Archive for September, 2006

My Special Pass

Published
by
Mike
on September 29, 2006
in Church and preaching
. 50 Comments

I have a special pass. The kind that gets some people into every athletic event for their school or that permits some people to park wherever they want.

Only my pass allows me to enter into the holy places of lives.

I’m a minister. I’m one who speaks the Word of God, one who shapes worldviews, one who challenges, chastises, encourages, teaches, forms, unforms, and guides. And because of that — ill-formed though my life often seems to me (dogged by doubts and shortcomings) and ill-prepared though I’ve always felt (despite those many years of Greek!) — I’m given a pass that permits me to walk into sacred places.

Places where vows are made. Places where last words are spoken by best friends before walking out to make vows. Places where grieving widows or widowers say one last word at the casket after everyone else is gone. Places where parents hold their breath and beg God, waiting for the latest MRI to come back. Places where people speak their secrets, needing reassurance that God still loves them. Places of grief, relief, sorrow, joy, fear, and ecstasy.

What would I say to a young person who’s considering ministry?

Well, let’s be honest. It isn’t always easy. (What job is?)

But it’s a privilege, a blessing beyond blessings. My pass lets me weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. And when that happens, I feel fully alive. Even with those hidden doubts and shortcomings.

Byron Nelson

Published
by
Mike
on September 28, 2006
in General
. 35 Comments

Don’t miss Grant’s tribute to Byron Nelson at PGA.com. Here’s a bit:

Nelson and my uncle, Pat Boone, are probably the two most recognizable names to ever come from the Churches of Christ, a technically autonomous but distinct body of Christ-followers concentrated primarily from tip to buckle along the Bible belt of the southern United States. This fellowship began in the first half of the 1800s as an attempt to strike a blow against sectarianism, even adopting the mantra, “Christians only, not the only Christians.”

Though many through the years lost sight of that original vision of unity — as so often happens when second and succeeding generations venerate the traditions of a group instead of the One the group set out to follow — Nelson was not among them. He knew his Bible, mind you, and he believed strongly in what he believed. His theology wasn’t casual, nor was he unafraid to lovingly share why he was convinced that salvation was found through Christ alone, why the Bible could be trusted, and why it wasn’t just for the next life that we have hope.

But Nelson never brandished his faith as a weapon, choosing instead to extend an empty and open hand in friendship to all comers. And did they ever come. Wherever the debate over which golfer is the best of all time ends, Byron Nelson was the game’s finest man, hands down.

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I love the story of the paralytic who is lowered through the roof to Jesus in Mark 2. Whenever I teach this to my students (as yesterday), I like to ask them to imagine being in the story: first as one of the friends (Who would you quickly load on a mat and take to Jesus if you believed healing was possible?), then as the person on the mat (What four people would be carrying you as quickly as they could to Jesus?), and then as someone in the crowded room as a skylight begins forming in the roof above.

Can Pujols Pitch?

Published
by
Mike
on September 27, 2006
in General
. 146 Comments

Can you say “free falling”? It’s hard for a Cardinals fan to watch. Can Pujols pitch? (What a time to lose a closer!) The Cards’ winning percentage is down to .513 — and they’re still in first! What a division. If this doesn’t stop, now after eight straight losses, it could be one of the great crashes in baseball history. Let’s hope not!

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Today Governor Swartzeneggar will be at Pepperdine to sign a major “greenhouse” bill — seeking to limit greenhouse gases. (Remember Kyoto?) So glad that he chose to do it at Pepperdine. I’m very thankful for Andy Benton and his administration and for their concern about environmental concerns.

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Confession: I like the “man law” commercials. Call me shallow. I still like them.

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We were a Wednesday night church family growing up. Questions were never asked. When it was 7:00, we were in class. At 7:45, we were in the auditorium for a couple songs and an invitation. And those are good memories.

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I know so many people who live every day with burdens and pain . . . and faithfulness. They are heroic.

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The Texas Supreme Court has an interesting case before it. Six years ago, Peggy Lee Penley went to her counselor to confide in him about the trouble in her marriage and an affair she was having. But her counselor was also her pastor, C. L. Westbrook, who informed the congregation of her adultery and instructed members to shun her (as their church law said to). To complicate the matter, Penley “quit the church” before her pastor initiated the disciplinary measures.

Now the question is: Was he her counselor, possibly subject to a negligence lawsuit, or was he her pastor, probably protected by the First Amendment?

Lots of important questions could be asked about the actions of the pastor and Crossland Community Bible Church. But there are even deeper questions about the freedom of churches to teach, lead, and discipline as they feel compelled to. I’m guessing lots of Texas ministers will be keeping an eye on this ruling!

God Bless America. And Tanzania. And Venezuela. . . .

Published
by
Mike
on September 26, 2006
in politics
. 114 Comments

What a blessing it is to live in the United States.

But.

But America is not the kingdom of God. America is not God’s plan for reaching the world. America is not our highest allegiance. This is a nation that has had great sin (slavery, greed, immorality, racism, etc.) and that has done great good (in the progress of human rights, e. g.).

If there is no America in a century, that’s tragic (in my humble opinion). But not ultimately tragic. Nations come and go.

But the reign of God will never be defeated. Even now, while the Christian faith is losing ground quickly to other religions in North America (partly because of the trivializing of it and the attempts to tie it to one or another political party), it is far outpacing other religions in places like Asia and Africa.

God bless America. And Tanzania. And Venezuela. And China. And Iran. And India. And Croatia. . . .

Worship

Published
by
Mike
on September 24, 2006
in General
. 13 Comments

“Many a congregation when it assembles in church must look to the angels like a muddy puddly shore at low tide; littered with every kind of rubbish and odds and ends — a distressing sort of spectacle. And then the tide of worship comes in, and it’s all gone: the dead sea urchins and jelly fish, the paper and the empty cans and the nameless bits of rubbish. The cleansing sea flows over the whole lot. So we are released from a narrow selfish outlook on the universe by a common act of worship.” - Evelyn Underhill

Have a blessed Sunday!

Published
by
Mike
on September 23, 2006
in Books and General
. 13 Comments

From Walter Brueggemann’s The Bible Makes Sense:

“We live in a society where we nearly have forgotten what humanness is about. And that is why the Bible must be taken seriously. It preserves for us alternative images of humanness. It holds for us promises of a new age coming upon us. It bestows upon us, by the rule of God, power to become whom we are destined to be. We are offered ‘power to become children of God’ (John 1:12) so that we may leave off being either slaves or orphans and we may stop building institutions to contain either slaves or orphans.

“The Bible holds for us an invitation to another humanness. We need not be triumphalist. We need not always be securing ourselves at the expense of others. We need not regard ourselves as the last defense of what is right. It is enough that this notion of humanness in the image of God finds joy in caring, life in dying, strength in meekness. That is not commonly believed among us, even by those who use such words. But these affirmations have resilience and credibility among those who are not prepared to settle for current one-dimensional self-understanding. That is the issue around which our work must cluster. To that issue the Bible has a singular pertinence.

“In the poor man Jesus of Nazareth, we have a new sense of our humanness. In his community we have a fresh discernment of being a distinct people in the history of the world, a people that lives always between the cost of Good Friday and the joy of Easter Sunday. The Bible insists upon our facing that call.”

Community and Mission

Published
by
Mike
on September 22, 2006
in Books, Salt and Light, missional and politics
. 61 Comments

“I have come to realize that aiming for community is a bit like aiming for happiness. It’s not a goal in itself. we find happiness as an incidental by-product of pursuing love, justice, hospitality, and generosity. When you aim for happiness, you are bound to miss it. Likewise with community. It’s not our goal. It emerges as a by-product of pursuing something else. Those who love community destroy it, but those who love people build community.” - Michael Frost, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture

I agree — sort of. The community is drawn together in authentic love and honesty when they, together, pursue the mission of God. It’s like the community that formed in The Wizard of Oz or the Lord of the Rings trilogy: unlikely people are brought together by engaging in a mission larger than themselves.

And yet . . . true community is itself the goal. Or at least a taste of the goal. God is seeking to bring all things together again — think “new creation” and “reconciliation” — and that means that community will break out.

But this community can be spoiled if it turns in on itself, forgetting that the work of God continues.

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CBS hoped there would be Katie Couric fans who would follow her to CBS. Diane and I have done just that. From Brokaw to Couric. Last night we got to see Jim Wallis talk about how many evangelicals are taking seriously the challenge to be “completely pro-life” (to quote Ron Sider). He kept resisting efforts to pin him as a person on the right or left, insisting that it isn’t about being a Republican or a Democrat but about being a Christ-follower who goes deeper in the call of the kingdom. When he said he thought he was something of a moderate, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, said that the only thing in the middle of the road is dead cats and smelly skunks. That added so much to the segment.

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Sorry I haven’t been very involved in comments the last few days. Just haven’t had time to keep up. Thanks for the discussions, though. Page loads have bumped up a bit the last couple weeks. Don’t know what that means in terms of actual people — but thanks.

Does God Want You to Be Rich?

Published
by
Mike
on September 21, 2006
in faith and justice
. 123 Comments

I hope you got a chance to read the excellent, balanced cover story in Time Magazine entitled “Does God Want You to Be Rich?” The cover description says: “Yes, say some megachurches. Others call it heresy. The debate over the new gospel of wealth.”

Seriously — how did the Evangelical church get here?

The basic movement of the gospel is clear (Phil. 2:5ff): self-denial and self-sacrifice rather than self-fulfillment. We follow one who had no place to lay his head, who warned us that life does not consist in the abundance of things, who told a wealthy man to sell all and give to the poor, who insisted that we cannot have two masters (God and $$). Followers of Christ in other cultures have often lost all as a result of their faithfulness to him.

But walk into Christian bookstores and there is a different gospel. The gospel of Joel Osteen.

And does it sell! Your Best Life Now has sold over 4 million copies. It finds a welcome audience in the consumerism of America.

The authors of the article write:

“What remains is a materialism framed in a kind of Tony Robbins positivism. No one exemplifies this better than Osteen, who ran his father’s television-production department until John died in 1999. ‘Joel has learned from his dad, but he has toned it back and tapped into basic, everday folks’ ways of talking,’ says Ben Phillips, a theology professor at the Soutwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. That language is reflected in Your Best Life Now, an extraordinarily accessible exhortation to this-world empowerment through God. ‘To live your best life now,’ it opens, to see ‘your business taking off. See your marriage restored. See your family prospering. See your dreams come to pass . . .’ you must ’start looking through the eyes of faith.’ Jesus is front and center but not his Crucifixion, Resurrection or Atonement.”

Does that tell us something?

The book is full of “illustrations of how the Prosperity doctrine has produced personal gain, most memorably, perhaps, for the Osteen family: how Victoria’s ’speaking words of faith and victory’ eventually brought the couple their dream house; how Joel discerned God’s favor in being bumped from economy to business class.”

Insightfully, the authors go on to talk about the basic for criticism of this Prosperity Lite movement: “Most unnerving for Osteen’s critics is the suspicion that they are fighting not just one idiosyncratic misreading of the gospel but something more daunting: the latest lurch in Protestantism’s ongoing descent into full-blown American materialism.”

Rick Warren, who by his words and life is becoming an incredible leader in the worldwide church, said: “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? Baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worthy by your net worth.”

Ron Sider, author of Rich Christians in a Hungry World: “They have neglected the texts about the danger of riches. Prosperity Gospel Lite is one of the most powerful forms of neglect of the poor.”

And Ben Witherington, an incredible Evangelical New Testament scholar at Asbury Seminary: “We need to renounce the false gospel of wealth and health — it is a disease of our American culture: it is not a solution or answer to life’s problems.”

The “internet monk” (Michael Spencer) has written:

“He’s being sold to us by people who want to make money off his success, and they are counting on us to be sheep, ‘baaing’ quietly, but going along to the slaughter. Any analysis of Joel Osteen’s theology is going to have a hard time saying he is proclaiming the Christian message. The most popular preacher in Christianity is proclaiming a theology that is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, but is pragmatically pagan. Pagan in the sense of finding ways to gain the favor of god so he will do good things for you. Manipulating the deity to give you blessings. This is the ultimate example of Luther’s ‘theology of glory’ chosen over the ‘theology of the cross.’ I would rather a non-Christian hear John Shelby Spong a hundred times than hear this. Spong denies it all- outright. Osteen is presented as a Christian, but his message isn’t going to bring you to Christ, the Kingdom or heaven. It’s spiritual cyanide disguised as candy. If there is a hell, Osteen’s message won’t stop you or the people you love from going there, because the savior in his messages is YOU and the salvation he offers is a NEW ATTITUDE, and some resulting real estate. The question becomes, will evangelicals do anything? Will they say anything? Will they register their objections to Osteen’s reshaping of the Reformation gospel into a positive thinking message that makes Robert Schuller look like John Calvin in comparison?”

Yesterday I listened to Dan McVey talk about the advancement of Islam in North America. It is the fastest-growing religion in North America. (On a global scale, protestant Christianity is by far the fastest growing religion, however. It outpaces Islam in growth by 3-1, I believe Dan said.) In this culture of ease and consumerism, Islam offers a faith of discipline and serious devotion. Of course, Christianity does too (along with a framework of grace and a God who has come near in Christ) — just not in the versions that have become so popular in “Christian” bookstores.

Mike Cope Reporting Live

Published
by
Mike
on September 19, 2006
in Church of Christ and General
. 22 Comments

A few things I’ve seen and heard:

1. I saw tomorrow morning’s keynote speaker sitting next to his father. His dad was worshiping with his arm around his son. I don’t mean one of those “guy hugs” where you could just claim you’re stretching. I mean this dad has his arm around his son as if he were ten. I found that to be very touching. His son is huge (maybe 6′5″) and is in his early thirties. But his father isn’t afraid to show that kind of affection.

2. I got to worship behind Tom Olbricht. I’m not an ACU person by heritage. I came here late. But my life — and nearly everyone else’s in Churches of Christ — owes so much to this man, to his rich theology, and to his gentle spirit.

3. I heard a testimony given in a church on missionality and church planting by a woman describing the dramatic change in her daughter’s life that gave me hope and reminded me that the gospel is true. (Thanks, Gailyn, for putting this session together.)

4. I tried to get in to hear Dan McVey but it was packed. He’s a rock star from Ghana. (I’ve asked him to give the special Saturday afternoon address at Zoe. Bono was unavailable.)

5. I’m hangin’ with my parents. Pretty cool.

6. John York spoke right to my soul today as he preached from John 15. He drew us into the image of vineyard and land throughout scripture, leading to that striking statement of Jesus: “I am the vine.” John said he prefers the older translation “abide in me” over the newer “remain in me,” because “remain” sounds external and distant (”please remain on the line and someone will be with you shortly”) while “abide” sounds internal and close. I’ve be abiding in that comment!

Mike Cope reporting live from the ACU lectureship . . . .

UPDATED AT 9:00 PM Tues PM - Don McLaughlin rocked the house tonight with a call for Christian unity that was bold, wide, gospel-formed, biblical.

If It’s ACU Lectureship, Why Is the Weather So Nice?

Published
by
Mike
on September 19, 2006
in General
. 26 Comments

Several fundamentalist Muslims, angered by the Pope’s statements that some parts of Islam are violent, have responded in violent retaliation. Thankfully, many moderates of their faith are pointing out the tiny inconsistency in their objections.

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High point of lectureship yesterday: hearing Pat Keifer talk about the good instincts in the DNA of our heritage not to tie Christianity to one political party or cause. He said that his tribe (Lutherans) and others have tended to tie Christianity to the Democratic Party, while other tribes have tended to tie it to the Republican Party. But fortunately, we have lots of experience in our past at resisting either attempt to reduce Christianity to right or left.

Low point of lectureship yesterday: someone from another Abilene church, upon meeting my parents at a luncheon, expressed his disgust for me. (Please: bring it to me, not to my parents or my kids!)

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What a blessing to have time at lunch yesterday with a couple of my close preaching buddies (Rick, Chris) and at dinner with a couple guys who are friends (Darryl, Leonard) who’ve made my life so much richer. Looking forward to hearing Don McLaughlin again tonight. He was incredible Sunday morning.