THINK DIFFERENTLY

I Think I Should Stop Thinking For You.

Rhett Smith absolutely knocks it out of the park on this one. Peep this:

“I wonder if we as preachers have helped condition people to often not think for themselves. They are so used to coming to church and hearing advice on how to do something, that anytime we leave the how to steps out they are paralyzed. I wonder if we have gotten away from the mystery and some of the parable style teaching of Jesus that often makes you scratch your head and say, “What?” Giving how to advice and laid out steps does not lead to transformation of people’s lives in my experience, at least not internally. But rather, engaging them in God’s Word and allowing them to wrestle with the meaning and action for their own lives is powerful.”

Amen! I had a woman call me today telling me how her daughter has gotten into the wrong crowd. “We just need to get her into church, that’ll fix the problem,” is what she said to me. Wrong!

Going to church is not the fix-all.
Putting your child in Sunday School will not automatically “fix” them.
Your pastor cannot and should not take your place as parent.

I said it once and I’ll say it again, pastors over-function for their people. Can I get an “amen”?

Technorati Tags: Christians, Church, Church Leadership, God

Live Webcasting Tonight!

Don’t forget, we’ll be broadcasting my sermon for Immersion tonight, starting at (approximately) 8:15pm CST. Make sure you join us! Tonight is the second week in our series, “What Does the Bible Really Say About…” This week: Sex. Buckle up, it should be fun. Oh yeah! If you want to check out last week’s talk on marriage, hit us up on the Immersion podcast (link opens to iTunes).

Technorati Tags: Webcast, What Does the Bible Reall Say About

Webcasting Immersion Sermon Live!

Check back here at 8:20pm CST and hopefully you should see a live sermon by yours truly!

It actually worked! If you tuned in from 8:20-9:05pm CST, you would have seen a live broadcast of my sermon for Immersion! Check back next Thursday, October 9th to catch the latest in our new series, “What Does the Bible Really Say About…” Next week: Sex.

Oh yeah, it’s also the 10/10 Challenge!

Technorati Tags: Immersion

More Than Music.

I’ll be leading a break-out session this weekend at Lutheran Church of Hope’s “More Than Music” Seminar. Grant Norsworthy, of Sonicflood fame, is the keynote speaker and will be addressing what it means to be a worshiper of Christ and how it invades all areas of our lives. Right up my alley.

I’ll be speaking on the emerging/postmodern church and the need to reconnect our modern-day church model with our ancient, Eastern roots. This is a hard road to navigate, as many people on both sides of the coin are passionate about the direction in which the church of the future is headed.

The following is a passage from the book, “Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?” by James K.A. Smith. I will be using this in my talk and wanted to share it with you because it perfectly illustrates the tension that the 21st century church is in. We have mistaken a new way of doing church for being unfaithful to the charge of Jesus and the work of the 1st century church - it’s called primitivism:

“Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God’s action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity¹) and then seeks to make only this first-century ‘New Testament church’ normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulate by a rigid distinction between Scriptures and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as ‘the traditions of men’ as opposed to the ‘God-given’ realities of Scripture). Such primitivism is this anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon’s formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumenical creeds and confessions - such as the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed - that unite the church across time and around the globe are not “live” in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.“

What about you? What news ways are you finding working in your church? Where do you see primitivism at work?

1. The fact that primitivists accept the shape of the biblical canon as determined several centuries later is a nasty little exception to this rule. [↩]

Technorati Tags: Lutheran Church of Hope, Postmodern, Primitivism, West Des Moines