Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

John Piper in Brisbane…

Everybody’s favourite tweed jacket wearing preacher – John Piper – is coming to Brisbane. August 25. The Brisbane Entertainment Centre. Don’t waste this opportunity. You should totally book now. I’ll be there.

Here is the page to watch, book, register, and tell your friends about.

Do it.

Who is John Piper? John Piper has written about a million books. Good books. About what he calls Christian hedonism. He is a minister and scholar in the states. He looks like this:

Pretty awesome and grandfatherly.

He runs a great website called Desiring God where you can get billions of free resources.

He seems like a lovely guy, and I’m really looking forward to being in the same room as him.

Here’s a video.

You can register at the qtc website. Do it. Go on.

Typographic Scrabble

I’d like one of these Scrabble sets if ever they become a reality.

So why don’t you head along to designer Drew Capener’s website and let him know you’d like one via his little form.

Helvetihangers: Hang your clothes in typographic style

? + { + ] = a coathanger. In Helvetica.

From Alegre Industrial (their blog is in Spanish).

Back to front clock

I love this. This is the back of the clock. No. It’s the front of the clock. The batteries are the hands. I wish to buy one. I’m not so sure I can. Somebody build it for me…

From Gihawoo.

Musical score – the sheet music for Mario’s coin grab

Da-doiiing. That’s my onomatopoeic attempt at making the sound Mario makes (in the original Super Mario Bros) when he picks up a coin.

If you’re more interested in accurate musical representations, I have a special treat for you. The sheet music.

Amy sent me this… It’s from tumblr somewhere.

The first rule of type club…

The first rule of Type Club is you do not make posters about Type Club.
The second rule of Type Club is you do NOT make posters about Type Club.
If someone says stop, goes limp, taps out, the critique is over.
Two typefaces at most in a composition.
One project at a time.
No Comic Sans, no Papyrus.
Sketching will go on as long as is has to.
If this is your first night at Type Club, you have to Type.

From I Like Type.

Vintage Christian Marketing: How not to a tract people to Jesus

Get it. These are “tracts”… I’ll be here all day. These are from a blog dedicated to such ethereal ephemera called Old Time Religion. They remind me that I should finally start my “bad Christian books” blog – I’ve got about thirty books on my shelf that I haven’t blogged yet, and I still haven’t finished reviewing Help Lord the Devil Made me Fat.





Jump up (over cars) for Jesus


Image Credit: Daily Telegraph

Because it’s not the proclamation of the gospel alongside a life of love that is going to win people to the gospel (not to mention the work of the Holy Spirit, and God’s sovereign will)… it’s jumping over stuff on motorbikes.

Meet The Jesus Team.

“Jumping for the King was founded by Aaron Ramsey, a Christian minister, in May 1999. In obediance (fully sic) with the great commission,
Matthew 28:18-20, JFK stages motorcycle stunt shows along with other high energy activities as a vehicle for sharing the messege of the saving grace of Jesus Christ with large numbers of people simultaneously.”

Read more about this ministry in an article in the Augusta paper, the Jesus Team’s local rag…
This is a different group – but I assume they’re similarly impressive:

Shirt of the Day: Furious Fowl

Pretty cool real life Angry Birds design – available on Threadless.

Gary Millar on Preaching OT Narrative (Liveblog)

Gary Millar is back at QTC, and he’s talking us through preaching OT narrative in our preaching lecture today. He’s cool because he knows U2. Well, he knows the Edge’s parents.

Four Obstacles to preaching OT

1. Familiarity – we all think we know what the Old Testament narratives mean – because we’ve been through Sunday School and learnt about the characters and the “moral” lessons of the stories. We’re not so good with the theology of the OT narratives.

For example – Joshua 2 – what is it about?

The majority would say that it’s about the miraculous way in which God saved Rahab, which is an element of the passage – but it’s almost a footnote when compared with the disobedience and ungodliness of the spies – who when entering the promised land head straight to a prostitute, and when given an opportunity to speak about God ask “are you going to save our lives”… the main thrust of the chapter isn’t Rahab, it’s on the spies.

When we come to this narrative, and we realise people know this story, we need to remember that their main focus is going to be on Rahab – because that’s what they’ve been taught.

People already think they know what the Old Testament means.

2. Perceived irrelevance

People think the Old Testament is obscure and obsolete. The only Bible reading that ever got a round of applause at the end of it was Nehemiah chapter 3. It’s a long and boring list of insignificant names. In the context of Nehemiah it’s a crucial chapter. Some people, the nobles, thought they were above the rebuilding of the wall. It has huge implications for the book. But we read it and say “this has got nothing to do with me”… sometimes that can work well, sometimes people sit back and say “there’s no way he can connect this to us today” – which gives us an opportunity.

3. Genre – we don’t know what to do with stories

We treat all these stories like they’re one of Paul’s epistles. The problem is that often OT Narrative is one story – like the book of Ruth – not a series of messages. But when we’re preaching the narrative we break it up into pieces. Chapter 1 of Ruth becomes a story about sad women. Which has nothing to do with the point of the book, which at the end of the book is about preparing for the coming of a Messiah.

4. Time – limited time to prepare, limited time to talk

So what do you do with a story that is really long? The Samuel narrative – from Israel asking for a king, to Saul becoming king, is really long. How do we cover it all? There are two problems – we’re probably not familiar with all the details of the story – how many commentaries are you going to read? Two or three. If you engage with that many, that’s a good week. That’s ok if you’re engaging with a short pericope in the New Testament. You go to 1 Samuel 8-11, and you’ve got sixty pages to read through, and the text is huge. Simply to read it in English takes forever. Handling it from the pulpit is difficult. You could just read it. And your time would be up.

If we followed Haddon Robinson’s approach to preaching narrative, working out the characters etc, not only would we have no time to do anything but preparing our sermons, ministry wise, we’d also never see our families.

So…

Five Simple Rules for Preaching

1. Read what it says, not what you always thought it said.
Example – Daniel 1 – is really not about vegetables. They have a purpose in this story, but they aren’t the purpose. Daniel 1 is about setting up Daniel in the king’s court.

2. Learn to feel with the story

Gary quotes from this article by Roy Clements.

“In this respect we must listen humbly to the criticism that expository preaching has been too wedded to rationalistic modes of interpretation. The intention of God in Scripture is certainly to impart objective knowledge of himself but it goes far beyond that. In addition to informing the mind, God seeks to address the will and the feelings. He may wish to encourage or to warn, to praise or to challenge; he may wish to make us weep, or laugh or frown. The purpose of the imperative ‘rejoice!’ is not just to impart objective knowledge about joy but to make the reader feel joyful!

Any Bible exposition will have failed if it locates the intellectual content of the text, but neglects to communicate the emotional texture in which that content is embedded. Good exposition invites the listener to feel with the text as well as to think about it.”

Look for hints, pregnant pauses, what’s left out, the unexpected, mood markers…

You’ve got to get people into the text. Standing beside Daniel as he prays in Daniel 9. Get them to feel with Daniel. Don’t take them away from the text to make them feel by analogy. We don’t want to manipulate people. How does Daniel feel at the end of the prayer? Desparate. It’s not a model prayer, it’s Daniel’s emotional response to learning that spiritual exile doesn’t end with the physical exile.

The best way to help people to read the Bible properly is to read the Bible properly, and to preach it.

The hardest narrative books to deal with are the longest.

Understand the way stories work – Neb isn’t described as a pompous king, but the way chapter 3 of the book unfolds it’s clear that he’s pretty full of himself just by how many people he surrounds himself with in court. We don’t need subtitles in movies to spell out “this is a pompous man” (Me: we do, however, have musical cues to frame a narrative – perhaps we should put music to the passages in our heads as we work through the story…).

Remember just because something is described doesn’t mean it’s prescribed – so when Nehemiah pulls out everybody’s hair we’re not to make an ethical judgment about hair pulling, we’re to understand the frustration that is driving his actions.

3. Zoom out as far as you need to

Get the whole story – don’t make a sermon out of Joshua 1:6-9 where the young men are told to be courageous. See it as part of the broader story. We underestimate the death of Moses. Joshua’s need to be strong and courageous isn’t about entering the land, so much as dealing with his own people.

Don’t be afraid to preach really big chunks. Genesis 38-50. It’s a long story spelling out one basic principle. That God used the evil acts of Joseph’s brothers for his purposes.

Question:What would you say about drawing ethical principles from the text?

Answer: I don’t have a problem with that. Because they are there. Sometimes they are made very clear from the story. But they’re always the minor point – but we get into problems when we focus on the minor thing rather than the major flow. This is the last resort for busy preachers, minor points are better than no point…

Big picture is important. Understand the driving force behind the narrative.

Question: Isn’t there a problem of reductionism if we reduce a book to a big idea and ignore all the other bits – aren’t we ignoring divine revelation by summing everything up in a big idea and preaching it

I would say that understanding the big idea is paying attention to, and respecting revelation. Which we’ll cover in point 4.

Understand the point of the details that seem odd – like the Levitical laws – where the point might be – it’s really important to take God seriously.

4. Make sure you keep pace with the story

There’s a lot of stuff going on at the start of 2 Samuel, and then you come to 2 Samuel 7. The story has been rolling on, and then bang. You get a massive event. And then you’re back into the chronological “this happened, then this happened” rolling out of the text. We should move at the pace the story does. See how the threads of 1-6 move, preach them. Then because chapter 7 makes a big deal about one event, make it important.

5. Preach the story, not the detail

The message of the text should be the message of the sermon. Get the message of the text right, don’t bring your own agenda or favourite parts of the text into the spotlight. Daniel’s prayer life isn’t the focus of the book of Daniel, it’s about the sovereignty of God and the transition out of exile.

The story of Deborah in Judges isn’t about women in leadership. We have to make sure the main message of the talk is the main message of the narrative.

Question: How much Bible do you read on the Sunday morning?

Answer: We’ll focus on the key “jump out” section, or extracts, with somebody giving the flow of events before and afterwards.

Cocktail Infographics in 3D

You might remember the Engineer’s Guide to Cocktails… well, this is a nicer version.

More here (where you can buy it as a poster). Via FlowingData.

How to be a Ninja using only a T-shirt (and mystical kung-fu powers)

Yes.

Via ChurchCrunch.

A hair razing event

I was craving steak all day. That’s where it started. You could say my trip to the supermarket to buy eggs for breakfast set the ball rolling, because that’s where I saw them. Two succulent pieces of eye fillet. Just the right sizes. One slightly bigger than the other (I am more than slightly bigger than my wife). Perfect. I had to have them. They became mine.

They sat in the fridge all day. Looking at each other, and their neighbours. The Beans. The Beans too, were destined for the fry pan. With a little butter, and some pepper.

Sometime in the early hours of the evening, you could say they were at sixes and sevens, the minute hand and hour hand that is, the steaks made their way to a dish. Where they met Olive Oil (not to be confused with Popeye’s girlfriend) and Rock Salt. Their demise at the hands (or teeth) of mastication was imminent.

Perhaps I was distracted by the thought of chewing on a delicious piece of barbequed steak, perhaps I was pondering the lack of blogworthy material filtering through my “Publish Now” button. Who can say. All I know is that for a moment, a long moment, between turning on the gas bottle, opening up the valves on the barbeque, and lighting a skewer to stick between the fronds of the grill, I thought “I can smell gas, but it’s airy and open out here, so it shouldn’t be a problem”… thoughts can be so misleading. The faggot alight (well, the skewer, unlike commercial radio I’m ok with using a word that has multiple meanings – because that’s what Dire Straits was singing about. Sticks with jewelry and makeup. Millionaire sticks.). My thoughts turned to introducing flame to gas. Which turned out to be a more volatile proposition than I planned – sending a ball of flame into my face. I shut my eyes. I smelled burning hair. I ducked and dived. Coughed and spluttered. And then went into some sort of shock, before making my way inside to confess my adventures to my wife. Who had been asleep. I surveyed the damage in the bathroom mirror – my previously almost invisible eyebrows were now almost more invisible, if that were possible. My eyelashes were but a shadow of their former selves. And my carefully nonchalant attempt at a beard was now half as substantial – which is to say not very substantial at all, though more stinky. My fringe, slightly puffier than the rest of my hair at the best of times, was now puffier, and shorter by half, than the rest of my hair.

So next time somebody, even if its the little voice inside your head, says “don’t turn the gas on 45 seconds before you light the match” – learn from my mistake. Don’t turn the gas on 45 seconds before you light the match.

Party like a Presbyterian

If there’s one thing Presbyterians like it’s a party.

So if you’re a Presbyterian who likes to party you should get a hold of this slightly awful Christian rap

Here’s a promo video. This is all the sample I needed.

Tumblrweed: 3eanuts

Gary found/posted this gem. 3eanuts. Peanuts cartoons with the third panel removed leaving the characters in some sort of existential crisis where the punchline has no joke. Reminiscent of Garfield minus Garfield, and incredibly brilliant.

Love it.