" in sanctifying grace mean we lose our salvation? Watson's argument is fine by itself; there's no need to resort to fear. It doesn't take away from the book, but it does seem to be the "rough edge" of the cost of refusing discipleship that I don't see as well defined. I'll have to ponder it a bit more and perhaps the more scholarly Watson will dialogue with me here.
Conclusion
A Blueprint for Discipleship works in "Hacking Christianity" realm as it isn't an implementation of a rigid doctrine or even a constellation of beliefs that can transform the church: simply by re-examining how we do discipleship can transform our church. By hacking the process of discipleship back to its core Wesleyan components, I found Watson's book a pleasure to read and it gave me a challenge in my local church.
All in all, Watson sees Methodism as a slumbering giant, one without the discipleship structure implemented even though it is in our DNA. Wesley called this "the form of religion without the power." By reclaiming the general rules and intentionally living them out in accountability groups, Watson hopes to wake the church back to faith, works, and transformation of the entirety of our lives.
BTW: Watson blogs at Deeply Committed if you want to read his blog and converse with him there.
Thoughts?
Humor for Breakfast [pic]
Gavin has a hilarious post up today about different denominations and such.
But the funniest was this pic.
Humor for your Thursday!
Wikipedia and the Essenes
Matt Shafer over at Twice Infinity (the blog was recently accepted into CCBlogs, which I am jealous of because my blog was not "serious" enough for inclusion), pointed me a month back to this story of a Wikipedia article that reported a false fact, a paper reported it, and then Wikipedia referenced the paper as proof of fact. Hilarious! Slashdot reports:
The German and international press picked up the wrong name from Wikipedia — including well-known newspapers, Internet sites, and TV news such as spiegel.de, Bild, heute.de, TAZ, or Süddeutsche Zeitung. In the meantime, the change on Wikipedia was reverted, with a request for proof of the name. The proof was quickly found. On spiegel.de an article cites Mr. von und zu Guttenberg using his 'full name'; however, while the quote might have been real, the full name seems to have been looked up on Wikipedia while the false edit was in place. So the circle was closed: Wikipedia states a false fact, a reputable media outlet copies the false fact, and this outlet is then used as the source to prove the false fact to Wikipedia."Matt and I mused back and forth about if there were any historical occurrences of this taking place in history. Wouldn't it be terrible if some church historical facts were shown to be referencing fictional accounts, even though for 60 years we have treated them as facts? Hope that never happens....
...Oh, did you notice that Hebrew scholar Rachel Elior claims that those awesome Dead Sea Scrolls that we found in a cave 60 years ago....yeah, they were real, but the community of Essenes that we wax nostalgic about didn't exist. (hat tip: Blake Huggins ' shared google reader items)
Elior, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, claims that the Essenes were a fabrication by the 1st century A.D. Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus and that his faulty reporting was passed on as fact throughout the centuries. As Elior explains, the Essenes make no mention of themselves in the 900 scrolls found by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947 in the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea. "Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls," Elior tells TIME. "But they didn't exist. This is legend on a legend."Oops. If we accept the research, Josephus reports a false fact, Roman history reported it as fact, and we point to both of them as evidence that the Essenes never even existed.
Elior contends that Josephus, a former Jewish priest who wrote his history while being held captive in Rome, "wanted to explain to the Romans that the Jews weren't all losers and traitors, that there were many exceptional Jews of religious devotion and heroism. You might say it was the first rebuttal to anti-Semitic literature." She adds, "He was probably inspired by the Spartans. For the Romans, the Spartans were the highest ideal of human behavior, and Josephus wanted to portray Jews who were like the Spartans in their ideals and high virtue."
Me? I'm not convinced, but it will be interesting to read the academic rebuttals and responses in coming days. And I was glad to finally have a parallel to Matt and my discussion a while back.
Thoughts? Discuss.
A Smile in my Inbox
Thanks HX reader "randLlama312" ... I have no idea who/what you are, but you clearly know my taste in things.
(hat tip: StreetProphets)
'Two-for-One Clergy' For the Weekend
Beliefnet has a decent article on an Episcopal Bishop-elect in Michigan who is also a Buddhist. Check it out here: "One Priest, Two Faiths."
Essentially, some Episcopalians are angry that this Bishop-elect holds what they view as competing beliefs and thus is unfit to be a bishop. This is called syncretism meaning "holding multiple religions." To those who believe in the exclusivity of their religion against all others, this is unacceptable for a bishop.
Let's make this an open weekend conversation. What do you think?
- Can people hold tenets of different faiths in our culture which is increasingly blending even as it is separating?
- Can religious leaders find meaning in two separate paths without losing their way?
- Does this really matter unless it is affecting their spiritual leadership?
God as Eagle Eye
Cover of Eagle Eye- To the good guys, they are given tasks by a shadowy puppetmaster. They each function like cogs in a machine ran by a shadowy spider head that is pushing them forward through sheer inertia and threats.
- To Eagle Eye, Shia and Michelle Monaghan are called as modern-day minutemen, as ordinary citizens called up to oppose a corrupt government. Each member is recruited and has no knowledge of the greater goals or even of each other until they perform the specific roles and actualize their potential in a distributed terrorist network.
What are your 13 Church Arguments?
Howard Fineman was on the Colbert Report talking about the 13 arguments that define America. While Stephen Colbert, obviously, digresses far away from the book topic, there's a few nuggets worth extracting.
First, Fineman articulates that within a nation, the arguments work. They are relevant and understood. When you move out of that nation, and the arguments need translation. For instance, other countries don't understand our arguments, and thus they look silly or need explanation.
Second, Fineman said that the 13 key arguments are key because they are interpretations of key values. For instance:
Once you accept the personhood of an individual, then you have to say "who deserves to be an American person entitled to the protections of American law"...what rights do we extend to immigrants once they are on our soil?
It makes me wonder what are the key arguments that our faith communities struggle with and that define us and that are untranslateable outside our faith community context.
Read more...
UMC Missional Statement
Image via Wikipedia"To Make Disciples of Jesus Christ
for the Transformation of the World."
That's the mission statement of the United Methodist Church. To me, then, this is a nice framework for the questions that need to be addressed in any ministry context.
- To Make Disciples
- Practicum: What forms of education and training are you offering your members?
- Of Jesus Christ
- Theology: What "Jesus" is being preached at your context? Is it a Jesus who proclaims an open hatred for sin or who offers sinners welcome arms?
- For the Transformation
- Ministry: What does transformation look like? What does ministry look like?
- Of the World
- Mission: Who is "the world?" How does your context answer questions of "who is at the table" (inclusiveness) and understands how they interact with the world (evangelism)?
A Pastor in a Prius
Image by Voxphoto via FlickrI admit that I was hesitant to drive a premium vehicle, especially thinking of what the monthly payments could be used for charity and missions. But we have to drive, and instead of continuing along the way things were, we decided our ecological ethic required that we put our money where our mouth was.
So, it's been six months, so here's the half-year review:
Read more...
Progressive Church: Radical or Rational? [3of4]
This is part three of four parts on Rational/Radical Progressive Churches. Read the whole series for the background!
Continuing our conversation on the two different sides of Nate Silver's Progressive chart, there's one element that, by the label, differentiates Rational and Radical progressives: rationality. By naming one group "rational," Nate automatically places the the radical progressives in the irrational camp. Nate seems to ascribe them with being irrational in implementation (wanting drastic change not incremental change) which isn't as easy to achieve. Some commentors on the article seem to agree,
One thing of interest I might point out is there does seem to be a larger amount of paranoia on the radical progressive side. While in truth corporations get away with A LOT behind closed doors, it’s always interesting how many radical progressives, who are seemingly intelligent people, will believe the most elaborate and implausible conspiracy theories about them. (IE thousands of individuals involved in a 9/11 coverup, all working together, all keeping things quiet)Read on to see how radicals (including political figures like Cindy Sheehan) tend to move to the fringe and lessons for the radical church on how to keep on message.
Read more...
Religious Prohibitions and Porn
I love it when what I'm reading offline and online complement or frame one another. Here's one for today:
Offline, I'm reading through The Fidelity of Betrayal by Peter Rollins, I got to a section where Rollins talks about how our religious convictions allow us to continue to act in ways with a minimum of guilt:
Is this not what Paul intimately understood when he wrote that the law and sin are interconnected, that is, that religious prohibitions generate the very activity they attempt to abolish? ... Paul understood that the law, while manifested as the obstacle to sin, secretly provided it with oxygen. So then, strange as it may first sound, religious convictions can thus provide an implicit command to act in a way that they explicitly reject.Online, this popped up in my feed reader and I used it in my sermon on Sunday:
(Fidelity of Betrayal, page 168)
Residents of 27 states who passed laws banning gay marriages had 11% more pornography subscribers than states that don’t restrict marriage.Interesting! I know correlation is not causation, but it's interesting that religious convictions against sexual minorities has a correlating uptick in pornography consumption. Hmm....possibly a bit selective in our sexual ethics, aren't we?
Source: ABC News
Star Wars Workout [video]
Yep, the cast of the Today show dressed up in Jedi robes and learned the Jedi workout.
This should be implemented at church meetings everywhere.
(hat tip: My brother sent it, originally from My Disguises)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
