Articles I’ve Found Interesting
Go to web-jesus.com and be amazed…. Here’s just a small snippet “Own your own personal Jesus internet coordinate. Leave a testament to your faith.” I found myself both laughing and horrified as I read the write-up on this. (HT @peterrollins)
I’m sure that the folks who made this are good hearted, but man it feels like Jesus junk at it’s online worst.
Speaking of Your Own Personal Jesus, here’s the Johnny Cash recording of the song(originally by Depeche Mode).
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In a comment from heffe on my last post, he quoted John M. Perkins, who said “we have overevangelized the world too lightly.” I think that this idea is really important in thinking about whether or not proselytizing is spam. Perkins emphasis on overevangelizing too lightly is helpful, because it helps us realize that we can turn the Christian message into spam. Many of our contexts are at least vaguely aware that the church is about this story of Jesus dying on a cross, and resurrecting, and that because of it we can be born again. What I find helpful about Godin’s stance in the quote from my previous post is that it helps us to realize that if we take a spam sort of approach to the Christian message, we risk trivializing our message.
Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase “the medium is the message,” and it serves in this case to help us understand something about the way we convey our message. There is another phrase which is very different than McLuhan’s, which is “the methods change, but the message remains the same.” If McLuhan is right, this second phrase is incorrect because the methods reshape how the message is understood. So, the impersonal, no context with a person approach to evangelism actually sends a different message(whether or not it is intended) than a relational, contextual approach would. The stance that we take when talking of faith shapes our message, if we are aggressive or being peaceful or even just allowing the other to dog our beliefs.
Now this is true not just of religious proselytizing. Advertising is proselytizing as well, and maybe a good reflection for Christians is to look at advertising and products and ask which sort of approaches to that seem most faithful to the way of Christ. Although somewhat tangentially related, blog friend, Jason Coker, has a great post on thinking about the church’s use of media and some critiques to keep in mind.
To sum up the question of whether or not proselytization is spam, my response is that it depends. I am unwilling to say that it is, but I think a non-personal, non-relational approach very well can be.
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I thought today that I’d put up some links to a couple of blogs that have series right now that I’m following and interested in.
Tyler Braun, fellow Portlander and a student at the seminary I graduated from, is doing a series of blog posts on the Lord’s Supper, which look really promising. You can check out his first one here. Bonus link: My friend Paul Metzger had an article posted on Out of Ur contrasting communities united around the coffee bar and the Lord’s Table.
The other link for today is to Kester Brewin’s blog. Kester is doing a series throughout December called “Advent(ures) in Incarnation,” and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his posts so far.
That’s it for now. I’ll be back with a post of my own soon.
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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve wrote anything of substance on the blog, and as such it feels like I have a need to explain myself. I had been writing about issues of Christianity and wealth, I was planning on a few more posts exploring teachings in the New Testament and early church about wealth. I got really sick the week I was planning on doing that and have been trying to get back into the swing of things since then.
I’m not going to have time to visit all the verses and quotes I wanted to, but there are two quotes that I’d like to put forward as a thought about how the early church approached Jesus’ teachings about how we handle our money. Both of these quotes are from St. Augustine.
“Failure to share one’s surplus with the needy is like theft.”
“The surplus goods of the rich are the necessities of the poor. When you possess surplus goods, you possess the goods of others.”
Both of these quotes from St. Augustine reflect a Christian mindset about money that I don’t really hear from Christians today. Augustine viewed the riches of wealthy individuals as being provided as an opportunity to care for the poor. I cannot think of many examples of preaching today that would put forth this idea, although I do know a number of Christian Financial minded people who talk about how Christians can amass wealth, and I can almost get the impression that we are more willing to talk about the surplus of the rich being used in a way that might someday trickle down to the poor, than we are to speak of wealth as the provision for the poor. It is this mindset that leads me to advocate living simply, because most of us can live more simply than we do currently and have more money with which to be generous.
It’s easy for me to launch into criticisms of the rich and how I think it’s tough to remain rich if you take these Christian ideas seriously. I too many times build a false dichotomy between the intentionally poor and the arrogant wealthy who amass their wealth for themselves. It’s easy for me to point out the flaw in that sort of rich, which is about self and earning more and more money for their own purposes. I’m pretty sure that Augustine would say that they are robbing from the poor to give to themselves(to turn the Robin Hood phrase of robbing the rich to give to the poor). But the wealthy person who realizes that their wealth has been given to care for those who are less fortunate, that’s the type of rich I can get behind.
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