Category: Of Random Interest

Beginning of Serenity Online

About two weeks ago I raved about the movie Seren­i­ty. It turns out that the first nine min­utes are avail­able online so you can judge for your­self.

Pleasure As An Intrinsic Good

In my most recent ser­mon at Chi Alpha I made a state­ment in the Q & A time that “plea­sure is an intrin­sic good.”

At least one stu­dent has been think­ing about what I said and sent me an email:

I was read­ing Boethius’s The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy and a com­ment remind­ed me of some­thing you said last week at XA. You said some­thing to the effect of plea­sure in and of itself is intrin­si­cal­ly good. Now I total­ly under­stand what you were say­ing and what you weren’t say­ing. But I was won­der­ing if you could shoot me some Bible vers­es to back it up.

So I wrote up a reponse which I thought might be of gen­er­al inter­est:

First, the Bible nev­er explic­it­ly teach­es that plea­sure is an intrin­sic good. The Bible does­n’t real­ly deal in such philo­soph­i­cal cat­e­gories. Rather, the notion of plea­sure as an intrin­sic good is a pre­sup­po­si­tion through­out.

Vers­es that occur to me in this con­text:

Deut 14:22–27, where cel­e­bra­tion is pic­tured as wor­ship (see also Nehemi­ah 8:10 where cel­e­bra­tion is por­trayed as more appro­pri­ate response to God than fast­ing)
Psalm 104:14–15, where God cre­at­ed some things in the world for the sole pur­pose of plea­sure
The book of Eccle­si­astes in gen­er­al. Espe­cial­ly a few pas­sages like Ecc 11:7–10 and Ecc 9:7–10, where the Teacher encour­ages us to enjoy life. As with every­thing in Eccle­si­astes you’ll have to spend some time study­ing to make sure you feel that he’s endors­ing plea­sure in the con­text of the whole book (the Teacher is con­fus­ing, to put it mild­ly).

And I see strong hints that plea­sure is an intrin­sic good in that joy is a Bib­li­cal virtue (Gal 5:22, Neh 8:11), that many pas­sages pre­sup­pose (or com­mand) our delight in God (John 15:11, Psalm 1:2, Philip­pi­ans 4:4), and that plea­sure is a short­hand for the good­ness God offers us (Psalm 16:11).

In fact, there is a whole host of pas­sages that com­mand or pre­sup­pose our joy: Deut. 28:47; 1 Chr. 16:31,33; Ps. 32:11; Ps. 33:1; Ps. 35:9; Ps. 40:8,16; Ps. 42:1–2; Ps. 63:1,11; Ps. 64:10; Ps. 95:1; Ps. 98:4; Ps. 97:1,12; Ps. 104:34; Ps. 105:3; Isa. 41:16; Joel 2:23; Zech. 2:10; Zech. 10:7; 2 Cor. 9:7; cf. Acts 20:35; Philip­pi­ans 3:1. Heb. 10:34; Heb. 13:17; 1 Pet. 5:2.

That lat­ter list, inci­den­tal­ly, was most­ly lift­ed from some essays by a pas­tor and the­olo­gian named John Piper. He has writ­ten exten­sive­ly on “Chris­t­ian Hedo­nism” and these two brief essays are excel­lent intro­duc­tions to the sub­ject: We Want You To Be A Chris­t­ian Hedo­nist, Broth­ers, Con­sid­er Chris­t­ian Hedo­nism!

And to clar­i­fy, the fact that the plea­sure of even a sin­ful action is intrin­sicly good does not make the action itself good. Nor does it even make the fact that you derive plea­sure from it good (con­sid­er, for instance, laugh­ing at a per­verse joke or the less com­mon case of necrophil­ia). All that I assert is that plea­sure is intrin­sicly good and that we need to appre­ci­ate that fact. Some Chris­tians treat plea­sure as some­how bad for you and are instant­ly sus­pi­cious of any­thing fun or enter­tain­ing. That’s just bad the­ol­o­gy. The fact that some­thing pro­duces plea­sure should cause us to give it the ben­e­fit of the doubt rather than assume it guilty until proven inno­cent.

This has been a pub­lic ser­vice announc­ment.

Pastor, Is Your Church Too Small?

He even looks a little like a pastor...Adam Long recent­ly emailed this to me and some oth­er friends and with his per­mis­sion I post it here for the world to enjoy.

A dis­claimer: I don’t know any­thing about Nel­son Searcy. He’s prob­a­bly a great guy who has very help­ful insights. The com­men­tary below isn’t about him or his ministry–it’s about his mar­ket­ing. In fact, it’s about the way most min­istry train­ing is mar­ket­ed. And it’s pret­ty fun­ny.

I have a long run­ning prob­lem with the con­fla­tion of cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket­ing and church life. Yes, yes, I believe in redeem­ing the cul­ture. No, no, I’m not a Marx­ist. But I think that we may be head­ing down a dan­ger­ous road. And we need to think things through before div­ing in.

So here’s my prob­lem. I think there’s too much sim­i­lar­i­ty between mar­ket­ing for “church growth” ser­vices and male enhance­ment prod­ucts.

Please don’t dis­miss this. I’m not try­ing to be unnec­es­sar­i­ly provoca­tive. I don’t com­plete­ly buy Freud, but so much church growth mate­r­i­al seems to tap a cer­tain form of envy that strikes many males.

Just take a look at the fol­low­ing quotes from the attached piece, “WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT A COACHING COMMUNITY WITH NELSON SEARCY.”

  • Assim­i­la­tion has been huge!!!
  • I was slump­ing in my per­son­al growth
  • This would have saved me sev­er­al years of frus­tra­tion
  • You don’t have to be alone, do it alone
  • Coach­ing Com­mu­ni­ty gave me more con­fi­dence, com­pe­ten­cy
  • Do it! It is worth expo­nen­tial­ly more than the fees!
  • Don’t miss this oppor­tu­ni­ty to grow your­self

I’ve heard peo­ple com­pare TBN to the Home Shop­ping Net­work. It’s so easy to make fun of oth­ers as long as their reli­gious style dif­fers from ours. But what hap­pens when “our” groups sound like Enzyte com­er­cials? Seri­ous­ly? What do we do?

The uber-wit­ty Antho­ny Sco­ma replied:

That is hilar­i­ous, but you missed the best line, My being chal­lenged as a leader has raised “the bar” for lead­ers in our church.

Good News/Bad News

When I’m not out preach­ing, our fam­i­ly attends Path­way Church in Palo Alto. Path­way is an 8‑month old church plant. Good things are hap­pen­ing there–a Mor­mon lady con­vert­ed last week, for instance.

But any­one who’s ever start­ed a min­istry from scratch knows that some days are just painful to be a part of. Things go wrong that you would nev­er imag­ine could go wrong.

This was one such day.

  • Good News: guest shows up based entire­ly on our inter­net ads.
    Bad News: while chat­ting with the pas­tor before the ser­vice she is struck solid­ly in the neck by a fris­bee and has to go home, take some med­i­cine, and lie down.
  • Good News: I brought five stu­dents from Stan­ford to check out the church.
    Bad News: every sin­gle one of our reg­u­lars who was­n’t help­ing missed church today. Every. Sin­gle. One. Dur­ing wor­ship it was me and the stu­dents in the con­gre­ga­tion.
  • Good News: the songs were real­ly cool songs.
    Bad News: two of the micro­phones stopped work­ing between the sound check and the start of ser­vice and some­how the key­board became pos­sessed by a demon. At least, that’s my best guess. It sure moaned as though pos­sessed.
  • Good News: Scott’s ser­mon was thought­ful and well-pre­sent­ed.
    Bad News: the trans­la­tion that was shown on the screen was dif­fer­ent from the trans­la­tion Scott was read­ing despite being pur­port­ed­ly the same (fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion reveals there are two edi­tions of the New Liv­ing Trans­la­tion–our pew Bibles are the first and our com­put­er Bible is the second–who knew?). The effect was dis­con­cert­ing and dis­tract­ed from an oth­er­wise excel­lent mes­sage.

I’m not one to hyper­spir­i­tu­al­ize things, but I see a cor­re­la­tion between the suc­cess our church has been enjoy­ing late­ly and all the “nobody’s fault” glitch­es that popped up today. The Bible teach­es us that we have an ene­my, and some­times he leaves scat behind.

This is clear­ly going to be one of those ser­vices we spend a lot of time laugh­ing about in a few years… espe­cial­ly the fris­bee in the neck bit. How ran­dom is that?

Python Eats Alligator, Pops

This just in from Nation­al Geo­graph­ic: pythons eat alli­ga­tors and get real­ly bad indi­ges­tion xxx movie . “Clash­es between alli­ga­tors and pythons have been on the rise in the Ever­glades for the past 20 years. Unwant­ed pet snakes dumped in the swamp have thrived, and the Asian rep­tile is now a major com­peti­tor in the alli­ga­tor’s native ecosys­tem.”

Elite Admissions

Mal­com Glad­well has a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on “the social log­ic of Ivy League admis­sions.” I must say, I take umbrage at the “short with big ears” denial–us short­ies got­ta stick togeth­er.

Lay Leadership Summit

Every year our dis­trict spon­sors an event called The Lay Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. It’s a big con­fer­ence designed to help church vol­un­teers do their jobs bet­ter. There are about 50 learn­ing tracks (each with four work­shops) rang­ing from chil­dren’s min­istry to using the inter­net effec­tive­ly to using light­ing and sound sys­tems. We, of course, spon­sor a col­lege min­istry track.

I men­tion all this by way of intro­duc­tion to men­tion two peo­ple I inter­act­ed with this week­end: Dan Bet­zer and John Abela.

Dan Bet­zer is a leg­end in the Assem­blies of God–he’s an incred­i­ble speak­er, a mis­sions fanat­ic, and an extreme­ly suc­cess­ful pas­tor. He’s also a bit of a hero of mine (his wife, inci­den­tal­ly, blogs).

Any­way, I learned two things about him this week­end:
1) he once lost his min­is­te­r­i­al cre­den­tials for sev­en years for flout­ing the hier­ar­chy’s rules
2) he’s such an intro­vert that he keeps his office at 60 degrees so that peo­ple feel too chilly to hang around and chit-chat

For the record, he and I have nev­er had a con­ver­sa­tion. I gleaned one tid­bit from his ser­mon and anoth­er from a friend of his.

The sec­ond per­son I met was John Abela. John is a for­mer core mem­ber of the phpBB2 team and runs the most pop­u­lar con­glom­er­a­tion of Assem­blies of God web­sites in the world. I am told that his total band­width exceeds that of all the nation­al Assem­bly of God web­sites in every nation com­bined.

That tick­les me. Many of our lead­ers attempt to lead by lim­it­ing infor­ma­tion and don’t seem to real­ize that’s no longer pos­si­ble. John has effec­tive­ly done an end run on a ton of stu­pid rules in the Assem­blies of God and because he’s a layper­son no one can stop him–he’s got no cre­den­tials for them to revoke. I love it.

He men­tioned that he gets a phone call from some AG offi­cial or anoth­er about once a week ask­ing him to stop doing what he’s doing. Even allow­ing for con­ver­sa­tion­al hyper­bole, that sounds about right. He’s mak­ing peo­ple ner­vous enough that we’ve even had res­o­lu­tions at Gen­er­al Coun­cil prompt­ed by one of his sites.

Any­way, I just want­ed to say that I think John’s a cool guy and that he’s mak­ing our move­ment bet­ter by using the web to help peo­ple. Kudos to him.

Great T‑Shirt On Campus

Hats off to this guy–what an awe­some slo­gan. I’m tempt­ed to make them our offi­cial Chi Alpha shirts.

By the way–clicking on the pic­ture reveals the gen­tle­man so garbed. He suits the shirt.

What All Religions Have In Common

At a three-hour Stan­ford Asso­ci­at­ed Reli­gions meet­ing last Fri­day I final­ly dis­cov­ered what all reli­gions have in com­mon: an aver­sion to meet­ings, par­tic­u­lary the long and bureau­crat­ic sort. Espe­cial­ly meet­ings in which the rules fall like man­na from heav­en. For instance, the Office For Reli­gious Life (an office I gen­er­al­ly and gen­uine­ly enjoy work­ing with), decid­ed that last year’s “Uni­fied Chris­t­ian Gath­er­ing” was decep­tive­ly titled because the Mor­mons (and a few oth­er groups) were not invit­ed to help plan the event and so now we have new rules gov­ern­ing event titles. And for a few min­utes there I thought we were about to be required to clear all guest speak­ers with the stu­dent activ­i­ti­ties staff. Yeesh!