Author: Glen

Worship for Believers and Unbelievers

One of my favorite MP3s is Tim Keller’s Preach­ing to Believ­ers and Unbe­liev­ers. I des­per­ate­ly want to preach in such a way that I nour­ish believ­ers while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly engag­ing non­be­liev­ers.

I don’t know of any com­pa­ra­ble resource that talks about musi­cal wor­ship. Does any­one know of a good MP3, arti­cle or book along these lines?

I’m not just look­ing for some­thing that says, “We should do this.” I’m look­ing for some­thing that says, “We should do this, and here is how.”

You can leave a com­ment the hurt lock­er dvd or send me an email/Facebook mes­sage.

Why People Are Getting Married Later

The Freako­nom­ics blog tipped me off to a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with the author of a recent book on mar­riage in Amer­i­ca. Two of the author’s respons­es stood out to me (empha­sis added):

Fifty years ago you had to be mar­ried to be a respectable adult in the Unit­ed States. Today, mar­riage is optional—you can get most of your emo­tion­al and eco­nom­ic needs by liv­ing with partner—and sin­gle par­ents can also get by. But odd­ly enough, mar­riage is, if any­thing, more impor­tant than ever to peo­ple as a sym­bol of hav­ing made it in life—of hav­ing a suc­cess­ful per­son­al life. Most young Amer­i­cans still want to get mar­ried, but they do it only when all the oth­er steps to adult­hood are in place—when they have com­plet­ed their edu­ca­tion, when they and their part­ners have jobs, when they have saved up enough for a down pay­ment on a house, or even have had chil­dren togeth­er. Mar­riage used to be the first step into adult­hood, but now it is the last. It’s the cap­stone of per­son­al life—the final brick put in after all the oth­ers are in place.

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So mar­riage is still impor­tant, but in a dif­fer­ent way than in the past. It’s a sym­bol of per­son­al achievement—the ulti­mate mer­it badge, the mar­riage badge.

And

One sta­tis­tic that stunned me: take two chil­dren, one grow­ing up with mar­ried par­ents in the Unit­ed States, and one grow­ing up with unmar­ried par­ents in Sweden—which child has the high­er like­li­hood of see­ing his par­ents’ rela­tion­ship break up? Answer: the Amer­i­can kid, because chil­dren liv­ing with mar­ried par­ents in the Unit­ed States have a high­er prob­a­bil­i­ty of expe­ri­enc­ing a break-up than do chil­dren liv­ing with unmar­ried par­ents in Swe­den. That’s how high our break-up rates are.

So… yeah. If it sounds inter­est­ing to you, check out The Mar­riage-Go-Round. Inter­est­ing­ly, the Google Books page is very sparse right now. How long does it take for new books to get a full list­ing?

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My Redeemer Lives Considered From The Standpoint Of Grammar

WARNING: gram­mar geek­i­ness ahead.

I hate songs with non­sen­si­cal lyrics, espe­cial­ly those that pur­port to be wor­ship songs. The lyrics of a song mat­ter far more to me than their accom­pa­ny­ing music: I would for­bid a song from being played in my min­istry for hav­ing bad lyrics but nev­er for hav­ing chords which I did not like.

And so I was espe­cial­ly pleased to make sense of some puz­zling lyrics in My Redeemer Lives

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in church this morn­ing.

The prob­lem­at­ic stan­za is

You lift my bur­dens
I’ll rise with You
I’m danc­ing on this moun­tain top
to see Your king­dom come

I was hung up on the word “to”, which I took to mean “I am danc­ing on this moun­tain top in order to bring about Your King­dom’s arrival.” In anoth­er lan­guage this would be called a dative of pur­pose. This trou­bled me, because as Lind­sey down­load the tragedy of mac­beth online down­load drag me to hell dvd down­load the name­sake online

said this morn­ing, “There are few things less like­ly to bring about the king­dom than danc­ing on a moun­tain. How about feed­ing some home­less peo­ple or talk­ing to some­one about Jesus?”

But then I real­ized there were at least two oth­er inter­pre­ta­tions of the word “to”. It could be like a dative of instru­ment (“I am danc­ing on this moun­tain top because I get a good view from up here which enables me to behold Your king­dom as it spreads on earth”) or like an abla­tive of atten­dant cir­cum­stances (“To see your King­dom come caus­es me to dance on this moun­tain top”).

I sus­pect it’s the lat­ter.

So now I can sing that song.

For the 1% of you who have been sim­i­lar­ly puz­zled, you’re wel­come.

For the 80% of you won­der­ing if I made up the words dative and abla­tive, check out Wikipedi­a’s list of gram­mat­i­cal cas­es.

Create a Facebook Friend List for Chi Alpha

I just sent this email to the stu­dents in my min­istry. If you find it help­ful, feel free to adapt it for your own church/ministry.

Hope you’re doing well in the after­math of finals.

Quick sug­ges­tion: take a bit of your free time over spring break to do a very sim­ple task that will help strength­en our com­mu­ni­ty.

If you use Face­book, make a friend list for Chi Alpha.

  1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn
  2. Click the blue “Make A New List” but­ton on the left side of the screen and call the new list “Chi Alpha”.
  3. On the next screen, add every­one in Chi Alpha. Use the phone list as a guide (I’ve enclosed the list of names below — just cut and paste them one at a time into the “add to list” box).
  4. Now every time you log in, you’ve got a sim­ple way to quick­ly check in with our com­mu­ni­ty. There will be a “Chi Alpha” link on the left side­bar of the main Face­book page that will show you the most recent sta­tus updates/shared links/whatever from the peo­ple in our group.
  5. Now add two or three peo­ple you are shar­ing your faith with to the list. When­ev­er you see their sta­tus updates pop up on the XA list you just made, remem­ber to pray for them and invite them to join us the next time you see them.

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It’s hard­ly going to rev­o­lu­tion­ize your life, but if all or even a lot of us do it then it will make our com­mu­ni­ty that much tighter. Face­book is a great tool for enhanc­ing real life friend­ships — max­i­mize it for the King­dom!

Hope it helps. We’re all in this togeth­er. car acci­dent lawyers ny down­load basic instinct 2 free

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College Ministry and Global Transformation

One of my favorite sub­jects to talk about is the strate­gic nature of cam­pus min­istry. As I was read­ing the most recent issue of Books & Cul­ture scar divx

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, one pas­sage from a book review popped out at me:

I saw a strik­ing pat­tern in these books [Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty and Democ­ra­cy in the Glob­al South: Africa chil­dren shouldn t play with dead things down­load /Latin Amer­i­ca/Asia] that the edi­tors and authors did not men­tion: a dis­tinct source for much of the more prin­ci­pled evan­gel­i­cal social and polit­i­cal engage­ment across the regions. Repeat­ed­ly, the lead­ers of para­church min­istries and reform-mind­ed NGOs that worked on behalf of the poor and the vul­ner­a­ble, who spoke up for human rights and elec­toral reform and against cor­rup­tion and auto­crat­ic rule came from two sources: stu­dent Chris­t­ian move­ments and the world­wide net­work of evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers affil­i­at­ed with the Lau­sanne Com­mit­tee for World Evan­ge­liza­tion. Inter-Var­si­ty Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship joined the Peo­ple Pow­er move­ment in the Philip­pines, while Cam­pus Cru­sade played a cen­tral role in the for­ma­tion of the Cit­i­zens Com­mit­tee for Eco­nom­ic Jus­tice in South Korea. Like­wise in South Africa, it was the mem­bers of Youth Alive, the evan­gel­i­cal stu­dent fel­low­ship start­ed in Sowe­to by Cae­sar Mole­bat­si, who drove the Con­cerned Evan­gel­i­cals move­ment to resist apartheid in the 1980s. The Latin Amer­i­can The­o­log­i­cal Fra­ter­ni­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal net­work with strong ties to both the Lau­sanne Com­mit­tee and the Inter­na­tion­al Fel­low­ship of Evan­gel­i­cal Stu­dents, fig­ures promi­nent­ly in pro-demo­c­ra­t­ic evan­gel­i­cal work across Latin Amer­i­ca.

INFEMIT [the Inter­na­tion­al Fel­low­ship of Evan­gel­i­cal Mis­sion The­olo­gians] itself is a prod­uct of this net­work, which might help explain these authors’ inter­est in high­light­ing this strain of evan­gel­i­cal social thought and action. But it is indeed sig­nif­i­cant. Lit­tle could the Anglo-Amer­i­can founders of the Lau­sanne and cam­pus min­istry move­ments have imag­ined that their empha­sis on thought­ful Bible study and a “whole gospel for the whole world” would help ani­mate demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments around the globe.

source: “Now What? Revival­ist Chris­tian­i­ty and Glob­al South Pol­i­tics” by Joel Car­pen­ter. Books & Cul­ture March/April 2009, page 36.

If you want to change a cul­ture, change its cam­pus­es. They are the steer­ing wheels of soci­ety.

How To Listen To A Bad Sermon

Lis­ten­ing to a bad ser­mon is like eat­ing crab legs. It’s a lot more trou­ble than it should be, but you can still get a lot of meat if you are dili­gent.

So how do you do it?

Here are some tips that I some­times find help­ful, in order of pref­er­ence. I don’t want to make you too excit­ed: noth­ing is going to make a bad ser­mon good. But these might help mit­i­gate your suf­fer­ing.

  1. Be mer­ci­ful. Preach­ing con­sis­tent­ly good ser­mons is a lot hard­er than it seems. Think about your worst day on the job and how you would like your cowork­ers and cus­tomers to respond with com­pas­sion and under­stand­ing. Now extend that same com­pas­sion to the preach­er.
  2. Over­look the stu­pid stuff. Every once in a while even sol­id and reli­able preach­ers will say some­thing that’s com­plete­ly ridicu­lous — usu­al­ly when they ven­ture out­side their area of exper­tise. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when preach­ers begin using sto­ries to illus­trate a point they are try­ing to make. It can real­ly throw you for a loop. Tune it out the same way you tune out that one cousin at fam­i­ly reunions. Even your favorite book has some bor­ing pas­sages, but you judge the book on its high­lights. Judge ser­mons like­wise.
  3. Be ran­dom­ly inspired. I learned this from Dary Northrop in a sem­i­nar: you should bring a note­book to ser­mons not because of how insight­ful and mag­nif­i­cent the preach­er is going to be, but because the Holy Spir­it will spark new and amaz­ing insights in you which are only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to what is in the speak­er’s notes. Few ser­mons are so bad that there is no good­ness in them — even a three-year-old will say some­thing pro­found and/or hilar­i­ous if you lis­ten to them long enough. So wait for a clever turn of phrase, an obscure or unex­pect­ed Bible ref­er­ence, or a fact that you were hith­er­to unaware of and begin writ­ing furi­ous­ly. Doo­dle as well. Repeat as nec­es­sary.
  4. Pre­tend it’s oppo­sites day. don t look now free down­load

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    had a tra­di­tion in his Chi Alpha min­istry. Once a year he would preach oppo­site: “Why You Should Not Pray”, “Why God Is Untrust­wor­thy”, etc. He did it dead­pan (well — as dead­pan as Har­low ever gets). The first time he did it he was wor­ried his stu­dents would­n’t catch on that he was mere­ly exag­ger­at­ing and then repeat­ing their own doubts back to them in order to demon­strate how ridicu­lous their doubts were, but it was a huge suc­cess. Even the guests got it. It became an insti­tu­tion. Ever since he told me that sto­ry, I game­ly pre­tend that a real­ly bad ser­mon is mere­ly the results of “oppo­sites day”.

  5. Improve the ser­mon.

    This is risky because it can lead to pride and also can be dis­rup­tive if peo­ple around you notice what you’re doing, but there are times when it’s your only pos­si­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal defense. There are two fun­da­men­tal kinds of bad­ness. There’s bad deliv­ery. That’s the best kind. The preach­er has good things to say, but the inabil­i­ty to say them well. The whole ser­mon can be spent fruit­ful­ly para­phras­ing and improv­ing the sol­id con­tent of the ser­mon. For exam­ple, you might reorder and reword the out­line for greater impact or log­i­cal flow. There’s bad con­tent. The preach­er is dis­tort­ing the text or not think­ing things through. That’s hard­er, but can be even more divert­ing. You can com­pose your own out­line from scratch on the same pas­sage or top­ic that the preach­er is endeav­or­ing to address. One or two of my best ser­mons has come about this way.

Final­ly, my apolo­gies to those who have had to endure a stinker from me. I know it has hap­pened before and have no doubt it will hap­pen again. It’s my job to be the best speak­er I can be and it is your job to be the best lis­ten­er that you can be. I’ll do my job whether or not you do yours, but if we work togeth­er this whole thing will go much more smooth­ly.

And a note to my pas­tor — relax, this was not inspired by your ser­mon this week. You did­n’t even preach. We watched a movie, remem­ber? 🙂

We're Number 10

Just noticed that the Nation­al Coun­cil of Church’s 2009 Year­book was recent­ly pub­lished (found via MMI). Here are the stats on the 10 largest reli­gious groups in Amer­i­ca.

  1. The Roman Catholic Church, 67,117,06 mem­bers, down 0.59 per­cent.
  2. The South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, 16,266,920 mem­bers, down 0.24 per­cent.
  3. The Unit­ed Methodist Church, 7,931,733 mem­bers, down 0.80 per­cent.
  4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, 5,873,408 mem­bers, up 1.63 per­cent.
  5. The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  6. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, U.S.A., Inc., 5,000,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  7. Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, 4,709,956 mem­bers, down 1.35 per­cent.
  8. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion of Amer­i­ca, Inc., 3,500,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  9. Pres­by­ter­ian Church (USA), 2,941,412 mem­bers, down 2.79 per­cent
  10. Assem­blies of God, 2,863,265 mem­bers, up 0.96 per­cent. dan­ger­ous beau­ty divx online blue­toes the christ­mas elf movie down­load down­load home­ward bound ii lost in san fran­cis­co online

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So.… yeah. We’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10! Maybe we can chant that at Gen­er­al Coun­cil.

Sad­ly, we’re the only Chris­t­ian group (in the top 10) that is grow­ing. And even sad­der, when you get into our inter­nal num­bers you real­ize that a few parts of our move­ment are grow­ing rapid­ly but that there are huge swaths under­go­ing slow decline. For now, the explo­sive growth is off­set­ting the decay.

I’m grate­ful that I’m on a win­ning team and that our move­ment is grow­ing when so many are stag­nat­ing, but I must con­fess that a 0.96% growth rate is not exact­ly the sort of thing that stirs the pulse.

We need divine­ly-sparked revival to which we must respond with orga­ni­za­tion­al renew­al, or else we’ll soon be cel­e­brat­ing the fact that we shrunk least.

But hey — for now I’ve got a handy fact I can share with peo­ple who say, “The Assem­blies of God? Nev­er heard of it.” I can now shoot back, “Hey — we’re almost as large as the Pres­by­te­ri­ans. Near­ly. We’re only off by like 80,000 peo­ple. That’s the size of a good South Amer­i­can church. We haven’t quite fig­ured out how to do that in North Amer­i­ca, but it can’t be that hard. So we’re basi­cal­ly one mis­si­o­log­i­cal insight and then one good church plant away from being num­ber 9. So there.”

Baptism on Campus

Jan­u­ary 29th I had a great priv­i­lege. I was able to bap­tize my friend Kel­ly in the Claw Foun­tain in between the Book­store and Old Union.

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The water was cold. In fact, I saw Kel­ly’s eyes shoot open when she went under the water and I could prac­ti­cal­ly read the thoughts run­ning through her brain, “I want to gasp. But if I gasp, I’ll drown. Drown­ing is bad at a bap­tism. But I want to gasp so bad­ly.”

For­tu­nate­ly, the warm Cal­i­for­nia sun brought her back from the brink of hypother­mia right after I pulled her up. I’m just glad I told her to bring a change of clothes and a tow­el!

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watch slaugh­ter online If hav­ing a bap­tism out in pub­lic strikes you as a lit­tle odd I’d like to point out that it has ample Bib­li­cal and his­tor­i­cal prece­dent. The most famous Bib­li­cal exam­ple is from Acts 8:36–38:

As they trav­eled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. Why should­n’t I be bap­tized?” And he gave orders to stop the char­i­ot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip bap­tized him.

Yeah. So we did that.

And I hope we get to do it again soon. 🙂

Digital Discipleship

In one of the first con­ver­sa­tions I remem­ber hav­ing with Scott Aught­mon, he tried to sell me on the advan­tages of using sequen­tial autore­spon­ders down­load evil under the sun

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in min­istry. I had no idea what he was talk­ing about, so I smiled and nod­ded.

Turns out they’re awe­some. I wish I had lis­tened to him soon­er.

Con­sid­er the case of Dick Schroed­er. He speaks at retreats and fre­quent­ly prays with peo­ple to be bap­tized in the Holy Spir­it. Over the years, he has put togeth­er a series of emails that he sends to peo­ple after­wards to coach them from a dis­tance.

One day he asked me if there was a way to auto­mate the process. My mind flashed back to Scot­t’s enthu­si­asm for these autore­spon­der things, so I down­loaded a free PHP script called Infi­nite Respon­der

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and set up http://chialpha.com/resources/holyspirit.

Now if some­one signs up, they begin receiv­ing coach­ing emails from Dick once a week. Since the mes­sages appear to come from his email address, stu­dents can just hit “reply” and ask Dick about any­thing they found con­fus­ing or that they need spe­cial advice about. It’s very low-main­te­nance for him, and Chi Alpha stu­dents nation­wide get a year’s worth of Dick­’s exper­tise.

Since rolling this out at the World Mis­sions Sum­mit (Jan 1st), we’ve had just over 200 peo­ple sub­scribe to these updates. That works out to about 7 signups a day. I have no idea where the total will cap out, but momen­tum is build­ing and I don’t even feel that the resource has been thor­ough­ly pub­li­cized yet.

Things I like about the tool:

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    It’s just email. No one has to install a spe­cial plu­g­in, put head­phones in their com­put­er, or have some insane­ly fast con­nec­tion.

  • Per­son­al. The emails come from an actu­al human being to whom you can respond.
  • Low-main­te­nance. Once the email is in the data­base, it’s just there. Nei­ther Dick nor I need to do any­thing spe­cial to send them out. And Dick only gets replies from peo­ple who have spe­cif­ic ques­tions, which is only a frac­tion of the peo­ple who receive any giv­en email.

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Pret­ty cool, eh?

Late­ly I’ve been won­der­ing what oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties are out there. Some ideas that I’ve had:

  • Emails for new believ­ers
  • A “40 days” type cam­paign for Chi Alpha with dai­ly emails where each cam­pus that choos­es to par­tic­i­pate picks its own start and stop times and the script takes care of all those details.
  • A first two weeks of school devo­tion­al to get stu­dents fired up when they return from sum­mer break
  • Coach­ing emails for peo­ple who are called to min­istry
  • Month­ly emails for Chi Alpha grads to help them make the tran­si­tion out of col­lege grace­ful­ly
  • A ter­m’s worth of week­ly emails for peo­ple pio­neer­ing new Chi Alpha min­istries
  • etc,etc

It’s just a mat­ter of find­ing a per­son with the right exper­tise and hook­ing them up. So if you’ve got an idea, I’d love to hear about it. I’d espe­cial­ly love to hear if you’re a Chi Alpha leader who has con­tent ready to go. I can just run it past Den­nis and get that stuff online faster than you can imag­ine. 😉

Thoughts on the Sociology of Religion

I have a stu­dent tak­ing a soci­ol­o­gy of reli­gion course right now, and she asked me for some advice on how to inte­grate what she’s learn­ing in class with her faith.

I thought this might be of inter­est to more stu­dents than just her, so here’s what I had to say (slight­ly mod­i­fied from the email):

We need to meet face-to-face to talk this through, but I have some ini­tial thoughts for you:

1) Many times we con­fuse descrip­tion with expla­na­tion. To explain how some­thing works is not to explain why it is. Clear­ly every­thing must work some way, and so inter­est­ing descrip­tions of every­thing ought to abound — I should be able to describe think­ing, love, humor, and grav­i­ty. But that does not mean that I have under­stood the things I am describ­ing inter­est­ing aspects of. For instance, I can describe the physics of golf in great detail, and then anoth­er schol­ar can come along and describe the rules of golf in great detail, and then a third schol­ar can come along and describe the his­to­ry of golf in great detail. All of these descrip­tions may be accu­rate, but none of these descrip­tions will explain why I play golf. And none will cap­ture what it feels like to play golf. And like­ly none of them, if writ­ten for a schol­ar­ly audi­ence, will be of the slight­est use to golfers desir­ing to hone their craft. Remem­ber that there is a soci­ol­o­gy of mar­riage, but should you become mar­ried one day you will dis­cov­er that there is a lev­el of real­i­ty that the soci­o­log­i­cal descrip­tions nev­er ade­quate­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed.

2) If you assume there is no God at the begin­ning of your analy­sis then your analy­sis will not per­suade me that there is no God, for how could it con­clude any­thing else? It reminds me of a sto­ry Fran­cis Collins told us last year: “A marine biol­o­gist casts a net into the low­est part of the ocean, brings up the catch, and ana­lyzes it. He makes an amaz­ing dis­cov­ery: there is no crea­ture at the bot­tom of the sea less than two inch­es in diam­e­ter! The prob­lem, of course, is that his net has two inch holes. It is inca­pable of dis­cov­er­ing any­thing small­er than its mesh.” In the same way, a method­ol­o­gy that rules out the super­nat­ur­al from the begin­ning will nev­er dis­cov­er evi­dence of the super­nat­ur­al. This should not be sur­pris­ing at all.

3) There are some faith-friend­ly soci­ol­o­gists out there. Three worth
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sea of love dvd , Bradley Wright, and Chris­t­ian Smith. Read some of their writ­ings, par­tic­u­lar­ly Stark’s. You can find him in the library. Maybe even email one of them and explain that you’re an under­grad and you have some ques­tions about how to relate soci­ol­o­gy to your faith (do not be offend­ed if they do not reply — they are busy peo­ple). Also, check out some of the books at http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/vocation/sociology/

Hope that’s use­ful to some of you. Much of it applies to the social sci­ences in gen­er­al. lam­ic­tal orange starter watch bar­bie mer­maid­ia online mak­ing waves divx movie online