December 2010
41 posts
Favorite Blogs of Friends
As a wrap up to this year, I’m posting some of my favorite blogs that belong to friends. Many of these folks you’ve probably not heard of, but I think they have quite interesting things to share.
Today, I want to highlight the blog of my friend, Bethany Grace Lomas. Bethany is a friend of Sacred Roots, who came and spent some time with us this summer. For the past few months, she has...
climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro
This is a repost from Jenna’s blog. Jenna is involved in Sacred Roots and is currently traveling in East Africa to visit her parents (who are there for a year). Being unwilling to just go and visit as a tourist, Jenna wanted to find a way she could help the community while she’s there. Her post below outlines what she settled on and how you can join her. If you’re looking for an...
“The issue isn’t emasculation and it’s not solely with men. The issue is with...”
– Eugene Cho on the growing emphasis on masculinity in the church in a post reflecting on MMA outreaches. I think it’s important that he emphasizes our tendency towards extended adolescence.
an overdue review: Chasing Francis...
I received Chasing Francis for review a while back and recently realized I never wrote a review for it.
Chasing Francis is a novel about a pastor whose faith begins to fall apart and how he sees life breathed back into it as he embarks on a pilgrimmage to learn about St. Francis.
The novel is an easy read and a bit of a page turner - I had a hard time putting it down, and ended up reading the...
Favorite Blogs of Friends
As a wrap up of 2010, I’m going to be posting some links to blogs of friends that I regularly enjoy reading. First up today is Rob Fairbank’s blog, The Drum.
Rob is president of Christian Associates International, the missions organization that I work with. He tends to have interesting posts about theology, especially as it pertains to birthing new churches in North America, Latin...
Thou Shalt Tweet In Church? I think not
I came across this article today on how we should all tweet in church. Count me as a nay sayer.
I’m not going to present some complex argument about presence in church and all that(I started to but I punted… too much to say!) Instead I’ll just talk as somebody who follows people on twitter.
When you tweet all your interesting nuggets from church and conferences, I tend to...
How to put the Christ back in Christmas
Here are some particularly Jesus-y things that might be a good start if we’re serious about putting Christ back in Christmas (and not just waging war on stores that say “Happy Holidays”)…
good news for the poor
freedom for prisoners
recovery of sight for the blind
setting oppressed free
proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor
These were the sorts of things...
How (not) to put Christ back in Christmas
YIKES! I never realized Christmas was about America….
“I had a dream last night that you were standing on banks of the east side of the...”
– Eric Blauer on my facebook wall | This might be the most awesome facebook post I’ve received in quite a while. And I’m quite profound in other people’s dreams apparently!
on the end of a year and repentance as preparation...
It’s hard to believe that we’re 2/3 through December, and it’s almost Christmas! It really seems like the latter half of this year has flown by. I’m reading through a manuscript right now. I can’t really talk about it other than to say it’s about views on marriage and singleness in the church. I’m finding the reading quite cathartic, and it’s making...
“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor,...”
– Stephen Colbert - December 16th Colbert Report | Let’s avoid the politics behind this and take it as a personal challenge. If you follow Jesus, what are you doing to care for the poor the way that Jesus is calling you? Too often we let the political debate distract us from the core principle:...
WatchHere’s a video that my friend Bethany made for Global Family. Bethany is in India right now spending some time with Global Family and the stuff they are involved in. I’ve previously highlighted some pictures she’s taken while in India. Global Family is a non-profit that does rescue and care work with abused, oppressed, and abandoned children in India and Nepal, with the angle of...
“The way to Christ is first through humility, second through humility, third...”
– Augustine of Hippo | HT: CAI Facebook Page
“The Church does not need brilliant personalities but faithful servants of Jesus...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer | HT: Brendan Ashley
This quote highlights well my feeling about the whole leadership conversation that’s been happening in the missional blogosphere. Here’s the link to what I wrote, in case you missed it.
biblical libertarianism
One of the interesting points made towards me during the Glenn Beck facebook debate from one of my blog posts last week was about Christ’s call for giving to be one of individual choice. The argument was Jesus called individuals to give and not for legislation, because then we are forcing people to give.
This is a fine argument by itself. It is through our western, individualist lens for...
leadership as service
There’s been some great conversation around the church blogosphere lately over the issue of leadership. Scott McKnight started it off here. Then Bill Kinnon posted something followed by a gentle corrective by Darryl Dash. And then today I see David Fitch has posted on whether leadership is biblical. And I hear rumor Bob Hyatt is going to blog about this too.
In the spirit of conversation,...
national championships and comparison of flawed...
I’m not a big fan of the Oregon Ducks, but I do live in Duck territory, so I hear quite a bit of talk about them on the radio. And as one might imagine would happen when a team is getting ready to play in a national championship, there’s been lots of chatter about the game on the sports talk stations.
I was listening to 95.5 the game today though and found the discussion being had...
the message and interpretive decisions
My friend Jeff wrote a post on how he is going to use a Message bible to do a bible read through. I applaud you Heffe! I wanted to offer some feedback on one part though, and I couldn’t remember my wordpress login to leave a comment, so I figured I’d post it here.
In the post Jeff says:
While I’m still in Genesis, I’ve found that the translation is a bit easier to read and still...
women in ministry, pointless church and once upon...
Hey everybody, I don’t have a lot of time to write today, but I wanted to share some links to a few things that I read in the blog world this week that I found really interesting.
Women in Ministry - Check out this video of NT Wright addressing the issue of women in ministry -
HT: JR Woodward - click the link to also find a link to a quite helpful paper where Wright addresses in depth...
Community and the Meaning of Christmas
I love the television show, Community. I think it might be the most clever sitcom on broadcast tv. If you’re not familiar the show follows a group of friends in community college together, but that just serves as the backdrop to spoof a number of different tv genres, and films. So I was quite excited to see that they did a spoof of claymation Christmas specials this week.
Caution, this is...
Horse Brass and Church Planting
Not a lot of time to write a substantive post, but I wanted to throw a quick shout out for a great night getting to hang out with Andrew Jones (tallskinnykiwi) at the Horse Brass. Bob Hyatt, Caleb Crider and Rick Meigs were all there along with some others. Great to talk about church stuff and to hear Andrew claim that Bob Hyatt killed the emerging church :) , amongst some other much more...
Blessed are the entitled? →
Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes I wonder if the best thing that could happen to this country is for Christ to be taken out of Christmas—for Advent to be made distinct from all the consumerism of the holidays and for the name of Christ to be invoked in the context of shocking forgiveness, radical hospitality, and logic-defying love. The Incarnation survived the Roman Empire, not because...
in Christ there is no longer red or blue
I know on facebook at least I caused quite a stir with my Glenn Beck comment from earlier and I didn’t do a good job of clarifying what it was I’m against, which is namely splitting from a church because you might disagree with someone’s politics. My belief is that allegiance to Christ runs deeper than allegiance to political system and it’s not good for us to divide...
“I think the core point here is this: Christian communities should be...”
– Jamie Arpin-Ricci in the facebook comments on my blog. | Jamie does a fantastic job of articulating what I was attempting to do but unfortunately entrenched my attempt in too much of a political stance. Check out Jamie’s fantastic blog, A Living Alternative
on repentance
on a different note than my last 2 posts(but also related in a way… everything is in my mind!), here is an excerpt from my sermon notes from the talk I gave with the Sacred Roots community on repentance. We attempted to explore repentance as being about aligning ourselves with the Kingdom and a way of life that we desire, in an attempt to move our minds from thinking of repentance as a...
In light of the current facebook commentary on my last post, I’m going to make a few points.
I’m not arguing for government imposed redistribution in any sense other than we already have it. Taxes are a form of redistribution that’s been built into the system for quite a while.
My larger concern is that we don’t get to split with other Christians because they disagree...
somebody warn Glenn Beck
about John the Baptist’s socialist plot:
“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.
John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”
from Luke 3
evangelical logical fallacy: appreciation as...
In commentary on a friends blog about the whole stupid Mark Driscoll and Jay-Z thing, there’s a logical jump that a lot of folks are making that just doesn’t make sense.
That is, the inference is if someone enjoys lyrical genius or the style of music, then one must tacitly accept everything that that artist is about. In the case of Driscoll and Jay-Z that means that to recognize...
fauxliness: the art of swallowing a camel
What if holiness isn’t about what we think it is?
I commented yesterday about how a lot of people had gotten up in arms about Mark Driscoll mentioning listening to Jay-Z, but that sort of occurence isn’t anything new. How often is it that we’ve heard other Christians slam somebody for the music they listen to, the company they keep, the tv shows they watch, or the language they...
“…it’s impossible to use the Palinism quoted above to say ‘therefore what’s...”
– Tom Wright with a fantastic theological reflection on the subject of “American Exceptionalism” | HT: Scot McKnight
