NetVibes

in

I've been using NetVibes for a while now and I like it.  It's a homepage that has modules for gmail, flicker, and any site with a feed (like a blog, CNN, or whatever).  Give it a look.

Emergent, Jews and Justice

in , ,

It seems Emergent (the organization) is muddling the Christocentric nature of Kingdom work (see Doug Pagitt's blog as well).  In other words, it looks like Emergent (Tony Jones, Brian McLaren, et al) is treating collaboration on social justice issues between Jews and Christians as equally valid Kingdom work.  Doesn't that give social justice primacy over faith in Christ so that Kingdom work can be done without faith in Christ?  Or is this worse in that Emergent is attributing spiritual life to both groups?

If we are talking about working together to help those who can't help themselves instead of sticking to the same political routes, that's fine.  But it seems much worse than that.  Read some excerpts.

Synagogue 3000 (S3K) and Emergent have announced a ground-breaking meeting to connect Jewish and Christian leaders who are experimenting with innovative congregations and trying to push beyond the traditional categories of "left" and "right." This will be the first conversation that brings them together to focus on the enterprise of building next-generation institutions. 

[...]

S3K Senior Fellow Lawrence A. Hoffman, (_Rethinking Synagogues: A New Vocabulary for Congregational Life_, forthcoming 2006) stressed the importance of building committed religious identity across faith lines. "We inhabit an epic moment," he said, "nothing short of a genuine spiritual awakening. It offers us an opportunity unique to all of human history: a chance for Jews and Christians to do God's work together, not just locally, but nationally, community by community, in shared witness to our two respective faiths."

Brian McLaren...

"We have so much common ground on so many levels...We face similar problems in the present, we have common hopes for the future, and we draw from shared resources in our heritage. I'm thrilled with the possibility of developing friendship and collaboration in ways that help God's dreams come true for our synagogues, churches, and world."

Tony Jones...

"As emerging Christian leaders have been pushing through the polarities of left and right in an effort to find a new, third way, we've been desperate to find partners for that quest," he said. "It's with great joy and promise that we partner with the leaders of S3K to talk about the future and God's Kingdom."

Without a bunch of explanation for how this isn't what it seems to be, I reckon this to be very bad news.

(HT: Mike Noakes)

Narnia: My Take

in

So I watched Narnia yesterday with my lovely wife, my four kids, and my 9:15am popcorn.  A lot of folks are blogging the heck out of this movie and I'm not going to try to do anything fancy or long.  But I thought it would be helpful to share some thoughts, both good and bad.  If you are going to watch the movie, I encourage you NOT to read on.  Experience it for yourself first.

**Spoilers Coming**

Over the last three weeks I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to the kids.  We enjoyed it very much.  And if you have never experienced a movie after reading the book, it's definitely a different experience.  I think it makes enjoying the movie (for an adult) much more difficult.  Plus, as we read I tried to imagine how the movie would handle certain things, and that led to some satisfying elements, but also some disappointments.

1. Characters: Both Lucy and Tumnus were played very well.  Brilliant.  Edmund was good, Susan was just okay, Peter was fine, the Beavers were fun, Father Christmas was better than I expected, Maugrim was pretty good, the White Witch was pretty good, and the professor was just right.  Some of the characters were a bit overdone, I thought (Susan sticks out to me here), but generally speaking the characters were good. 

2.  Effects: The effects were fine.  There were times when they looked a bit more fake than they needed to, but that isn't a big surprise.  I expected that from the very first teaser I saw months ago.

3. A Few differences between book and movie: Rumblebuffin was missing, at least in character.  There were a few random giants.  When they fled the Beavers' house they left through a tunnel, which was a nice addition for a movie.  There were plenty of other differences, but these stuck out to me.

4. What I didn't like: Edmund's insatiable desire for Turkish Delight (after the first bite) was missing.  He wanted more, but he just looked selfish.  The point was the White Witch's food could never satisfy.

The connection between the kids (or anyone else) and Aslan was poorly done.  When Lucy and Susan are laying on his dead body and just distraught (which was good), it wasn't developed enough ahead of time.  For example, in the book when Mr. Beaver said "Aslan is on the move" it's followed by some great description of what happens inside the kids as they hear this news.  They "felt something jump" inside them, "Peter felt brave and adventurous," and so on.  Someone needed to develop the heart-leaping aspect of hearing about and knowing Aslan, but it was missing.  This was the biggest disappointment for me.

One thing that I was looking forward to most other than seeing the general plot unfold was the roar of Aslan after resurrection which bent the trees.  Why was this not included?  From the book...

"And Aslan stood up and when he opened his mouth to roar his face became so terrible that they did not dare to look at it.  And they saw all the trees in front of him bend before the blast of his roaring as grass bends in a meadow before the wind.

I also thought they missed a great opportunity to show Aslan (Lucy and Susan aboard) running through the trees and such.  They showed this, but it was stunted.  From the book...

"That ride was perhaps the most wonderful thing that happened to them in Narnia."

One last thing, the narration quality of the book was missing.  And so it became the adventure of four kids rather than the adventure any kid can have.  I feel Lewis intends a more universal, YOU can find Narnia.  You can be a king.  You can have adventure and be brave and just, etc.  I wanted the movie to make me go home and start looking for branches in the back of my closet, but it didn't so much.  It could have been done better, I think.

5. What I liked: It was nice to see what Turkish Delight looks like, though I'm still not sure it looks all that delicious.

I liked how we saw a close up on the face of Aslan when he was executed.  I didn't like the book at this point.  He seemed to die too fast in the movie, but for a kid movie it needed to be fast I suppose.

For all the problems in developing the Aslan-children connection, I liked how Lucy and Susan were portrayed after the killing of Aslan, laying on him for some time.  The broken stone table was well done also, shaking the earth.

For the absence of the battle in the book, the movie needed it.  It was done pretty well, though Edmund looked pretty clueless the whole time. 

Side note: Liam Neeson has become quite the redeemer.  Oscar Schindler (purchases Jews), Qui-Gon Jinn (rescues Anakin), and now Aslan (saving Edmund and Narnia).   Hmmm.  I liked his voice with Aslan.  If it would have been Matthew Broderick (The Lion King) I would have walked out. :)

My overall take is this: If the book didn't exist and the movie came out, I would be telling everyone of great, redemptive kids movie that everyone needs to see.  And so I cannot help but to promote it and encourage everyone to go.  It's good.

So to be clear, I did enjoy the movie very much.  We will buy the DVD when it comes out.  And the movie, for it's weaknesses, is completely worthwhile.

Disney Executive Planting Churches

in

Wow. 

Al Weiss, a top-ranking Disney executive, is planting churches—doctrinally sound ones, and lots of them.

As chairman of the board for newly formed Vision USA, Mr. Weiss aims to raise $300 million over the next 10 years for aggressive church planting in 50 of the country's most influential cities. The project is well underway in Orlando, where several million dollars of grant money will help open eight to 10 churches by the end of the year. Preliminary efforts have also begun in Seattle, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Nashville, Charlotte, New York, and Washington, D.C.

[...]

Vision USA's basic model for each urban market is simple: Network Christian business leaders with local church-planting experts. Chan Kilgore, pastor of CrossPointe Church in Orlando, has helped locate and train doctrinally conservative pastors. "Our greatest challenge isn't the financial resources. It's finding great men to plant," he told WORLD.

To solve that problem, Mr. Weiss aims to build a large church-planter training facility on 40 acres of donated property in Orlando. Gregg Heinsch, an experienced church planter and former youth pastor at John Piper's Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, will serve as training-center dean.

Each church founded on Vision USA funds must pour 5 percent of its budget back into the project for further local planting efforts. Vision USA president Steve Johnson believes such give-back commitments will create self-sustaining, church-planting networks throughout the country. "This is not a bureaucracy where it's top down," he told WORLD. "We're just trying to empower local movements."

Though affiliated with the Baptist General Conference (BGC), Vision USA has partnered with a range of denominations willing to affirm the Lausanne Covenant, male eldership, and Reformed theology—most recently aligning with Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle and founder of the nondenominational Acts 29 church-planting network, is among a growing list of prominent leaders to join Vision USA, each hoping to combat the roughly 2,500 church deaths in the United States every year. "Church planting is hot right now," he told WORLD. "For years, guys wanted to get out of seminary and go get a church that had a nice salary and would call them pastor. Today, young entrepreneurial guys don't want to take over a church. They want to start one."

Read the whole article from World Magazine.

(HT: Goodmanson)

Moore, McKnight and McLaren

in ,

Scot McKnight recently saw Walk the Line, the movie on the life of Johnny Cash.  He blogged on it today (also at Touchstone's Mere Comments) with an interesting twist, that he found it curious that Russ Moore (SBTS) stands with the Man in Black while the Kentucky Baptist Convention didn't stand with a different sort of man in black, Brian McLaren. 

Russ Moore has responded.

I've read both posts a few times now.  On the one hand, I'm not sure McKnight's connections between McLaren and Cash work.  I don't know the history of how Cash was treated by SBC'rs, so I can't speak to that.  But the KBC decides who it wants to instruct them, and Cash had a different purpose altogether.  You are standing for different things when you stand for one or the other.

On the other hand, Moore's unreasonable caricatures of the EC make whatever wisdom he has on the issue hard to hear.  He writes,

The difference between Cash's sin-and-repentance authenticity and the manufactured faddish candles-and-incense "authenticity" of the "emerging church" movement is one of kind, not just degree.

and

One might also say of the repackaged liberalism of the "emerging church," everyone who wears dark turtlenecks is not a Man in Black.

I just don't get this sort of response.  Does Russ actually believe the EC is (STILL!) only a fad?  I'm not saying the EC is the church of the future, or whatever.  But I think Moore's position is a very unscholarly one.  I don't see John Hammett or Justin Taylor or Don Carson using this sort of language.  They are engaging the issues.  Sure there are faddish elements in the EC, just as there are in the SBC and everywhere else. 

But characterizing the whole this way is like saying you aren't willing to look any deeper.  It's like saying that you would rather see the EC as a big impersonal whole that you can mock rather than as real people with real faith and a real desire to know and follow Jesus.  I encourage my friend Russ to lose the rhetoric and stick to the issues.  He has a lot to add if he does.

UPDATE: Scot McKnight has posted a response to Russ Moore.

Church Our (His?) Way

in

I'd love to have some dialogue on the new piece by Real Live Preacher: "If We Could Do Church."  As most of us do from time to time, RLP is asking the question...

What if we could do church any way that wewanted?

I don't think he is talking about doing what we want vs what God wants.  He says...

What if these people decided to cast off any preconceived, cultural ideas about what church ought to be and instead tried to whittle Christianity down to its essentials? Instead of allowing church to become ever more complex, what if they sought to make church ever more simple, simple enough to be written on a thumbnail or even on a heart?

I know that we can't talk about this without some of us reading to find what he says that we don't like and then shout it down as quick as we can.  But I want to talk about the heart of what he says rather than the theology he has behind a certain point or a practice we don't agree with.  Read it and tell me what you think?

World Religions

in ,

We homeschool.  Friday my wife taught our children about worldreligions.  I came home after work, sat down for dinner and my 5 year old told me that he learned about Hinduism, Judaism, and Bootyism. 

Uh, I think he might need to relearn that last one.

Caption

in

I feel like saying something.  I'm not sure why.  So I'll say this...If I were to take a picture of my day at this moment, here's what would be written in a long caption. 

"At 2:49pm Steve was drinking Coke with a generous amount of lime juice, listening to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, working on his sermon on John 2:1-11, coughing from a bad cold, and watching the first flakes fall in the first significant snow storm of the winter."

Where's Joe Thorn?

in

Joe_cartoon_w_head_blank_words_1Yes, the rumor is true.  Okay, there's no rumor, but there should be one now that Joe Thorn has "unintentionally" deleted folders containing his blog posts. 

Since he was doing a series on the seven deadly sins, and his most recent one was "envy," it's clear that God deleted his blog because Joe envied my blog.  Shame on you Joe. 

In partial seriousness, Joe should have his blog up and running again in the next five to forty-five days, or something like that.

Christ Plays: Part 2

in , ,

We continue reading and discussing Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places over at Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog.   We are on pages 49-84.

Some good quotes from Peterson...

Wonder is the only adequate launching pad for exploring a spirituality of creation, keeping us open-eyed, expectant, alive to life that is always more than we can account for, that always exceeds our calculations, that is always beyond anything we can make. (52)

If you want to look at creation full, creation at its highest, you look at a person - a man, a woman, a child. (53)

Artists, poets, musicians, and architects are our primary witnesses to the significance of the meaning of "virgin" in the virgin birth as "a summons to reverence and worship."  Over and over again they rescue us from a life in which the wonder has leaded out.  While theologians and biblical scholars have argued, sometimes most contentiously, over texts and sexual facts and mythological parallels, our artists have painted Madonnas, our poets have provided our imaginations with rhythms and metaphors, our musicians have filled the air with carols and anthems that bring us to our knees in adoration, and our architects have designed and built chapels and cathedrals in which we can worship God. (57)

Warning to 'Emerging Church'

in ,

I learned recently that John Hammett (SEBTS prof of theology) delivered a paper at The Evangelical Theological Society meeting a couple of weeks ago on the Emerging Church: "An Ecclesiological Assessment of the Emerging Church."  I don't know if it's online anywhere (it's online now) but he has kindly emailed it to those interested in reading it.  So I have it on my desktop right now, but I haven't read it yet.

Baptist Press has picked this up as a news story: "Baptist Scholar Sounds a Warning to 'Emerging Church."  Here are a few snippets.  I've pointed out a couple of things in bold.

The leaders of many "emerging" churches echo McLaren’s claim, saying that traditional churches must change or die. Hammett, however, charges that this type of approach is overly simplistic. Many so-called "traditional" churches, he said, are reaching people by simply teaching the word of God and sharing the Gospel, he said.

[...]

Hammett also criticized emerging church leaders for letting cultural concerns over postmodernism drive their agendas, rather than being driven solely by Scripture.

"Key leaders of the emerging church affirm that they love, have confidence in, seek to obey, and strive accurately to teach the sacred Scriptures," he said. "I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of these leaders, nor the reality of their commitment to Scripture. But in reading their material in books, websites and articles, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the concern to respond to postmodernism is what is really driving the movement.

"It seems that the central problem with the emerging church ... is that in its zeal to respond to postmodern culture in a way that is evangelistically effective and personally and ecclesiologically refreshing, they have not yet carefully critiqued postmodernism," Hammett continued. "Without such critique, there is a real danger that the movement will appropriate elements of postmodern thought that cannot be integrated into a genuinely evangelical Christian worldview."

[...]

While the emerging church’s desire to engage a lost culture is admirable, Hammett said, they should do so with caution and a willingness to learn from traditional churches, not with a willingness to uncritically accept postmodernism.

"The more desirable alternative is for all churches to engage the culture, with a zeal to understand its questions and to speak its language, but also with a resolute willingness to take the posture of Christ against culture where biblical fidelity requires it," he said. "This challenge of thoughtful engagement with contemporary culture lies before the emerging church and all branches of evangelicalism."

A couple of thoughts...

1. I wonder if Dr. Hammett sees the difference here between a desire to understand and reach a culture influenced by postmodernity and uncritically accepting postmodernism.  These are very different things.  And if I read him right, I think Dr. Hammett hasn't distinguished these ideas.

Maybe he speaks this way because he thinks EC'rs muddle the line?  Maybe so.  I wouldn't fight over that claim.  But as he assesses the movement he needs to be clear on the difference.  Though I have no problem saying some in the EC are too accepting of postmodernism, there are many who are simply trying to reach a culture that has been influenced by postmodernism.

2. He says churches need to have a "willingness to take the posture of Christ against culture where biblical fidelity requires it."  What does he mean?  I'm increasingly skeptical over the intentions of statements like this one.

Critics of the EC may wonder if my skepticism is based in an unwillingness to see what's wrong with the culture because I would rather speak of love and grace than sin and judgment.  That's not my point at all.  I'm skeptical because of the 'culture war' mentality of much of evangelicalism, and of the SBC in particular.  I think it's the wrong approach to culture, it always has been, and the EC in large part is looking for a way to be the Church without scolding the culture.

Again, I'm fine saying the EC has created new problems at times in this area and in other areas.  But I think a non-scolding approach to culture is a better approach, not a lesser one, and I'm curious to learn whether Dr. Hammett's quote above is intending to hit on this topic.

I appreciate Dr. Hammett and the other scholars and pastors who are working hard to understand the EC and approach it in a conversational way.