Rob-Dog McGuire

an old col­lege friend gave me a call

This morn­ing I heard from an old friend from col­lege, Rob-Dog McGuire. It was very exciting–I haven’t talked to Rob in over five years!

He’s work­ing with Teen Chal­lenge in New Orleans and seems to be doing quite well.

Any­way, if you’re an old col­lege friend and need to find Rob, drop me a line.

36 Hours

anoth­er long week­end of min­istry

Sat­ur­day morn­ing we were up ear­ly to go hear Doug Fields and Bo Bash­ers talk about youth min­istry at an event spon­sored by the Church Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Net­work. It was great–CCN does these simul­casts from the Bay Area and they want a live stu­dio audi­ence. If you show up, you get in for free! There were prob­a­bly twen­ty peo­ple in the audi­ence.

It was inter­est­ing to see how well Doug worked the audi­ence. He’s a real mas­ter at con­nect­ing with peo­ple. Before the satel­lite broad­cast began he learned most every­one’s name, where the lead youth pas­tors were sit­ting, and made small talk with sev­er­al peo­ple. He remem­bered names and called on peo­ple direct­ly dur­ing his teach­ing. I was chal­lenged to get bet­ter at that.

Side note: I don’t think Doug real­ly liked me. He did­n’t dis­like me, either. It was just a weird vibe. Maybe it’s because I was­n’t dressed like a youth pas­tor; I mean, my shirt had but­tons and every­thing! It might also have been relat­ed to the fact that when Paula and I showed up one of the direc­tors asked us to sit in the cen­ter of the front row because every­one else was hang­ing back. His first impres­sion of us walk­ing out was prob­a­bly that we were some sort of weird groupies: we were dressed up and sit­ting in the cen­ter of the front row. And then we gave him weird respons­es: he asked all the youth pas­tors to raise their hands (and we did­n’t) and then he asked all the oth­er church staff to raise their hands (we did­n’t). I think we con­fused him.

Still, it was great mate­r­i­al.

After that we drove up to Tehama, CA. It’s way north, and pret­ty remote. We were to speak at the local Assem­bly of God church Sun­day morn­ing, so the pas­tor put us up in a hotel overnight.

I have to say that Tehama AG has the nicest church build­ing that we’ve been in so far. It’s the old­est AG church struc­ture in Amer­i­ca (built back in the 1800s) and it’s the old­est church in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Sim­ply gor­geous.

After the morn­ing ser­vice we drove down to Cuper­ti­no to speak at Abun­dant Life Assem­bly of God’s mis­sions ban­quet. That was fun.

Then we came home. It was a long week­end (with over 500 miles on the car), but it was great!

When Good Christians Use Bad Logic

I just ran across an inter­est­ing par­o­dy of Chris­t­ian legal­ism. If you’re not famil­iar with the phrase, it gen­er­al­ly refers to fix­at­ing on an arbi­trary action as a proof that you’ve for­sak­en the faith and are on a greased slide to hell.

Any­way, this essay takes the same log­ic that can be used to jus­ti­fy tra­di­tion­al legalisms and applies it to snow­mo­biles. That’s right: snow­mo­biles are the dev­il’s play­things!

If you were raised in a evan­gel­i­cal church you might find this fun­ny. If you weren’t you’ll prob­a­bly just find it weird…

Stanford Law Prof Loses Supreme Court Case

in which Con­gress gets the thumbs up to do what­ev­er they want as regards copy­right

Lawrence Lessig, a Stan­ford law pro­fes­sor, just lost his case in Supreme Court.

He was argu­ing that the Con­gress has over­stepped its Con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty through its abuse of the copy­right sys­tem.

As an edi­to­r­i­al aside, I’d like to say that I’m pret­ty dis­ap­point­ed by the defeat. I’m no expert in the law, but min­is­ters are con­sid­ered to have some exper­tise when it comes to moral­i­ty (which ought to under­gird the law).

The laws gov­ern­ing copy­right in our soci­ety are exces­sive. First and most impor­tant­ly, we are los­ing a pub­lic domain. Lessig’s (non-legal) argu­ments about the hypocrisy of Dis­ney are very compelling–Disney keeps its copy­right on Mick­ey Mouse despite mak­ing most of its mon­ey off rein­vent­ing char­ac­ters that have passed into the pub­lic domain (Beau­ty & the Beast, Cin­derel­la, Snow White, etc).

But that just deals with the longevi­ty of copy­right in Amer­i­ca. I also con­sid­er that my fair-use rights are being infringed upon by rigid copy­right schemes. To my knowl­edge, every empir­i­cal study has shown that elec­tron­ic redis­tri­b­u­tion of prod­ucts increas­es sales. You can read more about it.

For the record, I urge every­one to obey the law as it is writ­ten and to agi­tate for change in the mean­time.

Lessig will prob­a­bly nev­er read this, but I think he’s fight­ing a good fight.

Feeling Much Better

not sick any­more

I should men­tion that I’ve com­plete­ly kicked what­ev­er bug had me down a few days ago. Thanks for all your con­cern and prayers (espe­cial­ly to Andrew Carea­ga, who remind­ed me that I had­n’t giv­en any updates on my con­di­tion: he’s a true e‑friend).

Some Biblical Expressions of Corporate Worship

Last night Back in Jan­u­ary 2003 we talked about wor­ship, and I dis­cussed dif­fer­ent ways we wor­ship God. This list isn’t exhaus­tive, but it’s help­ful and so I thought I’d post it here for future ref­er­ence.

Singing: the book of Psalms, Eph­esians 5:19, Colos­sians 3:16
Music: 1st Chron­i­cles 13:8, Psalm 33:3, Psalm 150
Artis­tic Cre­ation: Exo­dus 31:1–11, Exo­dus 28, Ezekiel 4:1
Clap­ping: Psalm 47:1, Isa­iah 55:12
Words: Psalm 9:1, Psalm 73:28, Psalm 78:4–6
Laugh­ing & Rejoic­ing: Psalm 9:2, Psalm 126:1–3, Psalm 149:5, Zepha­ni­ah 3:14–17
Shout­ing: Psalm 95:1, Psalm 98:4–6, Psalm 100:1
Silence: Psalm 46:10, Habakkuk 2:20
Stand­ing: 1st Chron­i­cles 23:30, Psalm 24:3–6
Rais­ing Our Hands: Nehemi­ah 8:6, Psalm 63:3–5, Psalm 134:1–2; 1st Tim­o­thy 2:8
Bow­ing & Kneel­ing: 2 Chron­i­cles 7:3, Psalm 95:6, Daniel 6:10–11
Lying Pros­trate: Deuteron­o­my 9:18, Rev­e­la­tion 19:4
Leap­ing: 2nd Samuel 6:16, Luke 6:23, Acts 3:7–8
Danc­ing: Exo­dus 15:20–21, Psalm 149:3, Psalm 150:4
Speak­ing In Tongues: Acts 2:1–11; Acts 10:46; 1st Corinthi­ans 14:26–33

Inci­den­tal­ly, when I saw the mas­sive num­ber of Bib­li­cal ref­er­ences in this post­ing, I decid­ed to final­ly install Jonathan Fox’s Scrip­tur­iz­er plu­g­in for Move­able Type. Worked like a charm! If you use MT and quote from the Bible, I high­ly rec­om­mend this won­der­ful tool.

UPDATE: on 12/21/04 I added the Artis­tic Cre­ation entry (3rd one down) and struck through the com­ment at the end. Also, I’m not using the Scrip­tur­iz­er plu­g­in right now so the pas­sages prob­a­bly aren’t hyper­linked.

Ancient Tablet Seems to Corroborate Biblical Narrative

Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, archael­o­gists have found a very spe­cial tablet.

Israeli geol­o­gists said Mon­day they have exam­ined a stone tablet detail­ing repair plans for the Jew­ish Tem­ple of King Solomon that, if authen­ti­cat­ed, would be a rare piece of phys­i­cal evi­dence con­firm­ing bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive.

The find — whose ori­gin is murky — is about the size of a legal pad, with a 15-line inscrip­tion in ancient Hebrew that strong­ly resem­bles descrip­tions in the Bible’s Book of Kings. It could also strength­en Jew­ish claims to a dis­put­ed holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City that is now home to two major mosques.

…

The sand­stone tablet has a 15-line inscrip­tion in ancient Hebrew that resem­bles descrip­tions in Kings II, 12:1–6, 11–17, said Israel’s Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, which exam­ined the arti­fact. The words refer to King Joash, who ruled the area 2,800 years ago.

In it, the king tells priests to take “holy mon­ey … to buy quar­ry stones and tim­ber and cop­per and labor to car­ry out the duty with faith.” If the work is com­plet­ed well, “the Lord will pro­tect his peo­ple with bless­ing,” reads the last sen­tence of the inscrip­tion.

It’s inter­est­ing, but I should note that there seems to be much more con­fu­sion over this tablet’s authen­tic­i­ty than over the James ossuary.

The Groves of Academe: When Disrespect is Respectful

Dar­ryl Hart, aca­d­e­m­ic dean at West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, weighs in with a con­trar­i­an per­spec­tive on Chris­t­ian aca­d­e­mics in an essay titled The Groves of Acad­eme: When Dis­re­spect is Respect­ful.

Well, con­trar­i­an for an evan­gel­i­cal.

He argues that mod­ern uni­ver­si­ties have no place for Chris­t­ian schol­ar­ship, and appro­pri­ate­ly so: If believ­ing schol­ars could rec­og­nize hos­til­i­ty to faith as the acad­e­my’s high­est form of flat­tery, in oth­er words, if they could acknowl­edge the ways in which Christ and cul­ture are legit­i­mate­ly at odds, they might under­stand why some habits die hard. They might even dis­cov­er the plau­si­bil­i­ty of cer­tain anti-reli­gious prej­u­dices.

Inci­den­tal­ly, this essay is a response to Force of Habit and Spe­cial Plead­ing (both are also quite inter­est­ing, and take dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives).

Why Americans Don’t Like Evangelical Christians

I just read a very inter­est­ing arti­cle by The Inter­net Monk explain­ing Why Every­body Hates Us.

It’s a thought­ful and well-writ­ten essay. Here’s a rep­re­sen­ta­tive excerpt:

Here’s my list of why evan­gel­i­cals are among the most dis­liked per­sons in Amer­i­ca:

1. Chris­tians endorse a high stan­dard of con­duct for oth­ers and then large­ly excuse them­selves from a seri­ous pur­suit of such a life. Jesus is the most admired per­son in his­to­ry, but evan­gel­i­cals are far more like­ly to devise ways for Jesus to be like us than for us to be like Jesus.

If it has­n’t struck you late­ly that you do the very thing you con­demn oth­ers for doing (Romans 2:1), urge oth­ers to do what you don’t do or excuse in your­self what you require in oth­ers, then you prob­a­bly don’t get this arti­cle at all.

Our Sneaky God

God brings us togeth­er with a Stan­ford stu­dent.

God is sneaky. I’m pret­ty sure that’s not in the Bible (unless you read a very loose trans­la­tion), but I’m con­vinced of the fact. He tells us to be wise as ser­pents, and He mod­els that for us.

For exam­ple, today Paula and I shared at a church in Burlingame, CA called Three Cities Assem­bly. The San Fran­cis­co Forty-Nin­ers had a play­off game today, so I was expect­ing the atten­dance to be a lit­tle bit down. Oth­er than that, I was­n’t expect­ing any­thing unusu­al.

God had oth­er plans, though.

After the ser­vice, it’s cus­tom­ary for a mis­sion­ary guest speak­er to be avail­able to shake hands and chat with peo­ple. I met the head of anthro­pol­o­gy for Wycliffe Bible Trans­la­tors after the ser­vice today–that was pret­ty cool. I also met a guy who used to be in a Chi Alpha group led by some friends of mine in Stock­ton, CA. That was also pret­ty cool. It’s not unusu­al to meet very cool peo­ple after the ser­vice.

I also met one of my upstairs neigh­bors, which was pret­ty sur­pris­ing (and cool).

The best was yet to come, how­ev­er.

Towards the end of the good­byes, I met a young man named Charles who was vis­it­ing the church for the first time. Charles is a first-year Stan­ford grad stu­dent, and even though Burlingame is a good 25 miles away from Stan­ford he decid­ed to vis­it the church today because he used to know Pas­tor Hern­don back when they both lived in Las Vegas (Charles was actu­al­ly in Jay’s youth group).

Charles has been try­ing to find a church that can acco­mo­date his crazy stu­dent sched­ule: every third or fourth Sun­day he won’t be able to go to church. Today he learned about Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford and he was able to hear me preach.

I guess he liked what he heard, because he’s plan­ning to join us for wor­ship on cam­pus this Tues­day!

How prov­i­den­tial of God–to bring us to the same church at the same time and arrange a con­nec­tion. He’s sneaky I tell you…