Church Voices

Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, “Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.”

He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth

The resurrection is the entire point of this passage. But lets not forget that who the resurrection is for is the same group that Jonah’s preaching was for.

The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

When we gather as God’s family, worshiping the messiah who became sin, and defeated death for us let’s also avoid Jonah’s attitude.

When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened. But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.

My last post (and I admit its an easy mistake to make with my final sentence) has some people confused about what I’m advocating. I’ve received feedback, most publicly from Heath, about the failures of the Democratic party. Some were even handed (like Heath’s) some were not.

Let me say first, that I was not advocating a vote for either party, or any candidate. I believe the Democratic party has disastrously failed to reduce poverty, and in some cases has made it much worse.

But that only illustrates my real point, which is that Christians and churches shouldn’t see political systems as the answer to anything. Both parties which claim to be strong in areas that are of interest to Christians have failed utterly to achieve much of anything.

The answer doesn’t lie with our ability to force people to act in a certain way, it lies with churches acting like the church in a million little communities across the world.

The difference between me and Eliot Spitzer is largely this: I have never been elected governor of New York.

Douglas Groothuis writes:

However, the leading domestic moral issue remains the value of helpless human life. Since Roe v. Wade, approximately 50 million unborn humans have been killed through abortion.

He goes on to make a political case, in which Christians should be voting against both Democratic candidates because of their record on abortion.

A compelling case, until one considers what voting for Republican (and allegedly pro-life candidates has gotten us). After all, there’s been 8 years of President Bush, 4 years of the first President Bush, and 8 years of President Reagan. That’s 20 years of Republican Presidents broken only by 8 years of President Clinton. And in the end the only thing that pro-life forces have gotten is some room for states to regulate a bit more.

The strongest argument is the appointment of Supreme Court judges, but even if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned (as it ought to be) the result is not outlawing abortion, but rather allowing states to legislate as they want. I’m not sure how much of a dent this would make, as it would only require crossing state lines, and I would suspect that the majority of abortions are already performed in states that would allow it remain relatively legalized.

In other words, the political campaign has been a near complete and total failure, even as general pro-life sentiment has been on the rise.

So what are the options? Well the other option is the one the church should have been doing all along, and is naturally good at to begin with: creating a community that removes the motivation for abortion. This means doing more than just setting up centers that provide the nutritional necessities for a baby (and mom). It means more than just pointing pregnant women to a computer with its browser pointed at a medicare application. It means creating a church that will provide emotional support (via real, human relationships). It means providing things like babysitting as an act of family (rather than as an act which incurs an obligation), it means making people, who in the past might have been stigmatized by the church feel accepted. It means doing this in such a way that word gets around. It means doing this in places where women have abortions regularly

Or we can just keep trying what we’ve been doing. Maybe 20 more years of Republican president will make the difference this time.

In his Confessions, St. Augustine recalls a conversation he had between himself, his friend Alypius, and Ponticianus, a “fellow countryman…from Africa, who held high office in the emperor’s court” (VIII,14 [Trans. & ed. Albert C. Outler]). Augustine quotes Ponticianus, who tells a story about one of his fellow political friends who happened upon a book containing the life of Antony, the Egyptian monk. His friend began reading it,

and was so fascinated and thrilled by the story that even before he finished reading he conceived the idea of taking upon himself the same kind of life and abandoning his career in the world – both he and his friend were officials in the service of the State – in order to become [God’s] servant. All at once he was filled with the love of holiness. Angry with himself and full of remorse, he looked at his friend and said, “What do we hope to gain by all the efforts we make? What are we looking for? What is our purpose in serving the State? Can we hope for anything better at court than to be the Emperor’s friends? Even so, surely our position would be precarious and exposed to much danger. We shall meet it in every turn, only to meet another danger which is greater still. And how long is it to be before we reach it? But if I wish, I can become the friend of God at this very moment.” (VIII, 15)

I recently had a family get-together, at which one of my relatives went on and on about the infinite woes of the American government. In his spiel, he denounced this and that and suggested such and so as respective appropriations. It was a passionate and angry pitch to all in ear shot. All the while I couldn’t help but think of questions similar to those asked by Ponticianus’s friend. Finally, he paused, looked at me and asked, “What do you think?” Somewhat nervously, I replied “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Suppose this utopia you’ve been imagining were actualized. Then what?” He didn’t really have an answer. When you don’t have a prior foundation upon which to build political perspective, the question seems unanswerable. That’s probably why Jesus asked it.

Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free. - John 8:31-32 (KJV)

Reading the King James Version of the Bible is akin to reading/hearing pirate speech.  Fun and humorous at times, but doesn’t help communicate so well anymore.

Why do we insist on making people learn a new language to know Christ?  Now, I’m fine with learning a new language because we know Christ, such as the desire to learn Greek and Hebrew, or simply the process of learning how to speak in a way that glorifies God, but otherwise we are putting up an unnecessary barrier.  I don’t care what you use for your own devotions (although there will be plenty of words in the KJV that will mislead you if you don’t know better), but to insist that everybody uses that version because it’s the one God ordained is rediculous.

When I first moved to Owosso I didn’t realize some of the more subtle differences between here and my hometown. I come from a tradition that believes in the priesthood of all believers and so we generally try to strip all titles out when referring to clergy so I started out correcting everyone who wasn’t a member of my congregation (as they had the hang of it already) by asking to just call me Tim. Well, one day I was talking with a funeral director on the phone and he called me Pastor Reed about 12 times in a few minutes. Here’s our actual conversation afterwards:

Me: Could you please just call me Tim?
Him: You got it Pastor Tim.

At that point I gave up. I think at this point if someone called me the Reverend Pastor Priest Pope Reed I’d probably not even notice.

This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. This 33 year old woman wants Cheaters to check out her boyfriend because he seems to be more distant than he was. One of her evidences that she thinks he’s cheating is that she walked in on him when he was alone with his porn. She then goes on to say that she’s tried to be everything he sees on his pornographic movies. As the show progresses, we find out that they live together, he smokes marijuana, oh, and she’s a Christian. At this point, I went “Yuuwaaahhh?!?”

Turns out he’s cheating on her with her cousin. The show then goes to the woman so she can be debriefed on the situation. The woman has her Aunt there for support (the Aunt also goes to church). Cousin…Aunt…uh oh.
 So the two women start fuming and they go with the Cheaters staff to confront the guy and the cousin…on Wednesday night…when the Aunt and woman are supposed to be in church.

In the van the host is facilitating the chase/meeting/confrontation and attempts to console the woman and her Aunt. At one point he says “Your faith doesn’t keep you from having these emotions, it’s what you do with them.” I would have liked to have heard what else he would have said but they find the boyfriend and cousin.

The woman and her Aunt catch up to the boyfriend and cousin at a carwash. The woman runs out of the car and begins yelling and cussing out her boyfriend and cousin. Then they’re yelling for a good 5 minutes how they should all be in church. All of them…with each other.

More cussing. She starts spraying the guy with the hose yelling “You need to be baptized m*ther bleep.”

More “Go to church.”

The show ends with the woman not sure what to do but still “loves” the boyfriend, the guy is sorry and wants back in and believes she’ll take him back, and the cousin doesn’t care about the woman and says she saw him first.

I should not have to point out how, specifically, wrong every part of this (except the efforts and comments of the host) are, so I won’t. If you don’t know what’s wrong with this picture, please contact me directly and I’ll share with you about sin, what God did for you a couple thousand years ago, and how He wants you to respond to Him.

If only I could show this on a Sunday morning.

This has been said before, probably by many people, but I believe it is worth repeating.

If you want to be a witness for Christ, you need to earn that opportunity.

Part of the role and work of the Holy Spirit in the church was/is to give credibility to the message of the Kingdom of God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ through miracles.  People listened because they saw evidence of the love of God in their lives.

Dave Stone at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, KY recently related how they did that as a church by encouraging their people to participate in the local Aids Walk.  Their leadership was the third largest donor in the walk.  You can tell a sinner they are going to hell, but the question is, Are they listening?  When you tell a sinner you care about them, and then you show them you care about them (or vice versa),  then they will listen when you tell them God cares about them and how he showed it.  This is why “friendship evangelism” is so popular and beneficial.

Hating on sinners is never convicting to the sinner. 

Having been raised in the church during the 1980s, I received much knowledge concerning morality, but some tidbits I picked up were less than stellar. One such inculcated gem, was a rabid disdain for dungeons and dragons; that sinister game that could infiltrate the minds of adolescents and convert them into suicidal devil worshiprs. Well, like a good Christian young man, I wasn’t hesitant about expressing my view to my friends who has partaken in that heathen ritual… needless to say, I felt a touch foolish the first time I watched them actually play a game… wondering why on earth we were so bent against it. Years later after having been in the ministry for a while, one of my students afforded me the opportunity to play a game, and I decided I’d try it out. I loved it, and have been playing it nearly weekly ever since. I can tell you truthfully that neither I, nor any of my students who participate in this game have committed suicide, nor have we begun worshipping Satan. In fact, I see that over the past year Dungeons and Dragons has become a peculiar draw to our ministry, as our regular gaming nights tend to draw a specific crowd that the church has largely ignored in the bulk of its outreach endeavors. In fact, two individuals we baptized last month came to us as a direct result of our playing of dungeons and dragons… clearly this is not the adversary’s domain… well, unless we decide to cede it to him, which most of us apparently have. This all begs the question as to why the church occasionally picks innocuous social phenomenon and decides to wage war against it, as though our eternities hung in the balance.

To be honest, I see the hand of a very intelligent adversary in this. During WW2 the British intelligence campaign known as “Bodyguard” engaged in an elaborate ruse intended to misdirect German resistance prior to the invasion of Normandy. One of these techniques was the use of inflatable tanks and contrived tread-marks throughout various fields in England, as well as false landing craft jamming the bays of England. This is how intelligent warfare is conducted… the wise adversary sets up phantom threats to conceal the real dangers in his arsenal. So it is with our adversary. Since the 1980s we’ve seen the occasional revelatory uprising of Christian watchdogs, who proclaim a book or a game to be an open door to Satan worship. It is spiritual death to our children, and our moral duty to openly oppose these things at every opportunity. All the while, religious syncretism, relativism, the death of sexual modesty, and other very real and very dangerous issues went virtually unopposed throughout the world’s congregations. And so, true to form, the American church does the easy thing and targets an adversary that can be boycotted or burned. Brilliant; ignore the call to wage war against spiritual powers and authorities, don’t bother with the corrupting influence of people who read books or play games, just berate a publisher and close your wallets, oh and don’t forget to level some partially conceived diatribe about satanic influence at people who already need Christ. Well, this all mindlessly ends in a bulk of the church jumping on board and rallying their teachings and parental oversight against a perceived threat. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating here if I were to suggest that perhaps 90% or more of said Christian populace has no first-hand experience with said threat, nor do they understand exactly why they should view it as a treat (save for the quick tidbits of zealous accusations they’ve gleaned from other Christians offering opinions on the issue). Are the Christians who jump on these issues bad people? …No, they’re just Christians who trust the church and are under the impression that this zeal of other believers has a solid foundation. Are these believers damaging possible evangelism opportunities, and ostracizing people needlessly? Absolutely. There is no doubt that people outside of Christianity view this type of paranoia as absurd (especially given that the vast majority of it is highly ill-informed and, well… absurd).

So what’s a believer to do? How about exercising a bit of shrewdness concerning the adversary’s intentions, and his ability to carry them out in and through the church? I’ve got to laud the wife of our senior minister who decided to actually read Harry Potter before passing judgment (she of course concluded that it is harmless fantasy fiction). I really appreciate Christians who don’t cede territory to the adversary that doesn’t really belong to him. In way of exhortation, please believers, exercise a bit of healthy skepticism regarding the zealous ranting of other Christians. Don’t take up a position on seemingly harmless issues unless you have a solid reason for doing so. Satan doesn’t have to make us worship him, it’s far easier to keep us looking like hysteric nuts, that no sane person would want to have anything to do with.