Click here to read the Bible Belt Blogger article on the 50th Anniversary of President Eisenhower calling out the 101st Airborne to enforce the integration of Little Rock's school system.
You know my love for Pearls Before Swine, and today's strip is great. There is a spiritual application there that we need to pay attention to.
This is not a rhetorical question. It's one that I have been thinking about for a while now (seminary will do that to you) as I look at the different ways that the church views the finished work of Christ. Was His purpose: 
This view does give Satan a great deal of airtime. But the centrality of the intervention of God into the affairs of man to free him from Satan’s bondage shows the compassion and love of God for us. Christ came to not manage sin by restraining Satan, but rather to mark the beginning of the end of Satan’s reign by conquering death, the one thing Satan’s deception ushered into the world. Adam’s fall brought death into the world, and Christ’s resurrection ended death’s dominion over us.
Or just some members of the black helicopter, chemtrails, government is out to get us crowd, you should send them this. They can find shelter there.
For the past couple of months, I've been in a bit of a melancholy funk. Nothing huge, but just unsettled about the way things are going. Maybe this is the mid-life crisis now that I have hit 40, but I just don't know.
As we mark the 11th week of the water damage project, we have progress. Today they presented us with an invoice and took their key box off the house. All we have left now is to complete the refinishing of the woodwork and install the carpet, which should happen in early October. Praise the Lord. We very much look forward to getting our house back.
Is there any link between the struggling state of Michigan’s economy and the University of Michigan football team’s shocker loss to Appalachian State, called “the greatest upset in the history of college football” by sportswriter John Feinstein? Call it a metaphorical stretch, but I think there is. Here are some commonalities:
--Insularity. Why were the fifth-ranked Wolverines, with their glorious football history, playing an NCAA Division 1-AA team? Sure, majors often warm up with a patsy. But dropping down a whole division smacks of an unwillingness to benchmark against one’s peers.
For years Detroit’s Big Three automakers used to benchmark only against each other and not against the Europeans and Japanese. If you spent any time in Detroit in the 1970s through the 1990s, you discovered how insular it was. My colleague Jerry Flint, who has forgotten more than I could ever learn about the car business, says Detroit needs car guys running car companies. I’m not so sure. Outsiders like Alan Mulally at Ford and Bob Nardelli at Chrysler might be just what Detroit needs now.
Here’s another contributor to insularity. A perk for Big Three brass hats is use of a new car, always washed and perfectly maintained. It’s easy to think your own cars are the best in the world when your personal chariot is kept in showroom condition.
--Lack of Innovation. A favorite memory of mine is the 1972 Rose Bowl, when underdog Stanford kicked a last-second field goal to beat highly ranked Michigan, 13 to 12. What made the upset delicious was the complaint of Michigan fans that Stanford didn’t play “real football,” i.e., Stanford passed the ball and used trick plays, while Michigan, predictably, ran the ball. As if innovation were somehow unfair.
Similarly, the Michigan economy is locked into the Old World era of union labor and high taxes. Unions protested the new technique of flexible manufacturing pioneered by Toyota and embraced around the world. Michigan’s high taxes created a vicious cycle: Investors and entrepreneurs left the state, thus eroding the tax base, thus fooling politicians into raising taxes on those left behind.
--Loss of Talent. The Wolverines and the Big Ten had one huge advantage during the 1920s–60s. Most Southern colleges were segregated. African-American high school stars from the South would head north for college. Today they don’t have to, which is why the Southeastern Conference has become the country’s top football league.
The state of Michigan has suffered similar losses of talent: Google cofounder Larry Page; Sun Microsystems cofounders, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy; and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, all have Michigan roots. All departed.
By now you might be ready to depart this column because I’ve stretched the football metaphor too far! Okay. Let’s move on and look at what Michigan must do to revive its economy.
--Benchmark From the Best. While it might be useful to study hot spots like Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley, Michigan’s more relevant lesson can be found in nearby Minnesota. The Minnesota economy hums because it is remarkably diverse. Its anchor companies span the range from agriculture and food products (Cargill, General Mills) to medium tech (3M) to aviation (Cirrus Design) to health care (Medtronic) to retail (Best Buy, Target) to a cluster of tech startups in the southwestern suburbs of Minneapolis. Such diversity protects Minnesota from industry slumps.
As in Michigan, Minnesota is not lightly taxed. But in Minnesota the taxes don’t all go to waste. Minnesota’s public schools consistently rank among the top in the nation. Biking trails, wellkept lakes and other public amenities make life nice for its middle class. Corruption in government is rare in the Gopher State. Of course, if neighboring Wisconsin were to lower its taxes, Minnesota would have to do the same or feel the pain.
--Practice Ichironomics. Think Detroit has it bad? Consider the fall and comeback of Spokane, Wash. In 1974 Spokane hosted the World’s Fair, its theme being “Celebrating Tomorrow’s Fresh New Environment.” President Richard Nixon opened the fair, but his and Spokane’s fortunes soon went south. The 1982 U.S. recession hit Spokane especially hard. America recovered by early 1983, but Spokane, dependent on old industries such as forestry and railroads, struggled throughout the 1980s.
Today Spokane is ranked by FORBES as the 20th-best business city in the U.S. How did the city do it? My colleague Mark Tatge profiled Spokane in our Apr. 23 issue. Tatge wrote: “Cheap electricity, cheap land and favorable taxes are luring entrepreneurs from the coasts. … Five years ago the economy began to surge. Washington State has no personal income tax, no corporate income tax (corporations pay on gross receipts only) and relatively low property and sales taxes. Electricity from the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Spokane rivers is 50% cheaper than in California.”
Spokane, like Minneapolis-St. Paul, refuses to bet the economy on one or two industries. Rather, it practices what one city booster calls “Ichironomics. Like the Seattle Mariners’ center fielder, Ichiro Suzuki, we try to hit singles and doubles. We want to improve the overall conditions for small businesses, not chase the large employer.”
Good lessons, Michigan. Now, about those Wolverines …
Read Rich Karlgaard's daily blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules or visit his home page at www.karlgaard.com
This article in Leadership Journal really struck me, partly because it goes against the grain of the past 30 years of Protestant Christianity. It is about a new pastor at a church that aspired to be a mega-church and never made it there. They built the building, but for reasons you can read in the article, it didn't happen.1. To be honest about our current condition. This can be hard for a church with such a storied past.
People kept asking: Why have our long-term members left? When are things going to get back to the way they were? What's wrong with us? (Translation: Why have all of these people and businesses left?)
Such questions can squelch even the most sincere brainstorming sessions. The hard truth we've tried to communicate through all of this is that the glory days of the past are exactly that—past glory days. We're not to try to return to them. Garnett will never again be the church it once was. We have to do the difficult thing of letting go of our former glory in order to allow God to do a new thing in us.
2. To relinquish our rights as members to a church building that we are no longer able to pay for by ourselves. The Garnett Church of Christ building is becoming the Garnett Event Center.
Already, several other churches are using our facilities on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon: a Messianic Jewish community, a charismatic Hispanic church, a rock church called Rolling Stone, and a new church plant.
Throughout the week, a number of other events, some church-related and others not, are held at our building. Not only is the rental income from these events helping to pay the bills, but it's also giving us a hospitable presence in our neighborhood. (Translation: No longer will we have a dominant position with a dominant industry fueling our state coffers. We will have to go out and compete for each and every business that we hope to lure here.)
But not without some difficulty. Everyone, myself and all ministry staff included, must reserve any classroom or meeting space equally with those in the community who are using or renting space.
The way we're trying to see it: this building no longer belongs to us. It belongs to our community. This isn't easy to explain to a charter member who's been helping to pay off the building for 20 years!
We've started a bi-lingual preschool that has grown to 50 students, half Anglo and half Hispanic. We've projected beyond our ability to speak Spanish, putting "Bienvenito" (Welcome) on the front doors and asking Spanish speakers to help us translate for different events.
We made it our goal to pray for every family that comes into our weekly food subsidy ministry and to invite them to serve with us.
3. To recognize that the most life-giving activities of our church aren't necessarily going to happen in our facility. Church leaders in event-driven and personality-centered churches tend to gauge success by headcount, the number of people who show up. This is what leaders talked about, and subsequently members tended to judge success by how pews and collection baskets were filled.
With Michael Frost (author of Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture) and Alan Hirsch (The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church), we have been forced to ask new questions: What if events of church, personalities of church, and Sunday assembly went away? What would be our view of the Christian life? What would we do as Christians, and who would we be?
We're working with the local fire department to arrange Spanish classes for them so they can better serve and communicate on daily calls. We're partnering with Habitat for Humanity and our city to build and renovate houses and help people to get back on their feet again.
We are learning to see our community, and individuals, not as needing handouts but as valued people who can together with us serve our Lord and our community. (Translation: Not everyone is going to move all of their operations here. We may have to settle for a tech center and the manufacturing will be done in a lower-cost environment.)
4. To learn to be missionaries in our own culture. Across the street from us, Fire Station 27 is the busiest station in the city. Fire Chief Michael Baker said, "This is a big church and the neighborhood is waiting … waiting to see what you are going to do for this community."
This comment has been forcing us outward, while we are at the same time redesigning our space for community groups to enter. Church Shepherd Robert Garland replied to Chief Baker that "we want to be a better neighbor to you and this community." (Translation: Treat the people we have more hospitably instead of crying about what we used to have or didn't get. Don't stomp on the businesses that are here as we chase our next "fix" of a large employer that is using us as a negotiating ploy.)
And really, that's the first step to becoming missionaries: getting to know our neighbors' needs.
Todd Hunter of Alpha-USA articulates well what we want to do: "I want to help people become the cooperative friends of Jesus, seeking to live lives of constant creative goodness through the power of the Holy Spirit for the sake of the world."
That's what we're determined to do: equip our congregation to be Christ to neighbors, co-workers, and family members, rather than trying to coax people into signing up for every church program possible and burning families out with church involvement.
We've had to ruthlessly ask of each ministry venture, "Is this an energy drain? An event without purpose? A building-centered program that determines success by how many populate this building?"
Anything aside from a Christ-centered approach is out in favor of teaching one another how to be incarnational presence of Christ, in practical ways in our jobs, neighborhoods, PTAs, and sports teams.
I know it isn't all directly applicable, but it does ring true for our elected officials, and many pastors and leaders of churches that are not where they dreamed they would be.Jesus said, "Feed my sheep. 18 I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." 19Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me!"
20Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, "Lord, who is going to betray you?") 21When Peter saw him, he asked, "Lord, what about him?"
22Jesus answered, "If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me." 23Because of this, the rumor spread among the brothers that this disciple would not die. But Jesus did not say that he would not die; he only said, "If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?"
24This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.
25Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
If you are Peter, the prospect of crucifixion is not something that he relished. Jesus was making the point that it isn't about him, or Peter, but about God, who sent Jesus and called Peter. We would do well to heed that advice. I know I would.
It seems that the Michigan Legislature is not a fan of Jim Croce songs. In their Keystone Cops rendition of how to fix a state's ailing budget, they have fallen back to the old mainstay of raising taxes to fix their overspending problem. It seems that they are of the belief that everything the State of Michigan does is worthy of keeping and therefore, we should stick it to the taxpayers to continue status quo ante. So, in spite of the worst economy in the U.S which is going backward during a growth period for the rest of the country, they are going to stick it to those of us who are still here, and tell those who want to bring business here to pony up to support their system.
Sex Slavery is going on near where you live. Just last year we had busts in Detroit of people holding women and young girls in sexual slavery. It's not just in Asia my friends. Sadly it is in those "Oriental Massage Parlors" you see along the highway. It is in the inner city, and in the suburbs. In the heartland and on the coasts.
Deacon Raphael has started an interesting thread on The Ooze about Michael Vick and child abuse. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why we are obsessed with the animal abuse perpetrated by Vick and his companions.
Following The Great War (now called World War I) the victor countries commemorated the cessation of hostilities on Remembrance Day, which is Nov 11, the day the armistice was signed. In the current hostilities in which we are engaged, I don't believe there will be an armistice signing. Unfortunately this war is ideological, not national, and the combatants are scattered among a number of countries.
The dead-tree edition of today's Monroe Sunday News has a nice article on how to avoid financial junk mail. Unfortunately it is not available online. The gist of the article is that 1) many people are tempted to take out more credit than they can handle; and 2) these pre-approved offers are a identity theft risk.
You become the Michigan football team. One week after a humiliating loss to a Division 1-AA school, they get pounded by Oregon at home. I credit Bishopman for calling me out on this yesterday. It appears that the modern version of football has eluded Michigan's coaching staff. Every time they see a spread offense and a mobile quarterback, they struggle. It's been that way for nearly 10 years, since Donovan McNabb did them in when he was at Syracuse.
Sure Michael Vick has pleaded guilty to gambling and some dogfighting charges. He will probably get a year or so in prison for the interstate portions of the crime. He is now the poster-boy for this issue, but it is far more pervasive than you might have other wise thought. The Detroit Free Press as a story on how pervasive it is in Metro Detroit.
is dying. Sadly, it is not long for this earth. It seems that time has caught up with the 3-cylinder engine. So I appeal to you for assistance. If you come across a car that is in reasonable shape for a couple grand, drop me a note. I'm looking for a 4-door sedan that isn't a pig on gas. I can't be real picky in this price range, but you never know.
The American War Wagon
I would love a low-rider, but I'm not sure the rest of the family is on board with that.
Dr. James Kennedy has gone on to meet his Lord. He pastored the same congregation for what seemed like forever, and preached from his heart standing firmly on scripture. His Evangelism Explosion helped millions better share their faith, and the kingdom advanced because of it.
This one left me slack-jawed, which isn't easy. Let me see if I have this straight. 45-year old woman loves kids, regrets that her kids are growing up. So she is happy when her daughters become pregnant at 14, twice, and all live together on public assistance. No this isn't the South or Appalachia. It is the United Kingdom."I've wanted kids since I was 12," she said.
"I was sick of babysitting other people's and wanted one of my own.
"Gavin, my boyfriend at the time, and I weren't using contraception, and I was aware I might get pregnant. But I knew I'd be happy if I did."
She continued: "I never found it hard being a young mum.
"Both my children were good babies, so I always got enough sleep.
"And I wasn't worried about it changing my lifestyle. I never did anything but stay in and watch TV anyway.
"There's nothing to do around here, so having kids keeps me busy.
Sometimes I don't appreciate God's sense of humor. In July, we decided to put our TV on vacation hold (a cool DirecTV feature) until October 1. We realized we were watching too much TV as it was, and a break would be good for all of us. Little did we know that our TV would be unavailable until then.
Take a look at this article on Charles Sheldon. I'm in the process of reading In His Steps, and I love it. It's not great literature, that is true. But it is thought-provoking and inspiring to think of how the world would be different if people actually lived their lives based on the question "What would Jesus do?" It follows the story of the fictional town of Raymond which is transformed when a dying stranger wanders into a church service and asks, in a roundabout sort of way, the question "what would Jesus do?"
For those who have not seen the movie Groundhog Day, it is about a man who gets trapped in a cycle of reliving the same day over and over again. He is the only one who realizes this, and at first has fun with it. By the end he is trying to kill himself.
Professional wrestlers may have used steroids.
Since we have a long weekend, I offer you some reading on how pervasive this issue is in the church today. It is a destructive mentality that I have caught (and hopefully arrested) in my own thinking. The issue is insidious because our American focus on stuff and self-gratification then leads into the church, where our local congregation is reduced to nothing more than a purveyor of religious expression. If I'm dissatisfied with this expression, I'll go down the street and "buy" their style.
Following up on yesterday's diatribe on worship, I began to think about the consumerism question, which is at the heart of all of this. We want what we like, when we want it. That is American Christianity in a nutshell, I believe. Which is truly sad.
The next time someone (maybe even you or me) goes off on "worship" (when they mean musical style preferences) print this article and give it to the person to read. It is a sobering look at what worship really is, and what it isn't. While we quibble about the kerfuffles that bother us, brothers and sisters in Christ worship in conditions we care not to imagine.At a worship service I attended, my attention was drawn to the enthusiastic worship leader. He opened our time with prayer, asking God to meet us and draw us into the Lord's presence. Then he stood with eyes closed and the band playing. He lifted his hands and offered his joyful praise to God.
That's when I really took notice, for as he sang so rapturously, he kept stepping on the feet of the people behind him. Not just once or twice but repeatedly throughout the singing. No apology. No acknowledgment of his "tromping in the spirit." He was just praising God while oblivious to his neighbor.
I have no doubt the worship leader was just so caught up in his own experience of worship that he lost track of others. That's exactly the problem.
For all of our apparent passion about God, in the end much of our worship seems to be mostly about us. We presume we can worship in a way that will find God but lose track of our neighbor. Yet it was this very pattern in Israel's worship life that brought God's judgment. Biblical worship that finds God will also find our neighbor.
What is ironic and especially pertinent is that many debates about worship are just indirect ways of talking about ourselves, not God. Our debates devolve into how we like our worship served up each week. It's worship as consumption rather than offering. It's an expression of human taste, not a longing to reflect God's glory.
If we worship Jesus Christ, then we are to live like Jesus. In fact, Jesus says in Matthew 25:31-46 that our worship will be measured by how we have lived.
The heart of the battle over worship is this: our worship practices are separated from our call to justice and, worse, foster the self-indulgent tendencies of our culture rather than nurturing the self-sacrificing life of the kingdom of God.
Paralyzed in the pews
I do not stand outside of this sweeping critique, not for a moment. Nor does the congregation I serve. Many of us are simply busy with our daily lives. Apart from major headlines, few international needs go deep into our hearts. When we do pay attention, we often experience information overload and an unending sense of need and desperation when we hear of places like East Timor, Darfur, sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh, Haiti.
We admit that people may be suffering in the world. But we conclude that the suffering of "those people" is not what it would be for us; that dying of starvation in a refugee camp in Sudan is roughly the same kind of suffering experienced by the street person we encounter on the way to work; that it is beyond our grasp to respond effectively to suffering on a global scale.
Part of the malady is this tragic rationale: that in the face of global need, if we can't do everything, we can't do anything. We are paralyzed, inert.
Meanwhile our suffering world waits for signs of God on the earth, "with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God" (Rom. 8:19). God's plan is that we, the church, are to be the primary evidence of God's presence. Every continent needs solid signs of that. Staggering statistics of land grabbing and bonded slavery, of malnutrition and starvation, of HIV/AIDS and wrongful imprisonment are rife. An enormous chasm exists between these daily realities in our world and the preoccupations of most Christian disciples in North America.
Jesus' call to "go and make disciples" must be carried out in a world such as this. The life-changing good news is God's saving love in Jesus Christ, who wants to make every person and every thing (including every form of injustice and oppression) new. That is our hope and our commission.
The real crisis over worship, is this: will God's people worship God in a way that dem
onstrates we are awake? By loving our neighbor in God's name? Will we worship the living God as he asks: "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God"?
Worship leaders may want to focus only on what seems culturally and socially immediate. But if we are to worship the Lord of all creation, the Savior of the world, then while we are checking the sound system or pondering prayers or sermons, we have to hold on to a wider vision of God's love.
The world in our worship
For several years I received each Sunday morning an e-mail from mission partners we were supporting. This couple and their three small girls were living and serving at-risk children in Cambodia. One of the only e-mails I would read before the worship service was their weekly update. I read it as a spiritual discipline, as a morsel of mercy and truth, as a reminder and a call.
I needed to lead our worship services in Berkeley with my heart freshly reminded of the realities of suffering in the world, the urgency of hearing and living out the hope of the gospel, and the joyous and costly call of sacrificial living in the name of Christ.
Each Sunday I want to serve the people in the pews right in front of me and lead them into the transforming presence of God. The issue is: what are the criteria?
Scripture indicates that the answer will be whether those who feel blessed by worship live changed lives. The evidence is not just the immediate post-service buzz but whether people are actually giving their lives away for the poor and the oppressed in some tangible way.
One Sunday I preached on Psalm 27, a remarkable psalm that vividly describes being afraid and finding God's comfort. I'm sure it was at least a "nice sermon," maybe even a good one. Later that week I attended a dinner sponsored by the International Justice Mission, a Christian organization that seeks justice for people facing various forms of oppression.
Elisabeth, a beautiful 17-year-old girl from Southeast Asia, spoke at the dinner. She had grown up in a Christian home, memorizing Bible verses, which became all the more poignant during the year she was kidnapped, forced into prostitution, and enslaved in a squalid brothel. As she spoke, she projected a picture of her room in the brothel. Over the bed where she was so brutally treated, day after day, she had written these words on the wall: "The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and foes attack me, they will stumble and fall." These are the opening verses of Psalm 27.
I thought back to the previous Sunday and my sermon on this same psalm, remembering some of the fears I had listed for those in my church. Those were real and legitimate fears, but none of them were as consequential as those Elisabeth faced. I had this image of a silent movie going through my mind, listening to Elisabeth while envisioning my congregation gathering for worship on a random Sunday. While we were busy trying to park our cars in Berkeley that morning, a task "so totally horrible," as one person said to me recently, girls like Elisabeth were coming to worship in their settings too. She came before God in her windowless room in the brothel. We did so in our glass-walled sanctuary.
If we see Elisabeth's story through the lens of the biblical narrative, we realize that love for God ties us to love for Elisabeth. Not because her story provokes sentimental compassion, but because her life and circumstances make a claim on those who worship Jesus Christ.
Worship like the world depends on it
True worship reclarifies the purposes of God and our part in them. False worship, which can be found as much among God's people as elsewhere, leads to distorted mission.
Take power, for example. Power is one of the most profound gifts of God and therefore a prime target for false worship; that is, to take power and misuse it for something other than what honors God and his creation. Elisabeth's suffering, and much of our own, has to do with an abuse of power. Faithful worship helps us clarify and limit human power in our hearts and minds. False worship never does that. False worship sets the terms of injustice, a distortion or aberration of power. Faithful worship asks whether we are seeing and living in God's reality or in the fiction created by our own fallen lives. When we or anyone besides God assumes the central role, life whips us out of alignment.
The fallout of false worship distorts our sense of God, ourselves and others, leading to injustice and suffering, pride and entitlement. The damage continues relentlessly. No wonder God gets angry at Israel, or the church, when this distortion is perpetuated by the very people he calls his own. This is the burning message of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos. This is a battle line in the worship wars that really matters to God. Whom do we fear?
Another distortion that false worship fosters is this: the loss of God's intended witness to love and justice. God intends that from true worship will flow lives that are the evidence of his just and righteous character in the world. False worship instead leads to false representation: we may speak in God's name but fail to show God's life. The prophet Isaiah says that when God's people do this, we lie about the God we represent (Isa. 5:20-23; 29:13-16).
God intended for those in Abraham's line to be blessed to be a blessing. Their relationship with God was for their own sake but also for the sake of those who through them (and us) were to "taste and see that the LORD is good." The world is to see and know something about God through the lives and actions of faithful worshipers.
Worship that reorders
On a trip to India, I talked to a pastor about reading. He said, "If I save for four months, I am able to buy one Christian book through a discount I am offered. I have never traveled outside India, but I have heard that sometimes people in America buy books and don't read them." He asked with dismay, "Is that really true?" I mumbled something to cover my embarrassment, as I thought of just such books on my shelves.
For us, it's not a matter of if we have bought books we don't read, but how many. It's not whether we get our children inoculations, but whether we can keep track of the paperwork to prove it to the schools. It's not whether we eat, but how much we eat beyond what we need or even want. It's not whether we have a bed, but what color and theme the bed coverings will be. It's not whether we have a chance to hear about the love of God in Jesus Christ, but which ministry or church or medium we like best. Some people in our own country don't have these choices (a scandal in itself). But most people in America do. Meanwhile, millions in the Southern Hemisphere and in Asia have never lived a single day with choices like these.
This disparity between economics and justice is an issue of worship. According to Scripture, the very heart of how we show and distinguish true worship from false worship is apparent in how we respond to the poor, the oppressed, the neglected and the forgotten. As of now, I do not see this theme troubling the waters of worship in the American church. But justice and mercy are not add-ons to worship, nor are they the consequences of worship. Justice and mercy are intrinsic to God and therefore intrinsic to the worship of God.
Our worship should lead us to greater mercy, to costly acts of justice, for those who are the least seen, the least remembered, the least desired.
Vigorous biblical worship should stop, or at least redirect, our endless consumerism, as our free and faithful choice to spend less in order to give away more. Our community reputation, as Scripture suggests, should be that the church comprises those who pursue justice for the oppressed because that is what it means to be Christ's body in the world. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that it's enough to feel drawn to the heart of God without our lives showing the heart of God.
Mark Labberton is pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California
Excerpted from The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice (Zondervan, 2007), used by permission.
Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal.
Sean Casey hit his first triple since 2004. It is no coincidence that it happened on the night of a lunar eclipse. If you have ever seen Casey run, you will understand. Slow doesn't even do it justice.
This is a sad story. It's always sad when a couple divorces. It tears at the social fabric, destroys lives, and shakes the faith of those around them. But when the couple are pastors of a 23,000 member church taking in millions of dollars, it is greatly magnified.Michael Chitwood, whose financial services company devised their compensation package, said he recalled they have taken an annual salary as high as $1.5 million collectively, though most years it's closer to $600,000.
They were approved to take up to $3 million collectively, said the president of Chitwood & Chitwood of Tennessee.
Perhaps the most complex part of their divorce, being handled by Holland & Knight law firm, will be dividing up the assets, debts and business interests.
The couple's home on Bayshore Boulevard has an assessed value of $2.22 million. They have a land trust that includes two Tampa houses with assessed values of $144,800 and $257,835. The New York condo is valued at about $3.5 million.
Their multimillion-dollar ministry includes a private jet.
Randy White has said much of their wealth comes from more than 23 successful business ventures, including real estate and his role as a pitchman for Great HealthWorks' Omega XL fatty acid pills.
His main company, RAW Realty, is listed on his company Web site as being housed at 100 S. Ashley Drive, Suite 1180, in Tampa, but a law firm occupies that space. The state lists the company as being located at 2511 Grady Ave. in Tampa, which is the church address. The phone number on the Web site and listed with the state is disconnected. E-mails sent to the Web address were not returned.
White said this week the company is "very much active" in real estate, residential acquisitions and other ventures, but he's pared it down to himself and one assistant.
Citation from TBO.com story referenced above.
Was just reading about Mammon this morning. Mammon = wealth, and we can't serve both, according to our Lord. I think this just reinforces his 2000 year-old point. I understand we all have bills to pay, but that does seem excessive to me. I think heeding the words of John Wesley on from Sermon 50 would be wise in this situation:
Maybe they should make room in the box for me.
I come to you today from the Millenium Laundry, where I am babysitting the washers. We had quite a storm yesterday, and are without power. The plan was to do laundry on Saturday, and DTE Energy says we may be without power until Sunday or Monday. So.... Deb and the girls are running errands while I watch the washers. We are very fortunate. There are a number of large trees and branches down throughout town, and several of them landed on homes, porches and fences. All we have is no power and some water in the basement, for which we are grateful.
Verse:
John 3:16; Jn 3:16; John 3
Keyword:
Salvation, Jesus, Gospel
With Operators:
AND, OR, NOT, “ â€
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