Another busy period, and plenty of sickness has delayed blogging. There’s a couple of works in the post, as well as a return to the Sola series I started months ago! But here’s some stuff around the net that I’ve been reading and watching for your edification and entertainment.
Starting with some Good Reads:
First up, the sad but unsurprising announcement from Mark Driscoll that he is resigning his position as Pastor of Mars Hill Church. I’ve been cautious about wanting to comment as it seems that everyone has an opinion on it and, as I posted last time, I think Dave Harvey’s comments back in August continue to have application even more so in these present days. The majority of those looking onto these matters are sitting in the peanut gallery (the nose-bleed section, the back row of the stadium) and if that’s not humbly informing our opinion then it should. A humble assessment is given by Trevin Wax who offers four things we can learn from what’s happened.
Back in July, Sandy Grant from Matthias Media posted a helpful article on why God doesn’t intervene in tragedies and disasters.
Biblical religion is built on the premise that God not only upholds the world he made, but also sometimes actively intervenes for his own good purposes: the parting of the Red Sea in Israel’s exodus from her Egyptian slavery, through to Jesus’ raising the synagogue ruler’s daughter from death (Mark 5:35-43).
We believe that God can do miracles. After all, he raised Jesus from the dead.
So why doesn’t God intervene to knock the insurgent’s missile off course? Even more dramatically, why not just strike the terrorists of Boko Haram or ISIS dead, as he did the Assyrians when Sennacherib attacked and besieged Jerusalem (2 Kings 19:35)?
My initial response is to ask what the results would be like for humans if God intervened and directly over-ruled every time we did something wrong or evil.
Putting it most brutally, people would be struck dead left, right and centre.
For the past couple of years a new wave of missions cultural engagement has increased in popularity: the insiders movement. Kevin DeYoung has previously posted about this mission paradigm, and a more recent guest post/interview with Dave Garner gives more food for thought. Anyone interested in overseas mission needs to pay close attention to this.
Not unlike the tensions in the early Church, the problems with IM are not just theological and methodological, but imminently practical. Let me name some contemporary kerfuffles. Will IM-ers have a Muslim wedding or a Christian one? Whom do the children of IM-ers marry? Muslims or Christians? To my knowledge, the track record indicates that IM-ers’ children marry Muslims. What type of funeral and which burial ground will IM-ers choose? The choices in many contexts are binary – Muslim and Christian. Unlike in the pluralistic west, in many such places, open syncretism has no chapels, chaplains or burial grounds.
Biblical Christianity is an outsider movement. Sincere faith very practically and poignantly calls believers out from the world, repudiates any clinging to the old, celebrates God’s gift of new identity in Christ, relishes the Church as the center of all gospel ministry, and calls the Church to shine boldly from the outside in.
Anything else is not pure gospel and dishonors the Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church. Anything else produces colossal chaos, and concocts syncretistic soup. Anything else leads people down their wide roads of unbelief.
Part of my recent full plate of ministry activity included a mission week with a team from Queensland Theological College. One comment made by the team was the surprisingly good congregational singing we had during their weekends with us. Here’s a couple of good articles on singing. First for the Tone Deaf Singer, a helpful way to think through singing:
The prosperity gospel has not produced a new generation of great Christian hymns. Neither have Positive Thinking or Progressive Christianity. There is a reason we would not expect them to. The fact is, the deepest songs come from the deepest truth. The most faithful songs come from the most faithful expressions of the Christian faith. The richest songs come from the richest understanding of who God is and what God has done.
Second, a helpful article on how to improve congregational singing from 9 Marks.
Church leaders underestimate how deliberately they must push against these cultural trends to get their church singing; to teach them that the untrained but united voices of the congregation make a far better sound than the Tonight Show Band; to teach them that singing loudly in the presence of other people is not awkward; to teach them that all our emotions don’t have to be individually spontaneous to be worthy, but that there is place to guide and conform our individual emotions to the group’s activity.
If church leaders want congregations that will really “speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19), they will have to work at it. They will have to try things that might seem strange or unnatural for people who are accustomed to sitting quietly and watching the performance on stage. Here are a few tips, many of which, no doubt, fall into the realm of prudence.
Finally, 19 creative selfies worth ‘liking’, and a graphic reminder that password length is more important than the complexity of said password.
Onto Videos:
John Woodhouse on the place of preaching in the life of the church:
7 things every guy needs to know about buying a suit. Seriously guys, pay attention to this video!
A new form of pincode theft is now readily available and so easy to do. Here’s an explanation of how it happens, and the ultra easy method of avoid it.
Summer is upon us, and here’s a neat watermelon smoothie trick to serve up at your next BBQ:
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