My take on the Rob Bell controversy over at my other blog. Here’s an excerpt:

When the current Love Wins hype is over and the book completes its guaranteed run as a bestseller, Rob Bell will be able to release a book twice as controversial in the future and receive less than half the fanfare. HarperOne should enjoy the flood of free publicity from the power writers of the Evangelical blogosphere this time around. Next time out the bait will be a much tougher sell.

Read the rest here.

__________________

The “other blog” that features only my longer pieces of writing, some of which have been published in print and others that are waiting to be published. The post frequency is about once a week. So, if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for…

Go and take a look at the new site here.
You can subscribe by email by clicking here.
You can subscribe by RSS by clicking here.
The Facebook group for the new blog is here.

Enjoy!

Seth Godin. For real.

“Do you own technology or does technology own you?”

I’m really looking forward to reading the new book (The Next Story) by my friend Tim Challies. Below is a trailer produced by his publisher for the book. It is available for pre-order through Amazon.com and Westminster.

Look for an interview with Tim here at The Ascent to Truth in the next month or so.

(watch)

Jesus himself is our peace. He is the “Prince of Peace” but there is a paradox we need to deal with here found in Matthew 10:34-39 where Jesus says: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace…”

Of this paradox Russell Moore says:

There are two very different kinds of peace pictured in Scripture, and in order to get to the one you’ve got to disturb the other. Jesus speaks of himself as one who brings peace (Jn. 14:27), just as the old prophecies and the announcing angels promised of him. But then he turns around and says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have come not to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34).

In the gospel, that peace comes only through war. This isn’t violence, the way we think of it, flesh and blood against flesh and blood. It is the Spirit of Jesus marching as to war against the principalities and powers in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).

So the peace that he brings is:

1. Peace with God
2. Peace with other people are at peace with God
3. Not always peace with others who are not at peace with God. As much as it is in our power to have peace with others there will be, but this will not always be the case.

It would be nice to have all three but we cannot always have it. When it comes to taking up our crosses and following Christ there will be many with whom we will not have peace, and Jesus tells us here that this will cut deeply, even into family bonds.

Charles Spurgeon said of this peace:

“Peace will be the ultimate issue of the Lord’s coming; but, at first, the Lord sends a sword among men. He wars against war, and contends against contention. In the act of producing the peace of heaven he arouses the rage of hell. Truth provokes opposition, purity excites enmity, and righteousness arouses all the forces of wrong”

Nonetheless it says here that Jesus, as the Prince of Peace, IS our peace (v14), makes peace (v15), and that he came to preach/proclaim this peace (v17). So first he achieved it and then he proclaimed it. Since it still his achievement, we should continue to proclaim it!

As John Stott says:

“Jesus Christ is still preaching peace in the world today, through the lips of his followers. For it is a truly wonderful fact that whenever we proclaim peace, it is Christ who proclaims it through us.”

Forget those other “discernment” websites, always looking for groundless and specious accusations against popular teachers.

Here, Kevin DeYoung carefully articulates and then deconstructs an argument made by Miroslav Volf based on a section of writing by Augustine. He begins with this “Never forget this: sometimes even very smart people make very bad arguments.” Indeed.

“Clearly,” Volf maintains, “Augustine believed, it is worse for concrete deeds toward neighbor to be misaligned with the character of God than for thoughts about God to be misaligned with the character of God” (147). Actually, though, the line from Augustine never prioritized deeds over thoughts. In the quote he simply states that right thoughts, devoid of the right deeds, are not pleasing to God.

Volf goes on to use this bad argument to make an even worse argument: “If Augustine is correct in his assessment, the consequence for Christians’ relation to non-Christians are astounding: non-believers or adherents of another religion, if they love, can be closer to God than Christians notwithstanding Christians’ formally correct beliefs about God or even explicit, outward faith in Jesus Christ! The elevation of deeds above beliefs is the consequence of the claim that God is love” (147). The path from Augustine’s homily on 1 John 4:7 to Volf’s logic is far from obvious. Augustine said faith without works is dead; Volf concludes that works without faith is a sign of spiritual life. The one does not imply the other.

What’s more, the real Augustine clearly disagrees with Volf’s version of Augustine. In Homily 10 the Bishop of Hippo argues that works apart from belief, though “they seemed good, were nothing worth.” When the non-Christian does good deeds it is like running, but not in the right direction. “[B]y running aside from the way thou wentest astray instead of coming to the goal…He that runs aside from the way, runs to no purpose, or rather runs but to toil.” And “What is the way by which we run?” Augustine asks. “Christ hath told us, ‘I am the Way.’” In other words, the only deeds that please God are the ones done through faith in Christ. Deeds apart from creeds are nothing and worse than nothing. For, “He goes the more astray, the more he runs aside from the way [Christ].”

It’s well worth your time to read the entire flow of DeYoung’s deconstruction here.

Also from the “very smart people who sometimes make very bad arguments” files,  I heard similar reasoning from Brian McLaren at a conference I attended a few years back at which he said, referring to a young Muslim who also spoke at the conference:

And I think that Fatmire [Muslim peace activist] working for peace, is an agent for peace, and I’d much rather her be working for peace being who she is than… becoming a person in a church worrying about the list over there on that wall.

You can read the full text (and hear the audio) of that post here.

Discuss?

Below are some excerpts from an excellent book that was recently published (2007) and not widely read. Can you identify the author? (If you can, please just leave the name as a guess – PLEASE DO NOT TELL EVERYONE WHICH BOOK AND WHAT PAGES THE QUOTES ARE FROM)

If you can’t, can you guess what denomination or line of theological thinking the author subscribes to? Leave your guesses and observations in the comments section below.

I have a free copy of Kevin Abell’s book “The Edge of His Cloak” for the first 2 people who correctly identify the author of the following excerpts:

“The church must organize itself in such a way as to express its understanding of itself… The most common fault is for the church to be structured for ‘holiness’ rather than ‘worldliness,’ for worship and fellowship rather than mission… Further, our static, inflexible, self-centered structures are ‘heretical structures’ because they embody a heretical doctrine of the church…

Some zealous churches organize an overfull program of church-based activities… Such churches give the impression that their main goal is to keep their members out of mischief!

[This abundance of programs] inhibits church members from getting involved in the local community because they are preoccupied with the local church.”

How, then, should the local church organize itself?

“Every five to ten years each church should conduct a survey in order to evaluate itself and especially to discover how far its structures reflect its identity. In fact, it should conduct two surveys, one of the local community and the other of the local church, in order to learn how far the church is penetrating the community for Christ…

Is the church in reality organized only for itself, for its own survival and convenience, and for the preservation of its privileges? Is it organized to serve itself, or to serve God and the community? What are its cherished traditions and conventions which unnecessarily separate it from the community?”

On church members and leaders:

“Do we imprison our members in the church? Or do we deliberately release at least some of them (including leaders) from church commitments in order to encourage them to be active for Christ in the community, and then support them with our interest and prayers as they do so?

For example, a group of committed young people could adopt a local nightclub, not in order to make occasional evangelistic raids into it, but between them (in pairs) to visit it regularly over a long period, in order to make friends with the other young people who congregate there.”

Have at it…

The entirety of chapter 10 of Eugene Peterson’s “The Contemplative Pastor:Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction” is worth further exploration since it deals with small talk. What’s that you say… you didn’t think Peterson would be a fan of Seinfeld?

He may or may not be, but endless, mindless, pointless chatter is not what he’s talking about in this chapter.

I have to admit that sometimes as a pastor I feel the need to turn ordinary conversations into “spiritual” conversations. There is sometimes a guilt experienced in the aftermath of a coffee meeting or an evening spent with people from my church in which the conversation never made its way past the ordinary things of life. But this is more guilt than conviction; more a capitulation to a perceived requirement than a failure to act on what I know to be right.

“Pastoral work,” says Peterson, “is that aspect of Christian ministry that specializes in the ordinary. It is the nature of pastoral life to be attentive to, immersed in, and appreciative of the everyday texture of people’s lives – the buying and selling, the visiting and meeting, the going and coming.”

There are always crisis situations to attend to but most people, most of the time are not in crisis.

“Small talk: the way we talk when we aren’t talking about anything in particular, when we don’t have to think logically, or decide sensibly, or understand accurately. The reassuring conversational noises that make no demands, inflicts no stress. The sounds that take the pressure off.  The meandering talk that simply expresses what is going on at the time.”

This is about the only way I do person meetings. No agenda, no point list, no “desired outcome” – just start talking and see where it goes. But I’m not sure that this is working, insofar as I haven’t tried going prepared, with an agenda and a desired outcome. Something to try perhaps – being more “intentional” – but I don’t think I can bring myself to do it.

Being intentional, to me, means being available, being involved, trusting God providence to supply opportunity. Seeing what happens, watching where it goes, making my contribution (by the grace of God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit) and then repeating the cycle. Time will be the judge of the effectiveness of this strategy.

Peterson’s childhood pastor was the opposite – the only thing he ever wanted to know was how your SOUL was doing. The pastor’s refusal (or inability) to engage in any other kind of conversation implied that most of Peterson’s life was being lived at a sub-spiritual level. “Vast tracts of my experience we ‘worldly’, with occasional moments qualifying as ‘spiritual’.”

Not only is this practiced by some, it is expected by many. Back to Peterson’s earlier quote about the Pastor as court jester.

“I never questioned the practice,” he continues, “until I became a pastor myself and found that such an approach left me uninvolved with most of what was happening in people’s lives and without a conversational context for the actual undramatic work of living by faith in the fog and drizzle.”

I don’t have a 5-year plan – I don’t have a 1-year plan… I question whether I can legitimately say I have a plan beyond next week. I rely on serendipity as much as intentional action. I am wary (and weary!) of manipulation – of me or by me.

Stay tuned…

Eugene Peterson:

“Prayer is not work that pastors are often asked to do except in ceremonial ways. Most pastoral work actually erodes prayer. The reason is obvious: people are not comfortable with God in their lives. They prefer something less awesome and more informal. Something, in fact, like the pastor. Reassuring, accessible, easygoing. People would rather talk to the pastor than to God. And so it happens that without anyone actually intending it, prayer is pushed to the sidelines.

And so pastors, instead of practicing prayer, which brings people into the presence of God, enter into the practice of messiah: we will do the work of God for God, fix people up, tell them what to do, conspire in finding shortcuts by which the long journey to the Cross can be bypassed since we all have such crowded schedules right now. People love us when we do this. It is flattering to be put in the place of God. It feels wonderful to be treated in this Godlike way. And it is work that we are generally quite good at.”

– The Contemplative Pastor:Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction

Eugene Peterson:

[As a pastor] “the culture treats me so amiably. It encourages me to maintain my orthodox creed; it commends me for my evangelical practice; it praises me for my singular devotion. All it asks is that I accept its definition of my work as an encourager of the culture’s good will, as the priest who will sprinkle holy water on the culture’s good intentions.

But if I, even for a moment, accept my culture’s definition of me, I am rendered harmless. I can denounce evil and stupidity all I wish and will be tolerated in my denunciations as a court jester is tolerated. I can organize their splendid goodwill and they will let me do it, since it is only for weekends.”

– The Contemplative Pastor:Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction (p16)

I bought a big nerdy present for myself for my birthday yesterday: I ordered this book by James Davison Hunter: To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.

Are you nerdy enough to read it together with me and discuss it chapter by chapter? If so, order it at Amazon or CBD.

I ordered it after reading this interview and the following endorsements by Charles Taylor and Tim Keller:

“How should Christians act in the world? The dominant answer in America today seems to be: through politics. But the major model of Christian political action, visible most obviously but not exclusively in the Christian Right, has been a politics fuelled by resentment and a sense of victimization, actuated by a strong will to power, and a propensity to demonize its opponents.

This politics is a capitulation to the worst elements of the contemporary culture it claims to be redeeming. Hunter offers an acute end penetrating analysis of this paradoxical and distressing phenomenon, and carefully charts an alternative course for contemporary Christians, a form of ‘faithful presence’ within culture and society. The book is brimful of insightful challenges to our conventional understanding of things, and of inspiring suggestions for a new departure.”

– Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age

“No writer or thinker has taught me as much as James Hunter has about this all-important and complex subject of how culture is changed.”

–Tim Keller, author of The Reason For God

Publisher’s description of the book:

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in the Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry? And how might Christians in the 21st century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative?

In To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers persuasive–and provocative–answers to these questions. Hunter begins with a penetrating appraisal of the most popular models of world-changing among Christians today, highlighting the ways they are inherently flawed and therefore incapable of generating the change to which they aspire.

Because change implies power, all Christian eventually embrace strategies of political engagement. Hunter offers a trenchant critique of the political theologies of the Christian Right and Left and the Neo-Anabaptists, taking on many respected leaders, from Charles Colson to Jim Wallis and Stanley Hauerwas.

Hunter argues that all too often these political theologies worsen the very problems they are designed to solve. What is really needed is a different paradigm of Christian engagement with the world, one that Hunter calls “faithful presence” – an ideal of Christian practice that is not only individual but institutional; a model that plays out not only in all relationships but in our work and all spheres of social life. He offers real-life examples, large and small, of what can be accomplished through the practice of “faithful presence.”

Such practices will be more fruitful, Hunter argues, more exemplary, and more deeply transfiguring than any more overtly ambitious attempts can ever be. Written with keen insight, deep faith, and profound historical grasp, To Change the World will forever change the way Christians view and talk about their role in the modern world.

Interested in reading it together and discussing it online? Order it at Amazon or CBD.

This week I began reading Sex and the Supremacy of Christ. I’m using this as my morning study book. I’m about a quarter of the way though and I can already say “You should read this!” The authors (including Piper, David Powlison, Al Mohler, C.J. Mahaney  Mark Dever, and others) take neither the shock route (a la www.xxxchurch.com) nor the “we don’t talk about that” route.

What you’ll find in this book is frank and up-front writing about Biblical sexuality, the goodness of sex, sexual sin, and sexual restoration.

A couple of quotes from chapters one and two by John Piper:

“If the Scripture teaches that truly knowing God – truly knowing Christ – guards and guides and governs our sexuality in purity and love, then we may be sure that a pastor, or anyone else, whose sexuality is not governed and guarded and guided in purity and love does not know God – at least not as he ought.“

Echoes of C.S. Lewis: “My conviction is that one of the main reasons the world and the church are awash in lust and pornography is that our lives are intellectually and emotionally disconnected from the infinite, soul-staggering grandeur for which we were made. Inside and outside the church Western culture is drowning in a sea of triviality, pettiness, banality, and silliness.“

“It is inevitable that the human heart, which was made to be staggered with the supremacy of Christ, but instead is drowning in a sea of banal entertainment, will reach for the best natural buzz that life can give: sex.“

Order Sex and the Supremacy of Christ  here.

In my quest to immerse myself in the life and teachings of Christ I intend to read and watch a few works that don’t synchronize with the Gospel accounts.

One such work is The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer. As you can guess from the title, this is a fictional first-person account of Jesus’ own life. The Jesus who narrates this account is attempting to correct falsehoods, exaggerations, and half-truths included in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in order to enlarge their own folds.

After such a start, there is not much to be said for the rest of the book. The Jesus offered in Mailer’s narrative is a doubting, sinning, slightly above-average human with some suspicion that he might be divine. The Jesus offered us here is in many ways the opposite of the one presented in the synoptic Gospels; he has traces of the divine but is mostly human.

God is pictured as limited in His love, and if superior to Satan at all, only in that he is slightly more cunning.

The book was a bit if a labor to finish. It is certainly undeserving of the accolades included on its cover: “A staggering work”, Bold… daring”, “A triumph”.

It is none of the above – not in craft or literary quality. It is rather some parts of the Gospel texts interspersed with Mailer’s conjecture about what happened before and after.

And I suppose that not really unique; we all do this to an extent. What we fill in with conjecture merely betrays our biases.

I’m no historian. You probably aren’t either. Fortunately, this fact probably won’t serve as a handicap when reading this short book of history.

“The Great Emergence” is a book that makes sweeping generalizations about large swaths of world history. Many conclusions are drawn from these generalizations, which leaves us non-historians in a bit of a bind: in order to accept Tickle’s conclusions, we must first accept her version of the events. Without extensive knowledge of these historical events, it is difficult to refute or agree with either.

But before this really becomes a problem the book shows itself to be an exercise in unintentionally amusing hyperbole. Likewise, the concerns with historical accuracy subside, inversely proportional to the level of – again, unintentional – humor that accompanies the escalating hyperbole.

Pretending to be a short but concise assessment of current events, the book is more like an impressionist painting than an accurate portrait. The subtitle sets the goal of answering “How Christianity is Changing and Why,” but it is a small book with too few pages (165) in which to accomplish the task. In many places, the historical flybys leave so much unsaid that regardless of your level of historical knowledge it’s pretty easy to tell that too much of the story is missing. At other points in the book, inordinate amounts of space are spent on tangential developments at various historical junctures in church history.

Tickle sees the current period of upheaval as an event in significance equal to the Great Schism and the Great Reformation. What we are living through, by her estimation, is the Great Emergence – and this is a cause for great elation.

In one particularly effusive section, Tickle pictures the movement itself as a great healer:

“One does not have to be particularly gifted as a seer these days,” she says, “to perceive the Great Emergence already swirling like balm across that wound, bandaging it with genuinely egalitarian conversation and with an undergirding assumption of shared brotherhood and sisterhood in a world being redeemed.” (p29)

A sentence of greater utopian delusion has seldom been written.

It is little wonder that those who are leaders of emergent Christianity call Tickle a friend and ally. Of Doug Pagitt she says he is “one of emergent Christianity’s most influential and brilliant thinkers.” She calls Brian McLaren “the symbolic leader of the Great Emergence… in the same way that Martin Luther became the symbolic leader and spokesman for the Great Reformation.” It’s all a bit much, regardless of the contributions these two may have made.

Sola Scriptura

Tickle chooses as a common thread for the book the metaphor of a rummage sale, and though the metaphor appears at regular intervals, it is never quite explained or successfully coaxed into a relevant illustration of historical upheavals. We’re not sure what is being sold at the rummage sale or what the current one has in common with past one, etc.

A third of the way through the book 46, Tickle goes to work on the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, claiming, “Even many of the most die-hard Protestants among us have grown suspicious of ‘Scripture and Scripture only.’” She goes on:

“We begin to refer to Luther’s principle of ‘sola scriptura, scriptura sola’ as having been little more than the creation of a paper pope in place of a flesh and blood one. And even as we speak, the authority that has been in place for five hundred years withers away in our hands.”

Her evidence: Paul’s injunctions against women, the one-time acceptance of slavery, and flat-earth theology. For her, this evidence is damning evidence; she leaves no room for other options. Paul says one thing (women must keep quiet in the assembly), we do another (women are allowed to speak), therefore sola scriptura is an illusion and scriptural authority is eroded. This narrow view of Sola Scriptura is laughable. Occasional doctrinal corrections cannot be used as indicators of future change, as Tickle proposes on the following pages.

Tickle also makes parallel comparisons between the current and historical hegemony. Hegemony is leadership or dominance, esp. by one country or social group over others. In the 16^th century, the ruling hegemony was the Roman Catholic Church. It is pretty difficult to draw a modern parallel of a uniform hegemony against which Emergents are protesting or which they are attempting to reform.

In short, her parallels are too labored to be convincing, and too weak to maintain their connection to their supposed historical equivalents. Just who or what constitutes the current hegemony? We’re not told.

Grandma, Tin Lizzie, and the Decline of Protestantism

On pages 86-87, she proposes a line of social theory involving grandma (yours), Norman Rockwell, and the automobile that defies reason. Of Grandma, Tickle claims that “When the Tin Lizzie took away her kingdom of influence, it was Protestantism more than Grandma that came untethered and was diminished.” This attempt at a two-page synopsis of a wide range of events ends up looking more like the work of Salvador Dali than Norman Rockwell. Like Dali’s paintings, Tickle’s words are fun to look at but making sense of them is an arduous task.

Shortly after (91-93), in what seems to be another attempt at a “Dali Word Picture”, Tickle claims that pastoral authority was singlehandedly supplanted by Alcoholics Anonymous. Huh?

In another episode of incoherent and unfounded “fact-stating” Tickle claims that, “In the hands of the Emergents, Christianity has grown exponentially, not only in geographic base and numbers, but also in passion and in effecting belief in the Christian call to the brotherhood of all peoples.” Is there some evidence of this of which none of us are aware?

Tickle’s penchant for hyperbole is, if nothing else, amusing. I quote the following (p135) at length for your amusement:

“There is enormous energy in centripetal force, especially as it gathers more and more of its own kind into itself. Centripetal force, though, is usually envisioned by us as running downward, like the water in a bathtub drain. The gathering force of the new Christianity did the opposite. It ran upward and poured itself out, like some bursting geyser, in expanding waves of influence and nourishment. Where once the corners had met, now there was a swirling center, its centripetal force racing from quadrant to quadrant in every widening circles, picking up ideas and people from each, sweeping them into the center, mixing them up there, and then spewing them forth into a new way of being Christian, into a new way of being Church.”

Gathering… running… pouring, bursting, expanding, nourishing! Swirling! Racing! WIDENING! SWEEPING! MIXING!!! SPEWING!!!!!!

If you want to know what reading The Great Emergence is like, imagine your newest married-in relative attempting to write your family history. She may have something to say and plenty to add in the future, but hearing a few of Uncle Joe’s stories hardly qualifies her to write a definitive history of your family – or a map of its future for that matter. Tickle may well be truthful to a mainline perspective on historical events, and she may even have something to offer in predicting the trajectory of mainline denominations, but this book’s target is primarily Evangelicals, with whom, as far as we now, she has little affinity or experience.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, the book is more an exercise in poetic impressionist prose than historical analysis or prophetic utterance. It is a short read, but in the end not really worth the time. This much history deserves a more thorough treatment than 165 pages in a small book.

Are we on the verge of some significant shifts in the Western Church? It’s pretty safe to say that we are. It would be difficult to name another period in history where so many questions and debates and trends and issues were at play.  But to draw a parallel between this time and the periods of upheaval of the past is a bit overblown.

I have not read any of Tickle’s other books, but I’ve heard they’re quite good. I have heard numerous interviews with her and enjoyed them. Tickle’s thoughts, analysis, and prescriptions for our current age of upheaval are far narrower in scope than the book purports them to be. There is plenty of revision here masquerading as synopsis.

My friend Kevin and his wife Barb recently appeared on the television show “100 Huntley Street”. Previous posts about Kevin include a review of his book (click here) and a follow-up on some of the sources of his writing (click here).

Mark Driscoll, the fearless and sometimes controversial founder and Pastor of Mars Hill church in Seattle, writes books the way he preaches: . In fact, his recent books are transcribed from earlier sermon series’. Sure, there’s some editing and polishing, but if you’re familiar with his preaching, the content of his books is no surprise.

In Vintage Church: Timeless Truths and Timely Methods, Driscoll attempts in each chapter to address a question about the church, including what it is and how and by whom it should be led. (see table of contents below).

In all, the book is a great resource for church leaders and planters. Aside from the bits of humor, the book reads very much like a course text, with Driscoll, who has “been there and done that” and lived (barely) to tell about it, as it’s narrator. He is also aware of his church’s status as a “megachurch”, which puts it in a vast minority of churches on the planet. Rather than focusing too much on “here’s how we do it”, he focuses on “here’s why we did it this way”. His insights and recommendations are based on principles more than particulars.

Driscoll’s penchant for humor usually works well live from the stage, but in print it serves more as an annoyance than a useful distraction. In addition, he uses the same humorous anecdotes too often. New comedic material is the lifeblood of a good comedian and since he has studied the great comedians, he should see that his current crop of quips needs a makeover. (For example, the joke about Mars Hill starting “at about the size of Mormon family” is getting difficult to chuckle at.)

At one point he relates a story about someone giving him a sermon on tape, even though, as he points out, he has not seen a tape player since “the days when Michael Jackson was male.” While Jackson’s recent passing (after the book was published) makes this seem extra offensive, it is still unwarranted. The Gospel is often offensive by nature; comments like this, I would argue, offend people for the wrong reasons.

In one sense, you could say that Driscoll is trying to augment the offense of the Gospel with his own form of offensiveness. It requires no such assistance.

Whether speaking or writing he delivers a lot of facts – straight up. Delivered without humor, they lack life; delivered with the same tired anecdotes he’s been using for years, these facts become tiresome opportunities to take a jab at an easy target.

Those who have Driscoll pegged as simply an old-school pastor with a new-school mouth will find a few surprises here. For example, he endorses the active participation of non-believers in the life of the church.

As someone who is quite familiar with his writing and preaching, I have watched him mature as a leader, teacher, and preacher, increasing in humility along the way. Here’s hoping that trajectory continues so that more people will be drawn to his teaching than are repelled by his sometimes necessary crudeness. (Yes, that means that I believe that some of what he says that is counted as “crude” is actually appropriate.) If you can get by the instances of unnecessary crudeness – and you should be able to – there is much to be learned. At heart he is a caring and, according to current demographic data, young Pastor who, like the rest of us, is seeking to grow in godly maturity.

Driscoll’s passion for the local church – yours, mine, and his – is undeniable. His ability to accept criticism and wisdom is surprising for a man of his personality type, and this makes him rare. I have benefited greatly from his teaching in my own journey as a Pastor.

Vintage Church is a good read, packed with resources and wisdom. You will not agree with it entirely, but that’s true of any book. If you are a church leader of any kind who is concerned with both relevance and unchanging truth, I recommend you read this book.

You can read a sample chapter of Vintage Church here.

You can find previous posts at The Ascent to Truth about Mark Driscoll here.

A couple of weeks ago, a few hundred bloggers received a free copy of Max Lucado’s new book, “Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear“. In exchange for the free book (which we find impossible to refuse), we agreed to read the book and post a review of it. Fair enough – it’s a deal I’ve made a few times in the past. What’s different this time is that I am completely unfamiliar with Max Lucado. Not unfamiliar as in “Max who?” but as in “Oh, that guy who writes a lot of books with nice covers that I have no interest in reading. The ones that seem very comforting, in a shallow sort of way.”

So give me one point for reaching out to Max. He’s not the type of writer I usually read.

Were my preconceptions true? Partly. Lucado falls far too easily into cute turns of phrase and tear-jerking stories (which are not all bad).  For example, in one section Lucado does a good job explaining a cycling strategy, but then abruptly and awkwardly attempts to parlay that into a spiritual truth. It doesn’t work, except maybe as a bumper sticker. Another example, comparing the cheap rivets that sunk the Titanic with the the bolts we use to construct our lives, does seem to work a bit better. This probably has much to do with personal metaphorical preferences – for me, boats work, cycling doesn’t.

In addition, each chapter ends a bit too tidily like it began. I suppose this is good practice for a writer of this genre, but it gets a little tiresome after a while. This creates a weakness in the book in that it is much longer than it needs to be.

I know that repetition is the key to memorability, but it can also lead to episodes of hypersomnia.

But enough about that. Around those weaknesses are a lot of strong ideas about a radical Christ. In its best moments, Fearless gives us strong pictures of Jesus as the firebrand prophet he was seen as by the people into whose lives he came. Some received his message; others plotted to kill him. Lucado is at his best when when he’s giving us fresh eyes for Christ. Several passages do this as effectively as Yancey’s work in The Jesus I Never Knew.

The best chapter in the book is probably the one on doubt. Lucado goes bare knuckles with his doubts, revealing a faith that overcomes, even in the face of improbability. “Sometimes in the dawn-tinted, pre-pulpit hours,” Lucado admits, “the seeming absurdity of what I believe hits me.”

And aside from one three-line section of rhyming questions, he seems to suspend his affinity for cuteness.

In the end, this book hasn’t made me a fan, but I do have a greater respect for Lucado’s writing. There are many sections worth quoting, equally for the clarity of the ideas expressed as for the quality of the writing. Bottom line: Cut the fluff Max, you’re an excellent writer. An entire book of these quotable sections would open a new audience for Lucado. But there are other authors who convey the same message more efficiently and with equal potency.

Verdict: recommended with one reservation. If you are used to reading more distilled, academically oriented books, you’ll find Lucado a bit tedious and unfocused. However, anyone who sees Jesus as Max Lucado does and fearlessly writes about it is OK in my books. (How’s that for a tidy, cute, and clever ending?)

Upsidedn (read: upside-down) is a book about community, honesty, humility, and authenticity. Considering the relative brevity of the book, author Tim Bailey manages to go deep with these ideas. He describes the book as “not a self-help book,” unless it “helps you fail miserably at being selfish.”

Throughout the book Bailey speaks in the voice of a caring and compassionate – and passionate – Pastor. But his is also the voice of a normal believer excited about the counter-cultural nature of the life of Jesus and the seemingly odd, upside-down promptings of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers. This upside-down thinking is the theme of the book. “The upside-down kingdom where Jesus is Lord,” he says, “demands that we view others as better than ourselves…  This is a total rearrangement of the social system of the world.”

Bailey leads his readers to the truths he’s discovered with the excitement of a gold-digger who has stumbled upon a vast vein of new treasure. The difference here is that rather than hide and horde the wealth, he seeks to share with anyone who will come and take some of it, knowing that the source of this treasure is limitless.

The style of writing is at once reminiscent of Donald Miller, Rob Bell, and (in an odd twist of combination) John Piper. It’s a combination that somehow works and his balance of certainty, doubt, faith, and a love for mystery is refreshing. But above all, the tone of the book is an urgent compassion. He WANTS you to see what he’s seen and to taste what he’s tasted in Christ.

Like so much of the writing by Christians of this (my) generation, there is an undercurrent of pleading with people to take another look at Christian faith. Bailey doesn’t go as far as Donald Miller did in Blue Like Jazz (where Miller set up a confession booth to confess FOR the sins of Christians rather than accept confessions from sinners), but the same appropriate apologetic tone is there.

“There is a disturbing trend in the evangelical world,” he says, “of people who are more interested in feeling good about being right, rather than perpetually seeking truth. Their goal is to find conclusions to every question and answers for every confusion, rather than live in the mystery of NOT being God.”

We (Donald, Tim, and I) want you to know, dear readers, that not all Christians are ready grab, judge, and slap you into the kingdom. Authenticity, by Bailey’s definition is, “revealing the ‘you’ that God knows – mess and all… [it] isn’t avoiding hypocrisy – it is admitting it.”

Although there is not a weak chapter in the book, the chapter on worship stands above the rest. God is the center of our worship and, “the idea that we are the center of what is happening in creation has seriously warped our understanding of worship.” He continues, “Maybe we should be more interested in how God is experiencing His creation rather than being consumed by whether we are experiencing Him to our satisfaction.”

Due to its rather short length and the inclusion of discussion questions at the end of each chapter, the book is ideal for small groups and new believer discipleship. However, the content and presentation is compelling enough that the book would have been a joy to read at twice the length. Here’s hoping Bailey expands the content in subsequent printings.

You can order the book here or, if you’re local, drop in on the congregation that Bailey pastors in London, Ontario.

(part 3 of a miniseries on the emerging church – see part 1 and part 2)

Unfortunately, both sides (Emerging and mainstream) suffer from rejecting the other. Some of the old guard resists new life, ensuring the continuation of their own slow death. The emerging generation discounts the contribution of the previous generation – largely on the basis how little life change it sees – and thereby denies itself access to a great repository of solid theology and a heritage of belief.

One side needs to talk more about global issues while the other side needs to guard their theology a bit more.

I had the wonderful opportunity about a year ago to be at Brian McLaren’s “Why Everything Must Change” conference one weekend and being in Minneapolis at John Piper’s “Desiring God” conference the next. There was something at both that wasn’t at the other; there was something missing at both that the other addressed.

At WEMC, belief in the gospel was either buried under a torrent of concern for global humanitarian issues, or redefined as being the concern for those issues. These are not inappropriate or unimportant concerns.

At Desiring God ‘08 there was no mention of a current global issue at all. It was all gospel, all theology, all talk. I left there with my theological beliefs strengthened, which is a good thing. But where is the concern for global suffering and injustice? Connect the dots for us: how does this theological clarity lead us into a biblical concern for the poor and the action that must follow?

In my opinion, the best thing an organization like DG can do to stem the flow of young people going to the theologically unsteady regions of the EC is to talk more about practical application of the great truths they teach. In Piper’s own words, he does not “aim to be immediately practical but eternally helpful.” I think he should reconsider this and try for both.

A full gospel is both theological and social; it is belief and action.

I was given a book recently called “Faith Undone: The emerging church – a new reformation or an end-time deception” by Roger Oakland. This is an “anti” book. By that I mean its sole purpose is to tell you, with a good amount of hyperbole, about the many, many things the author is against.  In this case, all of those things are related to what the author sees as the “Emerging Church” (EC).

I have actually seen this book before, and I did a deep skimming of it and saw it for what it is: a tabloid-style, pick-and-choose hatchet job on people who, while not executing perfectly, are valuable leaders in today’s North American church.

Books like this are basically supermarket tabloid gossip rags without the pictures. To put it more bluntly:

This is a strange sort of theological pornography for people who see their calling as hunting heresy by identifying leaders with theological weaknesses (some perceived, some real) and telling others about what they’ve found.

That itself is not an unbiblical pursuit, but taken to the level of out-of-context tabloid journalism it becomes sin.

This is not to say there is no truth in Oakland’s book. I can agree with and affirm many of the things in the book; the problem is that there is page after page after page of short quotes followed by commentary. There are even quotes of reporters who say something about somebody and these are taken as damning evidence against the person who is the target.

Rick Warren in particular (not surprisingly) takes a beating throughout the book. As a side note, in the way that Oakland perceives the EC, grouping Rick Warren in with the EC  is a bit ridiculous, kind of like claiming that John Piper and Joel Osteen are kindred spirits and are going to be sharing a pulpit at some point in the near future.  Rick Warren does big; the EC is mostly about regionalized, contextualized solutions.  Rick Warren works on a global scale; the EC is about incarnational witness. The EC is (mostly) anti-megachurch; Rick Warren IS the megachurch.

But I’m with Ed Stetzer on this; we need both. We need big solutions and big churches and small solutions and small churches. Which is why in one sense the EC can be very broadly defined as every church that is not dying due to lack of activity.

Even Dan Kimball, who apparently committed the sin of asking non-believers what their perception of “church” is is mocked for daring to suggest that the American church might be able to have a more authentic testimony. Gasp. How can he say this?!?! I can’t think of any examples of American Christian leaders who have disgraced the name of Christ in very visible ways. This is the type of behavior, mostly on a smaller scale, that Kimball explores.

I’ll close with a quote from C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity (p. 118):

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.

Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

I think that a book like this is exactly what the Lewis quote above is about.

 In the scope of things, Neil Postman is the layman’s version, or an interpreter of Marshall McLuhan. He is more than that of course – he’s a applicator and a developer too, but I don’t think the average person would connect with McLuhan and therein lies the value of Postman. I originally found Postman because his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” was mentioned and footnoted in so many of the books I was reading. As I began to read more media books I saw the common reference to McLuhan in them and that’s how I discovered him.

Rather than looking to others who were making observations about media, McLuhan’s looked to people like the French philosopher and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and English painter and author Wyndham Lewis for insights into technology. He did so, I believe, because he believed that, as Wyndham Lewis said:

“The artist is involved in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present.”

Considering the accuracy of the observations and predictions he made based on this belief, maybe we would be wise to seek the same sources in our own era.

I’m not sure who else could be considered on McLuhan’s level as a master in the sense of seeing and saying what had previously gone unseen and unsaid. Jacques Ellul perhaps?

It is still widely believed by the avant guard of media arts (students and profs mostly) that McLuhan’s work has barely begun to be appreciated and recognized for what it is. Some use the word “prophet”; in many cases I think that’s appropriate. I guess if you believe as I do that McLuhan was way ahead of his time in thinking and analysis, then you might want to spend some time pleading this case.

This is too strong a metaphor, but you could see McLuhan as source material (scripture) and most others as analysis of source material (commentary)…. and you could make an interesting parallel to how many books we read that are not the Bible compared to how little actual Bible we read… but that’s a bit off-topic.