Doug Wilson is a very good author. I’ve been enjoying the online, chapter-a-Monday installments of his latest novel Evangellyfish. Well, “enjoy” doesn’t really capture the range of emotions triggered, not all of them comfortable. Anyway, we’re at the end of the story and one of the minor characters who has been going to church “gets it.” I love the way Doug described it:

The fact that Brian Lewis had been attending Grace Reformed intermittently was evidence that he was caught up in what might be called a slow-build spiritual crisis. Not like St. Paul, who by most accounts was blown off his horse all at once, Brian had always been thoughtful and deliberate about spiritual things, and he had been assembling the pieces for a number of years. He had been very diligent in his own way, but he was like a guy putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a lighthouse, but one where things got mixed up in the closet, and the picture on the box lid was that of a sailing boat. He was diligent, but was making slow progress.

After the wedding, he continued to attend church, only more regularly than before . . . it got  to the point where he was attending virtually every Sunday. Then one Sunday something just snapped, and he saw that it was supposed to be a lighthouse, not a sailing boat for pity’s sake. [Pastor] John Mitchell had gotten to the text about bringing every thought to the “obedience of Christ,” and Brian felt like he had been watching a blurry out-of-focus movie for an hour and a half, and then someone had adjusted the focus for him with fifteen minutes left in the film. Everything made sense. Absolutely everything, even the first part of the movie, which he would have to watch over again in his head. Brian talked to John after the service, told him what had happened during the sermon, and asked about baptism.

That was kind of what it was like for me. Not a lightening bolt from heaven moment, but a “oh, this is what it was all about” awareness over about a week or so. All the stuff I knew from before but didn’t see how it mattered, mattered.The picture puzzle I’d been only poking at for years turned into something beautiful and compelling. I love that we can put words to that experience that even begin to capture what it was like. Thank you Doug!

I am not a fan of hip hop. It sounds like noise to these 1970s-trained, suburban ears. However, I recognize that it is a large part of a predominantly young, black culture that I’m not part of. A lot of hip hop has been violent, misogynist gangsta music. Pour that kind of influence into a culture and you wind up with a lot of what the songs glorify. That’s not a rip on hip hop, it is simply pointing out what the message of many of those songs results in. The genre itself can be good or bad.

Thabiti Anyabwile has a post on the effects of what he calls “holy hip hop” on the African-American culture. He says:

What these brothers are able to distill, teach, and distribute via urban hymns is incredible. I pray for the widespread popularity and faithfulness of the brothers putting out theologically robust, evangelistic, and culturally-engaging rhymes for the glory of God.

What I thought of when I read this was how the gospel simply won’t be stranded in one culture. It is brilliant how God brought this about. He made a culture in the children of Abraham. He called one family, placed them into a society where they were outsiders (Egypt) and then gave them his Law which was so extensive that it formed their culture as something unique in the world. God never intended them to be isolated forever but used their different culture to bring about the birth of Jesus. The early church wrestled with the question of whether Jesus was for the gentiles but the Holy Spirit repeatedly demonstrated that the good news of Jesus was indeed for the whole world. After a few years, the gospel was largely rejected by the culture to which it was born and God used Paul, one of that culture’s fiercest protectors, to carry the good news across the known world.

Almost from its birth the gospel of Jesus was cultureless in that it was not bound to first century Jewish culture or North African culture or third century Eastern European culture or sixteenth century North American culture.

In all of these examples, the gospel didn’t destroy culture or segregate itself from culture, it righted culture. Consider Paul’s words:

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Acts 17:26-27

God placed people in different countries and contexts and time periods and he did it “in hope” not in judgement. Paul does say that now that Jesus has come things are different. “[N]ow he [God] commands all people everywhere to repent” and has sent his messengers to let them know about it.

So back to hip hop. Again, God didn’t destroy the cultures he sent the gospel to, he did destroy the things in those cultures that were opposed to him: idols, superstitions, distorted roles for men and women, etc. I don’t think you start with the question of what is wrong in a culture before you decide if the gospel can be carried into it. You bring the gospel to the culture and reformation follows. That’s what these guys are doing through their hip hop. They’re trying to bring solid theology into a subculture that in many important areas is standing on its head. We can stand on the outside and lob stones but that just kind of furthers the gangsta, bad boy identity. No, what needed to happen was change from the inside. Thabiti has been clear in the past about the reformation needed in black churches and culture so it is important that he applauds this effort.

So if you’re like me and very much an outsider of hip hop culture don’t tisk tisk and assume that hip hop itself must die. Rejoice that our gospel is not stopped by cultural barriers.

The New Atheists preach that religion is bad and irrational. Salvation is supposed to come through education. But a recent Gallup poll says otherwise. From a Wall Street Journal article:

Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn’t.

How about more liberal verses more conservative Christians? Perhaps the more liberal, more ‘enlightened’ will not fall for such things as Bigfoot? Again:

In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Hum, how about that? Could this mean that evangelicals are not necessarily irrational? Well, I suppose it could be argued that our brand of irrationality denies other forms of irrationality.

One final quote before I make a few comments. And this quote, I believe, stands on it’s own:

But it turns out that [Bill Maher] the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O’Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman — a quintuple bypass survivor — to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn’t accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: “I don’t believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory.” He has told CNN’s Larry King that he won’t take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn’t even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

Here’s my reflection on this whole interesting survey. The more conservative, evangelical a person is, the more they are inclined to believe the Bible and to allow scripture to inform their understanding of the natural and supernatural world. The West grew from a pervasive Christian worldview, including Western science and philosophy. The way we define something as ‘rational’ comes from an extension of a Christian understanding of the world. So the more Christian someone is, the more rational they are, not the other way around. To see the world rightly is to see it the way God created it and how He understands it. God’s worldview is what we call ‘reality’. In the West, atheists are Christian atheists. They specifically don’t believe in the Christian God and then by extension the gods of other religions.

The Journal article ends with a great Chesterton quote that I think is fitting:

Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are.”

Bill Maher has jumped on the Michael Moore bandwagon by using the “documentary” film format to preach his own message. For Maher, he’s got an axe to grind with organized religion and so he’s made a film called Religulous intending to show how religion is bad for the world. My reaction to this announcement was a short yawn followed by clicking on the next item in my RSS feed.

My hope was that the rest of the religious community would do the same. These kinds of films succeed largely not because  they’re necessarily any good but because a large group of people make a big stink about boycotting them. It is free publicity and the movie studios are glad to have it.

Well, it looks like my hopes came true! Apparently no one really cares too much about the movie. There have been a few reviews and the ones I’ve read have all said the same thing: Maher comes acorss as snooty and aloof like he’s so much better than religious people he says are so bad. Even if you’re not religious, that should be a turn off and a pretty big sign that this is NOT a documentary.

So what is a film maker to do when the people you are trying to skewer don’t care and don’t call for boycotts? Well, apparently, you do what any good marketing firm would do and call for the boycott yourself! Viral marketing, it’s called these days. And Christianity Today calls them on it. Great quote from the article “Real religious leaders, however, say they have more important worries than Maher’s film.” Now I can safely go back to my “yawn” status on this one.

However,  there is some more to be said not about the film (who cares) but about film in general. First, I got an email this weekend from Brian Godawa encouraging people to go see An American Carol. In it, a Michael Moore type character who hates America gets visited, A Christmas Carol style, by the spirit of John F. Kennedy, George Patton and George Washington who show him what is good in America. It is decidedly pro-American in a time when our country is taking some hard knocks. I haven’t seen it yet but would like to. Nice to see the “documentary” film makers getting skewered themselves.

The other thing this brings to mind is some of what Andy Crouch is talking about in his book Making Culture, which I’m nearly finished reading. At one point he makes mention of something called an othercott. The idea is that on the opening weekend of a movie like Religulous or The Da Vinci Code, instead of boycotting, picketing or staying away from the movies all together, go see something good. Spend your money, but spend it on the kind of movie you think Hollywood should be making. Sounds good till Andy does the math and shows that the impact is would only be less than one percent of the opening weekend tickets and just over half a percent if you compare it to all the movies opening on that given weekend. Not as big an impact as was hoped for. It isn’t nothing but it probably isn’t enough to move the studio either.

What Crouch calls for is not protesting or critiquing but creating. The world is going to continue to make films like Religulous but what if Christians create skillful, well crafted films that contribute some positive aspects to the standards by which the public judge films to be good or bad, worth seeing or avoiding? The problem is that those kinds of changes are slow but they are possible. The Passion of the Christ, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings have all done some of that by making it possible to to create successful films that speak well of religion. The boarders have expanded some, they haven’t yet contracted to reduce the number of films that ridicule religion yet, but perhaps as Christians once again engage Hollywood instead of shunning it, we might seem the definition of desirable films shift. They don’t all have to have the gospel preached in them to be good, Christian films either. When I left the theater after seeing Signs, I thought I’d just seen a beautiful demonstration of the Reformed doctrine of sovereignty played out in a well told story. No one is going to be saved by seeing a movie, but they might be moved to think about God in a way they perhaps hadn’t before.

Here is a shot from my first 5k.This proof that I did finish! I’m the guy running with a number on his shirt not the guy standing around watching people with numbers pinned to their shirts running.I’m looking off the left at the timer display. I thought I’d blown my goal but my official time was not what was on the display.Also, there is a little tab at the bottom of the number. I didn’t know it but that is supposed to stay on and you give it to the timer when you’re finished. The timer just yanked the entire number off my shirt and used that. Won’t make that mistake next month.

I haven’t updated Reformation Hardware in a while since Leopard broke my age old copy of Photoshop Elements. Upgraded from 2.0 to 6.0, that’s how old it was. Any way, I got an inspiration for a new tee and it is now available:

T-shirts don’t trust Jesus, they don’t follow him, they aren’t filled with the Holy Spirit. Well, they are if a Christian is wearing them I guess. A t-shirt isn’t a disciple of Jesus, but a person can be and a disciple of Jesus can wear a t-shirt. So this shirt is just my attempt so sort all that out.

Note: The copyright information is not on the image on the tee, I just put it here because people sometimes lift images or hotlink. Just want everyone to know where it came from. :)

This weekend I was at the Desiring God National Conference in Minneapolis and came to the realization that I am not a blogger. And odd thing to confess on a blog but let me explain. Reason why I’m not not a blogger: Mark Driscoll took the mickey out of bloggers in his talk. Something like “20 year old white male living in his parents basement, sleeping on Star Wars sheets with footy pajamas and when mom comes down stairs and brings him his bowl of Lucky Charms and askes if he’s going to look for a job today he says ‘I dunno, the alert level is orange today.'” That was really, really funny but it wasn’t that that made me realize that I’m not a blogger. What convinced me I’m not a blogger was something postive. They had a blogger get together between the sessions. It was hosted by Justin Taylor and Abraham Piper. Two individuals very much not fitting Driscoll’s picture of a blogger. I didn’t attend the blogger gathering. I overheard people mentioning blogs they read while moving aroud the conference and realzied that I’m just not a blogger.

So what the heck do I mean by blogging about not being a blogger? Well, I have a blog but that doesn’t make me a blogger.  I don’t update my blog daily. I don’t care that I don’t update daily. I remember a few weeks ago coming across a link from another blog to mine that said it was a good blog but that I hadn’t updated in a while. He was right, I don’t update a lot. I write when I have something to say. This is more of what should be called a “web journal” or “bournal” or something. With my Moleskine, I don’t write in there every day and with my blog I don’t update it every day. I think “blogger” has become something more than it once was. The most “sucessful” blogs have daily updates, big followings and a lot of comment activity. That isn’t me and frankly, I’m not interested in that kind of a blog. I don’t want to be Justin Taylor or Tim Challies. I enjoy reading their blogs but don’t want to duplicate their success.

So I’m just a guy with a blog, I’m not a blogger. Kind of remindes me of a cartoon I once linked to.

I did it. I completed my very first 5k run ever. The official results are in and I met my time goal. I finished in 30:50.6 and I wanted to make it in 30 minutes. That means I averaged just under 10 minutes/mile. I came in 71st overall (out of 193 including walkers) and was 6th out of 9 in my age bracket, one minute behind number 5 and 22 minutes faster than the last placed man in my age bracket. Overall, I am pleased. The event was scheduled to start at 9AM, which is late even for a 5k. On top of that the race started 15 minutes late. And it was an 80° September day so it was pretty warm by the time we got going. I’ll be leaving some comments on the website that registered the run.

I met my goal. I completed the Couch to 5k program and a few weeks later (3 months to the day from when I started running) I ran my first 5k. So does that mean a return to the couch? No way. I’ve already picked out my next run in November and am considering hiring a personal trainer for a few weeks.  After that, we’re going in to winter and I’m going to keep running as long as I can but we’ll see. I’ll probably do another 5k in the spring and then train for a 10k later in the spring.

If I can do this, anyone can. It wasn’t that long ago when I was telling other people who were running that they were crazy or “better you than me” and just couldn’t fathom what would cause someone to run other than being chanced by someone bigger or better armed than them. Maybe some time I’ll blog on the many different things that inspired me to start.

I’m no fan of Tony Campollo. One of his “things” lately has been to call himself a “Red Letter Christian” as in follow the words of Christ since, for an odd reason, they tend to be printed in red in our modern Bibles. What about the rest of the Bible? Well, who knows.

Anyway, there is now a Green Letter Bible. From Time:

Now there is a Bible trying to make gardeners of us all. On Oct. 7, HarperCollins is releasing The Green Bible, a Scripture for the Prius age that calls attention to more than 1,000 verses related to nature by printing them in a pleasant shade of forest green…The new version’s message, states an introduction by Evangelical eco-activist J. Matthew Sleeth, is that “creation care”–the Christian catchphrase for nature conservancy–“is at the very core of our Christian walk.”

So there ya go. Green or Red, you now have your choice in which subsection of the Scriptures you wish to obey or rise above other portions!

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness – 2Ti 3:16Okay, end the sarcasm.  I don’t disagree with the “Red Letter Christians” that we need to wake up to social issues. And I don’t disagree that the Bible has some serious implications for Christians in the area of “creation care”. These are areas where our following of Jesus really needs to improve. Hitching our wagons to the politically conservative train has done us a disservice in these areas. However, I really, really chaff at the approach that seems to emphasize one part of the Bible over against another. There is a danger in that approach that can lead to an unbalanced approach to the issues. We need the black and the green and the red letters of our Bibles to tell us how to live as God’s people in a fallen world.

A few weeks ago I got my favorite seat on the train. It is on the upper deck near the stairs.  After I got settled I looked around a bit and saw a women below and across from me I saw a women with a bag at her feet and a magazine in her hands. It was a Watchtower magazine. I bristled at the heresy. A young girl I had seen on the platform folded herself into a corner a seat or two away from the heretic in my third favorite seat.

After a bit the conductor came around to collect tickets and it became clear that there was a problem with the young girl in the corner. She was probably on the wrong train, she didn’t have a ticket or any money. She was trying to get to Milwaukee and we were going to a town in Northern Illinois about an hour’s drive from Milwaukee. The conductor tried to help her figure out what was going on for a bit but needed to tend to his other duties as well. And so that’s when the Witness moved in. She had put away her magazines and pulled out a schedule with a map on it, slide next to the young girl and they tried to work out a plan.

My emotional reaction was that I wished I was down there helping her instead of the heretic. I could protect her since the Witness would surely get around to her heresy and give the young girl a Watchtower magazine. But it was too late, I couldn’t barge in between the two. I didn’t want to overwhelm the young girl.

Then the sting came. With blistering clarity, I realized that I wanted to keep her from the heresy but I knew I wouldn’t share Christ with her either. Somehow my silence would be better than the Witness’ error.  I hung my head in shame and prayed for forgiveness and strength.

As I reflect on that, I realize that the Witness didn’t share her errors and if I were to be helping the young girl a gospel presentation wouldn’t have been necessarily appropriate either. In this case it was more about offering a cup of water in Christ’s name. But the brunt of the blow of realizing that I opposed error but was hesitant to speak truth stings and continues to sting.