In our discussion about the Culture Driven Church, I keep coming back to one major question. You should know how questions affect me. Questions are the hobgoblins that niggle my brain. On more than one occasion my good friends have heard me begin a two hour conversation with the words, “There’s this question that’s been bugging me.” Questions are the launching pads for inspiration. And often I find if we let some questions simmer and bubble without rushing to a judgment, they tend to yield some useful insights. So here’s the question that been crawling up the side of my mind throughout the last year.

“What Christian critiques of the culture are truly scandalous?”

By “scandalous”, I don’t mean which ones fit the Pulitzer Prize nominated National Enquirer’s definition of scandal. I mean those aspects of our proclamation to the culture that are stumbling blocks that non-Christians (more…)

As I mentioned last week, Jonathan Miles and I will be developing a series in this blog on how the church and culture have gotten to be where they are today. Nothing happens in a vacuum and as the old cliché goes, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

I ran into one of our supporters this week and we got to talking about this project. They wanted to know if this would only be a historical treatise or is there another reason that we are working on this? Is this mostly to point out the problems in the church and culture or to also offer solutions? Those are valid questions and concerns. I thought it would be good to try to paint a general picture and set up a framework of understanding and direction. (more…)

Joy and I were somewhere between Amarillo, TX and Fontana, CA when I opened checked my email and a friend had sent a link to a 9 ½ minutes political cartoon from 1948 titled. Make Mine Freedom. It was fortuitous because even as I opened the cartoon link Joy and I were listening to George Orwell’s novel 1984 and the description of Engsoc (English Socialism), New Speak and Double Think. Orwell was not opposed to Socialism per se; in fact he was a member of the Labor Party which was Socialist. However, he was concerned about what he saw in the future if left unchecked which would be totalitarianism. The political cartoon has a snake oil salesman selling “Ism,” which is guaranteed to give you what you want. One individual warns the others to beware and taste it before they buy it and what they discovered in their taste test was that “Ism” leads to totalitarianism. The political cartoon and Orwell’s book were both done in 1948. Both shared the same “Future Sight” of what happens with extreme government intrusion. Both were challenging their audiences to beware of the consequences of their decisions.

Most of us get involved with a variety of things without considering the end result, or what Scripture (more…)

Earlier this week I received an email promotion of Lovell-Fairchild’s DVD CONVERGENCE: RIDING THE SEA CHANGE IN U.S. CHURCHES

It seems to be sounding the death Nell of the small group era of church growth:

That change shows strongly in small groups, for 40 years the backbone of the church and in some 93 percent of US Churches (according to Beyond Megachurch Myths from Jossey Bass Publishers). The aging of small groups (”Group Movement Showing its Age,” Washington Times, 2-15-09) stands in contrast now to what younger seekers don’t like about them — including “reading assignments and Q&As” over relational learning.

As most of our Journal readers know (and many of the Crux readers as well), we have been concerned about the state of the church for a long time. In actuality, this concern even predates our getting into ministry and forming MCOI. Oddly enough, my essential concerns remained largely the same even as the church went through a variety of pop Christian trends. In my early Christian life the churches emphasis seemed to be in trying to figure out ways to get non-believers into its doors in order to let the pastor present the gospel. Even then Joy and I were round pegs in square holes. We knew lots of non-believers outside of church and were focused on leading them to the faith whether or not they ever stepped foot in church, let alone our particular church. It seemed to Joy and I that evangelism was something that was to happen (more…)

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton recently said ”Never waste a good crisis.”. That seemed to bother many and without getting into the politics of the moment I am thinking there is some merit to her statement. Last week I mentioned the article The Coming Evangelical Crisis which was written by the Internet Monk, Michael Spencer. Others have commented on this article as well. Phil Johnson at Team Pyro responded with Evangelicalism Down the Drain? James White at Alpha-Omega responded with The Coming Evangelical Collapse and even Mark Galli at C.T. got in on the discussion with his piece On the Lasting Evangelical Survival. Although Galli takes a bit of a different view for the most part many of the discernment ministries are in agreement with Spencer’s conclusion although not with his solutions. As I have had time to think (more…)

If nothing else this has been an interesting election cycle. Both major parties had a huge field from which to choose their candidate. But as Duncan McLeod of the clan McLeod declares in the opening narration of The Highlander,“In the end, there can be only one.” Of course, that is equally true of the Presidential election itself. At the moment the nation seems about equally divided between the candidates for the two major parties. One candidate represents age and experience (too much age and experience for some) and the other represents youth, energy, charisma and new ideas. The division between these two candidates extends into the Evangelical church as well. Emerging Church leaders such as Brian McLaren have formed the Matthew 25 Network to entice Evangelicals to vote for Barack Obama. In July of this year headlines read Conservative Evangelicals Discuss Backing McCain. In August the Evangelical Left was ecstatic as one of their very own, Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz) gave the closing prayer at the DNC meeting the evening of August 25th. Randy Alcorn who is friends with Miller and was also personally excited about voting for Obama has since rethought his position and decided Not Cool: Obama’s Pro-abortion Stance, and Christians enabling him. Many on the Evangelical Left have turned a blind eye to the killing of innocent unborn toward what they consider more pressing issues. One of the issues they are aligned with Barack Obama on came up through an exchange between Barack Obama and “Joe the Plumber”. Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher is considering (more…)

Over the years John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopalian Bishop and member of the Jesus Seminar has come out with a number of books such as Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile, and, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes among others. His basic views are that we have misread the Bible by taking it in its historical, grammatical context and as a result misunderstood the Bible. It isn’t about sin which resulted in separation from God and redemption which He provided through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. No, according to Spong, it is about Jesus being a political revolutionary and the Apostle Paul being a closet homosexual. Since Spong and the others in the Jesus Seminar operate outside of biblically sound churches most have paid little attention to them. However, emerging church leaders have similar views and recruit from within the Evangelical church. A case in point is Mike Gorman’s de-privatization on the “Reclaiming Paul the Apostle of the Emerging World” blog site.

Gorman declares: (more…)