Category: Rants, Opinions, and General Contrariness

Kevin Kelly, an influential thinker about all things digital, just posted an essay called Better than Free.

It’s quite good.

The gist is that technology is making copies easier and easier to create. In fact, copies of most things are so cheap that they’re essentially free.

In his words:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable

…

Well, what can’t be copied? 

There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world. 

Kelly identifies 8 similar difficult-to-copy qualities which add value to products and services:

1. Immediacy: getting it now (as it is produced or created)
2. Personalization: getting it made just for you
3. Interpretation: having it explained in a way that makes sense to you
4. Authenticity: knowing it’s the real deal or a copy of the real deal (as opposed to a song being done by a cover band or something)
5. Accessibility: it’s convenient to experience
6. Embodiment: it’s something you can experience on a uniquely intense level (you can shake the hand of the athlete who just scored the game-winning point, etc)
7. Patronage: you believe that by consuming it you’re enabling more of it (whatever it is you value) to be produced
8. Findability: it gets on your radar somehow

Kelly is mostly speaking about business in his essay, but it occurs to me that this is a pretty good checklist for ministry.

A sea of ministry copies is floating around your community. There’s Christian radio (carrying copies of some the best worship music and preaching to be found), there’s Christian television (carrying copies), there are Christian books and magazines (carrying copies of wise people’s opinions and Bible interpretations), and there are blogs that give everyone the opportunity to interact with any number of other esteemed Christian leaders. On top of that, there’s the multi-site church movement which at its heart is about copying ministry.

And this is to say nothing of the ministry clones that abound in every community. You know the ones I speak of. They are the Starbucks of churches, the McDonald’s of ministry. Each of them looks and feels the same no matter what community they nominally inhabit. They could care less whether they are in El Paso or Austin. They will treat Boston and Springfield, MO alike.

In this copy-laden context, what true value does your ministry offer? 

There are certainly other things we need to consider than Kelly’s list. Some of them are of exceeding importance, such as whether we’re proclaiming the gospel clearly and faithfully.

But his list still nags at me. It seems to me to be a helpful way to examine ourselves from a purely pragmatic perspective. 

I think ministries do well by these standards. For example, most ministries I know are strong at

1. Immediacy: people are there while we preach it — live. Our worship team is performing — live. Our prayers are spontaneous. People are operating in the gifts of the Spirit — live and without rehearsal.
2. Personalization: people are meeting with mentors who are showing them how to understand the Bible given their particular situation in life (although they’re not usually called mentors — they’re usually called youth sponsors, sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors, friends, co-workers, or something else that’s not very trendy to be callled)
3. Interpretation: people are not only given a Bible, they’re given a whole learning environment with it — sermons, Bible studies, Sunday School, seminars, conferences, Christian media, websites
4. Authenticity: it’s become cliche to knock around the established church for being inauthentic, but I just don’t see it. Most people love their pastor for a reason. Notable examples aside, most ministers aren’t hypocrites and are serving up the goods of a life lived in humilty before God.
5. Patronage: giving in the offering pays the salary of the pastoral team and allows the ministries of the church to operate. Giving in offerings allows missionaries to take the gospel around the world.

I think a lot of ministries could use work on the other parts of the list, however.

1. Accessibility: we too often make ministry inconvenient for the people we say we’re trying to reach. Our service times are funky. Our dress code is off-putting. Our lingo is difficult to decode.
2. Embodiment: too many churches seem obsessed with making church as bland and palatable as possible. This is especially true of my Pentecostal comrades: we’ve become embarrassed about our spirituality. To them, I can only quote Curt Harlow: don’t tone it down, sincere it up. Make coming to church significantly more lively and rewarding than watching a church service broadcast on a big screen tv at home with surround-sound.
3. Findability: not nearly as many people know about your ministry as you think. Existing is not enough to produce awareness.

So to my ministerial friends, I pose this simple question: in a world of copies, what makes your ministry valuable? Is it something that can’t be copied out from under you?

The things I find myself obsessing over are all too often the things that are the most copyable. Did my sermon sound like one of Rick Warren’s/John Ortberg’s/John Piper’s/etc? Does my worship team sound like they just rolled off the Passion Tour/IHOP Prayer Room/etc?

What I should be asking is: if Rick Warren set up on my campus, would I still be adding value to students’ lives? If Dave Crowder decided to lead worship for another ministry on my campus, would I still be adding value to students’ lives?

What’s not copyable about what I’m doing?

Anyway, just some off-the-cuff thoughts inspired by his essay. Read the article ladykillers the download free .

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A friend of mine asked me to watch the first section of Zeitgeist (a movie you can watch for free on the internet at http://zeitgeistmovie.com/) and give him some perspective on it.

Here goes:

I don’t recall ever having run across so many factual inaccuracies in such a short span of time. I doubt I even caught them all — they were flying fast and furious. 

I’ll start with a few that are easy for an untrained layperson to see right away. There’s some other stuff he said that I know is false, but demonstrating it is less easy. It becomes “my expert you’ve never heard of” versus “his expert you’ve never heard of” with me saying “my expert is better than his expert — trust me.” So I’ll keep this list focused on stuff anyone can easily verify on their own.

One easily-checked fact that he builds his argument on is that the Southern Cross is the real inspiration for the cross of Jesus (watch from 17:35 through 19:03). Three problems with this:
a) The Southern Cross is a modern invention — not an ancient constellation. Check http://www.windows.ucar.edu/the_universe/crux.html and http://www.fillingthesky.com/constellationhistory.html
b) The Southern Cross is not visible from where the New Testament was written. In the Northern Hemisphere you have to be below 30 degrees latitude to see it. The New Testament was written from Jerusalem on north.
c) It’s hard to see how a constellation that didn’t exist and couldn’t be seen inspired the story of Jesus when Romans actually killed people on crosses all the time. Is he seriously suggesting that the Romans didn’t actually crucify people?

Missing such a basic fact doesn’t inspire confidence in the more esoteric, less easily-checked facts he uses to make his entire case. There are other easily-checked facts he distorts. Two from the Bible struck me.

In the time range 23:38 — 25:20 the movie claims that Jesus is a personification of the astrological sign of Pisces. Towards the end of this section, the narrator states that Jesus’ disciples asked him when he would celebrate the next passover with them him after he is gone and that Jesus’ answer in Luke 22:10 was code language for Aquarius (the next age of the Zodiac). This is easy enough to check — and it turns out to be a lie. Luke 22:10 is about the passover they are celebrating that night, not the next meal they will share after his resurrection. That isn’t a minor difference — it undermines his entire interpretation.

Another example of his willingness to distort the Bible to make his point occurs around time marker 21:10, when he says that the Bible teaches that Jesus comes from heaven wearing a crown of thorns, which represent the rays of the sun. He quotes John 19:5 to support this point. Look it up. There’s not even a hint of Jesus descending from heaven anywhere in this passage. He’s walking from one place to another — not descending from the clouds as the narrator claims.

These two instances aren’t nitpicking — these are very easily checked statements in the bestselling book of all time which is always available for instant fact-checking on the internet at places such as Bible Gateway. If he didn’t even check these references that key parts of his argument rely on, then how much stock can we place in his references to obscure ancient Egyptian texts that only scholars have ready access to?

He’s evidently received criticism along this line, because he felt compelled to give some documentation for his use of ancient texts at http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/GMappendix.htm

Just look through it. Pay attention to the stories of Jesus in the right column (you are presumably more familiar with them). I think you’ll be surprised at how flaky that list is. 

Bottom line: Zeitgeist is very imaginative, but that’s about it.

UPDATE 2/24/2008: This post is still generating comments. It’s been six months since I wrote this post, and since then a helpful review by Ben Witherington has been posted — The Zeitgeist of the ‘Zeitgeist Movie’. Look to it for a more detailed rebuttal of the movie’s claims.

Every so often I’ll hear someone mention in passing that we are overloaded with information compared to our ancestors. I’m sure that’s true if you measure “information” in a very specific way, but I’m not sure it’s as true as people think it is.

Augustine, the 4th century bishop, left behind over 5,000,000 words in writing.

That’s 5 million words.

Many novels have 50,000 (the range varies depending on the genre).

He left behind the equivalent of 100 novels. And he’s just one author.

For the educated elite, the ancient world was rife with information. And, by and large, the stuff they read was more important than the “information” we’re so proud of. Most of what we devote our brainpower to processing is from newspapers, magazines, and television… the knowledge equivalent of empty calories.

For all the “information” we each have at our beck and call, not many of us could muster up 5 million words.

And since our point in saying that we’re so overloaded compared to the ancients is that we’ve got so much more stuff to process than they did, maybe we shouldn’t be so smug. After all — we don’t really process the “information” that bombards us. We rush through it and promptly forget as much as possible to get ready for the next deluge.

The ancients were reading and rereading and rerereading substantive works and actually understanding them. And so Augustine was able to write 5,000,000 words that people still mull over today.

We have no idea what information overload feels like. If we canceled our newspaper subscriptions, threw away all our magazines, and replaced all that reading time with rereading a handful of solid books until we understood them thoroughly, then we’d have some inkling of what true information overload is.

And since we’ve got so many years of insights beyond Augustine to avail ourselves of, and the modern peer-reviewed system of journals to draw from, we’d be very justified in saying that we wrestle with information in a way that the ancients never did.

But not now.

Somewhere I heard that most of today’s best-known pastors didn’t go to seminary. As I recall, this observation was brought up in the context of criticizing the very concept of graduate-level ministerial training. The implication was that the time spent learning about the Bible would have been better spent learning about marketing (or the internet or psychology or something practical).

This criticism didn’t have a lot of weight for me — I just knew seminary had been good for me and I continued to recommend it to any minister who loved learning.

But I realized this morning that the allegation was untrue. Not only have lots of the big-name pastors gone to seminary, I would say that the majority of those that we first think of are seminarians.

• Andy Stanley — Dallas Theological Seminary
• Craig Groeschel — Phillips Theological Seminary
• Rob Bell — Fuller Theological Seminary
• John Ortberg — Fuller Theological Seminary
• John Piper — Fuller and the University of Munich (Ph.D.)
• Tim Keller — Gordon Conwell and Westminster Theological Seminary (Ph.D.)
• Rick Warren — Fuller Theological Seminary

There are several who haven’t. Bill Hybels hasn’t gone to seminary, for example. I don’t think Ed Young, Jr. has, either. Joel Osteen hasn’t. Mark Driscoll is, I believe, finishing up a seminary degree right now.

But from what I can tell the majority of nationally-known Christian pastors have gone to seminary.

I’m not saying that going to seminary will guarantee you a numerically fruitful ministry — but I can guarantee you that it won’t prevent you from building a numerically fruitful ministry, either. And you’ll be a better person for having gone.

In an age when seminary gets a lot of knocks, I thought that was worth sharing.

I’ve been thinking about LifeChurch.tv lately (check the Wikipedia article on them).

In case you’re not familiar with the church, it’s one of the best-known examples of the multi-site church movement. At present, Life Church uses live video feeds to simultaneously have the same service in Oklahoma, Arizona, Texas, and Tennessee. They also stream the service over the internet.

They both start new churches and acquire existing churches (that’s their language, not mine. They are very clear that they are not proposing mergers — they are proposing acquisitions — listen to Kevin Penry). If you’d like to be acquired you can sign up online ask the dust divx movie online .

One thing I want to praise them for: they make their resources available online for free. They’re clearly very Kingdom-minded.

But something about LifeChurch’s approach worries me.

I’ll explain what it is after some necessary disclaimers:

1. I have no fundamental theological problem with multi-site churches. If you think it’s okay for a single-site church to have two services on a Sunday morning then you’re inconsistent to oppose multiple-site churches. Once you cede the splitting of the congregation it’s all just a matter of degree (if this is not clear to you then spend some time thinking through your problems with multi-site churches and how they are also applicable to a church that has an 8:00am service and an 11am service). 
2. There are a lot of ways to do multi-site church and there is certainly diversity within the movement. My concerns about LifeChurch’s approach don’t apply to all the ways multi-site is done. 

Here’s my concern: if LifeChurch’s philosophy becomes the norm (an excellent test of the soundness of a philosophy) then we lose something vital to the health of the church.

Let’s say LifeChurch continues to grow and spreads into 10 or 15 states. They reach 100,000 in aggregate attendance. 200,000. 500,000. 1,000,000. These numbers are not unreasonable — multi-site churches seem to be scale-free networks and thus will exhibit the winner-take-all phenomenon. The largest multi-site will be about twice as large as its next-greatest neighbor and so on down the line.

In effect, LifeChurch (or someone like it) will become the Wal-Mart of churches soon, and just like Wal-Mart the overwhelming nature of their dominance will be surprising and will take a while to sink in. And just like Wal-Mart, that will bring some good and some bad along with it.

What happens when the primary leader of the American gigachurch lapses into stupidity, heresy, or moral failure? How does that affect Christianity in America?

This isn’t an unrealistic concern — evangelicalism has a history of each of these blunders. And the higher-profile a person is the more prone they seem to be to falling into one or more of these.

• Stupidity: public displays of ignorance, particularly on political or scientific issues
• Heresy: saying things about Jesus or the Bible that just aren’t true
• Moral Failure: financial impropriety or sexual immorality, for example

As things stand now, when Joe Preacher on television has a moral blowout that church is destroyed but the rest of us rock on, saddened but unaffected.

Imagine a single church which contains 35% of all evangelicals in America (and a handful in England and Australia) having the same blowout. It’s a completely different story.

That’s bad enough, but what I really worry about is the lack of ideological diversity such an arrangement would bring about. Evangelicals are already prone to sheep-like behavior, but at least we currently hang out in different flocks. 

When we create an evangelical pope who has far more direct influence over his organization than the Pope has over the Catholic church, we will lose something vibrant and vital about evangelicalism. If we’re not careful, we’ll lose a vital part of the gains of the Reformation.

LifeChurch (and the entire multi-site movement) have a lot to offer and are doing some wonderful things. On the whole, I have high praise for them.

But it is not unqualified praise.

Yesterday I mentioned some of my least-favorite entertainment, today is the opposite-entertainment I adore.

Radio: Dennis Prager is the man. He’s smart, reasonable, and thinks out loud in an interesting way. If your local radio doesn’t carry him then it’s your loss. Honorable mentions: Ira Flatow and Hugh Hewitt.

Television: Mythbusters is clearly the best show in the history of something. I just can’t decide whether it’s the best show in the history of the universe or the best show in the history of television. Honorable mentions: Dog the Bounty Hunter, 24.

Books: Steven Brust is one of the greatest authors of our generation. If you like novels about assassins with sarcastic lizards, that is. Honorable mentions: Terry Pratchett, C. S. Friedman

Music: Rich Mullins rocks the free world. Or rocked the free world. Or whatever. He’s dead but his music continues to inspire me. Honorable mentions: U2, Men Without Hats

Social networking sites like the Facebook often ask you to list your favorite books, movies, and music. I understand the reasoning they’re using, but sometimes I wonder about what people really dislike. 

Lest ye wonder the same about me, here’s my list of entertainment I could do without:

• In radio, I could do without Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I just don’t like her interviews. She’s got a wonderful reputation and so I’m sure she’s great at what she does, but I just don’t connect with her. And I LOVE talk radio.
• On television, I could do without Project Runway. Paula loves this reality show, but I just don’t get it. Most fashion is ugly anyway — nobody really likes it except for those in the fashion industry. Even the supermodels who demo the outfits don’t wear that stuff when they don’t have to.
• In the world of letters, I could do without the books by Brian Herbert. Frank Herbert’s son has been writing science fiction novels just like his dad did. One problem: he’s not his dad.
• And in the world of music, I could do without hip hop. I know it’s hip (by definition — see name) and all the kids are diggin’ it, but it just doesn’t do it for me. I can appreciate the bizarre genius that goes into crafting the rhymes and that are rockin’ our times, but Dr. Seuss retired that genre years ago. Everything else is purely derivative.

So that’s my anti-profile. You may now judge me by the things I don’t like.

An article in the Stanford Daily today caught my attention: Jesus Never Lived, Speaker Says.

My first thought was a bit carnal — how come our events don’t get the same coverage in the Daily? We almost certainly draw more people (as when Dr. Bill Craig lectured on the existence of God to a crowd of hundreds) and our views are certainly controversial (God exists, Jesus is God, sin is real, salvation is possible, etc).

My second thought was more focused: I should respond to this. I hear more and more students talking about the existence of Jesus as though there is some real controversy, so I shouldn’t let this pass without comment.

Now I wasn’t at the talk, so I don’t know exactly what the speaker said. All I know is what the article claims the speaker said. He could have been considerably more effective at making his point than the article seems to indicate. This isn’t, strictly speaking, a critique of the speaker so much as a reflection on the whole notion of Jesus being a make-believe person.

According to the article, there are two clues that Jesus never existed:
1) Paul didn’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life
2) The stories about Jesus sound pretty amazing.

So Paul didn’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life in his letters. I find this unsurprising given that I, an ordained Pentecostal missionary, rarely do so in my own letters. Even when writing letters devoted to theology I rarely talk about Jesus’ life the way that the speaker seemed to assume that Paul should have: 

“Paul never discusses Jesus’ family, his deeds, where he went or where he came from,” Carrier said. “He never discusses any of his confrontations with the authorities, nor any disputes about what he taught. He says Jesus became flesh, was crucified and buried, but he never says when or where or positions these events in any historical context.”

I rarely bring up these details because they are assumed to be the background for the conversation, in much the same way that I rarely mention the details of George Bush’s life when discussing his politics. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in or am unaware of the fact that he has daughters — it just means that I don’t always consider them germane. 

To insist that Paul should have mentioned such details as evidence that he believed Jesus was a real person seems quite arbitrary to me, especially given that he mentions Jesus by name 198 times with absolutely no indication that he’s referring to a made-up individual. No one would argue that I don’t believe in George Bush on such grounds, and so I don’t see why we should think that this is evidence that Paul didn’t believe in Jesus.

As to Jesus’ life sounding pretty amazing — ya think? That sort of seems to be the point. The claim that Jesus was God in human form almost requires that certain amazing events occur throughout his life. So I sort of scratch my head when the guest lecturer says:

“Jesus conforms so closely to the criterion of a mythic hero the probability that he was a mythic hero increases substantially,” he said. “There are 22 features that have been identified by scholars that are commonly shared by many mythic heroes. They can be ranked with a score according to how many features they have. Jesus clearly scores at least 19 out of 22.”

…

Jesus scores higher on this scale than almost all other heroes, including Hercules and Romulus, Carrier said. Only Oedipus scores higher.

“Jesus competes for second place only with Theseus and Moses,” he said. “Everyone who scores more than 11 on this scale is most likely mythical. No historical figures who accumulated some of these features by chance or legend, such as Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar, scores even as high as 11.” 

Well of course he scores quite high. That’s like pointing out that NBA players are tall and athletic. How do you think they score all those points? Jesus being extraordinary is simply evidence that he was extraordinary. Whether he was extraordinary by not existing or extraordinary by being God is the question the guest speaker wished to address — but his argument does nothing to tip the balance.

Against these feeble arguments stands the scholarly consensus that there was actually a man named Jesus. Why is there such a consensus? Because in addition to the Bible, there is plenty of external evidence that Jesus lived. For example:

• Tacitus (55–117 A.D.): Annals 15.44 (search for Christians on the page)
• Suetonius (70–160 A.D.): Life of Claudius 25.4 (search for Chrestus)
• Josephus (37–100ish A.D.): Antiquities 18.3.3 (see also a critical version of the text) and Antiquities 20.9.1

There’s a very helpful (although incomplete) article summarizing these and other extrabiblical sources about Jesus which includes a discussion of the reliability of the Josephus text.

I think the reporter was wise to include this disclaimer the guest speaker offered:

Despite this evidence, Carrier was quick to point out that this is just a theory.

“We need to go out and interact with the community and see if it stands up to the evidence,” he said. “I’m not here declaring that this is absolutely true and it would be foolish to deny it. We’re not at that stage yet.

“The normal procedure is to assume that a person who is claimed to be historical is historical,” he continued, “unless there is a reason to doubt it. I believe this is an appropriate principle. For example, merely lacking evidence is not enough of an argument for someone not existing historically. You need actual evidence for them being mythified.” 

I am still awaiting such evidence.

Mother’s Day is an odd Sunday in most churches. Pastors get up and talk about Proverbs 31 or some other predictible text, and then give every lady a rose. 

I’m not actually preaching this weekend (Paula is, as it turns out), but if I was I’d be looking for a more unusual angle. For instance, here are some lesser-known verses which touch on the theme of motherhood.

1. Psalm 109:14 — may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.
2. Isaiah 50:1 — This is what the LORD says: “Where is your mother’s certificate of divorce with which I sent her away? 
3. Jeremiah 22:26 — I will hurl you and the mother who gave you birth into another country, where neither of you was born, and there you both will die.
4. Hosea 2:2 Rebuke your mother
5. Hosea 4:5 I will destroy your mother
6. Luke 12:53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.
7. Deuteronomy 22:7 You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go
8. Exodus 23:19 Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
9. Job 17:14, CEV: say to the worms, “Hello, mother!” 
10. Lev 18:7, MSG She is your mother. Don’t have sex with her.

Maybe Proverbs 31 isn’t such a bad choice after all… 😉

Please note that most of these verses have been horribly wrenched from their context to make them even less appropriate for a mother’s day sermon.