Archive for the 'Books' Category

Rest

Published
by
Mike
on August 30, 2006
in Books and General
. 19 Comments

Now that classes have started back at ACU, these words from Mark Buchanan strike home:

“In a culture where busyness is a fetish and stillness is laziness, rest is sloth. But without rest, we miss the rest of God: the rest he invites us to enter more fully so that we might know him more deeply. ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ Some knowing is never pursued, only received. And for that, you need to be still.

“Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness. It is both time on a calendar and a disposition of the heart. It is a day we enter, but just as much a way we see. Sabbath imparts the rest of God — actual physical, mental, spiritual rest, but also the rest of God — the things of God’s nature and presence we miss in our busyness.”

(Taken from The Rest of God : Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath.)

Ordinary Radicals

Published
by
Mike
on August 18, 2006
in Books, Salt and Light and faith
. 43 Comments

I had a wonderful couple days in Rochester, Michigan while my luggage enjoyed a relaxing time at O’Hare in Chicago. Fortunately, it showed up just in time for me to haul it back to the airport and come home with me. Left with clean clothes; returned with clean clothes.

As I went and returned, I read Shane Claiborne’s new book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical.

Read with care. This young man could rock your world! The very idea: living as an ordinary radical. It’s like Dallas Willard with steroids and dreadlocks. Claiborne believes that a Christian is, by definition, a disciple: a follower of Jesus. One who is called to participate in God’s work in this world.

My thanks to Zondervan for publishing this book. I’m sure it wasn’t a safe decision. Many won’t like it. Some will fume and rant. But I was inspired.

Claiborne, a member of The Simple Way in Philadelphia, is an activist in the best Christian sense: one who is willing to put his life on the line for justice and compassion. Here are some samples:

“We live in a world that wants things bigger and bigger. We want to supersize our fries, sodas, and church buildings. But amid all the supersizing, many of us feel God doing something new, something small and subtle. This thing Jesus called the kingdom of God is emerging across the globe in the most unexpected places, a gentle whisper amid the chaos. Little people with big dreams are reimagining the world.”

“We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor, but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”

“I remember when one of my colleagues said, ‘Shane, I am not a Christian anymore.’ I was puzzled, for we had gone to theology classes together, studied Scripture, prayed, and worshiped together. But I could see the intensity and sincerity in his eyes as he continued, ‘I gave up Christianity in order to follow Jesus.’ Somehow, I knew what he meant.”

“While the ghettos may have their share of violence and crime, the suburbs are the home of the more subtle demonic forces — numbness, complacency, comfort — and it is these that can eat away at our souls.”

“As I’ve heard my old mentor Tony Campolo say, ‘If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America.’”

It doesn’t take much imagination to predict that this book will join Don Miller’s Blue Like Jazzas a favorite among university students.

Baptism: Through the Water Into New Life

Published
by
Mike
on August 12, 2006
in Books and faith
. 15 Comments

From N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense:

That is why, from very early on, Christian baptism was seen as the mode of entry into the Christian family, and why it was associated with the idea of being “born again.” Of course, not everyone who has been through water-baptism has actually known and experienced for themselves the saving love of God in Christ sweeping through and transforming their lives. At various points Paul has to remind his readers that they have a responsibility to make real in their own lives the truth of what happened to them in baptism. But he doesn’t say that baptism doesn’t matter, or that it isn’t real. People who have been baptized can choose to reject the faith, just as the children of Israel could rebel against YHWH after having come through the Red Sea. Paul makes that point in 1 Corinthians 10 and elsewhere. But they can’t get unbaptized: God will regard them as disobedient family members rather than outsiders.
. . . The point is that the story which baptism tells is God’s own story, from creation and covenant to new covenant and new creation, with Jesus in the middle of it and the Spirit brooding over it. In baptism, you are brought into that story, to be an actor in the play which God is writing and producing. And once you’re onstage, you’re part of the action. You can get the lines wrong. You can do your best to spoil the play. But the story is moving forward, and it would be far better to understand where it’s going and how to learn your lines and join in the drama. Through the water to become part of God’s purpose for the the world.

Published
by
Mike
on August 11, 2006
in Books, Salt and Light and politics
. 78 Comments

My friend Ryan Porche introduced me to this picture of the new statue in front of a Memphis church. The Statue of Liberty holding a huge cross with the words “liberty through Jesus.”

My response? First, I’d have to say that I don’t know anything about the church, and I’m sure it’s made up of people seeking the Way of Christ in this world.

However, I’m not sure it could be said better than Randall Balmer does in his excellent new book Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament. After tracing the history of Baptists in America from Roger Williams to Isaac Backus to George Truett (who defended the separation of church and state at the Capitol Building in D.C. in 1920), and after pointing to two key ideas of the Baptist tradition — adult baptism and liberty of individual conscience, “generally expressed in the shorthand phrase ’separation of church and state’” — and after showing how Christians in the best of that tradition have sought to have an impact on the morality of their society without seeking to intertwine their faith with one political party and without eviscerating the first amendment, Balmer wrote:

I came to Texas in search of Baptists. What irony! There at the heart of Baptist country, Baptist principles regarding the separation of church and state have all but disappeared. What was once a proud and mighty — and defining — tradition of ensuring that government did not interfere with religion and religion did not meddle with government has withered beneath the onslaughts of misguided individuals who seek to impose their own views on the rest of society. The gospel is compromised, American Protestantism is imperiled, and the republic itself suffers from the massive disappearance of Baptists from the American landscape.

Never in my life did I think I would say this, but America needs more Baptists — real Baptists, not counterfeit Baptists like Roy Moore or Rick Scarborough or Richard Land or Jerry Falwell, all of whom are Baptists in name only. Our nation loses something very crucial as Baptists vanish from the American landscape. “The Baptists were the first propounders of absolute liberty,” John Locke once observed, “just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty.”

Christianity itself needs more Baptists, women and men willing to reconnect with the scandal of the gospel and not chase after the chimera of state sanction. We need women and men prepared to stand on conviction and articulate the faith in the midst of a pluralistic culture, not by imposing their principles on the remainder of society but by following the example of Jesus and doing what Baptists have always done best: preaching the gospel and not lusting after temporal power and influence.

The Cross and the Sword

Published
by
Mike
on August 3, 2006
in Books, Salt and Light, faith and politics
. 67 Comments

Even though my beliefs are orthodox (and somewhat conservative, if defined properly), I find myself less and less comfortable with the Evangelical world. In America this has come to mean one way to vote, one nation to defend. It tends to see all truth as CLEAR and OBVIOUS to anyone with a brain. It shuns doubt, mystery, and nuance.

Maybe others will find this article from the NY Times stimulating.

It begins:

MAPLEWOOD, Minn. — Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

For more, follow the link.

- - - -

Who is Agnieszka Tennant — and will we get to read more from her? Her article entitled “What (Not All) Women Want” in the current issue of Christianity Today is phenomenal. (I can’t find it online to provide a link.)

She responds to the book Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge. Here are a few of her words:

The gist of Captivating is this: “Every woman longs for three things: to be swept up into a romance, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, and to be the Beauty of the story.” I used to want such things — when I was a girl who didn’t understand how her womanizing father messed up her heart and when I fed my imagination with soft heart-porn like Pretty Woman. But doesn’t there come a time when we must grow out of the kind of self-regard that was cute when we were girls?

What do I long for? To trust God always, no matter what happens. That’s my trembling prayer.

And this: To figure out why, in a country as filled with devout churchgoers as my motherland, Poland, corruption is much more prominent and insidious than in the reputed atheistic countries of Europe. That’s why I’m going to grad school this fall. I want to do my little part to fight a battle against corruption. It will be an adventure. (But wait: Does this kind of talk make me sound like a man, since “in the heart of every man is a deserate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue” — and since intellectual curiosity doesn’t seem to mark a truly Captivating woman?)

I may not be an Eldredge kind of lady, but I know beauty when I see it. And the most regrettable failure of Captivating is its tame idea of beauty. “Beauty is core to a woman — who she is and what she longs to be,” Stasi Eldredge writes. “Beauty is what the world longs to experience from a woman.” She gives examples: “Pioneer women brought china teacups into the wilderness, and I bring a pretty tablecloth to eat on when my family camps. We wear perfume, paint our toenails, color our hair, and pierce our ears, all in an effort to be ever more beautiful.” Sure. But there’s so much more.

Beauty draws blood to the heart and speeds up the pulse; sometimes it evokes repentance. I wish more Christians were comfortable with its pull. Too often, beauty raptures us so forcibly that we fear it will lead to temptation. So we avert our eyes. What if we turned our ecstasy into worship? . . .

True beauty is precarious, unbound.

It cannot be confined to pre-approved tastes or to one gender. It is wild at heart. Like Christ. And like the complicated men and women who follow him . . . .

Gutenberg

Published
by
Mike
on July 18, 2006
in Books and scripture
. 39 Comments

If you had to pick which you think has had more of an impact on the world, would you choose the printing press or the personal computer? Perhaps it’s too early to tell.

But this much we know: Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) changed the world dramatically.

We’re used to books being cranked out that are exactly alike. If one page of a book has no errors, then that’ll be true of the next 100,000 copies. If there is an error, then you’ll find the same error on the other copies.

As you likely know, the first major work (1455) of his press was the Gutenberg Bibles, copies of the Latin Vulgate translation of scripture. The first priting of the Greek text of the New Testament came almost six decades later (1514).

But before the invention of moveable type, the copying of scripture was done by Christ-followers very slowly: line by line, word by word, letter by letter. For the first three centuries, most copying was done by “nonprofessionals” — i.e., by those who were just literate Christians (which was likely less than 10% of the population) rather than by professional scribes.

Probably around the fourth century, this job was passed on to professional Christian scribes, many of whom worked in a scriptoria — places for the copying of manuscripts.

We don’t have any of the original copies of the New Testament gospels and letters. We don’t even have copies of the copies. Our major manuscripts come from the fourth century and later (though there are a few pieces of papyri that date back into the second century).

It makes me thankful for brothers and sisters in Christ who took on the serious task of preserving scripture — both the early nonprofessionals and the later professional scribes. I rarely have the patience to sit and copy a whole page of notes. They went meticulously through page after page after page.

And it makes me thankful for the work of Gutenberg and others who made the process a bit easier.

Now — printing press or personal computer?

Real Men

Published
by
Mike
on July 13, 2006
in Books and family
. 36 Comments

“God’s definition of a real man,” Donald Miller told 900 high school guys a few years ago, “is a person with a penis.”

That’s where he landed after spending years trying to figure out — not having grown up with a father — what it means to be a man.

He kept running into definitions that left him or others out. The Promise Keepers rally he attended (much of which he liked) sold bumper stickers saying “Real Men Love Jesus.” That was just typical, he thought, of views that leave some guys out. What’s the message we’re sending to young men in our society if they don’t (yet, perhaps) love Jesus? Are they not really men?

“The rally taught me what a man does, and how loud a man must cheer, but apart from shallow bumper-sticker logic, Promise Keepers didn’t define the term. I found myself looking for a general definition. Because, if I had a general definition of a man, I would know whether or not I was one.”

He went to a men’s group at his church, but that threw him into further despair. It sounded like being a real man meant liking war movies, NASCAR, and football analogies — which he didn’t. “I couldn’t sit through men’s meetings anymore without rolling my eyes, or, at the end of prayers, sarcastically replacing the common phrase Amen with a loud and guttural Git ‘er Dun.

Here’s the tragic part of all this:

“I spent a lot of time believing I wasn’t a man because I didn’t like football analogies, or because I didn’t want to put a cheesy bumper sticker on my car, or, well, because I didn’t have a father. In a way, the guys who are promoting this approach to manhood are pretty innocent. I realize they are just trying to keep guys from yelling at their wives. But when those tactics hit my insecurities, they created a twinge. Tell a guy who grew up without a father that he is not a man unless . . . and he will automatically assume he isn’t one. I didn’t need manipulation. I needed affirmation.”

So he kept exploring: What does it mean to be a man? And he came to that simple conclusion: A real man is a person with a penis. If you have a penis, he insists, God has spoken.

You don’t have to like certain movies, you don’t have to be from Mars (or Venus — whichever it is), you don’t have to go deer hunting, you don’t have to be able to overhaul a car (whew!), you don’t have to coach baseball.

Any time we tell people that REAL MEN are a certain way (they love Braveheart or they hate shopping or they love Jesus), we are creating an environment where young men — and some not so young men — are left questioning whether or not they really belong to the group.

So there it is: a real man is a person with a penis. That’s not all it takes to be a GOOD man, for sure. But for a young man searching for his identity, it was critical to realize that God has (in the biological evidence) spoken. Trust him. “If God has spoken, then I have within me whatever it takes to do the things a man needs to do, to become a good man for a woman, for some kids, for an office, for whatever it is God wants me to do.”

(Quotes taken from To Own a Dragon.)

- - - -

Check out the writings of my buddy Grant Boone at www.pga.com. Move over, Rick Reilly!

To Own a Dragon

Published
by
Mike
on July 12, 2006
in Books and family
. 16 Comments

Who has Jeff Foxworthy write a blurb for their book — a serious (though often humorous book) one, at that?

Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, apparently. Foxworthy wrote: “It seems we humans carry the weight of our dad’s shortcomings. I know — mine left when I was nine. Don writes with candid humor and unembarrassed hoensty. He rips himself open. This book signs to those who have felt responsible for their father’s demons. The truth is, our real Father is perfect in every way, especially in his love for us. . . . This book spoke to a place deep inside of me.”

He writes in To Own a Dragon about growing up without a father.

Miller had left home in Houston and was traveling. He ran out of cash in Oregon, and had to stay for a while in Boring, Oregon, which he said lived up to its name.

At a church there he met John MacMurray, who became his mentor and male role model. Before long, John and his wife, Terri, handed him a key and invited him to move into an apartment above the garage.

Here’s what he observed about this family:

“What I am trying to say is, I saw a family. For the first time in my life, I saw what a father does, what a father teaches a kid, what a husband does around the house, the way a man interacts with the world around him, the way a man — just as does a woman — holds a family together.

“I am not going to tell you it was easy. There were times I would have rather lived on my own, played my music as loud as I wanted, come home drunk, whatever. But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren’t real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child. The lessons I learned in the four years I spent with John and Terri will stay with me forever.

“I read a passage in the Bible a long time ago that said, ‘God sets the lonely in families.’ Looking back on the time with John and Terri, I know that passage was talking about me.”

Suffering Servants

Published
by
Mike
on June 28, 2006
in Books and Salt and Light
. 13 Comments

In one section of Following Jesus, N. T. Wright explores the meaning of discipleship in Mark’s gospel. Working from the story of James and John in Mark 10, he points to the two options we usually choose from when facing a hostile world:

Option One consists of imperialistic dreams. It means matching power with power, using revolt and crusade. Wright says that this is “like firemen who had become arsonists.”

Option Two consists of passive noninvolvement. Just retreat. Wander away, protecting ourselves and letting the world destroy itself.

But Jesus (in Mark) forges a third way: in the dangerous arena of the world, he is a suffering servant. He takes on the evil of the world without bringing more violence.

“What would it take for the Church in England to embrace this vision of following Jesus? I long to see Christians in this country standing up to the government on the issues of education, of the arms industry, of Third World debt. I long to see the Church standing up to the radical opposition parties on issues like abortion. I long to see the Church lovingly but firmly confronting the media barons who destroy people’s lives and reputations for the sake of a sensational story. But it must be done in the right way. We live in a world of Jameses and Johns, of projected guilt and fear and anger. There’s no point in the Church simply keeping all of that in circulation. We don’t need any more Jameses and Johns, Christians who project their own insecurities out on to the world and call it preaching the gospel. We need — and it’s a scary thought — Christians who will do for the world what Jesus was doing.

“The Church must be prepared to stand between the warring factions, and, like a boxing referee, risk being knocked out by both simultaneously. The Church must be prepared to act symbolically, like Jesus, to show that there is a different way of living. The Church must be prepared to be the agent of healing even for those, like AIDS victims, who are the lepers of modern society. Taking up the cross is not a merely passive operation. It comes about as the Church attempts, in the power of the Spirit, to be for the world what Jesus was for the world — announcing the kingdom, healing the wounds of the world, challenging the power structures that keep anger and pain in circulation. We need to pray that we will have the courage, as a Church and as Christian persons, to follow the Servant King wherever he leads. That, after all, is why we come to his table. WE have seen in our century what happens when people dream wild dreams of world domination, and use the normal methods of force and power to implement them. We have not yet seen what might happen if those who worship the Servant King, now enthroned as Lord of the world, were to take him seriously enough to take up our cross and follow him. But that, as Mark reminds us, is precisely what the Servant King calls us to do.”

- - - -

Here’s my piece on unity in the current issue of Lookout, a journal of the Christian Church.

- - - -

A wonderful new ministry has been launched by a Highland couple, seeking to support a children’s home in India. You can read about it at this website.

“A person of prayer”

Published
by
Mike
on June 12, 2006
in Books and faith
. 14 Comments

From Greg Vaughn’s book Letters from Dad:

“Recently when my mother was in poor health I felt God calling me to capture the heart of this great woman on film. I flew to her with a video camera and asked if she felt well enough to speak. She gave the thumbs up.

“For the next three hours, I videotaped my mom talking about her life before I finally got to the most important question of all: ‘If you could speak to your great-great-grandchildren, what would you say to them?’

“I offered to let her think about it for a minute before I started taping, but she shook her head and said, ‘No, turn it on.’

“‘There’s a couple of things I want you to know about me,’ she said, speaking directly to the camera. ‘Whoever I am to you — your grandmother, your great-grandmother, whoever — I was not a person of power and prominence, but I was a person of prayer. And I have laid up for you in the throne room of God prayers that you will come to know the great God and Savior I have served for seventy-eight years. . . .”

That’s a legacy!