Announcing

A New Kind of Conversation

Blogging Toward a Postmodern Faith

With

Brian McLaren, Mabiala Kenzo, Bruce Ellis Benson, Ellen Haroutunian and Myron Penner.

This blog-book will discuss what a postmodern evangelical faith looks like. The blog format will make it possible to allow you the reader, to participate in the writing of both the blog and the eventual published book to follow by Paternoster Press. Be a part of this experiment in conversation by adding your voice to the discussion.

“A New Kind of Conversation� begins on Sept 15th 2005.

To find out more or to join the conversation, go here.

I’ve also linked this in the sidebar under “emerging church resources”.

I’m fascinated to see where this project goes. I’m planning to be a part of this conversation; I’ll keep you posted here as things develop.

Check this out!

Prayers, Relief Assistance Urged for Katrina Victims
American Baptist News Service (Valley Forge, Pa. 8/31/05)–American Baptists are being urged to pray for and assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which left a trail of devastation Monday as it hammered Gulf Coast states with 140 mile-per-hour winds.

An initial One Great Hour of Sharing emergency grant of $10,000 has been sent to Church World Service, which will provide Gift of the Heart Kits, seed grants to long-term recovery organizations, and other assistance.

American Baptists can respond immediately to emergency relief needs by contributing online to the “Give Now� option available on either www.abcusamissions.org or www.abc-usa.org. Churches so doing will receive credit for OGHS giving. Contributions also may be made through normal channels using the Monthly Report of Mission Giving. All contributions should be marked “OGHS—Hurricane Katrina.�

Hardest hit were coastal areas of Mississippi, Alabama and western Florida. Storm surges destroyed an estimated 90% of the buildings along the coast in Biloxi and Gulfport. New Orleans, while not hit as directly, is now dealing with the collapse of its levee system that has resulted in 80% of that city being covered in water.

More than 100 lives have been lost, and the toll is expected to rise. Approximately five million people along the Gulf Coast have lost electric power.

The Rev. Dr. Walter Parrish II, executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of the South, reported today that six of the region’s churches—three in Baton Rouge, two in New Orleans and one in Mobile—have been severely damaged by the storm.

Updates on the situation, and the response of American Baptists to it, will be forthcoming.

The title is, of course, all in good fun.

This afternoon I would like to highlight two new members of the blogging community and their nascent blogs - Randy Gauger and Chris Chambers.

These guys are pastors at the First Baptist Church of Champaign at Savoy (Illinois), the church where I grew up and from whom I feel I have been sent as a kind of missionary.

I’ve added them to the sidebar under “mission partners,” but if they add me to their own link-lists or blogrolls I think I might move them to “the home team” section. (Yes, hint, hint…) Then again, I might move them to “eccentricities”. Their choice, I s’pose.

It’ll be a lot of fun to hear from them through this medium. I’m sure I’ll continue to learn from them as they share their wisdom with the world through their blogs.

Cheers!

Yesterday and today we’ve had the most sustained rain we’ve gotten all summer. By all accounts, we’re to expect more tomorrow.

All of this is thanks to Tropical Depression (yes, Tropical! in Northeast Ohio! Tropical!) Katrina as she makes her way north.

We are, of course, under a flood watch.

This is nothing compared to what the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Biloxi have to deal with.

Please pray for the people of the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coasts as this is probably the most severe natural disaster in U.S. history.

One of the recurring patterns in the Gospel of Matthew is that of the Mountain.

There are a total of 8 Mountain references in the book.

1. Matthew 4:8, The Mountain of Temptation
2. Matthew 5:1 - 8:1, The Sermon on the Mount[ain]
3. Matthew 14:23, The Mountain of Prayer [In between the Feeding of the 5 000 and before the walking on water episode
4. Matthew 15:29, The Mountain of Healing
5. Matthew 17:1 - 9, The Mountain of Transfiguration
6. Matthew 21:1, The Mountain Overlooking Jerusalem
7. Matthew 24:3 - 25:46, The Sermon on the Mount[ain] of Olives
8. Matthew 28:16 - 20, The Mountain of Commission

Somebody check my math and tell me if I’ve missed any.

The mountain motif could be seriously symbolic. I know some writing has been done on this, does anyone have recommendations?

I’m inclined to discount Mountain #6, The Mountain Overlooking Jerusalem, since it seems to be a passing reference relating to #7 and since he never goes up there to do anything. That would make a perfect 7 mountains in Matthew. Rather interesting, eh? And if we do keep #6, it keeps the perfect 7 and adds one for New Creation. Equally interesting, in my book.

Further thoughts?

Sunday I preached a difficult text. Romans 12:9 - 21 is a very disjunct text; it is basically a list of “bullet points” rather than a real paragraph. It’s one of the closest places the New Testament comes to actually being an instruction manual.

Well. The sermon did well in reflecting the text. It was kind of disjunct. I think I lost about half the room yesterday to boredom. Those who did follow said I ran a little long and repeated myself. I still got a lot of compliments, though, so it wasn’t all bad. I have to be careful not to be too hard on myself, but I could tell there was much more “enduring” the sermon this week than there was “appreciating” going on.

It was a harder text to preach. And, as it turns out, so is this week’s text: not in the same way, of course - this week’s text is a discourse from Matthew rather than a Pauline epistolary argument. But it still doesn’t make much sense upon first examination.

The text is Matthew 18:15 - 20. I invite the readers of this blog to share with me in the following discussion of this text to aid in deepening our understanding of what is here.

With that said, let’s dig in. (more…)

Sermon 28 August 2005
15 Pentecost Proper 17, Year A
Romans 12:9 – 21

“A Vision Statement for Christian Community”

As many of you already know, the Sunday Evening Bible Study group has been working through the Book of Romans since about the middle of April. And I’m pleased to announce that after 14 weeks of study, with a significant number of breaks, this week we’re coming to the end of the Romans study. We will finish Romans 15 and 16 this evening.

We’ve discovered that whenever Paul writes a letter to one of the churches – Rome, Corinth, the churches of Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Thessalonica – there’s something wrong going on in the church. The church has problems. Yes, not just a problem: it usually has several. Typically, it seems that it’s not wrong-headed thinking (bad theology) that initially inspires Paul to write the letter to the church, but instead it’s un-Christian behavior, supported and justified by problematic ways of thinking, that is his primary motivation.
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One of the most popular notions of what “Heaven” will be like is basically that nothing will happen. This lends some justification to the claims of Christian detractors when they ask why we would want it in the first place. I mean, floating about saying “Halelujah” doesn’t seem like that great of an existence.

I tend to agree. This model of blissful, peaceful existence doesn’t really get me all that interested in “Heaven” either. For that matter, honestly, neither does the model of “perpetual worship service” either. Now, I think the “worship service” part is great - taken as part of a greater understanding - but it’s not the whole thing. There’s a lot more to the scriptural view of heaven than spirits floating on clouds singing to harp music.

First of all, there’s the whole body thing. The scriptures resoundingly affirm the Resurrection of the Body, which will be the way we experience “Heaven.”

This embodied existence is assumed by all the writers of the New Testament. John, in Revelation, evokes both Isaiah and the minor prophets’ sense of “The New Heavens and the New Earth� when he describes the ultimate transformation of all things.

He declares that the original creation will come to an end by the advent of the New Creation - a new heavens and new earth together. Embodied existence will be transformed, not eliminated.

The Isaianic visions John (and for that matter, Jesus and Paul) evoke are rather earthy ones: on the one hand, visions of agricultural prosperity - of farming and of cattle and of blooming deserts; on another, of international, inter-ethnic service of God in his temple (which, I must add, would base its existence on the agricultural prosperity vision, or else there would be nothing to celebrate with!), which is, in part, a vision of prosperous trade.

Life in the Kingdom of God - another name for The New Heavens and the New Earth - will be full life. It will not merely be spectral religiosity, far detached from everyday life. Rather, the Isaianic vision that John evokes seems to include new-creation wheat, new-creation cattle, new-creation dirt, AND new-creation bodies, all of which will contribute to the greater worship of God.

Heaven will be the place that we constantly and perfectly worship God forever only in the sense that we, freed from the Original Creation’s bondage to decay and Its slavery to sin, will finally be free, through the Resurrection of our Bodies, to be fully human to the glory of God. No longer fearing death, having conquered its sting, we will finally be able to worship by being the governors of the New Creation - what we were intended to be in the Original Creation - so that by the work of our hands, and not merely by the words of our mouths and the cogitation of our thoughts, we will worship the One True God Forever.

“Heaven,” then, or more appropriately, “The New Creation” or “The New Heavens and the New Earth” or “The Kingdom of God”, is and will be a place where all can live fully human lives. As we follow Jesus Christ, we begin to live in and live out the Kingdom, the New Creation and The New Heavens and The New Earth. Thus, as we grow in Christ, we should begin to understand what this Kingdom is like, and begin to experience it, within the confines of the Original Creation.

Thus we await the fullness of the New Heavens and the New Earth - hoping for the fullness of human life - not something that it a spiritualized distortion of humanity. Sure, “heaven” will be about being in the presence of God, but that “being in the presence” doesn’t appear to be like us sleeping peacefully with God as our nightlight. The images in the scriptures are much more robust: people bustling about, living in a city, doing all the things a city does; working in the fields, planting and harvesting; worshiping at a temple, singing and dancing. They do all these things in a world set free to live as it was designed to be, to experience the fullness of life that we cannot even imagine now.

We live up to our visions of heaven. I pray that we can investigate how the scriptures describe it - both in the Old and New Testaments, to see the amazing fullness of life that popular notions of “heaven” can’t even come close to.

I had a big camera disappointment today.

I went to take a bunch of pictures of the Mahoning River, and when I got the pictures back, about seven of them didn’t even show up on the negatives.

They were just blank. And then, on one of them, it seems that the shutter and the film weren’t timed right because it’s underexposed and has a black bar on the top of it.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but I did get a few like this:

There’s more here.

I’ve posted my photos from my trip to Niagra Falls over in the Gallery.

Here’s a couple of “teasers”:

and

For more, go here.

A study in the news today was released jointly by Columbia University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The solid core that measures about 1,500 miles in diameter is spinning about one-quarter to one-half degree faster, per year, than the rest of the world, scientists from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

via Wired News

Right now there’s more press on the local high school football teams here than there is for the U of I in Champaign!

That’s just amazing. These are high school kids after all!

Another good one from Church Marketing Sucks:

Marketing seeks to maximize a message’s impact; it serves the message, it definitely doesn’t serve the numbers. Numbers might suggest a change in method, showing what’s working and what isn’t, but it doesn’t change the message.

Justice is a message. Boycotts are a method.
Grace is a message. Events are a method.
Love is a message. Postcards are a method.

The methods can change, the message doesn’t.

Any marketing that attempts to undermine the message in order to boost the numbers is anemic and will eventually fail. Church marketing, and honestly any good marketing, must stay true to the message.

I guess you could say this is the message around which Church Marketing Sucks is organized.

It seems like it’s often my message, too. For Christians, this is an extension of the theology of the Incarnation: The immutable Word [Gk. logos, or "message"], divine that he is, was united with mutable humanity in the womb of the Virgin Mary for the sake of the salvation of the world. The ancient fathers affirmed that the Word did not change when united with humanity. Instead, the Word did all of the things the Word does in human form.

The message set the boundaries on the methods. In the end, we have discovered that in the case of Jesus Christ, the methods themselves have illuminated the message, rather than being mere “containers” for it.

It was only when “divinity” was packaged in “humanity” that either of them could be seen for what they really are.

Now, we must concern ourselves with discovering and utilizing methods that shed light on the message itself rather than merely acting as containers [a.k.a. packaging] for the message.

“Christ we proclaim, teaching and admonishing everyone with all wisdom so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” (Colossians 1:28)

During my preparation for the sermon this week, I dug into the text (Romans 12:9 - 21) in the original language to try to discern what the common threads are that tie the disparate elements in this text together.

So I developed a translation of the text, which I’m cross-posting to my Translation Project on the M Squared T main site.

The translation is as follows:

Love is “without dissimulation.� [i.e., love operates without disguise of its true feelings.] Thus,

• Be the kind of people that hate evil
• Be the kind of people who are indissolubly joined to good
• Be the kind of people who hold familial affection [love] toward one another in brotherly love
• Be the kind of people who take the lead in [initiate] showing honor to one another
• Do not be the kind of people who are timid when it comes to putting forth effort
• [Instead] Be the kind of people who are excited enough [make enough effort] to boil [over] spiritually
• Be the kind of people who enslave themselves to the Lord
• Be the kind of people who are glad in hope
• Be the kind of people who persevere under pressure
• Be the kind of people who persist obstinately in prayer
• Be the kind of people who share in the needs/poverty/providing for the needs of the ones set apart for holy use [i.e., the followers of Jesus Christ at Rome – all the recipients of the letter]
• Be the kind of people that seek out being hospitable to foreigners/strangers/outsiders/travelers [literally, “persecute hospitalityâ€?]

[Note that all of that is one sentence in Greek]

[With the preceding in mind,]

• Bless those who persecute [you], bless and do not curse [them].
• Be delighted alongside those who are happy; cry alongside those who are crying.
• Be the kind of people who are united in how you think, not being the kind of people who see their position as higher than others but instead are willing to live the same kind of life, subject to the same things, that the lowest of the low live.
• Do not be overly wise compared to others. [Don’t be know-it-alls.]
• Do not be the kind of people who repay wrongdoing with wrongdoing, [instead] be the kind of people who care to do the kind of good that everyone recognizes as good.
• As much as it is possible for you [all of you together], be the kind of people that live at peace with all people: do not avenge yourselves, my dearly loved people, but give a place for The Wrath [see 1:18, ff], because it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,â€? says the Lord. Instead, “if your enemy is hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them a drink; for doing this you will pile up burning coals on their head.
• Do not be conquered by evil but use good to conquer evil.

In Romans 12:9 - 21, Paul defines what love looks like through his description of the kind of people the Roman Church should be. As he defines love, he sets a vision before them as to how they should live.

How can we implement this?

In case anyone needed further evidence that the world ain’t the way it used to be, folks, here’s an Engadget entry purporting to be from 1985.

Just to look at what was “new” and “untested” and “innovative” 20 years ago makes us realize how far we’ve come.

The funny thing is, most of those technologies have survived. And even funnier, is how they’ve become such a part of daily life that we don’t notice them any more.

An example:

The Tandy 600
Related entries: Laptops

The Tandy 600 sports a flip-up 80×16 LCD, built-in 300 baud modem, parallel port, reset button, display control, floppy disk expansion port and an RS-232 serial port. Its onboard 32K RAM + 160K ROM is maybe a bit cramped, but you can add up to two additional 96K RAM modules for plenty of leg room to stretch out. Its internal nickel-cadmium battery pack takes 14 hours to charge, but gets you between 6 and 11 hours of computing time on a single run. It’s pretty light to at only 9.5 pounds (11 with the AC adapter), but maybe a little ungainly (13 x 12 x 2.75-inches). At least it’s not too unreasonably priced at $1599 to $2528.85 depending on configuration. It’s not like we can predict the future or anything, but this is where we’re going, people.

(emphasis mine)

and another example for good measure

Sony Discman D-50 MK2
Related entries: Portable Audio

Hold on a second, you’re still walking around with a Walkman? Dude, that’s so over, Sony’s just introduced a new version the D-50, the first Discman which they introduced late last year. That’s right, Discman, as in compact-discs, as in perfect sound forever in your pocket (just make sure you don’t bop too hard or you’ll make the player skip). Taking that first step into the future should only set you back about ¥49,800.

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Link via Jordon