Jared Wilson has undertaken an interesting project/challenge on his blog The Gospel-Driven Church: he’s posting his own 95 theses for the American church, 19 at a time for five days. The first 19 went up this morning, headed “On the Discipleship of the Individual Christian,” with the rest to come over the course of this week. In doing this, Jared acknowledges a possible charge of arrogance, but I don’t think that really follows; the fact that he’s deliberately echoing Martin Luther doesn’t mean he’s comparing himself to Luther, after all, or that he expects his theses to have the same effect as Luther’s did. As far as I can tell, he’s simply doing what Luther intended to do when he took hammer and nail to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral: systematizing his challenge to the status quo so as to provoke discussion. Judging by the first 19, I’d say he has a good chance of accomplishing that. If you haven’t already spent some time considering his post, I’d suggest you do so, and keep checking back for the other 76 theses; and then I’d suggest we all spend some serious time in prayer for the church in this country, and for ourselves.
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Cross-shaped ministry
There’s an excellent piece up on the Alban Institute website, written by a Lutheran pastor named John Berntsen, called “The Impossible Task of Ministry,” which I commend to your reading—and not only if you’re a pastor; like Dr. Andrew Purves’ book The Crucifixion of Ministry: Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ, which I wrote about here and here, I think the Rev. Berntsen’s piece is important reading for anyone who’s in leadership in the church in any way at all. Indeed, one way in which his article could serve the church is as a more accessible introduction to the theme Dr. Purves takes up in his short but dense book; since the article is adapted from a book of his own titled Cross-Shaped Leadership: On the Rough and Tumble of Parish Practice, I’ll be interested to read the book and see how he develops it, and how his insights complement and perhaps differ from Dr. Purves’ work. For now, here’s an excerpt to encourage you to read the article:
At a deeper level, the cross is the story of the world’s resistance to grace. The cross is the showdown—yes, the confrontation—between a steadfastly loving God who wills and calls a world into covenant partnership and a world that wants to live in its own strength, playing God for itself. Jesus comes preaching a kingdom of righteousness, justice, and unconditional love, and the world says, “No thanks. We think our system of merit and scorekeeping and judgment is safer. We prefer the reign of our marketplace to your upside-down kingdom that reckons by grace. So count us out.”But public leadership in the church is subject to a continuous cycle of death and resurrection. The very initiatives, actions, and plans of leaders undergo the cross. Under the cross, the moment-by-moment doings of ministry are subject to countless deaths and resurrections, few of which are heroic or glorious. So how does this transformation take place amid the rough and tumble of parish practice—through what I call cross-shaped leadership? . . .Ministry is hard. Ministry is, in fact, impossible. (Just try to referee a fair fight about the virtues of “contemporary” versus “traditional” worship if you need any reminders about that.) It’s a perfect storm in which leaders are pressured either to pick winners and losers or to feed the multitudes by offering a cafeteria of consumer choices. Here’s the good news, though. Once we’ve accepted the truth that ministry is hard, even impossible—once we’ve stopped living in denial of this reality, or perhaps whining about it—it becomes the truth that sets us free. We cease being gloomy servants, weighed down by our resentful conviction that we are all alone in our work, and instead become joyful coworkers of a strong, wise, and consoling Lord.
For my wife
The extraordinary thing is not that Paul said and did all these amazing things;
it’s that he said and did them without coffee.—N. T. WrightHT: Jared Wilson
Kudos to SNL
You have to give Lorne Michaels and the rest of the folks at SNL credit: they’ve done a really good job with this election season. They haven’t pulled their punches—in fact, at points, they’ve showed more willingness to tell the truth than the reporters whose job it is to do so; the skit they did on the bailout is perhaps the most obvious example of that, since it was so blunt that NBC felt the need to edit it:
Here’s the edited version, which is still quite good:
The one that really got me, though, was their skit of the first presidential debate where they had Obama insisting that under his plan “most members of the Chicago city council, as well as city building inspectors” would get a tax cut “because my plan would not tax income from bribes, kickbacks, shakedowns, embezzlement of government funds, or extortion.” I suppose they figured since their McCain followed that with a non sequitur, it was okay, but I still find it hard to believe they actually put that in there.In line with this, I thought they handled Sarah Palin’s appearance quite well. It posed some interesting challenges for Lorne Michaels, as he noted in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, but they rose to the occasion. They didn’t hand her anything, but they let her play to her strengths, and I think both she and the show benefited as a result. The way they handled the open was, I think, particularly interesting:
To be sure, Gov. Palin has actually been talking to the press a fair bit lately, but that’s fine; as Michaels says, SNL deals with perception, not reality, and the McCain campaign’s early folly in sequestering her (courtesy of Rick Davis, who should have been booted all the way out when Steve Schmidt came on board) created this perception. She now has to deal with it in turn—which SNL helped her do. Credit to them.
The myth of fingerprints
I spent a while earlier today thinking about fingerprints, courtesy of Heather McDougal—courtesy of both her own rumination on the subject, which considers various aspects of the whys and wherefores of fingerprints (such as why we have them in the first place, and how they work), and of a 2002 New Yorker article raising questions about the forensic use of fingerprints. They’re very different articles, obviously, but both are quite interesting; check them out.
On this blog in history: May 2007
Continuing with the historical links posts and jumping back to 2007, here are the highlights from that May:The coldest case of all
This was my response to a Cold Case episode that was an ugly and unsubtle commercial for euthanasia.AI: Amnesty International, or Abortion International?
Protesting Amnesty International’s decision to become an abortion-rights organization—and their initial determination to lie to the public about having done so.Robert E. Webber, RIP
What a great leader of the American church . . .Musings on worship, illustrated by the Songs of the Week
On how not to make worship about God.Tributes
Taking note of the death of Jerry Falwell, and of Charles Taylor winning the Templeton Prize.
The return of yellow journalism?
To borrow a phrase from Isaac Asimov, future generations of historians will look back and somewhere in the last eight years, they will draw a line and say, “This marks the fall of the mainstream media.” (Always assuming the world lasts that long, that we don’t blow ourselves up or something.) Orson Scott Card, the science fiction/fantasy author and writing professor, lays out the reasons why in a blistering attack on the MSM: they’ve chosen to ignore some stories, downplay others, and spend their time inventing new ones, in order to advance the cause of their chosen agenda and candidates, and in the process have become “just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party.”This is not a new thing, nor should it be surprising. As my father-in-law pointed out to me a while ago, the rise of modern standards of journalistic integrity, of the idea that journalists should be fair and impartial and treat all reasonable points of view equally, was driven and made possible by the rise of mass media that made it possible for the first time to market products on a nationwide basis. If you’re going to try to sell things to the whole country at once, you need to appeal to the whole country at once, which means that for your news division, a convincingly impartial approach is necessary so as not to turn anyone off. As Jon Shields, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado—Colorado Springs, has pointed out, this was made possible by the consensus-oriented, largely unideological centrism of post-World War II American politics.The problem is, both of the foundations of that approach to journalism are gone; Dr. Shields’ article tells the story of how liberal activists shattered that 1950s centrism, and mass marketing has largely been replaced by niche marketing. You pick a segment of the population and you make money by giving them what they want; along with that goes telling them what they want to hear. The only things left of the grand postwar era of American journalism are the major media corporations it created, which are now in varying states of disrepair, and their abiding conviction that they are the arbiters of truth and impartiality. (Hence their flaming contempt for that upstart Fox, which challenges the latter and competes with them for money.) We on the outside are free to see that that conviction is an illusion—and always was, really—and that the man behind the curtain is the abiding form of journalism in a capitalist society, to which we have returned after a brief aberration. Call it yellow journalism if you like (I for one think that’s fair), but don’t be surprised by it; remember, the highest award for journalism is the Pulitzer Prize—named after, and established by, none other than Joseph Pulitzer.Remember, you can’t count on the media to tell you what’s true. You have to figure that out for yourself.
The far country, and the road home
When you lay me down to die . . . just remember this: when you lay me down to die,
you lay me down to live.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”As I mentioned in my previous post, Sara and the girls and I went up to hear Andrew Peterson last night, which was a very great lift to our spirits. Before kicking into the songs from his new album, he opened with this one to set the theme. It reminded me of a time a couple years ago where I seemed to be surrounded by death. That was the time when Louie Heckert, one of the patriarchs of our little congregation and also one of the sweetest spirits I’ve ever met in a human being, was attacked and killed by a rogue bull moose; if you didn’t hear that story at the time, click the links—and even if you did, click on his name anyway, because if you didn’t know Louie, that was your loss. Around the same time, one of our long-time part-time folks died out in Missouri, as did two other long-time residents of Grand County for whom our church had been praying.To top it all off, my grandpa died at the same time, and his funeral ended up being the same time as Louie’s. As I was conducting Louie’s funeral, an old family friend was leading Grampa’s; and I could not break down, for Grampa or for Louie or for anyone else, because there were things that needed to be done. That, I think, is the hardest thing about doing a funeral, and the better you knew and loved the person who died, the harder it is: in order to honor Louie properly, in order to create the necessary space for everyone else to deal with their feelings of grief and loss, I had to keep strict control on my own. That’s just how it works. It doesn’t mean that the grief goes away, just that you don’t get to do anything with it.Nobody tells you when you get born here how much you’ll come to love it and how you’ll never belong here.—Rich Mullins, “Land of My Sojourn”As hard a time as that was, the good thing was that it all happened just before Easter, meaning that we were able to respond to all these deaths with the celebration of the Resurrection, because that is God’s answer to death; as one hymn we sang that Easter morning declares, “Christ is risen, we are risen!” because in his resurrection, “Death at last has met defeat.” That is the anchor of our faith, and it’s an anchor we particularly need when the death of someone we love dearly rocks our world. It’s not just because we want the assurance that we will see them again or because we want to believe that they are in a better place, either, though both those things are part of the equation. At a deeper level, encounters with death remind us that no matter how hard we try, we really can’t make our home in this world, because we can never fully belong here; we are temporary, and the world goes on.God is at home. We are in the far country.—Meister EckhardtWhat we tend to forget, though, is that the world’s perspective on death is something of an optical illusion; in truth, it’s this world which is temporary. It wasn’t meant to be that way—it’s the result of human sin—but we live in a world which is going to be replaced. The reason we cannot be fully at home here is because this is not the home for which we were made; we were made to live with God, and we live in a world that has rejected him. Our sin, our insistence on our own way, has opened a chasm between us and God—and the tragedy is that as a result, we have created a world for ourselves that we can’t live in, a world which can never be our home. As the German mystic Meister Eckhardt understood, we have made ourselves exiles in the far country, for no matter how hard we try, our only true home is still with God.I believe in the holy shores of uncreated light; I believe there’s power in the blood.
And all the death that ever was, if you set it next to life, I believe it would barely fill a cup.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”Another of the small graces of that difficult month was the release of Peterson’s album The Far Country, from which this song comes. The album’s title was of course taken from the Meister Eckhardt quotation above, and the album is primarily a meditation on death and Heaven. As I listened to the album, and in particular to the song “Lay Me Down,” I was blessed by the strong affirmation of our resurrection hope from a non-standard perspective. The problem, really, isn’t that we die; the problem is that we aren’t at home, we’re exiles in the far country. In this far country, we die, and those we love die, and it brings us great pain; but God is still at home, and he is here as well in this far country with us, and he sent his son Jesus to make a way, to be the way, for us to get across the gap, to go home to be with him. That’s why we affirm that death has been defeated, that it has lost its sting, because by his death and resurrection Jesus has transformed it; it’s no longer the final curtain in this far country, but the door that opens onto the road back home.I’ll open up my eyes on the skies I’ve never known, in the place where I belong,
and I’ll realize his love is just another word for Home.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.—Philippians 1:21
Worrisome thought
Right now, those focusing on Iran are primarily thinking Iran vs. Israel, and understandably so. Another possibility struck me today, however. If I’m right that Barack Obama wins in two weeks, and if he sticks to his promise to begin an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, would that be enough to re-orient Ahmadinejad? Might we not see Iran wait until the withdrawal is well underway, and then invade Iraq? They would have good reason to, from both a tactical and a strategic perspective, if they thought they could catch us at a point when we couldn’t respond effectively; I very much doubt Iraq would be able to mount significant resistance on its own.
The case against Barack Obama, in his own words
Guy Benson and Mary Katherine Ham, working with Ed Morissey, have put together a comprehensive closing argument against the election of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as President of the United States; you can find it here. It covers abortion, tax policy, his judgment regarding his associates and advisors (and mentions his advocacy of prosecuting those who criticize him), his judgment regarding foreign policy, his willingness to look down on people, his willingness to play the race card, and his lack of accomplishments in office—and it’s copiously illustrated with video, mostly of Sen. Obama himself and his associates, advisors and supporters. Check it out. If you see everything he and they have to say and agree with all (or most) of it, more power to you; but you just might find he’s not the candidate you think he is.