Christianity – Page 104

Election day

The countdown is over. We voted this morning. Robyn told me afterwards that she’d voted for Family First. It was a funny joke. We laughed.

Here’s why I don’t vote for Family First…

While I appreciate that Family First put the family first and often that means supporting things that are good for Christians and Christianity – I think their very presence dilutes the conservative vote and is counterproductive for Christians looking to vote on their issues.
I don’t like the idea of giving politicians a mandate to turn Australia into anything other than the democratic system we have now – theocracies are great provided you’re a believer. Which I am. But they don’t do a good job of protecting minorities or other interests. I’d rather a candidate sympathetic to all than a candidate only sympathetic to me.
It’s not the state’s job to convert people to Christianity – it’s ours. Separation of church and state is a protection for the church too…
Better the devil you know – I know that the LNP and the ALP will act in a predictable manner based on their convictions. The same can not be said for Family First members. There have been too many loose cannon loonies running for the party for them to have much credibility as a united voice. The idea of a united Christian voice is nice in theory – but you only have to look at the Uniting Church to see it in practice.
It’s a wasted vote. Unless we’re voting for a Federal senate spot the party will never the numbers to get candidates into seats. What’s the point of voting for Family First when you can be voting against a party you disagree with and keeping them out of power.

I have no numbers to back this up. But I’m sure I could find them. I know that some people who are single issue voters on abortion will get angry when I say this. But voting for family first when you’re a nominally conservative voter who doesn’t like abortion is pretty much a vote for Labor – who (despite their name being similar to the act of giving birth) are the most likely party to legalise abortion in Australian states.

Obviously the preference system allows you to make this statement while still essentially voting for the LNP – but a real statement would be made by the number of people not preferentially voting at all – and ousting a government without having to rely on preferences at all.

It may be a principled move. It may make a statement. But it’s a phyrric victory only. So I won’t be making that move any time soon.

This is too late to change anyone’s mind anyway. But it’s my two cents worth.

Also, I think it’s slightly ironic that the Greens print out how to vote cards. They’re such a waste of paper. Perhaps we should change the legislation to allow each nominated candidate to place a “how to vote” card in the voting booth. That’s under 10 printouts per candidate per booth – rather than thousands.

March 21, 2009

That which divides

There’s nothing like politics for dividing Christian unity. Jeremy Halcrow writes for the Sydney Anglican website. He’s a writer I’ve largely appreciated and benefited from. We happen to disagree on the Government’s Clean Feed. Here’s his post and long discussion thread on the Sydney Anglican website. Interesting read if you’re looking to sort through various Christian responses to the debate and trying to sort out an ethical approach to online content.

Here’s what Mr Halcrow had to say to me on another blog for daring to disagree with his position:

“Nathan, you don’t know what is the ACMA blacklist and neither does your extremist libertarian source you quote.

I’m not engaging with you any more for all I know your a Greens Party stooge or some other extremist libertarian group.

I don’t think you are discussing this in good faith.”

A Green Party stooge? Ouch. That’s hit a raw nerve. He follows with this little piece of irony (posted anonymously – but I’m pretty sure it’s him, it’s corroborated on the Sydney Anglican website at the bottom of the article)…

“You are wrong and I know you are wrong.

I am happy to say I have had an off-the record briefing with the Government.

I can’t say any more than that.

You are putting your faith in people who are out to spread mischief and misinformaton”

His information is as sensitive and secretive in nature as the Government blacklist he’s defending.

I did not respond in a loving manner.

March 20, 2009

Searching

One of the top ten search keywords that brings people to my blog is “Townsville Strip Clubs”. Not many of them stay. Perhaps I wasn’t what they were looking for.

If you’re here because you searched for that – skip the strip clubs and head to church for a more satisfying experience.

March 18, 2009

Plant rant

There’s a lot of chatter around the Australian evangelical blogosphere (that’s a pretty narrow field really) about a future church planting movement in Australia.

Some people are over in the US with Mark Driscoll and other renowned church planters right now. And they’re blogging up a storm. Most of the posts are buzzing with fanboyism. They’re chock full of quotable quotes, photo ops, video interviews and summaries from talks given at conferences. It’s no doubt very exciting for those caught up in the movement.

Some people are not so excited. ~~I won’t link to the post because I’m not sure how long it’s going to stay up~~. Simone has a post on the matter here.

Church planting is exciting. Sure. It’s great to be pursuing new avenues to preach the gospel to people. It’s something I’d like to do one day myself. Maybe. But it has to be said that it takes a special character to persevere with someone else’s work and not go off breaking new ground. I’d say it’s more challenging for a minister of a church to take on an established eldership or church governance structure.

These new fangled church planters have some compelling arguments but they’re often built with some sort of naive view of the nature of ministry in mind. Mars Hill, Mark Driscoll’s church is in my mind a case in point. Pull Mark Driscoll out and things change dramatically. There doesn’t seem to be a great succession plan in place if your preaching pastor preaches to multiple locations via a satellite link. The model they propose works so long as ministers don’t parish hop (which they do) and as long as the church can provide for their own staff members from within their numbers (which they can’t always). When there’s a vacancy in an Australian church an outsider has to come in and take over. That’s the way it works – particularly when there are more vacancies than candidates to fill them.

I’m also not sold on the idea that all the good church stuff happens in cities. Which is a key theory behind a lot of Mark Driscoll’s strategies in particular. So I’m reserved in my exuberance when it comes to responding to the news that Australia is going to have a network of church planting being supported by the Acts 29 movement.

The rest of this post is a comment I posted on Simone’s blog where she was less than enthused by the personality cult (my words not hers) surrounding super church planters like Driscoll… you may already have read it. A few of these statements address the particulars of that post.

While I appreciate Mark Driscoll and love him for his passionate teaching and church growth strategies – if you can call them that – I don’t think his is an easily reproducible style.

I would say the church planters who are running these conferences were not only not going to these church planting conferences – but were not even following a church planting recipe.

I don’t set out to be Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen, and I’m not going to set out to be Mark Driscoll in church planting. I think the beauty of being both a celebrity chef and a church planter is that you work with the ingredients you’re given – and in most cases the ministry you forge (or the food you make) works best when it reflects your unique personality and not a cheap imitation of a trailblazer.

These guys all seem to be wanting to be trailblazers by following someone. And that seems contradictory.

March 17, 2009

Pictures and words

Gordo has issued the challenge to demonstrate how a picture can paint 1000 words. There’s my entry.

Also, I’m preaching this weekend and here’s a thousand words painting a picture of what my sermon is all about thanks to Wordle:

March 17, 2009

Fruity protest

Here’s a novel protest against perennial protesters Westboro Baptist (the hateful “God Hates Fags” mob).

It’s pretty Biblically sound – but the Bible has a fair bit to say about homosexuality and sin.

March 16, 2009

Atheist Hunting

Occasionally nasty parody site Landover Baptist has a great list of tips for how to spot them atheists that needs some converting (sic)…

Here’s a summary of their five tips so that you can dob your local atheist in to police:

Five Tips on How to Spot an Atheist

1. Usually Atheists are pale of skin.
They spend a lot of times indoors, because they are afraid to come outside. They believe the preposterous lie that Christians are trying to kill them, when in fact, all that we really want to do is force a quick conversion or to kindly place them in a maximum security prison for their own protection from devout Christians who may try to kill them.

2. Atheists are overweight.
The stereotypes of typical Atheists are the trim, granola cruncher who jogs and plays racquetball or the vain hedonist, party-goer who worships only her full-length mirror, Recent studies have shown, however, that Atheists have become aware of these signifiers of their lack of faith.

3. Atheists have too many university diplomas!
These folks are chock full of secular knowledge. They toss the Bible aside in favor of so-called, “research” and “theories.”

4. Atheists Deceive!
Atheists go under many different names, but they don’t have the common sense to align themselves yet! Use this to your advantage in reporting them to the police! They call themselves, “humanists, agnostics, secular-humanists, moral relativists, Catholics, free-thinkers, undecided, Unitarians, and more recently, Brights.” It is important to note that anyone who has a post-graduate degree or is interested in getting a post-graduate degree, is suspect! Also be warned, Wiccans , Vegans, Yogists, and readers of science fiction are either Atheists or on the road to becoming an Atheist.
5. Atheists are afraid!
Even though there are as many as 300 active Atheists in the United States, we can safely assume that if recent polls are correct, most Atheists are afraid to come out and say what they don’t believe.

March 16, 2009

It’s Time

Time Magazine has just published a list of the 10 ideas changing the world right now. Number 3. New Calvinism.

There’ll be a bunch of links to some reactions in my link post today. But here’s the actual article.

And here’s a quote:

“Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation’s other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don’t have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by “glorifying” him.”

The article names John Piper, Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler as leaders of this pack.

March 13, 2009

Watching Watchmen

On Saturday afternoon I caught the Watchmen with a bunch of guys from church. Having not read the Graphic Novel I wasn’t sure what to expect. Having caught the movie I now want to catch the graphic novel.

The movie was violent. Graphically violent. And had a fair bit of sex – so it’s hard to “recommend” to Christians if that’s likely to cause you to stumble.

But it was eye-poppingly rendered. A beautiful, dark, film noiry feel – complete with a fedora wearing trench coated detective like protaganist narrating entries into his diary.

It also asked questions of the human condition and asked questions about the nature of an omniscient almost omnipresent, omnipotent “god” in the form of a blue supercharged superhero. It certainly generated conversation amongst our group – and most of us enjoyed it, despite some of us not being entirely keen for a thought provoking cinematic experience.

The film has divided Christian movie critics. Movieguide is a pretty terrible “family centred” (think Focus on the Family) film review centre – and this movie is not “family centred” in content or intention. Here’s their list of reasons not to see the movie (I love how they open with “anti-capitalist” as though that’s unChristian:

“Strong anti-capitalist content with a strong environmentalist conclusion and homosexual references; 44 obscenities and 27 profanities; hyper-extreme, gory, bloody violence includes lots of gore with fingers cut off, arms cut off by a rotary buzz-saw, man’s head graphically cleaved with a meat cleaver, pointblank shootings, boy bites into boy’s cheek and takes out hunk of another boy’s cheek, woman beaten savagely, people electrocuted, people dissolved, people shredded, pregnant woman shot pointblank, people cut with broken bottles, women raped, people poisoned, martial arts fighting, man’s body transforms in gory ways, etc.; very strong sexual content includes several sex scenes, lesbian kiss, prostitute exposes her breasts, rape, character fornicates with his girlfriend by dividing into two characters, heroes fornicate, little boy’s mother is a prostitute, overt suggestions of sadomasochism, and discussions of sex; extreme nudity and strong sexual nudity includes major male character walks around nude showing his private parts throughout the movie, upper female nudity and upper male nudity; strong alcohol use; illegal drug use by one of the criminals; and, vigilante beliefs are carried out, revenge, idolatry, Egyptian pharaoh worship, false gods, blackmail, etc.”

Upper male nudity? Oh no. Head for the hills. I wonder how they’d mark the Old Testament. Anyway. I can’t say I noticed the lower male nudity of Dr Manhattan as much as many reviewers critical of it did.

There’s a shining review of the Watchmen from the “Gospel and Culture” blog that balances out Movieguide’s response:

“Inviting a Christian audience to consume either version of Watchmen may seem irresponsible, especially to pop culture-weary brothers and sisters in Christ. While the story does contain more than its share of sexuality and violence, it simultaneously wrestles with important and weighty theological and philosophical issues. Countless sermons could and should be preached on Watchmen’s nuanced and allegorical treatment of predestination, miracles, the existence of God, human depravity, justice, and salvation. Few mainstream artistic texts so inventively grapple with these many important questions.”

They make the same criticism of Christian criticism that I just have too:

“And how exactly did the depiction of sex and violence become the third rail of Christian criticism? While not for everyone, certainly not for children, Watchmen goes places familiar to the grittier passages of scripture. Nothing in Snyder’s film, for example, equals the bleak sexual violence depicted in “The Rape of the Concubine”(Judges 19). This is not to suggest that the film is blameless. Snyder crosses the border into gratuitous territory by making the love scene between Silk Spectre II and Night Owl more sexually explicit than in the discrete, shadowy panels of the graphic novel. The same could be said of the frequent, if admittedly, humorous reappearance of Dr. Manhattan’s glowing blue genitals. Unnecessary. But, like the horrific passages from Judges in which a young woman is raped and dismembered, Watchmen deserves to be considered within its larger narrative context.”

Amen. A worthwhile movie – if not a wholesome one. It certainly raises more questions than it answers and is a conversational launchpad. Kudos to to Flickr minifig creator Sir Nadroj for his lego rendering of the Watchmen characters.

March 12, 2009

Doubt fired

While introducing myself to the iMonk website I came across this great essay on doubt. Particularly Christian doubt. It’s helpful, I think.
A couple of quotes:

These doubts have made me respect my honest, unbelieving friends. To many of them, it isn’t so much the content of Christianity that is ridiculous. It’s the idea that Christians are so certain; so doubtless. They find it untenable that anyone could bury their own doubts so deep that you are as certain as Christians appear to be. Our television and radio preachers, our musicians and booksellers, the glowing testimonial at church, the zealous fanatic at the break table at work–they all say that Christians no longer have the doubts and questions of other people. Only certainties. And for many thoughtful unbelievers, that appears to be lying or delusion, and they would prefer to avoid both.

So do I. I profoundly dislike the unspoken requirement among Christians that we either bury all our doubts out in back of the church, or we restrict them to a list of specific religious questions that can be handled in polite conversations dispensing tidy, palatable answers. Mega-doubts. Nightmarish doubts. “I’m wasting my whole life” doubts are signs one may not be a Christian, and you’ve just made it to the prayer list.

My doubts exist alongside my appetite for God. I believe no one has put forward a more cogent and persuasive critique of theism than Sigmund Freud. Freud’s contention that human beings create a God in the sky out of their longings for a perfect father and their fear of death has the virtue of common sense and realism. As a Christian, I do not doubt that vast tracts of human religiosity can be explained by Freud’s analysis. Yet, Freud is wrong. The Biblical God is not wishful thinking, but the center of the spiritual “appetite” of human beings. Billions of human beings would prefer no God exist. Billions of human beings would like to make God in the image of Santa or Oprah. Yet, Christianity, Judaism (and even Islam) persistently put forward a God who is terrifying to who we are. A just, holy God of judgment. A God of heaven and hell. Not the God of the wishful thinkers, but the God who is a consuming fire.

And it is this God that we long to know. This God who repulses us and damns us. This God who demands the purity of thought and action. A God who demands that we love Him with all that we are and love our fellow persons as His creations. It is this God that we long to know in intimacy. It is this God we long to be accepted by, to trust and to praise. This God is the source of all the notions of beauty, truth and goodness that we find in this universe. C.S. Lewis said that appetite could not prove the existence of food, but I don’t think that speaks for the experience of the starving person.

March 11, 2009

Requiem for a theme

I’ve just finished reading through the condensed summary of this series by the Internet Monk on the death of the evangelical movement. It was printed/posted by the Christian Science Monitor (which has not much to do with science if you’ve never been there before). And then discussed by Justin Moffat and the Pyromaniacs.

“Theme” doesn’t really completely capture the nature of evangelicalism – it’s more a theological framework – but that didn’t rhyme with dream – which was essential for the title.

The original piece is interesting. The commentary too. Worth a read. Feel free to discuss here.

March 11, 2009

Foetal position

Ben just sent me a link to this ABC story where Tony Abbott attacked Kevin Rudd for allowing changes to Australia’s aid policy and aid money being used to fund abortions.

The comments thread is telling. These discussions always bring out the rabid atheists who want to accuse Christianity of “holding back society”… I do like it when they put together a coherent argument.

Like this:

“Lets not forget that the bible tells the story of how god drowned every living person except Jonah and his family because he was annoyed with them. So to say the bible condemns murder is a very selective interpretation.”

Sadly comments are closed. So I couldn’t point out that Jonah was the guy eaten by a whale and people were saved at the end of the Jonah story because they repented. Anyway. There’s a lot of stupid Christians in the debate too. But Coloru seems to be a pretty rabid atheist, he says:

“Wakeup! If you cant find god in your own heart and mind then it doesnt exist. The bible isnt going to help.*”

*lack of apostrophes his own.

This again highlights the atheist’s fundamental misunderstanding of the place of the bible in Christian faith. It’s central – not an afterthought. It’s the way we find God. And hands up Christians who can find God in their own heart and mind…

March 11, 2009

Driscollisms

I’m about to break an unofficial rule – and post something about Mark Driscoll. If you’ve never heard of him – look him up on wikipedia – or check out his blog at his church’s website.

I’ve mentioned him a couple of times – but I know that he doesn’t really like bloggers. Unless they’re flattering. I also don’t want to appear to be a fan boy. I think he’s good – but not the second coming.

Will Henderson is a pressy guy in the US learning about Church Planting. That pretty much means hanging around as many Mark Driscoll fanboys as possible and learning from them.

He’s just posted a list of quotable quotes from a recent talk Driscoll gave. Here are my favourites:

“If ALL you are into is NEW you will end up a heretic. God call us to contend & Contextualise.”

“Preaching the gospel? There will be critics everywhere online permanent. Turn them into coaches. Never engage on their terms. In your anger do not sin. Avoid email.”

March 11, 2009

Ad value

Tim Challies is one of the world’s preeminent Christian bloggers. Today he wrote about advertising and the church – mostly advertising but this was a great quote about his approach to ads:

“I guard against this because I’ve seen what happens to churches when they adopt a marketing mindset. Every church markets; the moment a church places a sign outside or puts an advertisement in the phone book or the local newspaper, it is marketing. But some churches go far further, adopting a kind of marketing mindset that makes the church functionally not much different than a business. After a while every decision comes back to the bottom line, whether that is a dollar figure or an attendance figure. This quickly sends churches into a tailspin, a downward spiral that draws them further and further from the Bible. It is inevitable, really.”

I’m still not sure where I sit on the issue of church marketing. I’m not as sold on it as churchmarketingsucks.com – who despite the name actually encourage churches to do better.

Challies also asks a question about whether or not we should ethically watch ads when consuming content – and thus whether ad blocking is immoral.

March 11, 2009

Apologetics accepted

One of the things I do in order to increase my levels of frustration is read annoying things written by atheists who feel intellectually superior to us “unenlightened Christians”.

I spend a lot of time arguing with three of my friends – two of whom are declared atheists – one is a notorious fence sitter.

I often ask myself why I bother. They’re smart guys and as set in their beliefs as I am in mine. I don’t think we’re going to change each other’s minds. I guess there are a few reasons. I like them – so I’d like to see them change their minds – believing as I do that hell is real. I would like to not be scoffed at for having “an imaginary friend”. And I guess there’s the fact that I love an argument. But I think one of the key reasons I do it is to refine and define my thoughts on the criticisms atheism throws at any form of theism – but particularly Christianity. It’s an exercise in apologetics – in defending the faith.

I guess in the face of militant atheism, being championed as it is by leaders with evangelistic zeal, Christians need to make sure they’re putting up a fight for the hearts, minds and souls of the great unreached – the agnostics. Those who haven’t picked a side yet. Those people are being bombarded with teachings from both sides – and I feel like I need to mount a compelling, rational defence of Christianity.

That was all a pretty long preamble to a great reminder that the real “apologetic” winner is relational not rational. The reminder comes courtesy of Tim Chester at the Resurgence.

March 10, 2009