Hi everyone,
Having a great time at camp. The kids are having a blast. The weather has been great (right up to this morning.) The kids are having a blast. Wish you were here! The laundry is running out but as long as I have clean undies for tomorrow’s drive home I’ll be fine. See you soon!
Love, your church family!
Forty-one years ago today Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on a terrestrial body other than earth; A historic achievement that has never been duplicated in the same way since.
Sure, they went back to the moon six more times and drove a moon buggy, hit a golf ball and so on. Never-the-less, first steps are only done once. After Apollo 18, in late 1972, humans have not been back to the moon since.
I am sneaking away from camp to do a bit of work and use the Internet and I read an article by Ed Stetzer about contextualization. In preacher circles, contextualization is finding fresh ways to communicate the gospel, and it is a big deal. Ed observes that contextualization is all about communication. The gospel has, of course not changed. What has changed is the receivers and the way in which they communicate. People, young pepole in particular have changed so much, western culture has become a different planet overnight.
Shakespeare referred to death in Hamlet as the ‘undiscovered country.’ (also the title of one of the good Star Trek movies) and this is the challenge that faces the church. Without actually changing locations, your church has been moved in the past ten years to an undiscovered country. The language of the people in your community has changed. In order to be faithful to the call on our hearts we must learn a new language. Mark Love calls this a ‘faithful shift in imagination’ A new way of being the church. Are you willing to make the trip?
It isn’t a stretch to compare communicating the gospel to today’s culture with travelling to a whole new planet. Your first few steps there will be awkward. You are going to be bouncing around waving your hands a lot. Be prepared to fall down a few times. The key difference is that the church must not expend these resources and spend this time preparing, only for a visit to this new culture. We aren’t just coming for a visit to the 21st century. We need to pack bags (pack lightly people!) and prepare to stay.
A short course at McMaster, a wedding, and Bible Day Camp have kept me off the computer for a few weeks so here goes.
A colleague of Julie’s buried the love of her life this week at age 55 and it reminded us both of saying goodbye to Julie’s mom in 2002. Similarly, we shared dinner last night with another friend who lost her mom to cancer a month ago.
The day Glenna died (and repeatedly after that) I listened to U2’s album All That You Can’t Leave Behind and I associate a number of the songs off that album with that day. The album cover, which I didn’t get a chance to see until later, is of the band waiting for a departing flight at an airport ticket counter. I imagine the paradox is intentional – you don’t depart from the arrival area. Normally you leave your bags with the airline and go to the lounge to await your flight but Bono and the boys aren’t ready! There is only three bags between the four of them and a couple of guitar cases. The band appears to be leaving but they are not prepared to go.
love is not the easy thing…
The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can’t leave behindYou’re packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen
You could have flown away
A singing bird in an open cage
Who will only fly, only fly for freedomLeave it behind
You’ve got to leave it behind
All that you fashion
All that you make
All that you build
All that you break
All that you measure
All that you steal
All this you can leave behind
All that you reason
All that you sense
All that you speak
All you dress up
All that you scheme…
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
When I go to weddings I often ask myself, “why is it that people get married in the first place?” Many people who are getting married don’t have a good answer to that question. They make elaborate plans for their wedding day but they fail to make plans for their marriage. You know what order people are going to stand in but do you know how to listen to each other? Can you continue to love each other when you are tired? When you are sick? How about when you are sick and tired?
Marriage doesn’t strengthen a relationship. People often approach marriage as an arrangement to shore up a shaky relationship and that’s just crazy. If you are not committed to making this relationship work before you get married then you won’t be any more committed after you are married. It is such a delight to work with couples who take their relationship seriously. Couples who are going to last together are willing to make sacrifices in order to love each other well. Marriage is worth your best effort.
Marriage was not invented by the government! The Province of Ontario has stipulations and restrictions on how marriages happen and who can solemnize marriages and who can’t but marriage was not invented by the government, Marriage was invented by God. It has been around for thousands of years. Marriage was part of God’s plan from the beginning. Marriage was created before sin entered the world. It is described in Genesis chapter two! That’s about as close to the beginning as you can get!
Our culture totally doesn’t get marriage. We have TV shows like the Bachelor, the Bachelorette, Nerd Meets Girl, and some other cable shows that reduce marriage to, “who do I like the look of best?” or, “who fits with me best?” The problem with that is that looks fade and people change. We hear about things like prenuptial agreements and marriage contracts. Marriage is not a contract, it is a covenant. more…
Don’t trust anything you see on the Internet. I rest my case: (it takes about 90 seconds to load but it’s worth it)
You’ve gotta watch this:
If a picture is worth a thousand words then a three minute video is worth a million. These guys at Soulbend Productions were hired by Hi-Tec to raise some awareness about their shoes. Pay for commercial time? No way! How much commercial time can you buy with $5 000? Instead they made that dumb video that you just saw and hundreds of thousands of people have watched it all ready. It will get talked about on the news in the next couple of days and before the end of the month there will be millions of people who have watched it.
What is the moral of the story? You can make a cheap video clip that can convince millions of people of something that is totally false? You can’t believe everything you see on the Internet? There is something more important than that to be learned. If your church family, your tribe (or denomination) puts its highest values in dealing in propositional truth (proving facts using verses from the Bible) then you are in big trouble. A huge group of people have been totally convinced by a three minute video clip that they can run on water if they buy the right shoes!
In a Post-Modern World, the value of propositional truth is at an all time low. We can whine and complain about it all we want; Shake your fist at the wind, it is no less true. People don’t care if we are right about first century worship practices. Propositional truth has never been worth less than it is now.
The church needs to pick a new place to start. Instead of trying to tell the world about the truth we need to introduce them to truth. Truth is not a thing, truth is a person. Jesus doesn’t say, “I am telling the truth,” he says, “I am the truth”
If you have a neighbour that doesn’t know who Jesus is (and unless you are living on a desert Island, you do) don’t worry about telling him about Jesus, show him about Jesus. Serve him in the name of Jesus by forgiving them, loving them and expecting nothing in return.
The world needs to see the gospel, not just hear it.
The Orion Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
God is the hero of every Bible story. Right from the beginning, it is not about us, it is about God and the purposes He is accomplishing. The creation account of Genesis was never written to be a scientific treatise on how God accomplished the creation of the world. It was not a plan to be checked by scientists and confirmed as authentic or even realistic. It was written in an ancient historical context in order to argue against the prevailing opinion of the day.
Depending on your scholarly persuasion (Liberal or Conservative) the book of Genesis was written a long time ago (15th century B.C. or 5th century B.C.) and departed from the accepted script of how the world began. The prevailing opinion among the nations on how the world was created was that it came out of the strife and struggle of the gods or governing powers. There was some sort of struggle and the world in it’s complexity emerged from the wreckage. Genesis 1 describes an entirely different story.
Genesis describes that God was the single and only cause of creation. He brought order to chaos, He separated what cannot be separated (light and darkness, water and sky, the land and the sea). He formed the skies, the seas and the land and then in turn filled each with a variety of objects and forms of life. The point is not how many days it took, how many years ago this happened, or the process through which God performed this feat. The point is that God did it. God was the primary actor in this story.
The story refutes the competing worldviews by placing all powers and authorities of the day under the subjection of the one true God. Notice that in Gen 1: 16 the sun and the moon are not named. The names of these objects were in turn, the names of the gods they represented. The Egyptians, the Canaanites, everyone had names for the Sun and Moon. The writer of Genesis did not want to authenticate pagan gods in any way so they are called objects of creation: greater light and lesser light and they are placed there under God’s direction to serve God’s purposes.
The point is that God did it, for His own purposes, to bring Himself glory. Period.
Dallas Braden, a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics pitched the 19th perfect game in Major League Baseball history today: a game where he allowed no hits, no walks, not a single batter reached first base.
It was on Mother’s Day against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who were swinging pink bats, to raise awareness for breast cancer research. Braden’s mother, Jodie Atwood, died of cancer when he was in high school, and he was raised by his grandmother, Peggy Lindsey.
After the final out his grandma hugged him on the field and the two of them sobbed. It was absolutely amazing. If you can watch this video without crying like a baby, then you need to go back to eating kittens, or whatever it was that you were just doing.
You were never meant to ‘go to a church.’ You were meant to be the church; to participate in covenant life with a spiritual community. When evaluating whether a church family is right for you, you need to make sure that you are evaluating it on criteria it was meant to have.
For example, it makes no sense at all if I decide that my bike is a piece of garbage because it can’t fly. It wasn’t built to fly. In the same way your church wasn’t created to serve your needs so deciding that it is inadequate because it fails to meet your needs is silly.
Your church was created by the Holy Spirit to lead you into participation in the work that God is doing in the world. God is in the process of redeeming all things to Christ and a healthy, Bible believing church will, in some way, be about those things in this world. No church is perfect of course (otherwise we wouldn’t be allowed to join it right?) but there ought to be a voice within your church family that is calling the group to join in what Jesus is already doing in your community. Maybe that voice is yours.
Looking back over my nine day holiday in England a number of common themes came up in all the places we stayed. A major interest of the Renaissance was a renewed faith in the intellect. With the advent of the Modern era, humanity was going to solve all the problems of the past. The violence of the Clan system of Scotland, the filth of the plague, the inferior tribal systems of the colonies; all this was going to be sorted out by the discipline and the intelligence of the British people.
The sad truth is that for hundreds of years every generation has considered itself intellectually and morally superior to the generations before. It’s still true today. We are convinced that our networks, technology and mobility will bring the world closer together and allow us to develop a superior individual morality and while the world is getting smaller, we are more isolated than ever. more…
