Last week, Jonathon rightly pointed out in last week’s blog Christian Scandal (the good kind) that:

… all of these distinctly Christian stumbling blocks have been questioned by the Culture Driven Church. Grace and Hell have long been disparaged. Grace has either been watered down into universal salvation or thickened with concepts of good works. Hell has been disparaged by even venerable dons of theology. Evangelism has been abandoned in favor of a social gospel and Brian McClaren’s religous pluralism. And sexual ethics have been simply and quietly ignored in favor of discreet trysts or transformed into political debates. All of this in an effort to remove the skandalons that offend.

As we have continually emphasized through the series on the Culture Driven Church that nothing happens in a vacuum. We got to this point through processes in the past which bring us to where we are at today, in culture and the church as well. A physical analogy may be helpful. (more…)

 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…)

The last presidential election was interesting, of great concern and steeped in religion. God, it seemed, was in use by all candidates. On the Republican side, the candidates came down to a choice of three. Mitt Romney (Mormon), Mike Huckabee (Evangelical) and John McCain (Raised Episcopalian; now attends a Southern Baptist church). On the Democrat side it came down to Hillary Clinton (United Methodist) and Barack Obama (Trinity United Church of Christ, Afro-centric rooted in Black Liberation Theology which at its core is Marxism wrapped in Christian sounding terminology).

Evangelicals seemed to be split into four segments which I think made all the difference in the outcome of the election. One segment, the Emerging Church represented in Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Donald Miller and others in the merging Evangelical Left. They supported Barack Obama because (more…)

A friend, Robin Phillips, sent an article that he has been working on which I thought would be more appropriate for the Crux. I also thought at this juncture it would be good to look at President Obama’s first 60 days in office. Prior to the election I had expressed some of my views in Barack Obama, “Joe the Plumber” and Donald Miller, Who Am I Voting For? and a few others. So far, President Obama has done pretty much as I had expected only at a greater speed than I have anticipated. For all the Evangelical Left’s claimed concern about the defenseless and the poor the first one’s Obama has gone after are the defenseless preborn. One of his first acts was to provide Federal funding for abortions overseas. On the other end of the spectrum his “stimulus package” includes extensive health care rationing for Seniors:

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

He does not seem to be fairing well on the moral front. Robin Phillips comments on the economic front with:

SPEND, SPEND, SPEND: OBAMA’S SOLUTION TO THE ECONOMIC CRISIS (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…)