Rhett and Link are the guys who travel the US making local commercials – they also make pretty cool videos. Like this stop motion production featuring 222 shirts.
It’s spectacular. I love the eggs.
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.
What would Steve Jobs Do
This is probably a good question to ask yourself if you’re a product designer or an aspiring billionaire – it’s not going to get you anywhere in the long (eternal) term like the original FLAW (four letter acronym wristband). But it’ll only cost you $5.
Jesus was way cool*
You know. Jesus was pretty darn awesome and he hung out with all the movers and shakers in first century Jewish society – so we should totally do the same with our ministries… no wait. That’s not right. An Acts 29 church planting screener has pointed out that a number (all is a number) of the planting candidates he’s interviewed have the same missional passion – the desire to see cool people saved.
It’s amazing how many young pastors feel that they are distinctly called to reach the upwardly-mobile, young, culture-shaping professionals and artists. Can we just be honest? Young, upper-middle-class urban professionals have become the new “Saddleback Sam”.
Seriously, this is literally the only group I see proposals for. I have yet to assess a church planter who wants to move to a declining, smaller city and reach out to blue collar factory workers, mechanics, or construction crews. Not one with an evangelsitic strategy to go after the 50-something administrative assistant who’s been working at the same low-paying insurance firm for three decades now.
His conclusion is just as on the money.
It could be that we’re simply following in the footsteps of the church growth movement that we’ve loved to publically criticize while privately trying to emulate – we’ve just replaced Bill Hybels and Rick Warren with Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll.
In the Australian context it’s probably not so bad – but it’s just something to remember. Jesus loves city people, young professionals, farmers, retirees and the homeless. Our ministries should love those people too.
* Check out the King Missile song by this name if you haven’t already discovered it.
Choose your own adventure?
Can we ever choose our own destination or are we just pawns in a grand game of chess at the hands of an omnipotent deity. Are your choices your choice? Or are they the inevitable product of nurture and nature colliding. It’s a question that literally keeps young theologians and philosophers up at night.
I’m not actually sure where this originally came from – it just popped up in deli.ci.ous. But it made me laugh.
Wedding invitations taken to new level
I’ve posted some cool wedding invitations here in my time – none cooler than this one. A couple of geeks programmed their own Marioesque invitations and sent them out on CDs. Their friends had to play through the level in order to receive the details of the nuptials. They could choose to play as either the bride or groom.
Here’s a video of the invite being played (and you can download the actual invitation (link to .exe file) if you want to invite yourself along)…
Via here.
I can’t go past this video
You’ve no doubt seen the new OK Go Rube Goldberg music video by now. If not, here it is…
Watching it yesterday on Amy’s blog I was skeptical about its origins. I thought it might be a bunch of videos stiched together or some sort of CGI. But it appears to be legit.
Here’s the story behind the film clip on Wired.
Put a doll-up in every recipe
These Russian Doll measuring cups designed by Fred and Friends are cool.
Cuffdrinks
Carrying a bottle opener on your key ring is a great way to subtly let other Christians know they can comfortably bring alcohol to your house when you invite them round for dinner. If you’re not comfortable with such an overt method of communication perhaps you’d prefer these bottle opening cuff links.
Filtering the feeds
Some people (well, Dave Bailey who now has his own blog) have complained about their feed readers being overpowered by my posts. To help I’ve decided to point you all in the direction of the following options – you can, if you like, subscribe just to the feeds of individual categories – or you can subscribe to this feed I’ve just created using RSS mix that excludes the Curiosities, Coffee, and Sport categories and just has the serious stuff about my life, college, Christianity, tips for communication and any “cultural” insights I might come across.
Here’s the new megafeed.
Lucky you. Here are the links to the feeds for individual categories:
Consciousness
Curiosities
Communication
Culture
Christianity
College
Sport
Coffee
The Dawkins Delusion
I went along to see Richard Dawkins in Brisbane tonight. The results were unsurprising. I agreed with most of what he had to say – everything except his starting assumptions and conclusions.
He started by telling us all that our lives are incredibly improbable. That we should never take them for granted, that we should never take our existence for granted, and that we should marvel at our very unlikelihood. Then, he suggested, as his latest book indicates – evolution is the greatest and only show on earth.
Our improbable beginnings began with an improbable meeting of improbable matter that expanded improbably in a way that created stars and then life and then us. Somehow it makes more sense to believe a void created complexity than to believe a God did. But we can’t believe that a void created a God (especially the God of the Bible) who would eventually create a world… Once you start speculating about origins all the options seem possible to me.
It is, of course, improbable that anything like a God could possibly have been involved in the process – because for Dawkins as soon as you can describe the process the notion of an author is redundant. He ridiculed the God of the gaps (which is ridicule worthy) and a bunch of other strawmen. Then he closed with a question and answer session.
He was funny, engaging and most concilliatory. He just isn’t really engaging with any Christian belief that includes the ability to synchronise Christian belief with scientific truths, and he doesn’t seem to think that the Christian lay person is capable of anything but a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of particular passages. He did, in question time, suggest that the enlightened “bishops and archbishops” of the Christian world believe that God may have had some role to play in the start of everything but has then stepped back. Curiously missing the point of the incarnation.
He had a swing at anyone who believes anything on the basis of faith, authority, or feeling (there was one other factor – I forget) – and suggested that evidence is where it’s at. Which is fine. But he doesn’t really have anything to say to those of us who are believers because we think the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus is compelling. Like a modern day Don Quixote he spends most of his time tilting at windmills to the cheers of an equally delusional crowd. Until he starts actually engaging with the facts his efforts to discredit his opponents are risible.
I think in the process of answering questions from the floor (particularly one about whether our close relationship to the ape world had any moral implications) he may have suggested it was morally ok to breed with the entities that link us biologically to the apes – the only problem is that they’re extinct.
In question time a couple of people asked about the evolutionary future of humanity – I still want to know how feasible my shirt is – will we one day turn into shape shifting alien robots? Or self healing immortal mutants with retractable claws? I sure hope so.
Gary Millar on Application
Gary’s tips on application
- Know the context of the passage and the context of your people.
- Know the people you’re teaching the Bible to – people keep changing. We have to keep reading the culture.
- We have to know individuals and know the challenges facing every stage of life.
- “We need therefore to know every person who belongs to our charge… we should know deeply every person in our flock.”
- We have to be able to apply the gospel to teenagers, to grandparents… to every member of the flock.
- Start where people are rather than where you think people ought to be.
- We need to be prepared to spell things out – and keep spelling things out. We only want to have one thing to say – the gospel. And we need to be prepared to keep saying it. We don’t need to be original.
Our challenge is to preach and teach for people’s good and God’s glory.
Questions to ask when applying:
- Is my teaching applied specifically enough?
- Do I know my culture and context well enough?
- Do I know the individuals in my church well enough?
- Do I know the unique challenges facing the individuals in my church well enough?
- Do I care enough to find out?
- Is my speaking health promoting or damaging right now?
Gary Millar on Preaching (from Titus)
Looking at Titus 2.
You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine.
False teaching wrecks people’s lives.
“You and I look at things very differently. For you things are black and white. For me there are shades of grey.” – a former minister to Gary.
Like what? Like the divinity of Jesus and every other core truth of Christianity.
Paul’s main concern is not for doctrinal orthodoxy (everyone teaching the same thing) but for the application of doctrine through preaching. The nuts and bolts of Christian living.
He doesn’t say make sure your doctrine is sound – but make sure you speak in accordance with sound doctrine.
It’s not a question of Titus’ doctrine but a question of his preaching. Speak in a way that fits with sound doctrine – his concern is with the damage caused by false teachers rather than what they are teaching.
2v1 introduces the subject of teaching that doesn’t damage but gives health. Calvin says “teaching that can build men up in Godliness.
Paul is saying “we need to learn to teach the Bible wherever we are in a way that promotes spiritual help.”
Calvin says “if we leave it up to men to decide which teaching to adhere to they will never move one foot.”
No other passages that spell out the responsibility of preaching like this one here.
Impactful teaching is almost always preaching – sometimes the preachers have broken every rule in the book and have bad models – but the common thread is the powerful application of the gospel.
Gary Millar on how to preach a series on a book
- Read the book. Read it and keep reading it. Reading the text will save you from getting into trouble later on. Have a go at the big idea of the book.
- Sit down and break up the book.
- Work out your big idea for each passage.
- Work out how you get each passage to Jesus (Biblical Theology).
- How am I going to preach the gospel from this part of the Bible.
- Set up a table with your break up of the book as rows, and your bid idea, Biblical Theology and Gospel (NT passage) laid out. Make sure you’re not doing the same Biblical Theology model two weeks in a row or you’ll bore people.
Some further bits of wisdom
- Have your Kid’s program in synch with teaching program… but this means you’ve got to sort out your big ideas in time for your Sunday School teachers.
- It’s nice to be ahead in your thinking. Do the prep thoroughly prior to the week you have to preach.
- How to test a big idea – read back over the passage and if there are a bunch of verses that aren’t covered, start again.
- Sometimes there’s a major idea and a minor idea – it’s almost always right to focus on the major idea.
- If you’re not clear in the preparation stage you’re not clear on Sundays.
- Usually if people are confused I assume that it’s my fault. Normally it’s because I’m underdone in the planning stage.
Gary Millar on preaching God’s wrath
You can’t preach the Old Testament faithfully while avoiding the subject of God’s judgment. Especially in the current age where the idea that the God of the Old Testament is “evil”.
Bonus Bit – David chopping Goliath’s head off is an echo of, and an allusion to the story of the Philistines capturing the ark and it causing their idol to fall over until its head falls off.
Apparent injustice may in fact be a case of not knowing all the facts.
To make sense of the cross we need to understand that God is:
- Infinitely angry at sin
- Infinitely irrevocably committed to justice
- Staggeringly creative and innovative.
The God of the Cross is breathtakingly holy, passionately commited…
Without the OT – and in particular these stories of judgment – we can not have any idea how holy God is, or the depths to which people sink, or how important it is for the God of the Bible to deal with sin in a way that is fitting. We can not hope to understand the cross without it.
If we ditch the nasty bits we are ditching the holiness and justice of God. These stories are there to teach us that God is not tame – that he does things that shock us.
It is not our job to apologise for God’s behaviour.
God’s actions are explained in Romans 3.
19Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.
21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
Bizarrely, we culturally think that our treatment of the planet reaps just rewards – seeing causation in our actions – and occasionally predicting our own painful demise – but we will not afford God the same courtesy. Gary referenced the Day of the Triffids and this post from an Irish friend.
In the two episodes (which were rather a drag unfortunately), we got lots of warnings about what happens when you interfere with nature, namely that nature will eventually inflict its wrath on you. Come to think of it, this was a sort of Wrath of God story with nature standing in for God.
In fact in the last few years there have been several ‘Wrath of Nature’ movies; The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Day After Tomorrow to name but two. In both movies, and in this latest version of The Day of the Triffids, we are led to believe that we deserve what’s coming to us.
The funny thing is, no-one would ever make a movie these days about the Wrath of God in which the message also was that we had it coming to us. We’re able to accept that if we sin against nature we deserve our punishment, but not if we sin against nature’s maker.
More on preaching the Old Testament from Gary Millar
Reading back on my post about Gary Millar’s tips for preaching the Old Testament I realised I’d missed a couple of pages of notes. Here are some more nuggets of wisdom from the mouth of the Irishman…
- If you have the text at your right hand and a pile of commentaries at your left the biggest mistake you can make when preparing a sermon is to reach out first with your left hand.
- The OT is often preached with scant regard to the text – it’s almost always “be like the Old Testament Character”…
- Narrative doesn’t commentate on the action “this is a bad idea”… we have to be sensitive to what’s going on. We have to get into the flow of the story in order to pick up these little things.
- The biggest problem that we have when approaching Old Testament narratives is reading the text. If you don’t read the text you won’t get it right. You have to work on the text, then work out how it fits with Biblical Theology, this needs to be done before you start the talk.
- Having done the work on the text we need to start figuring out how we present the work as Christians.
- We don’t just need to pull Jesus from the hat in every text. Christ-centred preaching does not seek to find where Christ is mentioned in every text – but to show how each text manifests God’s grace in order to prepare people in relation to Christ. This is not quite so tenuous as Spurgeon suggests in the following quote (from this sermon here). He’s right to want to relate every part of the text to Christ – but sometimes his connections are tenuous.
“Don’t you know young man that from every town, and every village, and every little hamlet in England, wherever it may be, there is a road to London?” “Yes,” said the young man. “Ah!” said the old divine “and so form every text in Scripture, there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ. And my dear brother, your business in when you get to a text, to say, ‘Now what is the road to Christ?’ and then preach a sermon, running along the road towards the great metropolis—Christ. And,” said he, “I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it, and if I ever do find one that has not a road to Christ in it, I will make one; I will go over hedge and ditch but I would get at my Master, for the sermon cannot do any good unless there is a savour of Christ in it.”