Worst. Ministry. Commercial. Ever.
Category: Christianity
More on pragmatism
Mark Baddely on Pragmatism after a comment from Tony Payne on this Solapanel post…
“But a church or Christian who engages in life apart from the knowledge of God and ourselves that the Word gives us will also go nowhere. A pragmatism that abstracts ends from the gospel, and then sees the getting of those ends as a practical, and not theological, matter can’t be the process for growth in the knowledge of God either.”
I think the problem people are suggesting with pragmatism is academic rather than practical. Tony’s comment is perhaps echoing my thinking…
“It seems to me that as I observe those pastors and/or churches that I really admire, they have this constant running interplay between theological principle and smart practice. On the one hand, they are always being driven by the Bible and the gospel and the ‘strategies’ that God himself lays down in Scripture (knowledge of God), and they recognize their utter dependency on these. But on the other hand they keep noticing things about themselves and people and the way church and ministry ‘works’, and adjusting their practice accordingly (knowledge of ourselves). And the two aren’t separate, non-overlapping magisteria. The knowledge of God feeds into and informs the the understanding of people and how they tick, and the understanding of people and how they tick seems only to reinforce and foster more growth in the knowledge of God.”
Subtitled hymns
I post this without editorial, for your viewing pleasure.
Actually, I posted it without seeing the thumbnail frame. It’s a bit rude. Here’s the link to the video.
Here’s a new fangled version…
Is pragmatism a dirty word?
It seems pragmatism is on the nose. I’ve read a few posts around the Christian blogosphere that bag out a “pragmatic” approach to ministry.
Why is this? Am I missing something? I would have thought a ministry based on the ability to know and proclaim an absolute truth, where the methodology of communication is based roughly on “that which works” was both right and Biblical – those would seem to be key areas of the pragmatic school of thought – and yet, we seem to be so keen for our ministries not to be ego boosting that we’re fleeing the notion of pragmatism having a bearing on what we do.
Didn’t God give us the innate ability to strategise, plan for the future, and gifts to equip us for ministry. Shouldn’t we work with these gifts in a way that maximises our return (while being faithful to other imperatives – like not being proud etc). Does pragmatism necessarily lead to people planting churches with big screen video links?
This whole anti-pragmatism thing is strange to me. Perhaps I’m getting the wrong end of the stick… your thoughts?
Visible Holiness
I mentioned my theory of the “Holiness Shelf” back when I had about ten readers (but curiously could attract 31 comments on a trivial post).
The Holiness Shelf is a dedicated space on a public bookshelf. Typically at eye level. The idea is that people judge you by the books in your collection, and your music and DVDs. If the first thing they see is overwhelming holiness manifested in your well thumbed “Gospel and Kingdom” or “The Cross of Christ” they’ll judge you positively.
It’s a tactic I recommended to many single guys, while I was myself single. I’m not sure it works.
Ali makes a good point in this post that people are now judged by their online presence. Facebook has replaced the bookshelf. Which is why it’s important to list good bands and intelligent books in your Facebook profile (I’ll post a list of impressive books for your profile later). Christians are pretty bad at judging each other on the basis of faith and holiness too – so the availability of information like what books, movies and music you like opens you up to all sorts of questions from others. Should I tell everybody that my favourite movies are Fight Club and the Godfather (both R rated)? Or should I pretend I love the Passion of the Christ (which I’ve never seen), and Amazing Grace (which I did like)?
The personal “brand” we build online opens us up in a new way to Christians who may or may not be weaker brothers, and may or may not be the judgemental type who emphasise the “not of the world” part of “in the world, but not of it”. This raises questions about what you should and shouldn’t blog about if you’re bloggingly inclined. You should read Ali’s post, and join the discussion there.
I post just about anything. I’m not sure I’d want people making an assessment of my holiness on the basis of that which appears in the right hand column of this page. Especially the bits about toilet paper.
I don’t want to be more discerning about what I blog about, it would take away half the fun. But nor do I want to be judged solely on what I blog about.
When to make unpopular decisions
John Howard has re-entered the political fray – and probably done more bolster Rudd’s leadership than to aid his former parliamentary colleagues. He’s commended Rudd on a couple of points – and made this interesting comment, which I think probably applies to starting at a new church too…
From the SMH.
The time for unpopular or difficult reforms should always be in the first term for new prime ministers, who tended to be cut a lot of slack by the public.
When you’ve been there two years, you haven’t done anything that’s the least bit unfriendly – jeez, it gets hard in the third year.
YouTube Twosday: Ricky Gervais on Christianity
Anyone who checked out the iMonk’s post on atheism may have seen this already… but this is the “new” new atheism. Not rabid, but friendly. Not insulting, but funny. Not arrogant, but “humble”, not scientific, but cultural…
How do you counter these arguments of religion as a positive form of social control that isn’t necessary for “enlightened” people?
I’d suggest it’s not like the Pyromaniac Centuri0n would have us do it… he suggests, in a series of posts, that we move away from apologetics, and just preach the gospel – both the iMonk and Frank Turk (Centuri0n) suggest the likes of William Lane Craig have the approach wrong – and we should either be cultural or biblical – not philosophical.
Me, being a pragmatist, I think we need to have a balance of all three. You can’t use the Bible on people who reject the fundamental premise of a book authored by God. Especially if they insist on deduction rather than induction. So you need to take the philosophical apologetic when arguing for the existence of God. And you can’t do any of this without getting the cultural element right – and I’d say one of the big issues there is the damage done to our reputation by nominal or apathetic Christians. So don’t be one of those.
YouTube Tuesday: Irreverant irrelevance
This one’s from Vimeo, not YouTube. But it’ll do. It’s another terrible piece of “relevant” worship. Shorter this time. So that’s something to be thankful for.
Boom Boom Pow from Tim Corder on Vimeo.
The father of all links posts
Ah, another week, another post chock full of links from the narrow sector of the world wide that I like to call the blogosphere.
I thought I’d get a little bit geographically specific with this little link edition. Just to give you an idea of the spread of blogs that I read (that you should too). This is by no means comprehensive – but here are some of the homes of regular commenters, people I know, and people I reckon you should discover (along with some choice posts from their sites).
Right-o. Lets go.
Starting with those in my own neck of the woods – the Townsville scene… (in no particular order).
- Tim – doesn’t post often and when he does it’s usually a YouTube video.
- Leah – is the Andrew Bolt of the North Queensland Christian blogosphere, or perhaps the Tim Blair. She also covered North Queensland’s lost and found saga this week where a local lad from a local church went missing in the bush, and was found a couple of days later.
- Stuss – has picked up the pace a little, though most of what she’s saying is about gardening and decluttering. Which is fine. Because both are good things.
- Phoebe – hasn’t really said anything for 21 days. I just counted. But no list of bloggers from Townsville would be complete without her.
- Joel – if Leah is the Tim Blair of the Townsville blogosphere then Joel is the Piers Ackerman.
- Carly – is an education student and gives some interesting insight into the female psyche with pieces like the one she wrote last week about Oprah.
- Chris barely posts enough to rank a mention. But he’s a blogger. In Townsville. So he sneaks in.
If you’re in Townsville, and I’ve missed you, let me know in the comments.
Moving south, here are some of the notables in Brisbane…
- Kutz – I mentioned his new endeavour last week. It’s been trickling along. I’m sure more comments from nice friendly readers would keep his motivation levels up.
- Tim and Amy – The same could be said for these two. They’ve kept a pretty steady pace and you should go over, read what they have to say, and say hello.
- Simone – well, I’ve talked about her blog enough for you to know what goes down over there. She gets a prize for being the third blogger to mention my dad* this week. Her little piece of speculation about narrative in the new creation was interesting enough to get my hippocampus firing today.
- Will Henderson – gets the prize for being the first to mention dad*, and also for being the first Acts 29 affiliated church planter in Australia – a story that apparently hadn’t received all that much coverage before I mentioned it the other day (based on some posts like this one from Jeff Attack)… check out the website for his upcoming plant. Unfortunately it’s a bit grungy. And we all know how I feel about grunge.
Now, on to Sydney. The city of my birth and home of many good blogs.
- Izaac is back from a holiday and taking on the challenge of posting about Christian love and social justice.
- Ben celebrated his birthday yesterday – and I promised him a link. Then he posted a story about how the Governator has the Conan sword in his office – that I was all set to feature in my next little string of “Curiosities” posts.
- At the fountainside Soph asks the important questions about train etiquette – something we’ll have to (re)familiarise ourselves with next year.
- Ben (of the Bathgate variety) lists five things that made him tough(er). I score one on his list.
- Dave Miers managed to scoop Mikey Lynch by posting an interview with Andrew Heard, one of the Geneva Church planting crew (another post on the network from Dave), before Mikey could wrap up his series of similar interviews with church planting figures (including Will Henderson and Al Stewart).
Mikey (from Tasmania) was also the second person to, somewhat vicariously, mention dad this week because his name came up in one of the posts from the aforementioned series of interviews.
It has also become apparent – from what Andrew Heard said on Dave’s blog and what Al Stewart said on Mikey’s – that the Geneva portmanteau was only a vicious rumour, and that the name is actually a reference to Calvin’s work in that city. Which is a good thing.
And to conclude, here are my favourite ten posts from my blog this week (including bits from Robyn and Benny).
- Benny on Ministry
- Robyn on Grammar (PS – you should all encourage Robyn to blog more – she needs some comment love…)
- Good bad haircuts
- Bad relevance
- How to pick a cafe
- Cool stuff to do with your photos/iPhone
- Tips from a guru (my dad – since he’s the flavour of the blogosphere these days…*)
- The one about being wrong.
- The one about yawning.
- The one about being a PK, and the follow up about being a PK being a bit like being Harry Potter.
* I should point out that these constant mentions of dad being mentioned are a mixture of patri-pride and because I think it’s slightly funny that he feels a sense of discomfort about being in the spotlight. It’s not because I think he’s super special (though he is). And if you want to join the fan club here’s the video I made for his 50th.
On forgiveness
Forgiveness is hard. I’ve been talking to someone about that today and dug up these posts from around the blogosphere.
- A sermon from dad last weekend
- Some snippets from a Jewish woman who “forgave Hitler”
- This one helpfully defines what forgiveness is not
- Here’s one on When not to forgive
- An article on what our forgiveness (not God’s) looks like.
- … a response to that post
- And another response to that post
Preach or Perish
My grandfather (aka Fafa aka Donald Howard) wrote a book. About preaching. I’m reading it. It has been helpful. When I finish reading it I’ll post a proper review. In the meantime you should know that it did not win the 2009 Australian Christian Book of the Year – but it was an equal joint second prize winner with two others. A little like Townsville’s Rachel Finch in the Miss Universe competition…
It was self published. It features chapters from plenty of well known preachers. You can buy it here.
New strategy for the new atheism
The iMonk puts forward a little insight into how the goalposts are moving when it comes to discourse with atheists. I tend to agree with his diagnosis of the problem.
Some great insights.
“One of my letters this week stated that a 17 year old raised in an evangelical family was now an avid atheist, with many of the hijinks of evangelicalism as evidence of manipulation and control. He couldn’t mean take off your shoes and spin your socks over your head while singing “Jesus mess me up?” Why would that bother anyone?”
“You see, evangelicals have made such outrageous assumptions and promises about happiness, healing, everything working out, knowing God, answered prayer, loving one another and so on that proving us to be liars isn’t even a real job. It’s just a matter of tuning in to an increasing number of voices who say “It’s OK to not believe. Give yourself a break. Stop tormenting yourself trying to believe. Stop propping up your belief with more and more complex arguments. Just let go of God.”
“Keller is still great. C.S.Lewis is still helpful. [William Lane] Craig is still impressive. But I’m not sure their arguments are on the right channel. Vast numbers of people aren’t asking for philosophy. They are asking what will let them live a life uncomplicated by lies, manipulation and constant calls to prefer ignorance to what seems obvious.
What we’ve said and written is fine. What we’ve lived in our homes, private lives, churches, workplaces and friendships has spoken louder.
We are the ones who appear to not believe in the God we say is real. We are the ones who seem to be forcing ourselves to believe with bigger shows, bigger celebrities and bigger methods of manipulation.”
Go with the flow chart
Diagrammr is pretty cool. It creates flow chart diagram things from sentences. I just used it to map out the logic of John 14. Because it’s a pretty layered little passage. It doesn’t quite get there… but it goes close. Check it out. It appears to save the stuff I’ve put in here – and I think you can probably change it all you like… which is a pain.
It only works with simple sentences. Here are the things I put in:
Jesus is in God
God is in Jesus
Jesus speaks words of God
Jesus is going to God
Jesus brings glory to God
God gives the Spirit
We are in Jesus
We are in God
We have the Spirit
The_World does not have the spirit
The_World does not love Jesus
We have seen Jesus
We have seen God
The_world does not see Jesus
The_world does not see God
Spirit comes in the name of Jesus
Jesus loves God
Pottering around
While I was thinking about the whole PK issue the other day I was struck by a comparison that I’ve thought of in the past but not, until now, documented.
Being a PK is just like being Harry Potter. Hogwarts is the broader church, the houses within Hogwarts are either the different types of people within a congregation or representative of multiple denominations. Atheists are muggles, and people who come to faith from outside of Christian homes are “mudbloods” according to some of the less tolerant members of the church – obviously only the nasties. (this actually closely reflects some comments I’ve heard from people who come into the church from other backgrounds).
So being a PK is like being a child of promise – and you rock up to Hogwarts and all the faculty know you by reputation and have expectations.
I promise this will be the last time (for a while) that I mention Harry Potter. But it seems a valid meta interpretation of the world in which the wizards operate.
What say you?
Also, the picture at the top comes from this great article about how Christendom has suddenly decided that Harry Potter is OK because they’ve figured he’s a messianic figure with plenty of plot allusions to Christ.