New Blog Site

It is hard to change, but the time has come. I needed to find a new site to do some things that I could do here. Blogspot has been wonderful; however, it doesn't like Macs and I'm a mac guy since Tim Sturgeon and Ron Kirchgessner got ahold of me in 1989!

At any rate I am moving to a new site-- http://www.carsonreed.squarespace.com (see. . . . I can't even create a decent link!

Please drop by and leave your comments. The new place will offer me the opportunity to do some new and interesting things.

Thanks to all.

places to begin

"We’re at the start of a Great Awakening—a time of spiritual upheaval and religious revival.... What’s different about this awakening is that there’s very little agreement on who or what God is, what constitutes worship, and what this ritualistic outpouring means for the future direction of our civilization." –Faith Popcorn, author.

My next door neighbors are ex-Presbyterians who now are looking for a place to worship where they can embrace nature. A drive through the metro area will take you by Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques. Of course, the more subtle sources of spirituality are more likely found in malls and athletic clubs. Being spiritual can mean almost anything today. And people are looking for meaningful spiritual experiences inside of and outside of churches.

It seems that if a local congregation is wanting to be serious about letting people know about the gospel, then the burden does not lie with getting people interested in “spiritual” things. Rather, the task is more appropriately focused on how does a church make a connection with people’s spiritual interests with the claims of the Christian faith.

According to one church observer and leader, Reggie McNeal, much of the problem lies in the perception that exists in the world. “People outside the church think church if for church people, not for them.” In other words, people may not naturally turn to a church in their search for spiritual meaning. The result is quite ironic. People looking for spirituality and wanting to connect with God look everywhere but the church.

So if a church is going to be serious about connecting with people who have spiritual interests, then they will have to show that one’s hunger for God can be satisfied by engagement with the Christian faith. Most important, people will need to see individuals—and communities of people—living lives of grace and hope.

From the News Services

Actually, this came to me via Aaron Zee. . . .

170,000 people will die of AIDS in Zambia this year, according to the Birmingham News. But there is hope that that awful figure will take a different turn in coming years. As a part of Bush's 15 billion dollar initiative drugs and personnel are setting up clinics, training local health workers, and slowly changing people's attitudes about treatment. The U.S. government is focusing on AIDS in 15 nations.

170,000 people--in one country alone. In Zambia they will have their own tsunami--slow and debilitating. And with the wasting away of large segments of the population, the whole infrastructure of the country languishes.



I don't guess I need a new car after all.

Fulton County Fiasco

Brian Nichols is now in custody. The destruction and loss of human life remains. The senseless violence will not find an adequate answer.

Already in the middle of a trial for rape, he now will have numerous additional charges to address.

The "why" question raises its head and the answer, depending on your point of view, may or may not ever have a satisfactory ring. From a theological perspective we can talk about the problem of sin and systemic way it infiltrates culture and society, leaving individuals distorted. We could explore the depraved and destructive forces of poor thinking, how one poor choice only sets one up to make another poor choice.

But it all seems way too academic and disconnected. All I can say is that we live in a world that is broken. I know that sometimes every thing seems right and most things work. But every now and then we are reminded about how tragically flawed the world is. Something down deep is busted and it is going to take something bigger than the FBI or the Fulton Co Police to fix it.

Quote du Jour

"When I look back on the worries in my life I remember the story of the old man who said on his death bed that he had had a lot of trouble in life, most of which never happened." --Winston Churchill

Quote du Jour

"When I look back on the worries in my life I remember the story of the old man who said on his death bed that he had had a lot of trouble in life, most of which never happened." --Winston Churchill

Questions

What am I learning about you?

How are you working in the world?

How are you working on me?

Do I see too much of the world's ways and too little of yours?

How do I embrace my failure and still wear your clothes of grace?

Do you ever give up, especially when we seem more interested in our stock portfolio than in the 20,000 people who died today because of the lack of food or basic medicine?

How often could I see your activity in any given day?

Can I live with a deeper sense of your redemptive work in the world?

Will you allow me to join you in what you want to do?

Reformation

I finally took the opportunity to watch the recent movie, Luther. I was impressed. Sitting with my children around we kept stopping the movie and talking about so many of incredible points in Luther's life and in the sweeping sets of ideas that were flowing in the period of time.

I was reminded, as the movie rolled, about the high cost of change. People, values, cultural attributes are all up for grabs when a new vision is presented. The upheaval in society and church that Luther's teaching presented eventually reshaped the world. However, a price was paid.

I wonder, that in small ways, if that is what holds churches (and people) for that matter back from embracing gospel more completely. Embracing the gospel would lead us to have to pay a price. Our customary ways of doing things; the way we do church (which is for many of us the one really stable thing in this world), our perspective about countless persons who have never really heard gospel (their version of Christianity is the tawdry caricatures of media), and so much more would be altered.

Why is it that we have a challenge to find a few people to watch a few children once a month for a nursery or have people upset at the prospects of changing something about the way we do things to make worship more available to the unchurched? Why do people prefer the way we have done things over striking out for some new adventure for Jesus?

The answer lies, as it did in Luther's day, with how serious do we take living Word. Is God for real? And are we willing to pay the price?

Peterson on Spirituality

Mark Galli recently interviewed Eugene Peterson for Chrsitianity Today (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/003/26.42.html) on spirituality. As usual Peterson's simple wisdom shines.

Question: "Many people assume that spirituality is about bcoming emotionally intimate with God."
Peterson: "That's a naive view of spirituality What we're talking about is the Christian life. It's following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordianary stuff.

The promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it's like any other intimacy; it's part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you ddon't feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn't primarily a mystical emotion. It's a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency."


I guess I'm thinking that to call people to a deep personal walk with Jesus may just be doing a person a deep disservice. Particularly, if we allow contemporary searches for intimacy to define the spiritual life. As Peterson will go on to say, intimacy often means getting something from someone else. And a whole lot of people are running around today looking for someone or something to deliver a load of meaning and completeness. What they end up with is nothing less than more emptyness.

Perhaps it would be more appropriate and authentic and realistic to propose a way of life that leads to meaning and purpose. To pursue the spiritual is more about work and life and study and prayer and the passing of time; it's less about ecstasy and intimacy. Or, to put it another way, God's love shows up in ordinary ways in our lives. And we had better get used to looking for it on Monday afternoons and Thursday mornings. The annual church retreat isn't the standard by which we measure spirituality;being faithful day in and day out is.

A little more on witness

Tom Long's recent book, Testimony, (thanks to Richard Wright) is really a continuation on this theme. Long's thesis is that the idea of witness is really a whole way of living in the world--our speech, our worship, our conduct, our work. The idea is not new with Long. He sounds this note in his earlier work, The Witness of Preaching.

Telling, and living, truthfully is foundational. As Long recounts early in Testimony a Flip Wilson story: "As the comedian Flip Wilson used to reply when asked about his religous preference: 'I'm a Jehovah's Bystander. They wanted me to become a Jehovah's Witness, but I don't want to get involved.'" Here is the critical moment. The crisis of decision rests here. Does this Jesus stuff make sense? Do I embrace it?

I know what a lot of people think about this. It is a matter of trust and all too often trust has been blown. Why trust in some line, some story when I've been taken down some primrose path of illusion before. To really believe and practice the absurdity of the gospel story takes a leap of faith.

That's where church comes in. The church, as a community, becomes the safe place for us to wrestle with our doubts and to practice our faith. Sunday becomes the day to practice this Christianity stuff--the words, the values, the actions--with other Christians. And if we do our practice faithfully, maybe we will do better with our trusting and with our truth-telling on Monday.

Talk about witness only raises the stakes for the church. Its not enough to hold a set of doctrines. The idea of witness means we'd better be living it. Because if we aren't living Christianity (no matter what we may hold as doctine), there is no Christianity present.

Witness

Keith Brenton raises important and probing questions in his comments yesterday. In a word, my response is "witness."

Contemporary Christians are not the first people to be faced with the puzzlement of living out Christian faith in a pluralistic world. The earliest Christians lived in a world of great diversity and in an environment where Christianity was only one of many expressions of religion or truth. The way of the those ancient professors of the Christian faith was bound up in "announcing," "declaring," or "bearing witness" to the reality of their encounter with Christ.

To be a witness simply means that you tell the truth about what you have seen. Ancient Christians understood something to be true because they had experienced it to be true. So they declared it; they announced the news. That truth was not only spoken; truth was lived out. To bear witness was not merely a declaration about Jesus; it was a life lived in consistent with the truth. One might could say that truth is not truth at all until it alters a life in some distinct way.

Too many contemporary Christians have bought into a modern (non-biblical) notion that truth is ultimately about facts. That may be the case for scientific inquiry; however, in theological and philosophical terms, truth has less to do with facts and more to do with relationships, with covenant, with an engagement with God. "You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free," says Jesus.

Do facts free us? "Knowledge is power," says the modern world. Yet it is not the knowing of facts that transforms human lives according to the Christian faith. Rather it is knowing and being known by the living Christ that transforms and alters human fears and failure.

All of this means that as Christians that we need to rethink our apologetic and our language. Brian McLaren makes some suggestions in some reading I was doing earlier today (from his book, The Church on the Other Side). Here are his five suggestions:

1) Words will not stand alone. It is words plus deeds.
2) Words of trugh are not less important but "they will be few and simpler and softer if they are to have power. We now suffer from a glut of words, trumpted loudly."
3) Words should offer mystery, not remove myster.
4) Words should be "less religious, more common, more earthy."
5) Story will be a significant way of conveying truth.

(For those who want to explore more deeply the idea of engaging pluralism I would strongly recommend Lesslie Newbigin.)

So the church is called on to simply bear witness to the truth of Jesus Christ. And we should become acquainted enough with other traditions to see the seeds of "truthfulness" that do exist within other traditions. But that doesn't mean we become wallflowers on one hand, nor do we become hatchet bearers like some radio talk show host.

If Paul could say to Christians in the cosmopolitan city of Rome that he was not ashamed of the gospel for it is God's power to usher in salvation, then neither should we be ashamed either. So we simply tell the truth--and we live it out.

Enough for now. . . . (thanks Keith for the prompting)