“But if we do not then love him who first loved us; if we will not hearken to his voice; if we turn our eye away from him, and will not attend to the light which he pours upon us; his Spirit will not always strive: He will gradually withdraw, and leave us to the darkness of our own hearts. He will not continue to breathe into our soul, unless our soul breathes toward him again; unless our love, and prayer, and thanksgiving return to him, a sacrifice wherewith he is well pleased”
Harley Finkelstein on resourcefulness, focus, and coaching
Harvey Finkelstein, Shopify's Chief Platform Officer of E-Commerce, recently gave an interview to the folks at FastCompany about value of resourcefulness and focus to his company. I'm a big believer in the power of professional and executive coaching to pull people toward their best, most productive selves. So, I was delighted to hear Finkelstein attribute his own focus and resourcefulness in no small part to the work he does with his executive coach.
Are you listening?
“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them.”
Unintentional wildfires
It’s easy to picture Luther standing in the pulpit, preaching Grace to his faithful, pre-Protestant flock, when a crotchety Church official starts selling get-out-of-purgatory-free cards to the confused sheep in the back pews, and Luther drives them out like Jesus drove out the money-changers. We picture Luther creeping through the night to the chapel, his infamous 95 theses in hand and a Glorious Revolution on his mind. And then he nails the theses to the door, his hammer thundering through the night. Trumpets and drums resound.
But in reality, Luther approached his efforts with tremendous fear and trembling. The door he nailed the Theses to was more like a bulletin board, where academics and Church leaders posted papers and announcements, so to nail a theologically-based thesis to the door was hardly an act of menacing defiance. Luther’s training as a biblical scholar led him to dispute what, to him, were interpretive flaws of traditional Church doctrine.
Nevertheless, what Luther intended to spark conversation and debate enflamed a tremendous controversy, thanks in large part to the recent advent of the printing press.
Until the day he died, Luther wrestled with the thought that he was in the wrong. The violence that his words inspired, which eventually reached a Crusade-like crescendo across Europe, were to him, a tragedy he could not forgive himself for.
Read more at http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/martin-luther-was-craft-brewer#2U28OLAJD6MqU4Ff.99
An early church view of "free will"
“It is in vain that you misrepresent me and try to convince the ignorant that I condemn free-will. Let him who condemns it be himself condemned. We have been created endowed with free-will; still it is not this which distinguishes us from the brutes. For human free-will, as I said, depends upon the help of God and needs His aid moment by moment, a thing which you and yours do not choose to admit. Your position is that once a man has free-will he no longer needs the help of God. It is true that freedom of the will brings with it freedom of decision. Still man does not act immediately on his free-will but requires God’s aid who Himself needs no aid.”
Revolutionary
Our current problem is that the church jettisoned the revolutionary Jesus of the Gospels in exchange for a Jesus-just-like-me. We have a Jesus who wants us to be safe and our kids nice and our lives comfortable and, if possible, convenient; an English speaking, TNIV Jesus. The only wood this Jesus carries is boards for the white picket fence. Ignoring Jesus’ social history while obsessing over theological verities, we removed all revolutionary aspects from Jesus’ life. We created a comfortable chameleon Jesus who blends in with everything American. We cannot tolerate a Jesus who scares us witless. When we sing “Jesus loves me this I know” we mean “Jesus coddles me this I know.” Like most things American, Jesus is another product to sell or own; another religiously-packaged commodity that we put on the cluttered shelves of our lives.
Jesus is Alka-seltzer for the soul; he’s our pain-reliever Jesus.
We need the radical Jesus; the Jesus of the canonical Gospels. The Man who exploded every category of what it means to be human and who was never, ever for sale. When the traumatized disciples gaped at Jesus in the boat after Jesus simply spoke a fierce hurricane out of existence, they screamed in terror, “What kind of man is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?!”
What kind, indeed. This is the Jesus we must meet. We have so many micro-brewed Jesus’s domesticated for our various tastes: Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Episcopal/Anglican, Wesleyan, Baptist, Evangelical Covenant, Four Square, Lutheran, Reformed and Christian Reformed, the generic, non-denominational Jesus, cathedral Jesus and house church Jesus, Wall Street Jesus and surfer dude Jesus, Catholic Jesus, the Protestant Jesus’s, Orthodox Jesus, tee totaling Jesus and beer-drinking Jesus, institutional Jesus, hipster Jesus, and organic Jesus. No one seems to want the bold, full-bodied Jesus who radically changes everything.
Hot Now!
Have you seen the roll-out for The Donut Church?
It's not a real church, of course, just a wickedly humorous sendup of the distressingly common flaws to which the seeker-sensitive and felt-needs ministry paradigms are prone. The design and copywriting people behind the website have a sardonic wit, albeit not a particularly subtle one. The humor with which they critique the seeker-senstive paradigm is more bludgeon than stiletto in effect. More whammy than whimsy, one might say.
The seeker-sensitive and felt-needs models of ministry are, of course, not above challenge. All church leaders, no matter how successful, no matter how convinced of the past efficacy of their methods, should champion any good-hearted attempts by others to point out where our ministry methods have gone awry, even if delivered on the end of a skewer rather than a helping hand. As Solomon wrote, "Faithful are the wounds of a friend" (Prov 27:6).
The early Reformers championed the value of being open to correction, and willing to correct course, crying out "Ecclesia semper reformanda est!", which phrase simply means "the church is always to be reformed." The value being expressed was that the church must always be in the process of renewal, of coming back to its roots. No church can assume what was true or right or effective in the past is appropriate in the present let alone in the future. Our methods, even our theologies, must constantly be examined for need of realignment and conformity to the faith once and for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3). (An ideal, ironically, that many modern Reformed leaders seem to ignore).
But I digress. The creators of The Donut Church have served up a tasty confection to be sure. One does wonder though, all that creativity, the insight, the work hours, the money expended in completing and launching the site--how much more might the team have accomplished had they expended all that effort on innovating an ancient-new, better, paradigm of ministry? What if they had employed all their gifts and not-inconsequential assets in setting a table of ministry before the church, instead of merely upending one at which many are already seated, for little more than chuckles?
In many respects, creation is far more difficult than critique. Maybe doing so is next on their agenda. One can hope.
Dating, mating, and (not) waiting
According to a recent article in The Christian Post:
- Only 11% of Christians (survey of 716) said they would save sex for marriage. 60% would be willing to have sex without any sort of commitment, and 23% would only have sex with someone whom they loved.
- Relevant Magazine released a poll in 2011 showing 80% of young Christian singles have had sex.
- In 2012, the National Association of Evangelicals, in conjunction with Grey Matter Research found 44% of unmarried Evangelicals between the ages of 18-29 reported having sex.
- Of Christian singles responding to a poll sponsored by ChristianMingle, 61% were willing to have uncommitted sex.
A couple thoughts present themselves, the most basic of which is this: whatever the church is doing with its young people to mitigate the corrosive effects of our hyper-sexual culture, it's not working. It's time to rethink our approach to teaching the Biblical value of sexual purity.
Climate-change and the flat earth society
“We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.”
Good eggs and bad
“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”