Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Religion

All posts relating to religion, including those on the relationship of religion to other fields, such as science and politics

  • Lord Save Us From Your Followers – The Movie

    I think there are two major errors we can make as Christians: We can fail to have a message, and we can fail to be the message. If I follow the stereotypes I would say that liberals tend to fail in the first, and conservatives in the second. But I’m afraid we all tend to fail at both.

    Tom Sims posted this trailer on his blog The Dream Factory. I think the trailer, and hopefully the movie, should make us think, then make us do.

    The gospel will offend, but make sure it’s the gospel that is doing the offending and not your attitudes or prejudices.

  • Preaching until you Mean It

    Shane Raynor is again stirring things up with a post on a Toolkit for Radical Methodists. He has proposed the idea of preaching faith until you have it, rather than waiting for faith.

    Since I recently posted some about doubt, I was interested in his phrase “wearing [your] doubt as a straitjacket.” I wonder if one could distinguish acknowledging doubt as opposed to wearing it as a straitjacket. Might it be possible for there to be healthy doubts, doubts that lead you onward as opposed to unhealthy doubts that keep you from taking action?

    This is one I’m still thinking about.

  • Living Romans 12

    Alan Knox has reposted a series on how the church can live Romans 12:9-21 along with some current thoughts. He points out that Romans 1-11 are theological, but starting with Romans 12, Paul begins to speak about how the church can live out the theology of the first chapters.

    This all reminded me of one of my complaints about my biblical training, both undergraduate and graduate. While an undergraduate, I took Exegesis of Romans in Greek, a one quarter course designed to make sure that those of us with two years of Greek didn’t just stop there. It was wildly unsuccessful at that task, as the assignments that forced one to actually read Romans in Greek were minimal. But my greater complaint was that we didn’t follow a schedule and thus only got through Romans 8 in class.

    This did allow the very Arminian professor, also an advocate of the moral influence view of the atonement, to avoid some difficult passages in Romans 9-11, but it also meant that we stayed in the theological portions of the book.

    I was further disappointed when I took an exegesis class in Galatians in seminary. I was disappointed that it was done from the English text, but because of the graduate school/seminary agreement (I was in the grad school), I had to take on an extra assignment, and the professor agreed that I could simply do all of my work from the Greek text. (The value of two years of Greek after which one doesn’t actually study the New Testament from the Greek text largely escapes me.) But again I was disappointed, as we only completed through Galatians 4.

    Now I know that both professors would say that they were just trying to cover the text that they did cover in depth. I know this because I asked, and they did say that. But the risk here is that one gets an extremely skewed view of Paul–Paul the theologian, when he was really much more pastoral. His theology was the foundation for his practical teaching.

    I’m no expert on Paul. My primary study was in the Hebrew Scriptures and other ancient near eastern literature. But I am a firm advocate in all cases of studying whole pieces of literature and putting the appropriate weight on all portions. I can’t imagine Paul being happy when we read about salvation by faith and then miss Galatians 5:13 which tells us the results.

    How does your church and your life measure up to the practical, active portions of Paul’s epistles? What difference might it make in the way other people view Christians if we did so?

  • Am I a Doubter?

    Bruce Alderman has written a post that is making me think. That’s a good thing!

    He thinks that we are misusing the word “doubts” when we suggest that believers may have doubts. To quote:

    Questions can and do lead to a more mature faith. Genuine doubts do not.

    Hmm! I must say that I have few to no doubts about the basics. I have, in fact, attempted to truly doubt that God exists, a foolish effort if one actually believes, but I have doubts about many secondary things.

    As I said, this one is making me think. If it’s making you think as well, head over to Bruce’s blog and comment.

  • Beware Friends Bearing Manuscripts

    That’s something every editor should have laminated and stuck on the wall. There is nothing to make me cringe like a friend or relative telling me that they have a manuscript they’ve been working on for a long time. Inevitably this leads to the question, “Would you be interested in looking at it?”

    Depending on how good a friend, or if the relative is in the part of the family you’re speaking to, you really can’t say, “No, I suspect your manuscript stinks, and I really don’t want to have to make that opinion official.” On the other hand, once you have the manuscript in your possession, your only defense is your power of procrastination.

    You see, when you have to pay the bills, you can’t accept the manuscript for publication just because the author is a friend. You can’t lie and say, “This is a wonderful manuscript, but I can’t publish it right now,” because the author will doubtless continue to hound you after receiving such encouraging news.

    All this is my round about way of telling you that while I always look at manuscripts brought by family and friends, I do so with serious reservations. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I can’t afford to publish something I can’t sell.

    So when I found out that Nick May, who was my son James’s best friend (without prejudice to several other best friends) was writing a book, I received the news with mixed emotions. “Sure,” I said, “I’ll be happy to look at it.” And really, truly, I was happy to do so. I just wasn’t happy at the possibility that I would have to say, “This just won’t do for us” much less “you need some more writing practice!”

    But when I read the sample chapters he sent, I knew I was saved. His writing was excellent, his subject controversial. It was possible I would even lose some friends by choosing to publish his book, and such a book is always of interest. After all, if someone isn’t angry about a book, it’s probably not accomplishing anything.

    So just what is Megabelt, and why did I choose to make it our first fiction title for Energion Publications? (Press release.)

    Well, you can follow the links for details on the book itself. I can simply tell you this: I laughed hysterically at points while reading it. At the same time it held up a mirror to my life and ministry and made me think. A book that can make you laugh and think seriously at the same time has something important going for it. Laughing and thinking are excluded from church far too often.

    Just try changing the order of service in the bulletin of many churches and listen to the complaints. People didn’t know what to do. They were confused! They couldn’t handle having another prayer before the scripture reading, or two songs at the beginning, or perhaps being asked to stand at a moment when they had been sitting. The problem for them is that church is a habit. It’s not that going to church is a habit. It’s that the elements of church itself are habitual. Heaven forbid they should be asked to participate!

    But even more, we have many ministries that are also habits. Now some of these habits are good things. Visiting the sick or shut-ins. But what happens if the pastor asks some other members to visit someone who is sick or shut-in? Oh the misery! Oh the insult! They have been treated as lesser beings because they received a visit from the wrong person.

    Youth ministry is another area of habit. There are certain things that you do, and if you don’t do them, you’re not really “reaching” the youth. If you try something new it will doubtless be dangerous, or you’ll find members of the church who remember a time long, long ago when someone tried that and it didn’t work.

    My friend and pastor Geoffrey Lentz likes the following quote:

    “Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.” – Jaroslav Pelikan

    While, as the description says, Megabelt doesn’t have an agenda, nor is it a story with a moral, it takes aim at our traditionalism by highlighting it in action. Like me, I suspect that you will find that the mirror shows you in a less than flattering light at some points. The question, of course, is what one does after one looks in the mirror.

    23For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his natural face in a mirror; 24for he sees himself, and goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25But he who looks into the perfect law of freedom, and continues, not being a hearer who forgets, but a doer of the work, this man will be blessed in what he does. — James 1:23-25 (WEB)

    So what about publishing a book without a moral? I told Nick that if he had written a story with a single moral, I would have been less likely to buy the manuscript. Since bedtime story days, when we had an endless supply of children’s stories with a moral, I have despised the story written with one single purpose in mind, that inevitably leads to that one moral.

    You may say that Jesus told such stories, but if so, I would suggest you read Jesus more closely. My wife borrowed a devotional from me today, The Work of Being a Disciple. I grew up with the notion that a parable had one meaning and you should ignore everything else in favor of that. I found later that parables have a multistage punch–the longer you go on thinking about them, the more they do to you.

    I’m not calling Megabelt a parable, nor am I nominating Nick for the role of Jesus–I doubt he would thank me! But I am suggesting that sometimes we will hear in story what we would miss otherwise. In other words, while no moral is pushed in your face in this book, you may nonetheless get many morals from it–if you’re willing to think while you laugh, and after you laugh as well.

    I can’t ask much more of a manuscript, even when borne by a friend!

  • The Bad Name of Evangelism

    Via Shane Raynor on Twitter and the Wesley Report, I found this article on UMPortal about early Methodist evangelism. What struck me, was how many of the ideas there could be found in Acts.

    Here’s a key quote:

    She [Rev. Laceye Warner of Duke] defined evangelism as preaching the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ and “living it out.”

    I think we can trace the bad name of evangelism to two things:

    1. We have separated evangelism from discipleship, i.e., we equate evangelism with persuading people to say a particular prayer
    2. We think evangelism is about talking people into joining our particular church

    While the symptoms are varied, including much obnoxious behavior, I think at least most of the symptoms can be traced back to one of those two points.

    A return to the long term, often difficult work of making disciples would be rather valuable, I think.

  • Disaster and Judgment

    John Piper has suggested that the tornado that struck Minneapolis was a judgment on the ELCA for the recent change in their statement on human sexuality. Piper is a great preacher, and despite some disagreements, I love to hear him present a good gospel message, but I find this, and other similar statements, quite disturbing.

    I think it is biblical to hold that God can send judgment. But I also think it is Biblical, with Job as the showcase example, to think that disaster need not be judgment. Much damage can be done when Christians are told that all setbacks and hardships are somehow a sign of punishment from God. Suffering may come so that we can learn, it may come despite our best efforts, it may come to the best of us, it may come to the worst of us, and finally, it may come because that’s how things work.

    After Hurricane Ivan I was very glad that our double wide trailer was undamaged. As I drove from the home where we had been guests to our home, I saw many similar structures completely gutted. In fact, I had little hope in my mind after the drive that I would find anything where we lived, but there was no damage at all.

    So did God love us more than those other people? Was this salvation because we are praying people who put our trust in God? Even in normal circumstances, I would hardly think so. But in this case our 17 year old son was dying, and within a week of the storm he had gone on to be with the Lord. If we could have lost our home and kept our son, what might I have chosen?

    So to reverse it, were we much more wicked than all those folks who did not lose children to cancer that day or that week?

    It’s simply a dangerous game. If you feel strongly about what the ELCA has done, expressing that belief is appropriate, even expressing it vigorously. But I think it would be better to leave the tornadoes out of it.

    I found the Internet Monk’s comments on this very helpful and well stated, though his were in response to a different post.

    Update: I had intended to provide links here to my Hand of God series of three essays: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, as well as a story I wrote some time ago for the God-Talk Club series on my Jevlir Caravansary fiction blog, The God-Talk Club: Tornadoes.

  • Church 7 Days a Week

    Kevin at Shooting the Breeze comments on a YouTube video.

  • Love Without Involvement

    I have, on occasion, been accused of being a “love preacher.” It’s not an accusation that frightens me, but it used to puzzle me. It doesn’t so much any more. There’s a difference between a casual “all you need is love” attitude and “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34), especially considering that the latter is a command given by someone who went on to die immediately afterward.

    The problem is that we want “love” as a kind of general good feeling about people, a general desire to have nice things happen to them, but at the same time we don’t really want to get involved in the actual implementation. I think many of us want to help the homeless, but sincerely hope we can do so by giving some money to the soup kitchen, or voting for politicians who will implement policies to help them, but not getting our hands dirty in the process.

    There’s nothing wrong with giving money to the soup kitchen, or with trying to implement policies that help the homeless, nor with voting for politicians who will support such policies. The problem is that too often we call this “loving one another as Jesus loved us” and that’s not how Jesus did it.

    He starts in heaven, takes on a human body, lives with us, eats with us, sleeps with us, gets dirty with us, and finally dies on a cross, all the time being like us. If you take the incarnation seriously, that Jesus was God in the flesh, you have to also believe that Jesus could have done as many or more nice things for people around him whilst hanging out in heaven.

    But the Jesus kind of love doesn’t allow that. It gets dirty. It suffers. It cares in a personal way. Read Philippians 2:5-11.

    My friend Greg May is a contributor to our Energion.com Podcast, and I think he hit one out of the park with his podcast today–A Spiritual Tragedy. Please check it out!

  • Exceptional, Must-Read Article – Be Farmers, not Recruiters

    If you’ve been on a church nominating committee and experienced the task of persuading someone to take a job that just has to be filled, or if you’ve been on the other end of that phone call when you’re begged to take a job for which you know you are not gifted or called, or if you’ve wondered why these problems crop up, then you need to read an article I found today.

    Here’s a taste:

    Recruitment sucks! I used to think that recruitment was a strategy that only added ministry to the Kingdom and could never be a multiplying strategy. I have come to see that it is not even an addition strategy. Recruitment is actually a subtraction strategy. It doesn’t add anything to the kingdom. It simply takes from it. It is a strategy that uses the kingdom for its own good rather than contributing to the kingdom.

    When everyone is taking and no one is contributing, soon the pool sucks dry and we are all left with nothing. The vast majority of churches are sucking up what little resources are left in the kingdom and contributing nothing back. The results are that we are in a drought. Our pool is shrinking daily, and in the end all we have left to us is the muck at the bottom of the pond.

    This explains why so many churches are dying of thirst. Quality diminishes. Needs are left unfilled. Our thirst for more resources increases. Our churches are left weakened.

    There is a solution, however. There is an oasis available to all our churches with enough resources for everyone. We can learn this solution by a quick analysis of how leaders are found in the Book of Acts.

    It’s at SmallGroups.com. Read it! Practice it!