What about “Us Vs Them” Church Ads?

mac-pc_ad.JPGUPDATE III: Joel Hunter has written a massive substantial response to the podcasts that go along with the ads.

UPDATE II: The pastor whose church produced the ads has a blog that is full of provocative ideas. If you want a glimpse into what the emerging church growth culture looks like, this is a very good window.

UPDATE:Bill Kinnon blogs about the “stolen intellectual property” angle.

Noel Heikkinnen sent me the links to these church created “Apple/PC” parodies because they reminded him of a discussion we’d had about churches advertising themselves as alternatives to traditional churches. (Noel’s experiences and opinions were instructive. I hope he writes them sometime.)

Check out the videos, then come right back. (Let me say right here that I haven’t even visited the web site of the church who made these and nothing I’m writing has anything to do with that church in particular. Please don’t write me and tell me I am wronging that church. The ads are out there, and discussing them isn’t attacking the church.)

My initial reaction to these videos is two-fold.Continue reading “What about “Us Vs Them” Church Ads?”

Riffs:12:06:06 Dan Kimball Responds to Macarthur’s Portrayal of the Emerging Church

logo.gifUPDATE II: Andrew Sandlin with a fine review of the Emerging Church and politics. An outstanding essay. Very helpful.

UPDATE: Bill Kinnon let’s his hair down, so to speak, in this post on Macarthur’s letter.

Dan Kimball’s response to John Macarthur’s characterization of the emerging church stands in stark contrast to the large quoted sections of the fund-raising letter that inspired it. Point by point, Dan states the truth: the EC churches he knows have doctrinal standards, leadership, real preaching and love the lost with the Gospel of grace. In contrast to the stereotypes that drive radio ministry critics and reformed watchblogs, Dan describes the real EC of his experience; a movement that- with some exceptions- seeks to missionally carry out the Great Commission in faithfulness to Jesus.Continue reading “Riffs:12:06:06 Dan Kimball Responds to Macarthur’s Portrayal of the Emerging Church”

Christ: The Meeting Place

esjones2.jpgHe became the reconciling place where opposites met. He was the meeting place of God and man. Man the aspiring and God the inspiring meet in Him. Heaven and earth came together and are forever reconciled. The material and the spiritual after their long divorce have in Him found their reconciliation. The natural and the supernatural blend into one in His life- you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. The passive and the militant are so one in Him that He is militantly passive and passively militant. The gentle qualities of womanhood and the sterner qualities of manhood so mingle that both men and women see in Him their ideal- and the revelation of the Fatherhood and the Motherhood of God. The activism of the West and the meditative passivism of the East come together in Him and are forever reconciled. The new individual, born from above, and the new society- the Kingdom of God on earth- are both offered to us in Him.
– E. Stanley Jones, “The Sign is a Baby.”

Jesus often calls his followers to make choices- decisive choices. There are two ways, and only one can be chosen. In the present, we must choose to be citizens of the Kingdom of heaven or citizens in the city of Man. Today, the choice may be between Christ and family, or even between Christ and my right hand or my right eye.Continue reading “Christ: The Meeting Place”

A Lesson From St. Jack: Holding on to All Things

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“He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively- even playful- imagination. He was a “romantic rationalist.” He combined things that almost everybody today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.”
-John Piper on C.S. Lewis, Don’t Waste Your Life, pg 19.

I’m rereading Don’t Waste Your Life for my men’s group, and this paragraph has been on my mind for a couple of days.Continue reading “A Lesson From St. Jack: Holding on to All Things”

Support WorldServe

logo.gifEvery year at Advent and Christmas, the BHT features a ministry that deserves your support. There are many good ministries and feel free to promote them in the comments. This year I would like to encourage your support for a ministry that directly affects many of our students at OBI and millions of Christians around the world: Worldserve.

Worldserve is a church planting, church supporting, pastor supporting ministry that specializes in assisting the church in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Ethiopia. Worldserve hopes to plant over 100,000 churches in 5 years. They are effective at supporting suffering pastors and in getting Bibles into these countries. I became familiar with Worldserve through Michael Card.

They have an excellent web site and you can learn learn all about their work there. One of the reasons we are supporting Worldserve is their philosophy of supporting movements in the country and not sending in westerners to be pastors. Their ministry on behalf of suffering pastors is especially impressive. If you read the web site, you won’t think of Christmas lights quite the same way again.

I encourage your support for Worldserve. They are doing work in places work desperately needs to be done and where are brothers and sisters are suffering for their faith in Christ.

Skip the Carping This Advent

rick_wakeman_203_203x152.jpgI never heard about Advent growing up. Our church recognized Christmas, but anything else would have been too “catholic,” and we were fundamentalistic Southern Baptists. What I heard about Christmas was dependable preaching from the texts surrounding the birth of Jesus, the Lottie Moon Christmas offering for foreign missions, and a lot of negativity.

Negativity? Yes, there was plenty of negativity in the season of Joy. We heard a lot about how Christ had been “X-ed” out of Christmas. We heard of the evils of Christmas celebrations involving alcohol. We heard warnings about leaving Christ out of Christmas. We heard that most people had no idea what Christmas was about anymore. (Apparently things used to be better.) Eventually, we heard that if you stayed home from church for any kind of Christmas or New Year’s celebration, your salvation was probably questionable.

This eventually extended to Super Bowl Sunday night, but that’s another story.Continue reading “Skip the Carping This Advent”

The Advent Blog is Open

adventicon.jpgThe Boar’s Head Tavern sponsors a blog each advent season called “Go to Bethlehem and See.” This is a place for BHT fellows and friends to blog on Advent related themes. Last year’s blog was a real highlight of the season for many IM and BHT readers.

We began the advent blog as a way to keep the season positive and our minds on the coming celebration of the birth of the King, Jesus Christ. I’d like to invite all IM readers to mark the blog, add it to your RSS feed and tell others to make a daily stop.

Have a great first Sunday in Advent, and enjoy this season of Christ’s coming to save his people.

That Silly Question and The “Truth War”

print-warrio.jpgJohn Macarthur has a new book called “The Truth War.” This article is not a review or a critique of that book. I haven’t read any more than a brief summary chapter published at “Pulpit” blog. In fact, I’m not quite sure why I mentioned the book at all. Probably to attract readers who will write annoyed comments.

Anyway.

After seeing the title of the book, I got to thinking about the usefulness of the “war” metaphor in Christianity. We’re always involved in a “war” of some kind: the culture war, the war for the Gospel, the war for the minds of our kids, the war to protect the unborn and now the “Truth” war, which seems to be mainly about clearing evangelicalism of the emerging church.

Actually, I raised the question at the BHT of whether what Jesus was seeking to create could be called a “Truth War?” I won’t quote the response, but you can trust me that the seriousness of the question was fundamentally questioned, and later on, the issue of the silliness of “What Would Jesus Do?” inevitably made an appearance.Continue reading “That Silly Question and The “Truth War””