Pastor Ryan Gaffney

There is an article Here (I hesitate to link it lest I help propagate the popularity of the article) it is titled “When Two Lesbians Walk Into a Church Seeking Trouble” and features the story of a wonderfully loving and accepting church and how their Christian nonjudgementalism softened the heart of Amy the lesbian.

This church is called Gateway in Austin TX, and their motto is “Come as you are” and they mean it! they even let lesbians come even though they admit they were trying to be shocking on purpose!

I’ll bet you would like a church like that. Maybe if you were in Austin you would like to visit.

Well I am, and before their article went viral I did… Or at least I tried to. I was not allowed.

I guess I’m not troublesome enough. I’m just a heterosexual white pastors kid, but at Gateway, you are not permitted to join a bible study until you have joined their church, and that is no easy task. I’ve spoken to others who have been asked to leave the gateway community because they “didn’t fit in” or they “made people uncomfortable” both descriptions that sound very much like Jesus to me. I was only turned away at the door, I’m thankful I’m not like those who were invited in to the toxic community.

This is the pastor’s perspective, and I’m thankful that the pastor apparently sees the value in things like love and acceptance, and that the people who have taken this article viral, apparently do so for the same reasons… But while the pastor toots his own horn, he seems to fail to realize that his church has massive problems with acceptance, and they are visible even in his own article if you read carefully.

Guess what: If the fullness of our love is the capacity to not be shocked by girls who like girls, then our love is not full enough. GLBT people have hopes and dreams and personalities. They need much more than for you to be unaffected by what you perceive to be their troublesome antics.

And as we in the church pat our own backs by spreading this article. saying “Yes, I am a champion of allowing lesbians to come to church where they will learn to stop being lesbians, look how accepting I am” we need to turn out gaze back on ourselves. I’m not

Not “Look how loving I am”.

Not “let me teach you how to be an accepting Christian”

Not “even people who are muddy are allowed near me”

But “Lord have mercy”

“Lord, teach me to love more, to accept more”

”Lord thank you for allowing muddy people like me near you”

Last year at this time I was sitting in Varsity Donuts trying to make sense of living in Rural Kansas while not actively working for InterVarsity (My term ended February 2013) Today I’m back in the same Donut shop to visit, a Seminarian, still making sense of my experiences here, many of which I was too busy, or too emotionally involved in to blog about at the time.

The town is full of Ghosts today. It is not the same community that I am returning to, the students I served, and friends I made have almost all moved on like I have, in their place is a new crop of NPCs. People I don’t know and will not build relationships with along with the land’s memory of what once was.

On that bench over there I met with the Moore group for the first time, the table over there housed a weekly bible study where someone came to faith. That’s the field where I fought with lightsabers, and across from it I helped students move. Each place abandoned, except by the imaginary silhouettes of significance I put there in my mind.

It’s a funny statement “there is no such thing as ghosts” I feel like I’m beginning to understand how a house where a child has died, or a violent battle has taken place can be considered haunted and therefore inhospitable. I guess it’s like Santa Clause in that way.

I’m going to try to meet the ghosts while I’m here and write about them. I want to engage in the memories before they fade. Some of that will be published in the coming days. Forgive me if some others show up in random places in the coming monthes

As I begin my Lenten discipline of looking back, I’m most immediately reminded of Urbana 2012, one of my freshest memories from my IV life. It was there that Terry LeBlanc spoke about the discipline of remembrance telling a story about fishing with his grandfather, who told him how not to get lost in the woods “When you look back at the way you came, you will always be able to find your way home. Listen to his sermon for free here

When I sat there listening to Terry remember his elders, I knew that I was about to transition into a new stage of life, and I thought back to the experiences that had developed me. The Charismatics, The Evangelicals, The Lutherans, The Presbyterians, The Methodists, and finally The Missionals, paying particular attention to my time with them, which had not yet been reflected upon.

Now as I sit here remembering my remembering, I have the seminarians to add.

I’m not ready yet to write about the seminarians yet. As I was not ready then to write about the Missionals. My classmates read this blog, and what I would say if anything would be the sort of happy slappy drivel that wouldn’t be worth reading. If I am to authentically talk about both the strengths and weakness of a community, I have to do it in retrospect, so that is what I will endeavor to do here and now. Next week I’ll go to Kansas and reflect on my time there

A little under 1000 years ago in Italy there lived a man named Giovanni de Bernadone, but his friends call him Francis.  Francis was a Christ follower, and if her were here today he would be the first to tell you that he didn’t understand completely what that means. But he lived his life in poverty and faithfulness and trusted the rest would work itself out.

He read the bible simply and literally. When he encountered Mark 16:15 “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” where I would debate canonicity, Francis simply took God’s word for it, and endeavored to preach to rocks and birds.

At In the midst of the crusades he was praying by the old church of San Damingiano outside his hometown. He heard Christ’s voice from the cross say to him “Rebuild my church which is in ruins” and Francis did as Francis does, proceeding to literally rebuild that church one stone at a time.

While he was working some people started to follow him, then some other people got mad about the movement he created. The pope got involved, some great stories took place, and then he got old and died. He was never ordained.

Fast forward back to the present. There are no fewer than 3 major ecclesiastical movements started as a result of his faith, millions have been inspired by his life, and a new pope has been elected. A humble argentine named Jorge, who took the name of Francis in the highest office of Christendom following the reign of Pope Emeritus Palpatine to do just what Francis endeavored to all those years ago. Rebuild the church which is in Ruins.

But you knew that. What’s my point?

It’s striking to me how long-lasting the influence he had has lasted, and indeed how long it will last. Francis is arguably more influential now than he ever was when he was alive, an we can expect that influence will only increase- forever.

I believe that Francesco possesses an immortal soul which lives even now, but suppose I have taken scripture overly literally. Suppose even that I have chosen the wrong religion, or that I was wrong to choose religion in the first place. Even still through his humble faith, even his gullibility, Francis has apparently achieved what was promised of the saints. Eternal life. Eternal influence. He traded the opportunity to be a wealthy silk merchant for a couple decades for the opportunity to serve the poor for the next thousand years and beyond.

It was a good trade

Earlier this week I wrote on awareness. I wasn’t terribly nice to the awareness industry. I beat up on it, I asked hard questions of it. I did it for a reason.

A while back an old friend by the name of David sent me a message about a sex trafficking documentary he wanted me to raise awareness for, and I let him have it! I wrote him about my concerns with the endeavor and suggested in no uncertain terms that he should consider throwing his support behind somebody who already gotten started.

He did something incredible.

He wrote me back!

Hi Ryan. Thanks for your concern. All of the issues you have raised have been concerns of mine as well, and it’s great to know that others are thinking like this. For our first documentary (www.motherindiafilm.com), our budget was only $30,000, and I personally invested $10,000 of that. I’ll never see a penny of any profits. In fact, we haven’t seen one. The ministry that we interfaced with uses it as a fundraising tool, and if and when we receive money from the distribution company, 100% of it will go directly to that ministry (www.harvestindia.org). From my experience with the first film, there is very little money to be made through the second documentary. If any significant money comes in, it will be through the worship album, which will be sold for the benefit of Abolition International (www.abolitioninternational.org), and they’ll be heavily advertised in the process. In terms of the devotional/study guide, 50% of any revenues will be directed toward Abolition, who is focused on real-world action through their network of 30 after-care centers (25 of which are in the US). These are passion projects for me to help the organizations that we profile in a subtle way in order to ensure they are still documentaries and not advertisements. I make a living through my marketing business – not these films. Natalie Grant founded Abolition 7 years ago, and she now speaks about it at all her conferences and sits on the board. They are doing amazing things. In the film, we’ll be profiling the stories of freedom and hope that are emerging in 5 of their after care homes in 5 different US cities

The film is called “In Plain Sight” and the website is www.storiesoffreedom.com

I’ve corresponded with David several times since this initial interaction, I kept asking hard questions, and I can say now with full confidence that this is the real deal.

Give this guy money. Share this link!

And if you are involved in leadership of a church or college ministry and would like to do more, e-mail me and I can put you in touch with him directly about starting small groups and movements in your cities that will grow with the movie, from fund-raising, to showing the film, to multiplying the influence as we fund and empower shelters to put an end to slavery!

Non-Profits love people like me. People with initiative and influence, people who already care, who don’t need to be sold on why the mission is important. They love to give me flyers, they love to link me to Facebook pages, they love to sell me T-Shirts, and accept donations. But I have a hard time finding agencies that will let me or my college students do anything else.

“Raising Awareness,” it’s called. Although in any other context we would just call it “marketing.” Letting people know that there is a problem and there is an organization which has something to do with the problem. Some of these organizations actually do something about said problem, but they only want awareness from me. A lot of them exist solely to raise awareness.

The result of all this is that I sit here knowing lots of stuff. There are more slaves today than at any time in human history; diamond miners and cocoa farmers are not paid; coffee and tea growers are paid unfair and unlivable wages. Apple is using sweatshops; Abercrombie hates fat people; Bank of America hates the poor. There are genocides going on in at least 6 different places globally; Syria is using Sarin Gas; Sudan has an issue with refugees; Uganda has an issue with child soldiers; every country in the world has an issue with sex trafficking; North Korea just has issues. Cancer is a thing and so is autism and so are our troops. We are destroying the environment. The NSA is spying on the internet; Habeas Corpus is dead; Gitmo is still open; Monsanto is growing mutant corn; and McDonalds sells food that’s bad for you!

I haven’t done much to solve any of those problems. But I’m happy to know that I am, nonetheless, the 99%.

I think awareness has gotten away from us a little bit. It’s an important first step, but if that first step isn’t followed by more steps (and it almost never is) it’s pretty useless, and can actually be detrimental to the cause.

You’ve probably heard of the Susan G. Koman foundation. They have raised over 1.5 billion dollars. Less than 15% of that goes to actually curing breast cancer. The money goes to letting people know breast cancer is a thing and getting them to give more money to the Susan G. Koman foundation so they can tell more people. But the problem with breast cancer isn’t actually lack of awareness. The problem is rapidly multiplying cells that kill people. By raising awareness you don’t actually solve the problem and you take money away from researchers that do. (Here’s a link to the ACS).

This profitable Awareness market becomes especially problematic when it entails the poorest of the poor. Suddenly there are kids in Haiti that live on 3 cents a day and literally eat dirt cookies but I need $200,000 to make the documentary starring me. Next week I’m staging a fun run for amputees. The winner gets a golden pair of Nikes.

With the best of intentions, we end up perpetuating the same cycle of exploitation that we are raising awareness about. Money is being made off the misery of people who will never see a portion of the profits. Women who were sold into sex slavery now have their testimonies sold to enable companies to go out selling more sex testimonies. Images of child soldiers lead armies of white privileged hippies through the quad. “Stop Child Labor Now” is written on T-Shirts, but the kids don’t cash the checks.

I’m interested in hearing your ideas for alternatives. Rather than offer a pithy solution to this problem I’d like us to think about real things that can be done by people with full time jobs. Sound off in the comments.

Guys, summer is over. Can we please stop with the posts policing women’s bodies?

I’m not sure why but after years of relative silence the issue of women’s modesty has become “a thing” this year. It seems to have started with a fashion designer who made some vintage style swimsuits. I wasn’t going to talk about it initially because it’s not important, and there are too many unimportant things for me to write about all of them. I’m not stoked about my religion being used as a tool to sell clothes but I figured it would blow over with the end of swimsuit season and we would all move on. But here we are in fall and there is a whole new crop of viral posts making the rounds.

The newest one features a mom from here in Austin who bespeckles her article with glamor shots of her shirtless sons flexing while threatening the ban hammer on any and all teenage girls on the internet who arch their back for a photo, thereby causing her poor little boys to stumble. In linking, one friend of mine challenged “C’mon men, help your sisters in Christ by being truthful about how we really work.”

Well as Taylor Mali said, if you ask for it; I’ve got to give it to you.

Ladies, I’m a Christian man who struggles with lust. I want to believe that all women are created in God’s image to be loved and appreciated and cared for but that head knowledge doesn’t always reach my heart and sometimes I have a tendency to think of women not in terms of their value as individuals but in terms of their capacity to gratify me and satisfy my felt needs. This process in my head is called objectification. Turning full people with needs and wants and backstories in my imagination into objects that exist for me. That’s a problem, especially because it has a tendency to slip over into the real world and affect how I interact with women.

But let me be clear about something. Objectification isn’t an accident. It’s not like stubbing my toe. It’s an inherent and ongoing sin in my life and I’m really really good at at. So good in fact that I have no trouble objectifying you in a one piece swimsuit. The glamor shots that I am getting from these Christian modesty blogs create no fewer thoughts and feelings in me than ordinary bikini pictures do, and if you are winking at me while trying to do your best Audrey Hepburn pose it will probably do a little more.

Needless to say if stopping me is your goal, and you are photographing yourself from the breasts down, with a hand reaching up your inner thigh, as if to say “this is a good swimsuit to take off”. You’ve failed completely.

The good news for you is that that’s my problem. You don’t have to feel guilty for me objectifying you, I have to feel guilty for that. And that’s true no matter what you are wearing. If you want to help me, forgive me! And pray for me.

As to the culture that says it’s all on you, I feel a bit responsible for that too. Do you remember how I said objectification has a tendency to slip from my mind into the real world? Well I think it did. Somewhere along the line some men, probably in spiritual leadership like me, struggled with objectification, and it slipped into the real world and they decided that the best thing to do is cover these objects up so they could stop being such a problem for us. We decided that if only we could impose our will on you we could get our needs (for sexual purity) met more easily.

It was a dumb idea.

Now I’m not saying don’t be modest. I’m not saying you don’t know best what to wear. What I’m saying is quite the opposite. Wear what you want because you want to. Don’t let someone like me make you responsible for my sin.

All pictures in this article come from ReySwimwear.com where all the swimsuits are named after Audrey Hepburn characters. Audrey, who quite rightly said “there is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don’t need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.”

People joke about entering ones 20s and the passage on from teen years as a transition into “no longer knowing everything” If that’s what teenagers are characterized by than I guess the arrogance of ones 20s comes from knowing that your knowledge is limited but believing that what ideas you do have are your own.

I’m headed out of my 20s now.

It’s striking to me how people got on so well for so long without the internet. When I got the flu last month I had to google my symptoms and find out what to do about it (Rest, plenty of fluids, and chicken soup btw) but hundreds of years ago none of that information would have been available, and I would have relied on the collected knowledge of the elders of our community for what to do. What would they have said? (rest, plenty of fluids, chicken soup probably)

The Christian Church, for most of it’s existence (AD 0 to AD 1530) unanimously valued tradition as equal or greater in authority than the Bible. And even the Bible was often just considered another source of tradition. Most Christians in the world (the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox + Anglicans for good measure) still do.

And as to the rest of us, do we really think we are so evolved? Perhaps we have head-knowledge that scripture is the final authority but do we really follow that in our analysis of ideas. Do we prefer to follow what scripture appears to say even when it goes against what we were taught in church? It seems to me that most of us protestants have gone right on following tradition and merely stopped citing our sources.

For instance. when I use the term “head-knowledge” I’m drawing upon a memetic tradition in the American Christian subculture. you are inclined to agree with me because you have heard that term somewhere before from someone reliable. But where did it come from? I for one have no idea.

Consider also the phrase “right relationship” particularly the restoration thereof. Christians from every group I’ve been apart of agree that it’s important to restore right relationship to God, to one another, to whatever the thing we are trying to advocate for is. But the way it’s phrased it’s obviously borrowed from someplace. I googled it, and still have no idea from where. could be the Quakers or the Jesuits, maybe I’ll ask an old Jewish lady.

How many of the ideas that I draw upon on a daily basis come from somewhere else without my being able to identify it as easily as these two examples? How many of my ideas are shaped by other ideas that come from these traditional sources. Is there any idea that I currently hold which does not rely on the work of someone who came before me?

I don’t expect there is. but I’m not inclined to fight it. If I were to arrive on this planet as a wholly logical observer, and could not receive any past information I would come to different conclusions, about the world and what’s important. But I believe most of those wholly logical contemporary conclusions I would draw would be wrong.

I’m probably just prejudiced though

Once in Mr. Kaufman’s 5th and 6th grade combo class I said something really stupid and awkward. I was trying to make sound effects for a movie. I bragged on myself quite a bit; I could not deliver what I promised. I still remember it once and a while and cringe at how dumb I was.

It was almost 20 years ago.

Do you ever do this? Feel guilt for something from high school? Stress about mistakes you made in college? Shrink back as you remember your parents yelling at you for something from ages past and forget that you are an adult now with a car and a job and your own apartment?

I think most of us do.

I’ve come to believe the problem is characteristic of a lack of absolution. We seek confession, but often forget absolution. When something goes wrong, out societal response is to investigate, see what and who messed up. Then we accuse that person. Then that person confesses.

20 years later they still feel like the person who messed up.

I don’t like shoes; I walk around barefoot a lot. Sometimes I walk into a restaurant, forgetting I don’t have shoes on. I don’t mind being told I need to go put on shoes. I do however mind the 3 minute lecture I often receive after I get the shoes.

”Sir, I noticed you aren’t wearing shoes.”

”Oh I’m sorry, I have a pair in my car, I’ll be right back.”

”Yeah, would you get some shoes? We need you to have shoes. It’s because of a state law actually, people have to have shoes on at all times where food is being served. It’s corporate policy that we obey laws in all Burger King locations, so shoes are definitely a must.”

”JUST LET ME GET THE SHOES!!”

…I don’t actually say that; I just want to.

When I come back there is often another lecture waiting. Someone wanting to justify themselves and convince me that I am the wholly guilty one, the one who committed the grave abomination of barefootedness.

But your self-justification deprived me of the opportunity to restore relationship. I never get to hear that it’s okay, I have shoes now, I’m not a 5th grader anymore, my lost Gameboy is obsolete and I can afford a new one. I don’t know I’m forgiven, and it haunts me years later.

This is one of the many reasons that the gospel is so good. Even if you don’t forgive me for saying something insensitive, my heavenly father forgives me. Even if it’s years later and the person from whom I need forgiveness is dead, the person I really need forgiveness from offers it freely.

Confession is a good discipline but absolution is a life giving necessity that all Christians should experience regularly.

Alright so I missed a week! I’m really trying hard not to do that, but I knew the next post should really be about my adjustment to Texas, and I’ve had a hard time finding the internet time, and the depth of revelation I wanted.

In short: I’m loving it.

Austin is a great town, and while it has been just egregiously hot here, it’s been hot in a way that hasn’t kept me from doing active things like riding my bike and going swimming. The restaurants are ridiculously good here and the food and gas are not nearly as expensive as I thought they would be compared to Kansas.

My apartment is old, but it’s huge. Centrally located just north of downtown in the middle of campus surrounded by grass and trees. I live alone, but an connected enough to the buildings around me that I have access to things like tools if I need them. I am refurnishing on craigslist.

Classes haven’t started yet and I still need a church, and a job. but so far I’m not worried.

—

As classes start I’m expecting to be rocked a bit. First years in seminary tend to. I’m not sure I can depend on the ideas I will be having or how quickly I will be able to share them without annoying people, but I am hoping to use the next couple months to dump unused Kansan ideas while I write new Texas ones for later publication. There is a lot that I’ve learned which I’ve yet to share, so I hope to go back and remember where I’ve been for a while as I go somewhere new. I hope that makes sense, and I hope you’ll join me

Three years ago at this time I started this blog. I backdated some posts from earlier blogs when I started it.

I was fundraising for InterVarsity and trying to increase my web presence. I had a lot of time on my hands, a lot of people who I wanted to be able to stay in contact with, and a need to feel heard.

Yesterday I left Kansas. and as of Today I live in Austin, Texas.

Three years ago I felt like I had been waiting forever for my life to start. That I has abundant training and experience, but precious little application. I felt pressed against the door to adventure and adulthood, but I felt it locked from the other side.

Today I feel tired. Poured out like a drink offering. I gave everything I had in mission at Kansas State University, and now I look forward to a break where I can think and fast and pray and rest while I get my MDiv

The process 3 years ago took longer than I wanted it to. More than a Full year from first contact to final departure. In that time I left churches and friends, often months in advance. I took I moved 3 times and regretted my storage unit and moving truck.

Today I packed everything into my van and left in a few weeks notice. 3 Different churches blessed me on my was this past Sunday. And I arrived ahead of schedule.

When I arrived in Kansas I was greeted as a spiritual leader, and given overwhelming hospitality in the prairie. I come today as a servant and learner, and don’t know yet how it will go in the big city.

3 years ago I watched a Church open it’s doors for the first time, this Sunday I saw one laid to rest

I will always treasure the experiences I had.

-I learned a new methodology of Bible Study
-I gained experience with the cultural differences inside the US
-I saw people come to know Christ
-I learned incarnation
-I got the big typical college experience I had always wanted
-I led a Black Bible Study, which I had never expected
-I spoke at many churches
-I made lifelong friends
-I played matchmaker and got some folks hitched
-I lived with A Christian Philosopher
-I started a Bike ministry, a paintball ministry, a computer ministry, a car ministry, and an RPG
-I was inspired by great teaching, and read great books
-I succeeded at many things, and failed at more
-I learned to make Chai from a Pakistani, and talked social media with a Jasmine Revolutionary
-I saw parts of America the coasters never bother to visit, and grew in love for the flyover states
-I ate the best BBQ in the world at no less than 3 distinct places
-I applied scripture in new and radical ways
-I did a thousand other things
-I lived, laughed, and Loved

Now I look forward to the next chapter

I came across a piece of art recently that puzzled me.

I recognized it immediately as a depiction of the miraculous catch of fish, a passage which I have analyzed exhaustively in the last year with InterVarsity. I knew the passage had great things to say about mission and devotion, depth and trust, selection and evangelism. But this depiction caught my eye. The bizarre femininity of two of the figures confused me, as did the inclusion of a character I didn’t recognize. Until my curiosity lead me to Google, I didn’t recognize it as a reproduction of a Raphael. Thanks to it being famous, I can share it with you:

That’s clearly Jesus with the prominent halo and long hair. By him is Peter, who fell to his knees in Luke 5:8, Andrew his brother, and James and John in the other boat who were “called over” to help them in verse 7.

But why are there 3 disciples there?

Also, Why don’t they have shirts on?

Raph is usually pretty good with this sort of thing, so I figured I must be missing something. I thought maybe he was depicting the other great catch found in John 21, or harmonizing the two somehow as biblical literalists like to do.

But no, John includes 7 disciples Peter, Nathaniel, Thomas, James and John the sons of Zebedee, and two mystery disciples. Also in that passage Jesus is clearly on the shore, and Peter isn’t afraid (to say the least) it has to be a second occurrence of the same miracle.

It turns out the anonymous oarman is none other than Zebedee himself. Matthew 4 records it

²¹ Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, ²² and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

There is no miracle here in Matthew but unlike John, it makes sense to harmonize this passage with Luke and assume Zebedee was in the boat the whole time. After all, in Luke we never get names for the occupants of the other boat until after they leave, Zebedee didn’t leave.

He just sat there.

Watching this.

Look at him.

With his little oar.

Thinking about this has brought new life for me into what had become a very familiar passage.

At one of the most dramatic moments of Jesus ministry. with the help of an undeniable demonstration of divine power. Jesus, the son of God, reached a success rate of about 80%. (or a B-)

That is of course to say nothing of the hundreds of people he left back on shore.

What was Zebedee thinking? How did he completely miss what was so blatantly obvious to Peter? Is there really nothing at all that would have convinced him?

As you go out to minister in your workplaces and communities, who are the Zebedees in your life? The little clingers that hang around but don’t get involved. How much of your energy goes into including them? How many people have tried and failed?

Is there a Peter at your feet begging for direction, reassurance, and discipleship? Are you ignoring him in favor of a diplomatic obligation of someone who never did and never would receive what you are offering?

There is an ordinance which passed in the city I live in, which gives equal rights to sinners.
Specifically speaking it adds Sexual Preference and Gender Identity to a list of protected statuses according to the American Civil Rights act.
The bill is HERE if you’d like to read it. But I’ve read it. And I can tell you, It is a good bill

• It’s reasonable and realistic
• It protects Churches and religious speech
• It does not favor any particular group
• It will some make peoples lives better

But the Christians have flipped their lids. Their version of the story says

• It requires all bathrooms in the city to be unisex
• They will make us hire a Gay pastor
• I could be fined if I say homosexuality is a sin
• It will ruin everything

Even before reading the bill it should be obvious those sorts of concerns are ridiculous. Even if the bill didn’t protect religious organizations specifically (and it does) the constitution would. Women have been protected from discrimination for decades and nobody has forced the Baptists to hire female pastors yet. and Gay people use the same bathrooms as the rest of us.
Come on now people. Let’s think about this for a minute.

Today I spoke with a young lady, and a much younger adorable little daughter. She was telling me all about how the bill got passed but there is a movement to repeal it because there’s a part in “the bathroom law where a guy can just follow you in and say ‘oh i felt like a woman at the time’ and that’s fine, so you could get sued for discriminating him.” and her daughter, who must be about 6, piped up and said “But Mommy wat if yuwr a gay woman ” to which mom responded “Yup! same thing”

I replied to the young girl (but really to her mother) “You’d have to be a transgendered woman” hoping to communicate some of the complexity of this question…rather than actually expecting to be understood. But I was cut off “NOOOO! even if they’re dressed as guys they can just pop in”
…I walked away… I would have liked to beat my head against a wall trying to make a difference but I knew better

-I would have liked to explain that there is a difference between transsexuals and transvestites
-I would have liked to point out that neither switch between genders based upon their mood
-I would have liked to hear how she would have transsexuals treated. (Do we just not let them pee?)
-I would really loved for the most important and obvious fact to sneak in, that none of this bathroom stuff was actually in the ordinance but rather, that Mommy had just made it up in her ignorant and fearful brain.

But it wasn’t going to happen. so I walked away.

And thank goodness I did because the further I got the angrier I became. That poor little girl is being filled with hate, and she has no way to know any better.

And it is “hate” this isn’t just political disagreement anymore. At the point where we are making up and perpetuating lies about a people group in order to justify being against giving them rights I’m no longer comfortable calling it anything but “hate”

And there’s nothing I can do about it… So I’m telling you guys.

The next time your pastor tells you to be against something: Read the dang ordinance! Read it through all the way. Look up the words you don’t understand, and come to a conclusion. And if that conclusion goes against what the Christian sub culture tells you to believe… Well then we have a problem don’t we?

There is an ordinance which passed in the city I live in, which gives equal rights to sinners.
Specifically speaking it adds Sexual Preference and Gender Identity to a list of protected statuses according to the American Civil Rights act.
The bill is HERE if you’d like to read it. But I’ve read it. And I can tell you, It is a good bill

• It’s reasonable and realistic
• It protects Churches and religious speech
• It does not favor any particular group
• It will some make peoples lives better

But the Christians have flipped their lids. Their version of the story says

• It requires all bathrooms in the city to be unisex
• They will make us hire a Gay pastor
• I could be fined if I say homosexuality is a sin
• It will ruin everything

Even before reading the bill it should be obvious those sorts of concerns are ridiculous. Even if the bill didn’t protect religious orginisations specifically (and it does) the constitution would. Women have been protected from discrimination for decades and nobody has forced the baptists to hire female pastors yet. and Gay people use the same bathrooms as the rest of us.
Come on now people. Let’s think about this for a minute.

Today I spoke with a young lady, and a much younger adorable little daughter. She was telling me all about how the bill got passed but there is a movement to repeal it because there’s a part in “the bathroom law where a guy can just follow you in and say ‘oh i felt like a woman at the time’ and that’s fine, so you could get sued for discriminating him.” and her daughter, who must be about 6, piped up and said “But Mommy wat if yuwr a gay woman ” to which mom responded “Yup! same thing”

I replied to the young girl (but really to her mother) “You’d have to be a transgendered woman” hoping to communicate some of the complexity of this question…rather than actually expecting to be understood. But I was cut off “NOOOO! even if they’re dressed as guys they can just pop in”
…I walked away… I would have liked to beat my head against a wall trying to make a difference but I knew better

-I would have liked to explain that there is a difference between transsexuals and transvestites
-I would have liked to point out that neither switch between genders based upon their mood
-I would have liked to hear how she would have transsexuals treated. (Do we just not let them pee?)
-I would really loved for the most important and obvious fact to sneak in, that none of this bathroom stuff was actually in the ordinance but rather, that Mommy had just made it up in her ignorant and fearful brain.

But it wasn’t going to happen. so I walked away.

And thank goodness I did because the further I got the angrier I became. That poor little girl is being filled with hate, and she has no way to know any better.

And it is “hate” this isn’t just political disagreement anymore. at the point where we are making up and perpetuating lies about a people group in order to justify being against giving them rights I’m no longer comfortable calling it anything but “hate”

And there’s nothing I can do about it… So I’m telling you guys.

The next time your pastor tells you to be against something: Read the dang ordinance! Read it through all the way. Look up the words you don’t understand, and come to a conclusion. And if that conclusion goes against what the christian sub culture tells you to believe… Well then we have a problem don’t we?

I was happy to become one of the first responders to the disaster in Oklahoma City. I was one of the late responders to Katrina, unable to find time to get down there until years after the event, and I’ve often lamented the opportunity missed. When the tornados hit Moore though, it was much closer to me, and I had no trouble taking a week off and heading down within a couple of days.

I had a friend who arrived even before I did, and I gave him a call to ask what was needed, “What can I bring? Should I bring my own tools? Do you need water?” and what he said surprised me:

Whatever you do, don’t bring water, don’t bring clothes, we stopped accepting clothes at all earlier this morning. Food is helpful, if it’s non perishable, but people bring canned food, nobody has a can opener.

That really hit me — the disconnect of it all. We so lack the capacity to understand what it is like to have your house demolished in the blink of an eye that we do things (and by we I mean me) that make no sense!
We run around collecting water bottles, and we fail to realize that this isn’t a hurricane, the plumbing still works. When I went down to Moore, every street corner was equipped with a mountain of donated bottled water from Dasani or Aquafina.

We donate clothes and we fail to realize that it takes a person a long time before they die of a lack of old second hand clothes. If you don’t want them, the chances are good that they don’t either.

And I really think that the workers down there appreciate the thought. They appreciate that we’re trying, but often we as donors and servants feel entitled and say, “Look I brought you this clothing aren’t you happy?” and the victims will say, “Thank you,” but they want to say, “Look, I actually didn’t lose many of my clothes. They fell off the rack in a pile of rubble; they need to be washed, but I still have them; I need a tarp; I need something to make sure that everything doesn’t get soaked when it rains tonight and… that’s probably what I’m going to use these old jackets for.”
…
It’s not just disasters either. Our treatment of homeless people, mourning people, the handicapped, and every kind of minority so often fails so completely to understand their situation that our help borders on hurt. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try:

I brought some tarps to OKC. I brought a bunch of church key can openers, as many as I could. By now the situation has changed, different things are needed, and I’m bringing a team of teenagers down this week to help clean up.

Pray for my humility in service.

The word cult evokes strong negative feelings, immediate accusations and denials… But no definitions… “Cult” is a disapprobation more than it is a proper category, people use it to mean “religious group I don’t like”. Unfortunately that doesn’t help us to protect people from religious organizations they are not familiar with, and that’s pretty much the only reason to have a category like “cult”.

We’re fixing that today.

Acutely felt tension, religious problem-solving perspective, religious seekership, experiencing a turning point, development of cult-affective bonds, neutralization of extra-cult attachments and intensive interaction.
These 8 terms originate from John Lofland, a sociologist who spent his life studying doomsday cults and millenarian movements, such as at the Unification church (the Moonies). His perspective is about the most comprehensive, authoritative, and non-biased. I’d like to share it with you and along the way I will keep other key words in bold so that by the end of this short article you will be well equipped to identify dangerous trends in religiosity.

Acutely Felt Tension (Guilt)
Guilt is the bread and butter of cult activity, they tend to prey on people who are already predisposed to this sort of thinking, for this reason you will find divorcees and ex-military personnel in those communities in higher than average numbers. Often a doomsday scenario helps the community keep up the pressure once conversion is accomplished. You have to evangelize lots of people and stock up on food because the end is near. This is coaxed into the mind of the convert so as to become a new normal.

Religious Problem Solving (Black And White Thinking)
In keeping with the trend of guilt, cults teach that the answer to every question in life is found within their community. Are you depressed? Don’t see a doctor, that would indicate a lack of faith, instead pray more. Are you looking for a wife? God will bring her to you from our community when you have finished your mission. Are you unemployed, or concerned about your station in life? You don’t need to worry, just have complete unquestioning trust in our infallible leader.

Seeker Ship (Recruitment)
Cults spend a disproportionate amount of their time, money and resources, preoccupied with finding and converting new members. Almost every religious group is interested in recruitment to some degree, but it is a cults number one priority because the community will typically shut down without a steady revenue stream from new members. Quotas are not uncommon as a means of determining recruitment, and deception is frequently used as a means to convince the unfaithful. This leads to what I call “increasing irreality on a gradient” which means that information about the crazier beliefs and more serious expectations is withheld from new members until they are slowly integrated into the community. The boiling frog effect.

Turning Point (Brainwashing)
Brainwashing sounds like something out of science fiction, but the use of thought reform methods is actually reasonably mundane. Cults have a particular way of talking about their life before and after membership, and will teach you to do the same by encouraging consistent repetition of formulaic testimonies which speak in black and white terms about everything changing in an epiphany moment and encourages “us and them” thinking about those who have not experienced it.

Development of Affective Bonds (Insulation)
In order to enforce these thought reforms, the cult relies on an insular social structure. In keeping with the trend of increasing irreality, this will initially be touted as a boon of conversion. “Do you want to convert? Look at all these instant best friends you will have in a tight knit loving community”, but over time it serves as a limiting factor, as you will be encouraged to live, work, and date and marry only within the group. When a member begins to realize that some of the teachings are false, they will fear leaving the community, because of the investment they have made within it. This leads to cognitive dissonance or an unwillingness to accept the truth they see before them.

Neutralization Of Extracult Attachments (Isolation)
Among the more serious warning signs of cult activity is the neutralization of attachments. When loved ones of converts begin to worry, cults need a way to keep their members in the fold and out of the deprogrammer’s office. It’s main two tools are shunning and excommunication. Shunning applies to nonmembers, such as a converts’ parents, whose child  will be encouraged to cut ties with if they become too vocal about their disagreement with the group’s practices. Excommunication is the ultimate weapon against members who ask too many questions. If they cannot be brought into line with shame, and social ramifications, they will eventually be cut off from the community, and members will be strictly dis-incentivized, or prevented from continued interaction with them.

Intensive Interaction (Deprivation)
The final, and perhaps most important characteristic of cult activity, the reason it matters, is intensive interaction. The end result of any cult involvement is the deprivation of its’ members. In order to keep you malleable and dependent on the leadership you will be compelled to give a substantial control of your finances to the community. Cults will encourage regular and intensive fasting, and Orwellian levels of accountability. Your privacy will be stripped from you, you will be weak, hungry and poor, and then you will be asked to go and find new blood, as you will have been sucked dry.

Leaders in the church today are facing a new kind of problem. Previously, the majority of the challenges faced by the church, and by church leaders, were identifiable, comprehensible, and often fully solvable. Some experts now refer to those types of challenges as “technical problems.”

In contrast to technical problems, “adaptive challenges” appear to be arising in our churches with increasing frequency. Adaptive challenges are characterized by being complex, difficult to identify, and multi-faceted. To resolve adaptive challenges people and communities must change at fundamental levels. Experimentation is required–with no guarantee of finding solutions. The church is facing these sorts of problems more and more.

That means when we teach things like “How to share the gospel” we run a serious risk of doing more harm than good. If we believe there is a formula for conversion that means we believe that non-Christianity is a technical problem. When we talk about the “right way” to do a worship service, or to lead a praise band, or to have a dating relationship; not just naming some pitfalls, but acting like there is a correct path to follow… We are making stronger claims than we probably realize.

There may have been a time a generation or two ago when most of the responsibility of a church leader, was reasonably boilerplate. Give the sermon, collect the offering, close in prayer. I doubt it, but It’s possible. But I just don’t think we can get away with it anymore. Instead I believe that we as a church need to address with flexibility and humility the amorphous shifting problems that lie ahead.

I want to steal one other idea from the book Confident Faith which I wrote about last time and use it as a springboard into talking about something I’ve wanted to broach for a long while, but haven’t known how.

In the book, Mark talks about “6 paths to faith” which is a pop level way to talk about epistemology. Ways of knowing.

He talks about a Relativistic Path: Truth is whatever works for you.
A Traditional Path: Truth is What you’ve always been taught.
An Authoritarian Path: Truth what you are told you must believe.
The Intuitive Path: Truth is what you feel in your heart.
The Mystic Path: Truth is what you think god told you.
And the Evidential Path: Truth is what the logic and evidence point to.

I thought it was very elegant, ant it covers its bases pretty well. I probably would have made experience it’s own thing, and I like his way better, splitting into a couple.But after laying it out so nicely, Mittleburg does something that puzzles me: He proceeds to discredit each of these paths as unreliable in favor of the last one.

Why Mark?

This attitude is typical of all apologists I have met, often in less obvious ways, and it’s bewildering. Somewhere along the line we have agreed that the way to engage a postmodern culture that doesn’t care so much about logic and reason as what is good and beautiful, is the prove them wrong, turn them into athiest modernists, and then evangelize them.

Why not instead learn to defend the faith, postmodernly? Jesus was not a modernist! Nonetheless we learned (a few hundred years after we might have), that we could defend the faith using science, and logic, and rational inquiry. Why now that the seekers are asking for testimony and authority are we throwing up our hands? Why should we limit ourselves to such a small slice of the epistomological pie for a god that is larger than the slice and larger than the pie itself.

If Truth is what works for you then I am going to show you why living for Jesus is the best and most productive way to life, and introduce you to Christian Pragmatism

If there is Truth in tradition, then I’ll invite you into a tradition greater than your own, at the cradle of monotheism, Where the great men and women of the Judeo Christian tradition worship the one who is greater because he came before.

If Truth is in authority I’ll quote to you from Einstein and Newton, From Shakespeare and Bach, From the Mohammed and Isaiah about the man Jesus Christ, who he is and what he means.

If Truth is something you feel then feel this and tell me it hasn’t been what your heart has longed for all along: There exists a mighty being, a creator of the universe, an everlasting father of all mankind, and he loves you. He knows your name, and he wants more than anything to be your friend and never leave you, not ever, in all of eternity.

And if Truth is what God told you, then I’ll pray with you to a God that I know answers prayers and promises always to give good gifts to those that ask, trusting his goodness and faithfulness to answer his children over my capacity to show him to you without his help.

If you still want me to do If P then Q. Yeah, I can do that also. Because Jesus is all these things and more. He is Truth incarnate, the word made flesh. And we couldn’t hide him if we wanted to.

I love apologetics, so when I happened into a Christian bookstore today I was happy to see a new apologetics book on the bestseller list.

I was even more happy to see it came from Mark Mittelberg, an author I’m very familiar with. he went to my church and I was his son’s small group leader.

It seems to me he finally put to paper an idea he has been talking about for a good long time. It’s a pretty seminal idea, and one I’m a pretty big fan of. I’m not however a fan of couching good ideas in 150 pages of kinda okay stuff, and then selling the lot for 25 bucks rather than simply sharing the goods. So I’m going to share with you Mark’s Big Idea here on the blog today. If you want to learn more, click the cover and it’ll take you to his amazon.

Mark presents a rational faith, one that is well evidenced as being like the picture at left (or the cover of his new book) Arrows represent arguments. Some are bigger, some are smaller some are closer, some are further away. So maybe that big straight one at the top is evidence for the resurrection, then off to the sides you have some big classical arguments, combined with some anecdotal evidence. They all point in the same direction so we know we have a good, rational position.

For many of us though, the Christian life doesn’t feel that way. Maybe we used to think it looked like the picture above, but lately it feels like the picture at right. We don’t have all the answers, everything it not neat and clean. There are some evidences or arguments for faith, but there are big questions in the way that could mean anything, and worse yet, some evidence we have seen seems to point in totally different directions. Maybe that one at the bottom there is evidence for evolution and the “?” above it is the age of the earth. In those cases, the point Mittelburg would make, is that you are still in a rational position. to stay where you had been. You need to research more, and not less, because the evidence should all point to something, but invalidating a few of the reasons for a belief is not the same as undermining the whole thing. So many people seem to have a crisis of faith at this point and it’s just not justified.

The only time it’s rational to leave Christianity and join something else, Or leave something else and join Christianity for that matter. Is when your belief and evidence system starts to look like below. Everything that used to seem to point to one thing is actually pointing to a different thing, new evidence arises pointing there, and what is left to justify your old belief is dubious at best, with a lot of questions left unanswered.

Where are your arrows pointing today?

I have a big list of blog ideas.

When I get an idea for a blog, I put it on the list. When I get time to write a blog, I open a list and write a page about the idea. Usually I add in some analogy to illustrate it or some argument for it’s truth if it’s controversial. Then I steak a picture and call it a day

I’ve had one on that list practically since I started it. It’s for a series about “What exactly I believe”

See I understand that on this blog or in conversation, I talk more about what I don’t believe, or what I’m thinking about believing, rather than what I actually think is the case. And I’m not being evasive, I just think that’s more interesting. So I think it would be advantageous for posterity to have a series of articles about what exactly I think about Jesus, about the bible, about church.

It’s been years. I haven’t written that series. It would be long, and I wouldn’t know what all to include. But I still feel like I owe you, my audience, something of my credo. Just how liberal am I anyway? Versus just how far am I willing to take this radical Christian “thang”? Well here’s what I can offer.

If everything I believe took the form of a big ball. A Katamari of Christendom, with my tentatively held doctrines near the outside, and most important beliefs near the middle, the very center, the creedal core, would be grace.

The extent to which a belief or practice is important to me corresponds to how connected it is to grace. The doctrines that are escaping to the outside, are those that conflict with it.

I believe that you and I and everyone are and should be the recipients of unmerited favor, from god and everyone else. And I believe in believing that. I believe you should believe that.

I believe grace before I believe evidence. I believe it before salvation, I even believe it before I believe the historical death and resurrection of Jesus.

That’s my blend. That’s how I’m able to stay so interested in Social Justice, and Equality, and interesting things form other religions or the secular world. That’s how I’m a leader in both a Presbyterian and a Baptist church. And still not fall off the cliff of anything goes and everything’s a metaphor.

Hate doesn’t go. Lies don’t go. Subjugation, and superiority, and guilt, and indifference can’t come into the CredoBall because the CredoBall is made of things that are tied to things that are tied to grace. Things like Love, and Truth, and service, forgiveness, passion and Jesus Christ crucified.

Generally speaking, the church tolerates apologetics nerds like myself. They acknowledge us, and withhold comment except perhaps to say something like “maybe you could teach a class or something sometime”

Sometime never comes.

Believe it or not that’s a pretty good lot for us, comparatively. it wasn’t so long ago that we were all but forgotten, most Christians saw no use for apologetics whatsoever and it was treated with scorn if it was ever raised at all.

Giants of the faith that came before me like Alvin Plantinga have carved out a place for rational Christian discourse in academia and in our churches and earned apologetics a status as a “neat trick” rather than where it used to be; as an unhelpful practice that probably isn’t biblical.

But why?      Why did it take so much work and why does it remain on a back shelf even today?

I think the answer lies in it’s categorization.

Most Christians understand apologetics as something of an argumentative subset of evangelism. That is, they understand that there exist some individuals who reject the claims of Christ, and will only be converted if we find one of these apologicians to talk to them. (So we’ll keep some around)

Apologetics then takes on a status alongside “alter calls” and “bible tracts” and “Christian hardcore music” as one of the things a few people do to help bring people into the kingdom. The rest of us have nothing to do with it.

And it’s true that apologetics has some function as an evangelistic tool. Just as social justice has function as an evangelistic tool, or prayer has some function, or biblical study, or church. But that’s not all it is! Just like all of these other things, apologetics needs to be recognized as a branch of theology itself, overlapping all other branches not just evangelism.

Apologetics has a function in theology. Our ability to understand the faith rationally and through evidence speaks to the sort of God we serve, a rational god who wrote the book of creation along with the book of scripture.

Apologetics has a function in Christology grounding Christ in a historical time and place and illuminating the resurrection as a dependable hook upon which our faith hangs. preventing Jesus from being washed away into some ethereal idea of a man that was said to have said some things.

Apologetics has a place in the practice of pastoral care, removing worries from the minds of individuals who struggle to fit the faith they were called to into the boxes we’ve given them. Introducing them to the freedom of rational inquiry.

It has a role in mission, in service, in liturgy, in soteriology, and perhaps it’s most important role of all, in worship. For we are called to love God nor only with our bodies and our souls but with our minds.

Do me a favor the next time you open a book, or listen to a lecture, or watch something to do with apologetics. Forget about evangelism for a minute, and be just a little bit selfish. Is there an idea here that could be helpful for you? Is there something enlightening or elucidating or fascinating for you personally that you don’t need to share with anyone else ever if you don’t want to. That’s doing apologetics.

I wrote earlier about profanity. I argued that the bible often finds profanity necessary to make it’s point. At the time I said that I wanted to make that point not just to defend profanity, but because there were other points that I felt were important to make, that rested on that point as a premise.

This is one of them

This article used language some may consider offensive, because it deals with topics the bible considers offensive. If you are not okay with that, go here instead.

^{1 Corinthians 5}

^{English Standard Version (ESV)}

^{1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. 2 And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.}

^{3 For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. 4 When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, 5 you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.}

^{6 Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? 7 Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.}

^{9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. 11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. 12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? 13 God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”}

This passage is preached on occasionally by pastors who fancy themselves as bold, and willing to talk about what scripture says even if people don’t like it. It is used to justify the power of the governing body of whatever platform the speaker happens to be speaking from to decide whose in and whose out.

I think that interpretation is understandable. After all the plain reading of the text is that Paul is asking for somebody to be kicked out of the church and if Paul did it that means we can do it if we need to. It’s even paralleled in Matthew 18

^{If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church,let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.}

With these two verses it is not hard to justify a biblical argument for excommunication. The occasional expulsion of a brother from the family of God (or at least from the local expression thereof).

But even though that interpretation is understandable, I think it’s wrong. I think it misunderstands both the role of the church and the church universal, and it has become default because of cultural factors in the 21st century and the desire of sinful men like me to get power.

I vehemently disagree and am considerably bothered by the implication that “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” should mean “Kick them out of your local church”

We love our gentiles and our tax collectors, we invite them to church. We may think twice before asking them to teach a class, but we certainty don’t sit them down with the elder board and tell them they don’t belong. That flies in the face of just about everything in the book of Acts.

1 Cor 5 However is less obvious. Let’s look at it again closely together, and see if it still seems to be about an example for First Church Main St. to follow.

^{1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife.}

”A man has his father’s wife” You know something is up when a translation that was published in 2001 still uses the phrasing from the KJV. Paul’s actually quoting too

^{Deut: 23:30A man shall not take his father’s wife, nor discover his father’s skirt.}

This comes at the end of a long argument about proper and improper practices in ancient Israel, and it arrives as a conclusion to a mounting list of sins that begins with divorce, then follows to adultery, then rape, and finally the most offensive of all: Having sex with your mom, creating a cultural understanding of an incredibly offensive act, and a horrible accusation in the ancient near east, that would be impossible to translate if not for the fact that the exact same offensive accusation exists in English.

”Mother Fucker” worse than a standard fucker, the mother fucker is among the most offensive phrases in the English language. That’s what was going on in Corinth

“There is sexual immorality among you, that is worse than all the orgys and pedophilia that the pagans approve of, this guy right here, Is a bonifide Mother Fucker”

^{2 And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn?}

Paul has written an earlier letter to the church in Corinth (0 Corinthians) That letter has been lost to time but from this verse we can gather some info about their response to his previous correspondence

”Well yeah we know he’s a mother fucker, Isn’t that awesome? but that’s okay we know how to handle this kind of thing, It’s not a problem”

Paul’s response comes from the opposite posture

^{Let him who has done this be removed from among you.}
and later
^{deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh}

In modern cultural parlance ”This Mother Fucker can go to hell!”

I love verses 9 and 10

^{9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.}

Lol true that, Paul. Do you ever realize how funny the bible is? It really is if you take the time to think about what is being said. If you didn’t associate with sinful people there wouldn’t be anyone left to talk to. Good point

Then he goes on

^{11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one.}

Ouch. That’s pretty clear. Don’t associate with people who say they’re Christian, but continue to sin. Don’t even eat with them if they have problems with sex or alcohol or putting other things before God, or trying to accumulate money. Don’t just kick them out of your church, refuse to associate with them.

…That’s what it says.

And if we are going to take this passage literally we need to do that. we need to kick all of the sinners out of our church including Paul himself who will confess continuing to struggle in Romans 7. Paul no longer has any place in our church and we won’t listen to anything he says anymore and… wait I’m confused.

Maybe more context

^{12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? 13 God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”}

I sure wish more sermons on this chapter would focus on this verse rather than the one before it. Pastors who teach on it want to be brave and conservative, but they pick a verse that nobody has the spine to interpret completely conservatively, meanwhile there is a perfectly good point to be made about not judging non Christians.

The end though brings it home. “Purge the evil from among you” (the word “person” is not actually there in the greek) what is he quoting there?

Why It’s Deuteronomy 22 again

²² “If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel.

oh.

…

OOOHHHH

Kill them

…Kill…Him…

Kill the motherfucker. Says Paul send him to Satan for… the destruction of.. the flesh…

He can go to hell… you mean literally… Oh dear

There is beauty here.

It’s a very raw kind of beauty. But God had called the descendants of Abraham to be a nation set apart, where there would be no place for evil such as adultery. Here Paul is holding the church to that same glorious standard.

His methods may seem extreme, or harsh, but we must not forget that he pens the words of scripture. Inerrant truth, and we must be faithful stewards to believe what it says, not what it wants us to say.

It does not say kick someone out of church. It says kick them out of earth. Are you prepared to believe that since it’s what the bible says?

I think we need to be.

But we should also consider this

^{2 Corinthians 2}

^{1 For I made up my mind not to make another painful visit to you. 2 For if I cause you pain, who is there to make me glad but the one whom I have pained? 3 And I wrote as I did, so that when I came I might not suffer pain from those who should have made me rejoice, for I felt sure of all of you, that my joy would be the joy of you all. 4 For I wrote to you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you.}

^{5 Now if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure—not to put it too severely—to all of you. 6 For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, 7 so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. 8 So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. 9 For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. 10 Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, 11 so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.}

“Maybe I was too harsh in my last letter” says Paul “You should forgive him… I will too”

Paul reveals his motives for writing. “To let you know the love I have for you” “to test you” and he reveals the real work of Satan, not as a last resort to evangelize sinners, but to outwit us if we do not forgive.

The passage has come full circle

So in review. 

-The general theme of scripture is one of grace,and adoption into an eternal family.

– Matthew appears to offer an exception in one verse, but upon further examination that turns out not to be the case

– In 1Cor 5 Paul does apparently suggest that sending someone to hell might be justifiable if they are habitually sleeping with their mother (a crime more offensive than serial rape)

-But in 2 Corinthians he seems to regret being so harsh. and calls us all back to forgiveness.

There is no biblical basis to be found in 1 Corinthians to say to a sinner “we love you and that’s why we are sending you away from us until you repent”. If you raise 1 Cor 5 to a christian sinner, what you are telling them is “I think you’re a Mother Fucker, get out!”

I don’t deny that that may be necessary in some circumstances.

I will not be the first Christian to write a blog that 6 people ever will read refuting relativism. I won’t be the last. I’m not the smartest, and despite my ambition for uniqueness, my article will not break any new barriers in the field of epistemology. It is, according to all formal logical tests, inferior to standing refutations of relativism that already exist. But maybe, possibly, it just might, be a little bit more fun. And hopefully more in keeping with a postmodern relativistic mindset.

Let’s Define Terms:
Relativism: The belief that everything is relative, nothing is absolute, and if you think something is true it’s true for you.
Moral Relativism: The belief that morality is subjective, but other things could be objective (like science, maybe)
Objectivism: The alternative to relativism. The belief that absolute truth exists whether or not we know it.
Modernism: A philosophical system of beliefs and practices characterized by enlightenment ideas esp. the search for truth through logic and reason
Postmodernism: A new set of loosely connected beliefs mostly characterized by a disappointment in modernism for failing to make good on what it promised

All of these terms are a bit wibbily wobbily. But for the sake of discussion, let’s suppose that these simple definitions are the end of it.

You can see how modernism goes hand in hand with objectivism. Postmodernism opposed modernism and it’s ilk and so tends to gravitate towards relativism, which drives modernists crazy as they are convinced it will lead straight to the denial of all sorts  of important things.

Considering this, it is typical for a objectivist to ask an obvious question such as “do you exist” or “are circles circular” about which virtually everyone agrees, and try tog et the relativist to admit that this is absolutely true not just true to them. It’s no fair and not any fun.

So instead I ask this question. in the movie Star Wars when Greedo attempted to capture Han Solo resulting in shots fired at the Mos Eisley Cantina. Who shot first? Was it Han or Greedo?

The answer depends. In the original theatrical release, Han shot first. But in the Special Edition and subsequent versions, Greedo shot first, and CG was used to make Han awkwardly “head dodge” and then fire back. Thus characterizing him as less a ruthless scoundrel, and more of a loveable friend for a young audience.

The relativist has some ground here. The answer you give will depend on when you were born, what version you saw first and what is and is not “cannon” in your personal opinion

The objectivist is on more shaky ground. It’s worth noting that an objectivist need not be an objectivist about everything, anyone who believes in any absolute truth is an objectivist. But if he is to be a MosEislian Objectivist he has an obligation now to find some absolute authority on which version is correct.

Often a dispute about a text will be settled by “authorial intent” but since the author of both versions is the same man (George Lucas) it does little to help us. We must determine whether 70s or 90s Lucas is the real authoritative Lucas.

…Or do we.

I mean must we be so modernist about this whole thing?

I for one believe Han shot first because it is right and good and true for Han to shoot first. It makes him cooler, it makes his character arc more profound, and it furnishes in us the appropriate doubt at the climax about whether or not he will do the right thing.

The Firstitude of Han’s shot outranks Lucas, it transcends authorial intent. Before Star Wars was even filmed, Han was shooting first. Because it is an objective moral reality that he should.

I am aware of some ministries that have become so focused on the the importance of evangelism that they talk about “The parable of the fishless fisherman”. I won’t link you said parable (as it’s copyrighted) but the gist is that just as a person who claims to be a fisherman but never catches fish is not really a fisherman, so a person who claims to be a Christian but never wins converts is not really a Christian.

I have problems with this thinking. I get where it comes from, but I object to equating effectiveness at evangelism with salvation, and I further object to equating the winning of converts with evangelism as if he with the most notches on his coux stick is the best.

It brings to mind the Buddist fisherman who have a saying for what they do day to day. Their religion prevents them from saying that they kill living beings on a regular basis, so they say that instead of “fishing” they “save fish from drowning” and unfortunately this causes them to die.

I feel this concept is worth our consideration when we hypothesize that Jesus related evangelism to catching fish. I wonder if sometimes we might be kidding ourselves about what that accomplishes, doing the same thing, saving fish from drowning. Most secular people have little to no felt need for something to change in their lives. We come along and introduce them to that need. We tell them they are helpless worthless sinners and need Jesus. Then, like Peter we bring them up onto the shore and leave them there to die.

Jesus offered salvation from much more than being a non-Christian. He proclaimed freedom of the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. If we don’t intend to do anything with out catch then we are not christian evangelists, we are Buddhist fisherman

I was just an an outreach for international students where the speaker was a local church pastor. One of the students was bothered by the concept of the trinity, so the pastor tried to explain it.

“It’s like your family” he said “You and your parents and your siblings are all different people, but you are united together as one family. In the same way the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are different people, but they are all together. “God” isn’t one person, it’s just his nature, like how your nature is human”

Luckily the student did not understand, because that is exactly wrong.

That is a heresy called tri-theism. The same heresy that is central to Mormon theology. There is not so much 1 God as 3 gods all of whom are on the same team.

I came up and talked to him afterwards, expecting that he would realize he miscommunicated in the difficult cross cultural setting, but no, That actually is his theology. God is like a family.

Obviously the trinity as very unique, and explaining it adequately is difficult. But this is getting out of hand. People are actually believing that their bad analogies are the truth, and teaching others. While we might not have a great idea of how to explain what the truth is, but we do have a good idea about what is false. Tri-thiesm is false. Christians are monotheistic.

Modalism is also false. Modalism denies the “threeness” where tri-theism denies the “oneness”. it says there is only 1 god with 3 different modes, or 3 different aspects. The father is the son, and the holy spirit is the father, They are all just different parts, or different aspects of one god.

Do you believe that God is like an egg, with a shell and a white and a yolk? You are a modalist

Do you think it’s like water (solid, liquid, gas) or a Pastor (Father, Husband, Pastor) or a person with DID or Mitt Romney? Then you are not a Christian! You are denying the trinity!

————————–

“Okay Ryan” You’ll say “what’s your solution then?” I always say I won’t complain about something without offering an alternative. “If all of these are bad, what analogy for the trinity can we use?”

Well I still say that no analogy is perfect and I’d rather teach it the way the church fathers did (by actually explaining what it is and what it isn’t without any analogy as I did above) But if you are pressing me for an analogy here is the best one I have: The trinity is like Darth Vader

Vader was most famously played by James Earl Jones, But JEJ never played Vader in person, he just provided the characteristic voice. Vader was actually played by David Prowse, who wore the suit. If you met him in the Vader suit you would be looking at the real Vader from the movies Or was he? We never saw his face. Anakin was played by Sebastian Shaw. Anakin is Vader, so Sebastian Shaw is also the real Vader.

3 actors, one character. co-equal co-eternal for all time each individually is Vader himself, not just “one of the Vaders” but one does not truly know Vader unless one knows all 3

In nomine patri et fili et spiritus sancti

I’ve been a very effective evangelist this summer.  Not so much for Jesus; I’ve been hanging mostly with Christians.  But for Doctor Who, the long running BBC science fiction program.  I’ve converted 4 new Whovians in the last 3 months!
I’ve written before about some parallels between Doctor Who and Jesus.  But there is a lot more there to talk about, specifically surrounding evangelism.

See, I’d originally been converted to fandom by my friend Tim, who’s been a Whovian since childhood.  I was curious about the program, but overwhelmed with the idea of catching up on 50 years of programming and didn’t know where to start.  And besides, wasn’t it just for Brits?

When I showed interest Tim took the time to walk me through Ep 1:1 of the new series.  And since I liked it, he lent me his DVDs of the entire season so I could watch on my own.
It wasn’t long before Tim was apprenticing me in leading a small group of new Whovians in a weekly showing at my apartment (I’m not kidding).  I did most of the inviting, but whenever there was a question I didn’t know how to answer about continuity or time travel, or the old series, Tim was there to help.

As a community, we followed the doctor through time and space in our living room.  Some episodes were good, some were less good, some were in-freaking-credible.  My relationship with The Doctor was shaken when he changed his face, becoming David Tennant, but we got through it together.
And then I left.  I traveled to Kansas where I didn’t have that community.  And I stopped watching for a while.  I got into Battlestar Galactica….  It wasn’t until Yvonne (whom I helped convert to both Christianity and Doctor Who) challenged me on it and revealed that she had watched a whole season ahead of me, that I really considered watching alone.

And when I did, people started taking notice.  It started showing up in my speech patterns, in my jokes.  People asked questions, I answered them.  People showed interest, I introduced them to my show.

I learned to contextualize the show to multiple audiences.  I became intimately familiar with Series 3:11, Series 5:1, and Series 1:1 because those are the best episodes to show potential fans.  And I have started watching the old seasons as I wait with great anticipation for the new series next month.
You may find your curiosity piqued in reading this.  What is this show?  And what’s all this stir about it?  Maybe you want to check it out.  I encourage you to do so.  It’s a great show.
But if I may return to the original premise:  evangelism.  The more interesting part for me is why introducing people to The Doctor is so easy, and introducing them to Jesus is so hard.  Why do we get awkward about our faith and not our favorite TV show?

It might not be Doctor Who for you.  You may be a Brony or a Trekkie or a Browncoat.  You might preach the gospel of Apple Computers, or vegetarianism, or the American Libertarian Party.  And you are probably pretty good at it.  And people appreciate you sharing that part of yourself with them.

That’s all evangelism is.  Sharing something you love.  That isn’t so bad.  Is it?

Have you heard about the recent study about how people are increasingly disconnected from each other because of the Facebook and txting? Or how traffic accidents are up because people are Twittering while driving? And attendance at church is down because the kids these days can’t tear themselves away from Worlds or Warcraft.

Our lives today are filled with noise, we are constantly stimulated with our phones and out computers and our GPS devices, we are becoming disconnected from the spiritual world and from one another because when we are always tied in to the digital world we lose the ability to be fully present.

We need to find ways to “unplug” from out electronic idols. And escape from our digital addictions so that we can reconnect with God in nature.

Because that’s where God is, right?

In nature?

God’s not on the internet.

I’m not going to deny that there are people who have legitimate problems with technology replacing social interaction, or who worship their iPhones, or who have legitimate addictions to computer gaming. But its my opinion that fro the most part, those people would be screwed up anyway. It’s not technology’s fault.

I also won’t deny that it would be deeply transformative to people to live without technology for a while but argue that many of the more escapist and distracting technologies are actually older. Clocks for instance only became so prominent and accurate as they are now because of the Railroad industry in the US. They are not inherent to the spirituality of the ancient near east. Date books are not new, but neither are they inherent. And escapist fantasy stories predate WoW by eons.

If you are having difficulty connecting with Jesus. It’s because you are sinful fallen and broken, not because you have a smartphone. And the missional call of God is not to run away from it’s secularness but to redeem even this new technological space,

Genesis 28:16

In Part 1 I talked about The healing of the beggar in Acts 3 and the three parts to peters approach, Focusing on the first part: Eye contact. Paying attention.

In Part 2 I identified the second part, as a willingness to give away everything rather than what it seems at first: an excuse to give away nothing. Peter said “Silver and Gold have I none, but what I have I give unto you”. You on the other hand (if we are honest) would have to say “Silver and Gold I have, but I have nothing to give you”

And now here’s part 3: The part we usually want to talk about. Let’s read the passage one more time for context:

One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon. And a man lame from birth was being carried in. People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked them for alms. Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, ‘Look at us.’ And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, ‘I have no silver nor gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’ And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. Jumping up, he stood and began to walk, and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God.  All the people saw him walking and praising God, and they recognized him as the one who used to sit and ask for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the temple; and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.

Part 3 is to miraculously hear them.

Then bring everyone to Jesus when they see the miracle. (that happens in the next Chapter)

Am I the only one who is not totally cool with this?

”And your Bible study application for this week is, go do a miracle, let’s close in prayer”

I mean, I know there are other faith traditions that place higher emphasis on the work of the holy spirit but this just seems a little over the top to me. This does not describe my daily life of ministry at all!

I’ve talked to people who have had more of these experiences than I. But I can’t help but wonder about coincidence and verifiability. Why has nobody gotten real good video of this stuff? Cameras are everywhere now. Those people we have caught on tape like Popoff and Hinn, have been shown to be frauds when under scrutiny.

Maybe my skepticism is faithlessness, and that’s why god hasn’t blessed me with the gift. But I have another theory.

I think my faithlessness is faithlessness, and so is everybody else’s

I think there is an order of magnitude of exponential growth between the amount of spiritual maturity it takes to say to a beggar “look at me” and the amount it takes to say “what I have I give to you” let’s say it’s 100x. I suspect that’s the same order of magnitude between the ability to say “what I have I give to you” and “stand up and walk” 100x100x.

And that’s the reason we don’t see miracles every day, and what we do see are the non-verifiable kind such as “god gave me hope” or “God hastened my recovery, it took less time than it would have” we just don’t have the kind of faith Peter had. None of us. Some of us will respond by saying the miracles are happening “over there somewhere” (perhaps in Africa) others will try to say miracles have ceased, or that the passage means something other than what it does. Perhaps Peter isn’t an example to follow at all and this is a unique miracle for a unique moment in history.

All of that might be true, but you know me, I have to chime in with the minority report. Maybe it means exactly what it looks like, and we are just not awesome enough to handle it.

Lord, make me awesome enough to handle it.

I want to continue a discussion I started about Acts chapter 3. Particularly I began to highlight 3 unusual things about Peter’s response to the beggar he meets. Previously I highlighted the simple fact that Peter looked at him. I don’t look at beggars, do you? Peter paid the beggar more attention than the beggar paid him.

In this second post I want to highlight the famous line Peter used “Silver and Gold have I none, but what I have I give unto you”

Without getting distracted into the awesomeness that is Peter and what happened after, Let’s look at that… little… piece:

Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, ‘Look at us.’ And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, ‘I have no silver nor gold, but what I have I give you;

At first blush that sounds something all of us would say.

”Spare any change?”

”No I’m sorry, I haven’t got any”

The only difference between us and Peter (aside from the Eye Contact thing) is that he wasn’t lying. He actually didn’t have any money. no silver, no gold no coins, no cash, no atm card. We learn in Chapter 4:34-35 that the reason he didn’t have anything, was that he had already given everything away to other people who are in need.

I spoke previously about the challenge to simply look beggars in the eye. Can you imagine the challenge of giving beggars everything you have. Straight to them, not through some ministry. you ask “how much do you need” and then you empty your bank account until there is nothing left. What a radical and incredible statement to make about the Kingdom of God if that actually worked for both of you?

I’ve been living out the first challenge since it came to my attention last year at this time and it had been a tremendous blessing. The truth is that I’m just too selfish to take on this challenge just yet. But I am putting this blog up as an exercise in the biblical practice of admitting that.

Lord God, my trust in you is incomplete, imperfect broken and sinful. I see these words and I know very well what they mean. I see the same call in the story of the Rich Young Ruler, The Widow’s Might, and Ananias and Sapharia. Even in the Feeding of the 5000 you include a report of a child that shared all he had and fed a multitude. Yet I grasp. I cling to what is mine because I still think I know better despite knowing I don’t. I am broken. Forgive me. And Forgive the many ways I twist the scriptures in my sin to make them mean something else with which I am more comfortable. Amen

I published an article last week that was based upon the good Samaritan parable that Jesus told.

I did the best I could to stay faithful to the story. Without adding any elements to the story simply for dramatic effect. I just replaced all of the 1st century references in the story with 21st century ones. I did my best to pick fair cultural equivalents to the road, the Levite, and the Samaritan. And it did it back in college, so there’s that.

There is another story I want to talk about that’s along the same lines, and I want to do this one with some more rigid theological backing. It’s in Acts 3

One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon. And a man lame from birth was being carried in. People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked them for alms. Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, ‘Look at us.’ And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, ‘I have no silver nor gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’ And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. Jumping up, he stood and began to walk, and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God.  All the people saw him walking and praising God, and they recognized him as the one who used to sit and ask for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the temple; and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.

Unlike the Good Samaritan this is a historical story. We believe this actually happened, in the early church, with the new leader Peter. Look at how he interacts with poor people. There’s a very similar principle at work here that Peter picked up from listening to Jesus for a couple years. It delves into what we do with people who need help.

Notice a couple things:

1. “Peter looked intently at him”

2. “Silver and gold have I none”

3. “in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazereth, stand up”

It seems like while trying to chug this spiritual Milkshake we get caught up in the chunky pieces of number 3 and start to ask some really complicated and controversial questions about miracles and healing. Which we ultimately decide we don’t know the answer to, and so we move on. But in doing so, we miss some of the more melty digestible truth of Number 1 and the creamy sweetness of 2 which we could really learn from if we tried to.

Let’s focus on 1 to start with, What if this story ended right there? What if it only said:

And a man lame from birth was being carried in. People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked them for alms. Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, ‘Look at us.’ And he fixed his attention on them.

How much better is that, than what you and I do every day when we see a beggar? No miraculous healing, no exchange on money, Just the attention. How few of us are willing to offer even that much? Or do we avert our eyes and hope that if we just ignore them they will go away?

An acquaintance of mine wrote this article about that very thing. Let’s start there.

Or here’s a version with Jesus doing it:

a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard a crowd going by, he asked what was happening. They told him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.’ Then he shouted, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Those who were in front sternly ordered him to be quiet; but he shouted even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Jesus stood still and ordered the man to be brought to him; and when he came near, he asked him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’

What if that was all I did. “Oh hi, what did you want?” I can do that much!

I confess that I have not taken the time of day to interact with people who I know desperately need interaction. But who I suspect want something from me that I’m not willing or not able to give. I want to avoid akwardness more than I want to pursue Christ, and I want to change that about myself. Right here before God and the internet I choose to commit to being a good enough Samaritan to look, at the very least. To look intently at beggars in my life. Literal historical human beggars as well as metaphorical ones and say, if nothing else “No I won’t give you any money, sorry”

We’ll cover 2 in the next post

Late one Sunday afternoon a young woman was traveling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for the holiday weekend.  As she traveled she noticed her engine light was on and stopped in the city of Baker to have it checked. The mechanic, seeing an opportunity to make a profit, concocted a story about a problem with the young woman’s piston regulator. He sold her a $50 bottle of oil and a new filter and sent her on her way.  Although he did nothing to her engine, he mentioned to her that the light would turn itself off in the miles to come as the oil passed through the car’s system. Before long the oil warning light appeared and the temperature gauge rose; and the young woman’s car then overheated. Power steering malfunctioned as smoke began to creep from the engine and in an attempt to quickly pull her car over to the shoulder; she ran it into a ditch. Her car came to a stop just below a road sign that read “Jean, Nevada, 50 miles.” Below the road marker was a handmade sign that had “Last chance for gas!” handwritten in red paint.

The woman was not badly injured, but had managed to twist her ankle quite severely. She knew that walking the great distance to Jean would be impossible. Her cell phone was on its last bar of battery life and showing no sign of reception. Time passed slowly and she found herself very hungry. Her phone eventually beeped its last and turned itself off, and she resigned herself to misery, sobbing against her steering wheel, with smoke still pouring from the hood of her car.

It happened that the youth pastor from that woman’s church was on the 15 freeway at the same time – he was carrying the high school group to Lake Mead for a water-ski trip. When he saw the young woman’s car he shifted to the left lane and sped past her, as he was already behind schedule.

As it got later into the evening, the young woman still hadn’t eaten and was beginning to feel weak. Soon a missionary on furlough that was traveling that way spotted her and seeing her distress he thought about helping her. Before pulling over he decided that being seen alone on a dark roadside with a woman might compromise his moral integrity and passed her by, murmuring a prayer as he passed.

Late that night a male exotic dancer, still covered in sequins from his late night shift at a men’s cabaret saw the woman’s car. He was traveling in the opposite direction of the woman after his long shift. He swerved his car around and parked behind her on her side of the road.

He got out of his car and walked to where the young woman was. And when he saw her, he took pity on her. “Hey shuga” he said “Ya okay?”. He used his first aid kit to bandage her wounds and treat her pain. Then he helped the young lady into his car, took her to his room at The Mirage where he took care of her. The next day he gave a generous tip to the concierge. “Look after her,” he said, “Whatever she needs goes right on my tab and I’ll cova whateva’ extra that comes to.”

Which of these three do you think was a Christian to the young woman who fell victim to the dishonest business practices?”

There is an old hustler bet where you offer a sum of money (say $50) to somebody in a bar if they can drink an entire pint in a minute. An experienced drinker can often polish off a pint in well under that, at which point you can take their money because they did not finish it in exactly a minute, they finished it in less, so they lose.

We in the Christian community often do the same sort of thing. We will insist there is a moral difference between Murder and Killing People despite the fact that there is nothing about the Hebrew Language to indicate that. We’ll say we don’t like Dating but instead we’ll support “courting” we will insist that it’s wrong to Lie but we’ll say stuff that is deceptive or misleading as if that’s okay.

We are like the expert in the law in Luke 10. We know that we should love our neighbor, but we pretend not to know what the word “neighbor” means

I could write articles about every one of these inconsistencies I see. But frankly I’m just not that starved for topics. At the end of the day the root problem is simply this: It is very easy to follow the bible so long as you are prepared to reinterpret all of the words in the bible to mean whatever you need them to.

So if you believe there is a difference between “teaching” and “preaching” between “submitting” and “obeying” between “drinking” and “drunkenness” between “judging” and “judgement” and between “gossip” and “talking about someone behind their back” then I have to ask you a question:

What then is the difference between believing the “bible” and just believing “whatever you want”?

A friend of mine who is planting THISchurch dispensed some advice to me that I’d like to pass along to you.

“Work with the people in front of you” he said “Not the people you wish you had in front of you”

What a great word for a person in ministry. (or for any person) It’s easy for me to get excited about results or programs or possibilities. I want to Build a chapter, I want to plant a church, I want to lead a small group. And the people who are involved eventually become like props inside the visionary’s mind. The temptation then is to get upset that the props are not correctly filling the holes you have built for them. They are supposed to be more mature, or less mature, or more evangelical, or more Justice oriented.

But the bottom line is that that’s ridiculous. The people are the point, they are the reason we have churches and small groups and chapters, and if they don’t fit our expectations that’s because our expectations are wrong.
I want InterVarsity K-State to be huge. I want to hire more staff, and have a group for every ethnicity on the campus, and do 101 ongoing service project ideas I have, but that doesn’t matter, because there will be nothing good about any of that in IV K-State doesn’t first become a ministry that deeply impacts the lives of the particular individuals that have become involved in the ways they need to be impacted. Not just the ways I need them impacted.
Lord I believe. Help My Unbelief.

One of the key obsessions of out modern Christian environment is gender identity.

“Biblical Manliness” is a buzzword in our churches and youth ministries. Small Groups gather to read and discuss books like “Wild at Heart” and “No more Christian Nice Guy” Men’s groups are encouraged to do manly things with men to mend the mentality of mendacity that has long prevented men from doing the manly things men love!… For Jesus!

This is understandable. Boys in today’s societies are raised primarily by women. They spend all day with their mothers, their fathers returning from work at 5. Authority figures in schools are mostly female, Sunday school teachers, nurses, and even specialists like child psychologists and social workers tend to be female. Stereotypically Masculine impulses like fighting, cursing, exploring and getting dirty are discouraged and in instead they are asked to sit still and play nice.

This is frustrating. A backlash was only to be expected.

Girls on the other hand are being raised in the wake of the feminist movement. They are being taught to be onmicapable warrior women who can do anything they set their minds to, they mature more quickly than boys, and by the time they make it into the business sector they find it populated by a bunch of sissy boys.

So to review” we have boys that act like girls, and to make up for that men now act like boys, fighting and getting dirty. In response girls act like women, and develop into women who act like men.

And did I mention the social and political conflicts at work here?  Looming large over this whole scenario is the debate over Egalitarianism V Complementarianism all of this creates a perfect storm for angst which can in turn be channeled into consumerism by people who sell books and write blogs.

Here’s the problem though, It’s not an ignorance issue.

It would be great if there were a simple proscribed set of gender attributes enumerated in scripture but there just aren’t. We would have to insert our own experiences into scripture to find those. And to make matters worse God made all sorts of different kinds of people, including macho men and girly girls and effeminate men and tomboys. he even made some people that defy out categories entirely like androgen insensitive men and hermaphrodites which, if taken seriously, should cause us to question any unilateral statements we make about a specific gender.

I don’t have the answers. I only have more questions and the willingness to ask them somewhat loudly. I’ll let you know here if I come up with anything. and if you have any answers, by all means sound off in the comments.

If you read my blog, You’re probably familiar with the trendy Social Justice issues in the world today. Sex Trafficking, Creation Care, Multiethnic Reconciliation… I’ve written on most of them in passing, You may see a whole post on each one day. Today however, I want to see if I can’t contribute a new issue to consider.

Obesity.

No I’m not kidding.

It’s associated with discrimination based upon an individuals appearance, it’s systemic, and it is responsible for the early deaths of millions (particularly the poor)

The way an individual relates to food is passed down according to the same patterns as domestic abuse or alcoholism, overeating is comparable to drugs in the way it is used to medicate or mask deeper emotional and spiritual problems, and it nurtures a vicious cycle of self loathing.

The Bible is far from silent on the issue. Condemning gluttony as a spiritual problem in both the old and new testament. Paul  spends a substantial portion of 1 Corinthians discussing food and various issues that arise around it.

The American Church, by contrast is impotent. Our response ranges from pithy and unbiblical, to harmful contribution to the problem. You do know the obesity rate is higher within the church don’t you? It’s no surprise, we want to be a welcoming and accepting place rejecting worldly standards of beauty, but as we’ve learned in a bazillion other areas, there is a difference between accepting a person, and encouraging their behavior.

So why not bring that up at the next potluck?

I earnestly believe that now is the time. Previously we may have had bigger fish to fry, but I think the world, and the church, is ready now for a revolution of biblical thinking about out relationship to food. I think we can see healthy cooking classes, weight loss accountability groups, and action teams that help get healthy eating habits into the minds of the next generation. Who’s with me?

On Facebook I saw a status yesterday, after volunteering at vacation bible school that said something along the lines of “Why is it that once we turn 18 we have to stop learning about God by doing crafts and singing silly songs?”

I don’t think he was serious, I think he was being cute, but enough people responded in affirmative ways, saying things like “lol yeah totally” and “what are you talking about? I still sing silly songs!” that as a college pastor I started to get concerned.

There actually is a reason why we grow up in out faith. It’s really quite biblical. Arts and crafts on the other hand are fine, but they are extraneous to the bible, and far from the point of christian discipleship. So just in case, I posted a quick bible reference as a comment, one you probably know: 1 Corinthians 13:11

¹¹When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

To my shock. I found that verse utterly dismissed by my friend. his exact word was “Nahh..”

…

…”Nahh..”

Nahh?

I criticized the church a while back for not feeding us enough to grow up on, but at the time I pointed the problem more towards the spiritual leaders, arguing that they need to offer more. But there is another side to this maturity issue, and it’s the congratants.

It won’t matter what your pastor teaches so long as you look at it and say “Nahh”

It won’t matter how much of the bible you read, as long as you are prepared to ignore the parts you don’t like.

You can spend all of your life in the best church in the world with access to 5 star discipleship, it won’t do any good for your spiritual growth if you only want to go back to Kids Church

Grow Up.

Dear Friend

Dear Person I Once Knew,

I have to write you this letter, but I’m afraid I can’t address it, so you’ll probably never read it. You’ve just gotten engaged to the wrong man. This marriage will end in disaster and unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about it. You cannot tell a blushing bride to be that she is about to make the biggest mistake of her life. It’s not good manners.

But this is a pattern I’ve seen over and over and it seems to be increasing in frequency. So I’m writing this letter to you, not for you. You my dear, are screwed. Instead I’m writing in hopes that some other young women might read this before it’s too late for them. they might know the pattern, they might see it coming, and they might not be resigned to your fate.

You were raised in a loving christian home. Your parents were high achievers and so were you. You often thought about what your life would be like when you grew up and left that house and met the man who would love your and care for you for the rest of your life. and in return for his love and protection you would submit. You would follow his firm but fair leadership, and rear the children and so on.

…Well he was behind schedule wasn’t he? It’s just like men to not follow the script properly! You didn’t get your first real boyfriend until college, and that boy was all wrong! he wasn’t your dream man at all! I mean you thought he was for a little while, but no, he was weak, and immature, and… just… not right, but you learned a lot about men in that relationship. Most importantly, you learned you wanted one!

Then you met the other guy. the new guy. The guy you’re going to spend the rest of your marriage with. Him! And he was a rebound.

Let’s face it. He was.

You dumped the first guy, and you were lonely. He was there.

I mean you waited a little while in between, propriety was involved, none of your other girlfriends who date a lot would have called it a rebound, but you and I know the truth. He was below your standards and you dated him because you were lonely and there were no other options right then.

Well unlike the first guy this one turned out better than expected. Apparently you weren’t out of his league after all, He was out of yours! I mean what other reason could there be for him caring so little about impressing you.

You two didn’t actually start dating until several months after it was obvious to everyone around you that you liked him. and even when you did start dating it wasn’t public. but that’s not big deal, It’s certainty not because he’s not actually committed to you… even though there was that one time… yeah, no, that was just a mistake. That’s not why he doesn’t want it to be official. He told you that’s not why. and you trust him implicitly! The real reason for the secret is probably because what you have is special, and not this worldly conformist dating relationship that the Non-Christians have. this is more like the old days, where you wait for his hand.

Well that came!

Pretty quick huh?

Seemed like it took 6 months for you two to start dating and then you were kinda engaged in a couple weeks. You must really be in love for things to be happening so fast! and now you can finally make up the time you lost in College!

You think this story ends with 2.5 kids, a dog and a happily ever after doesn’t it?

I’m sorry It doesn’t.

You see: You’re too good for him.

You’re an 8 and he’s a 4

You’re settling for him because you infatuated with him right now, and because you’re running behind schedule and thought this day would never come and it finally has with a guy that’s really… not horrible… but trust me. You can do better.

He’s a child. He thinks himself wise but he is a fool, he’s mean to people who he considers to be below him, and that category will soon include you, and he is not professionally secure. (He didn’t give you a real diamond did he?) Guys like him are a dime a dozen, and they would all gladly fight over you if they thought for a moment they might actually win your love.

He will never be a spiritual leader for you. You’re ahead of him. You know God, and what the bible teaches, you are prepared to put it into practice. You just need someone to show you how. He on the other hand is a part of a religion called Christianity and he has figured out how to use it to get what he wants. Do you remember that time when you both sinned, and you realized it and apologized? What did he do?

You might wonder how I know this much about you and your relationship. After all it’s not like we’ve kept in touch. You don’t much speak to other boys since you started dating Him. He wouldn’t like that.

I know because I know the story.

Because I know you

And because the pattern doesn’t change.

I’ve seen your relationship move from first encounter, to first spark, to dati-, to engagement, to marriage, to marital bliss, to marital unhappiness, to marital desperation, to divorce. I’ve seen it over and over. It’s always the same.

Right now I have 3 divorced, 2 married, 1 newly married, 5 engaged, 2 dating and 2 "not" dating friends

nobody has broken from the pattern yet.

Consider waiting a couple years before you have kids.

"The bible does not say ‘Thou Shalt not kill’" say many christian leaders "It says ‘thou shalt not murder’"

And those christian leaders are lying to you. (or at least they aren’t telling you the truth)

It’s easy enough to see how this line would get absorbed so readily into out unconscious. It doesn’t take a person very long to realize that the bible is full of killing, and much of it is done by biblical heroes, or by God himself. But the Ten Commandments contain a statement that seems to stand in direct opposition to this. So is the bible contradicting itself?

When a person first hears the explanation "It says murder, not kill" it makes so much sense and answers the question so well, they rarely bother to investigate it further before they start informing other people that that’s what’s going on.

And if you check many English translations in your bible, you’ll even find it translated that way: Exodus 20:13 "You shall not murder"

The Hebrew word here is " רצח ratsach" which is not the word you ordinarily see used in the old testament to indicate killing, it’s normally " נכה nakah " but the difference between the two words is not so specific as "ratsach" means "murder" while "nakah" means "kill"

"Ratsach" is used in the new testament exclusively to refer to killing humans, but not necessarily intentionally, so in that sense it might best be translated "Homocide" or "manslaughter" and it’s often used as a personal noun to mean "killer" "murderer" or "slayer"

"Nakah" on the other hand is much less specific. It’s used to refer to people and animals, in war and in peace, for good or bad reasons, and it does not always result in death. "nakah" is often used in conjunction with the Hebrew word "muwth" which means death (as in "kill to death") My favorite translation of this word is the old-timey term "smite"

So then the text doesn’t actually specify that David "killed" Goliath. so much as David "smote" Goliath, and we understand from context that he died from it.

What then is the teaching of the scripture on killing?

Numbers 35:30 Whoso killeth any person, the murderer shall be put to death by the mouth of witnesses: but one witness shall not testify against any person to die.

The Hebrew there is "Nakah nephesh ratsach ratsach" so my direct translation would be "Anyone who smites a man is a slayer and must be slain"

the word here translated "killeth" is "Nakah" and when you "nakah" a man the bible says that you are a "murderer" (ratsach) and you should therefore be "put to death" (ratsach)

Clever word choices will not be our salvation from our difficulty about scripture and killing. Murder, and killing, and nakah, and ratsach are all heinous crimes according to the bible. They are also sometimes recorded, commended, and even commanded by God. Sorry pastor, there’s no easy shortcut out of this one!
Comment Me up and tell me how you resolve that conflict.

I might regret this. But I think perhaps it’s time to bring my perspective to bear on the Occupy Wall Street Protests. I don’t know about you, But I’ve certainty been curious about who’s side I would end up on. What with my tendency to controversy and social change, while also championing rationality and Christian values.

At first blush I thought it wouldn’t amount to anything. When my friend Salim, the Jasmine Revolutionary said he heard protests were happening on wall street and there were accusations of police brutality, I was quick to explain to him that in this country “police brutality” usually means a cot accidently knocked a kid down and he skinned his knee. “It’s not like Bahrain” I said “Protestors will get arrested if they cross picket lines, but they will be written up and sent home, nobody’s going to be locked in a dungeon I assure you” I then added “Wait a sec What’s happening on Wall Street again?”

When I did more research I scoffed. “Protesting cooperate greed”??? how do you do that? Every protest I’ve ever been to has an awareness raising component, “This is going on, nobody knows about it and it needs to stop, so we’re going to make a big stink until somebody does something about it” So as an abortion protestor I held a sign that depicts what abortion actually consists of. For Invisible children we wrote letters and took a picture of the crowd to show the sheer numbers of people who were concerned about Child Soldiers in Uganda. But how do you raise awareness for corporate greed? Who in the world did not know, prior to the protest that corporations on Wall Street were greedy? Are you going to protest Gambling in Vegas next? Windiness in Chicago? Fundamentalism in Utah?

What’s the Best Case Scenario here?

“Hey Mr. CFO, I made this sign that says you should stop being greedy”

”I should? Well dang, Okay! But what will I do with all this money?”

“Let’s give it to the homeless together”

“Great Idea! Last one there’s a sub-prime lending agreement!”

One news blog I read suggested that there are legitimate issues here and this is just an organization problem and the cream has yet to rise to the top. When it does,the blogger theorized that the protest would be more about taxation and lobbys than it will about “I hate rich people”

Another perspective is that this is the first true protest of the information age. No longer tied down by Bumper sticker slogans and androcentric leadership we can finally use free mass communication to allow people to communicate a truly complex and nuanced message in a  truly brilliant way.

Still others think the protests are a waste of time and they should all just go get a job because they don’t know what they’re even protesting.

I’d like to offer a fourth perspective. There are legitimate issues here, the protests are a waste of time, and that’s truly brilliant!

See, It’s a front.

They say they are hanging out protesting corporate greed, but really they’re just hanging out, and if social change happens all the better.

The more I read about what’s going on the less I feel like this resembles the work I did with Invisible Children and the more it sounds like the week I spent camping out for Star Wars.

Sure, In theory I was reserving a seat, but in reality we had all purchased tickets on fandango, I was really just spending the week outside with other nerds under the auspices of wanting a “really good seat”. It was one of the best weeks of my life.

Invisible Children was awesome too. I stayed up late talking to unique like-minded people and telling jokes while making the world a better place.

Am I the first one who’s noticed that rent in Lower Manhattan is $72 per square foot per month? People often commute for hours from 3 states to get to the City, these guys are camping there for free! That’s brilliant!

Meanwhile they have raised the level of public discourse in the country about an issue that nobody in their right mind would protest. You see they can do that, because they’re not in their right mind. they’re transient hippie whackjobs, and they’re changing the world.

In Ancient Israel there was a massive temple court where people would mill about and talk to each other and debate the issues of the day. I’ve often lamented that no such place existed in America, but I think these guys are creating it. And how beautiful and ironic is it that they’re creating it at the great temple of America’s favorite God, the Almighty Dollar. I think it’s marvelous.

I hope the protest continues indefinitely. I hope one starts in every city in America, and the civil leaders adjust to having people camping in their parks discussing whatever is on their mind 24/7/365. I hope I can go there and talk to everyone about Jesus and what his sign would say and what they all think of him versus the organized church community.

I hope we start talking about things as a people from now on. and don’t just limit stuff to what’s easy to talk about, or what fits on a sign or what problems are “solvable” I hope our prophets stop following procedure, and start crying out in the wilderness again because I hunger and thirst for justice and I hold to the audacious hope of satisfaction.

…also I would really like to hang out with these guys, but I have a job and it’s getting kinda cold out.

One of the wonderful, and sometimes horribly embarrassing things about being a young man putting your thoughts on the internet, is that once they’re out there, they’re kinda out there (and my thoughts are out there in more ways than one)

There are quite a few things I don’t agree with 2008 Ryan about, and yet his thoughts are here right with the thoughts I’m having today. 2004 Ryan also had a blog. Boy was that guy a pompous idiot! I’m often relieved to know most of the stuff he wrote is lost to the sands of time before Google had a memory

Of course I’m actually just as much of a pompous idiot right now. In the scheme of the universe the amount of knowledge I’ve gained in the last 7 years in insignificant. But I like my ideas now, even if 2018 Ryan is going to think they’re awful.

This is the Art of the Blog. This is how it is. A few superstars like Arianna Huffington might elevate the format to the lever of true journalism, but the rest of us just shout out opinions at the wall and hope in instigates an interesting thought in someone else.

Last year at this time I found myself in no position of leadership for the first time since high school. I was transitioning out of Church Ministry into Parachurch. I had one foot out the door on my way to Kansas, and without any students I needed an outlet for my interesting thoughts. So I brought the blog back (it had been inactive)

Then I moved to Kansas and I didn’t know anyone, I was unsure of the landscape, I didn’t know what comments were appropriate to share, and this forum needed to mutate into a mouthpiece for thoughts I couldn’t say our loud for any reason.

Now I’m drifting into inactivity again and I think I know why. I have a chapter now, and a mission, and friends. I have stuff to do, and I’m just not angsty enough to bleed on the page most days. I’m going to try to shift again. This time into a more official capacity. My identity as Campus Minister, is getting more integrated into my central identity and I think it’s time to start preaching from the blog. Posting fewer edgy opinion pieces, and more biblical interpretations.

At least I hope that’s what’s going on

Hey Everyone!

I know most of you haven’t seen or heard from me since my visit in august. Since that time I have been fully devoted to learning the ropes of what InterVarsity calls NSO “New Student Outreach”.

At the beginning of each new school year, about 5,000 new freshmen come to K-State. History has taught us that we have about 5 weeks to get these students involved, before their schedules fill up and they are no longer available. So all through September, all over the nation, campus ministers are scrambling to get the word out about their groups in an effort to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to meet students. We plan special events, plant new bible studies, take trips, and host tables in order to meet people, and when we’re not doing that we’re mostly walking up to strangers and getting to know them!

Then in October, things wind down a little bit, our programs for the semester have some momentum, and we all take a nap and focus on casting vision for the semester ahead.

This year’s NSO was especially crazy for me since it’s the first time I’ve ever seen one and I was in charge of it. But God is faithful and he has answered your prayers. We started the year with a dinner at Chili’s for all our students. Prayerfully, I made a reservation for 20 people, hoping that if most of our students came and some brought friends we would fill all of the seats.

Unbelievably over twice that many people ended up coming and learning about InterVarsity. There were so many people there getting to know each other that I couldn’t even do the talk I had planned in the restaurant and we had to gather outside afterwards in order for everyone to be able to hear.

Events like this wouldn’t be possible without the prayers and generous giving of donors like you, so I want to thank you and ask that you continue to pray that God will pour out his blessings in such abundance that out nets begin to burst. That’s the kind of ministry we need here!

You’ve obviously heard the bad news.

No, Not the unrest in Libya, not the genocide in Myanmar, not Zimbabwe with it’s insane inflation rate. Nobody cares about that stuff

I mean the BAD news.

Facebook has once again slightly changed its layout!

I know. I know. It’s difficult. But you’ll get over it.

…

…

No…

.. No I lied. It’s not difficult actually. It’s the opposite of that. The service you use for free just gave you a free upgrade. the product is now better, and you are clinging to the memories of an imagined past. Facebook has made consistent improvements since it’s inception, and each one successively has been regarded with scorn, followed by indifference, followed by unspeakable loyalty resulting in a feeling of betrayal when it is changed again.

This is what Facebook used to look like.

When they changed it from this, I was a part of the conservative holdout. They wanted to remove the exclusivity and allow profiles to everybody (including my mom) instead of just college students.

I was convinced at the time that this would lead to uncontrollable spam and alter the Facebook culture in a way it could never recover from. And it’s not like the world needed another general audience social network, we already had MySpace! 

Well now, having graduated college years ago, still logging onto facebook every day I’m pretty happy Mark Zuckerburg didn’t listen to me on that one.

The next revolt concerned the new addition of a horrible feature everybody hates called “the wall” which has at this point completely eclipsed profiles s the reason you log onto facebook. I mean who actually browses around their friend’s “info” pages for fun anymore?

then they subjected us to apps.. which was of course, awful…. Except for the good ones…But there was this learning curve whereby we had to learn to block the apps that were abusive, and before we figured how to do that we got a lot of Farmville Requests. Like, a lot.

And then Chat. Everybody hates chat still right?

You always think that the last version of Facebook was the “good version” but you keep forgetting that that’s what you said about the last version before that.

We do the same thing with the world. Where we get upset every time there is a starlet who is famous for no reason or a school shooting we wish it could all be like it used to be. But we fail to ask the important question “When was that?”

People talk about the 50’s like that was a golden age when men were men and women new their place. Actually the consensus in the 50’s was that women had become altogether too uppity following the war when they had been permitted to hold jobs, and were starting to think they were equal to men. Black men could not use the same bathrooms as white men, other races were parodied or not acknowledged at all and everyone lived in fear of nuclear annihilation by the reds (unless the polio got us first)

Prior to that we had the war (and the holocaust)

Before that was the great depression

And the “roaring 20s” remembered as a time when young Americans hung out at Coney Island, forgotten for having invented organized crime.

Go any farther back than that and you die of food poisoning before the publication of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”

I for one say we should all sit back, relax, and enjoy the present as it turns into the future one day at a time. Clinging to yesterday wouldn’t help bring it back even if yesterday was better.

…and it wasn’t

… Seriously what the hell was “random play”?

I was talking to a student tonight and invited him to out bible study.

“Oh, I’m already going to a bible study tonight”

Oh Cool, With your church?

“Naw, there is one with a family, they come to our church sometimes, have you heard of the Truth Project?”

Dobson?

“Yeah.. It’s like a video series. What are you studying?”

Have you heard of “Ephesians”

::laughing:: “Yeah”

…It’s not a video series…

We need to grow up. Call me old fashioned but I think at the point where milky evangelical videos are actively being used as an excuse not to study the bible they can no longer be counted as “positive”

When I went to the gulf coast to help out after Hurricane Katrina I had the privilege of helping to finish a house for a family who had lost theirs.

On my team was a school teacher, a pastor, a judge, a car mechanic, a secretary, a professional home contractor, and myself.

Guess who won MVP for most useful volunteer that week?

…

If you guessed “The judge” You’d be right. If you guessed ”me” you’re a suckup, and if you guessed the “professional home contractor”, you would be very very wrong. He was the most problematic person to work with, far worse than the secretary who had no idea how to work a hammer.

Randall wasn’t a licensed general contractor, but he worked for one. and he spent day in and day out installing drywall, and filling holes, and painting houses for rich and famous people who generally looked down on a manual laborers.

When he came on the trip and found out we would be finishing houses he was understandably excited to be the expert for once in his life. Now finally he could clearly use his gifts to glorify God as a great drywall installer.

Unfortunately Randall didn’t understand that this was not a crew of professional, that we had a hard time limit, or that this was not the family of a B list celebrity with 6  other homes like the people he worked for in LA. He became hyper focused on doing the job perfectly (because he knew how to) and lost sight of the ability to just “get it done”

He didn’t understand bastante.

Randal was so critical of other people’s work, so bossy, demanding they do things over again if he didn’t approve, and so slow, that eventually the team leader assigned him to work on the kitchen by himself. He could do the kitchen perfectly, everyone else would finish the rest of the house.

… At the end of the week the rest of the house was livable. It wasn’t perfect; the drywall was splochy under the paint and the ceiling texture was uneven, but it was a nice house. I would live there.

But the kitchen wasn’t done

The kitchen had the nicest, cleanest, smoothest mudding job I’ve ever seen. But it wasn’t painted, and the fixtures weren’t hooked up, because Randal never got to that and he wouldn’t allow any of us to do it and “ruin it” so the family didn’t get to move in to their house…they had to wait for a case management team to come by and assess it, and then find a way to assign another team, and I have no idea how long it took but it couldn’t have been easy to get a team out to do just half a kitchen. And when they did I’m sure it was done hurriedly as an after thought, and they splattered the paint.

It was just not a reality that we could have given away a perfect house, or even a house with a perfect kitchen. We could have given away a good house, a nice house, a bastante house. Doing worse work, faster, was much better in this case (more glorifying to God) than work of the highest possible quality.

One of the most useful words I ever learned does not exist in English.

I learned in in Spanish class, where I was taught it meant “enough” but also could be used similar to the way we use “kinda”.

Like most things I learned in high school Spanish class it was promptly forgotten, but my memory was rekindled when I took a mission trip to Mexico, and found that it was incredibly handy for a missionary.

To someone who doesn’t know the language with any level of fluency, everything between “Sí” and “No” is “bastante”. And to someone whos eyes are being opened for the first time in a dusty impoverished border town, just about everything lies somewhere between “Sí” and “No”

Did you sleep well? “Bastante”
Is the water safe to drink? “Bastante”
Do you speak any Spanish? “Bastante”
Are we going to finish on time? “Bastante”

It got to the point that “bastante” became the motto for work in Mexico. It took on a life that goes beyond it’s literal meaning in Spanish grammar. We were a crew of teenagers who had no idea what we were doing, didn’t speak the language, and would be gone in a week. We couldn’t pretend like the house we were going to build would be great, or that out outreach to the community would “work”. But we could make sure it was bastante. That it was “good enough” that is was “sufficient”

Bastante doesn’t mean you do the bare minimum, the way the English word “enough” implies. Bastante means you get it done, and you do a good job considering. You can’t go and visit a family of four living in a shack made of tarp and pallet racking and call anything “good” at the end of the day. neither can you say the problem is “solved” or the job is “done”. What you can do is dig a trench so that when it rains the water goes around and doesn’t run through the house and make the baby sick.

Passwords, like underwear, should be kept private, and need to be changed every couple of years or they cease to be secure.

It’s time for me to change my passwords, which means I’m spending a lot of time on the “My account” section of websites updating things. and getting rather frustrated with the inconsistency being demonstrated by various IT departments about what makes a secure password.

The truth is I’m a computer geek, I think I have a pretty Good idea of what makes a password secure. Preferably it should be a random string of all 95 printable ASCII characters (Upercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols) but, since it’s no good for security if you can’t remember it and have to keep it on a stickynote stuck to your monitor. It should be memorable.

“1mXun#” for instance is a fabulous password. This seemingly random series of letters and symbols is not something anyone would ever guess, yet it’s easy for me to remember. (it’s the phrase “I am not a number” spelled in a funky way)

But of course there is also the problem of password reuse. If I use “1mXun#” for my bank. I should not also use it for my Gaming Account on JoesFlashGames.com which is why I always have a backup password that’s less secure but even easier to remember like “Exodus16:36”

The problem comes when some webmaster thinks they’re clever, and decides to make it impossible for anybody to use a stupid password such as their name, or the word “password” and starts making up rules. When that happens I’ll type in my new password “1mXun#”

*****

And it will spit back “passwords must be 8 characters or longer”
Well okay fine, I’ll use my other one “Exodus16:36”

***********

”Passwords must not contain and identifiable word”
Dangit , I bet it doesn’t know this word “Preterest Miroslav Vulfianism”

”****************************”

”Passwords must contain each of the following: one (1) uppercase letter, one (1) lowercase letter and one (1) symbol”

SWEET MOTHER MARY OF THE SEVEN SORROWS!!! FINE! ”Pa$$w0rd”

********

“Your password is accepted”

Do you notice how, the more restrictions I bump into, the more insecure my password becomes? I already naturally want to have a strong secure password, but I also have other stuff to do with my life, and the more you attempt to prevent me by force from being an idiot, the more tempted I am to be just enough of a non idiot to make you shut up.

Notice also that this would not be a problem if every site had the same standard. If everyone wanted an 8 character alpha numeric password it would be fine, I would get a small password like that and forget about it. but every site is different, and whenever I don’t fit into the box, I start finding ways to climb out.

This happens in the church constantly. Which is why you see people who wouldn’t dream of kissing until they get married, but will cheat on their girlfriends and in their studies. Or you see people who’ve memorized whole chapters of scripture but refuse to talk to people that aren’t like them.

We want to protect people from having a unstable spiritual life, we want to prevent them from phoning it in with something like “password” and just coming to church on Sunday. So we require small groups, or devos, or learning Greek before we really consider you spiritually mature and ready for leadership.

But sometimes I haven’t been to your “FaithRoots™” training course, because I’ve been too busy witnessing in the GLBT community, and you write me off. Or you put me on a pedestal because I’m there 3 nights a week, but I’m actually not really listening and capable of much more.

This is the eternal problem with programs. And probably why Jesus didn’t have any and just hung out with people all day

I know It’s a classic line for bad blogs, to contain apologies for not updating more. But I do have another full time job, It’s really really busy this time of year.

I’ll be back soon, I promise

I got on the express bus to Madison. Spent time online replying to e-mails and catching up with my friend Michael who lives in New York now. It’s striking to me how utterly unreasonable it is to travel by Greyhound. From a customer service perspective this is probably the worst trip I have ever been on, and yet if all the busses were like this one, and they arrived on time, and actually let you onto the busses you bought tickets for, it could easily compete with air travel. This ride is actually quite nice, and I don’t mind the extra time it takes.

But as nice a thought as it is, it’s not reality. My foray into comfortable convenient travel was short lived and ended abruptly when the bus got off the interstate near Madison and promptly turned in the wrong direction.

Before long we were stopped at a truck stop in the middle of flipping nowhere Wisconsin about 15-20 miles out of downtown Madison where my bus stop was supposed to be.

“I need to get to the capitol, where’s the Madison Express Bus stop?”

“It’s about 20 miles that way” said the bus driver, pointing at the horizon

“That’s my stop”

“Well you got on the wrong bus, only express buses go there”

“I got on the bus they told me to get on!”

…he didn’t respond, he just looked at me without a single care to give…

“This bus isn’t going to get any closer to downtown Madison is it?”

He shook his head “Next stop, Minneapolis”

“Thanks a million”

I started to walk.

I hung my rucksack on my back and wore my laptop bag on my shoulder, I hadn’t showered in a couple of days and I’d been sleeping in my clothes. I had 15 to 20 miles to walk along a Wisconsin state highway. So I decided to stick my thumb out and see what might happen

To my complete and total surprise I found a ride in about 10 minutes. I was picked up by an ex hippie. He said he had over 700 miles of hitching on his record, but not lately. He’s a professor now at UW Madison.

We talked for a while. He was a Catholic, and agreed with me that JP2 was way cooler that Benny16. He drove me straight up the door to my hotel and then gave me his card so I can send him an e-mail and keep him updated on the ministry I’m doing.

What an amazing cherry to top off my travel odyssey! I got to the hotel and found that rooms were not available yet, so I switched into my bathing suit and went for a swim (wouldn’t want to be the smelly guy at the nice hotel) then I changed into a fresh white shirt and headed to the thrift store. Mission accomplished… At least until the trip back!

PS: Although I was not positive at the time, I have since checked it out and Hitchhiking is legal is Wisconsin, so long as you do not stand in traffic lanes or cross any signs prohibiting pedestrians.

I stayed up on the internet in a UIC lounge until about 4am, ate the other half of some really good pizza, and then walked back to the bus station. People were already lining up for the 6 am bus, and an attendant told me to go stand in line 13

When I got to the end of it the ticker taker told me that my bus had just left. She pointed to a nice shiny blue express bus like the one I had ridden from Saint Louis. I guess I got comfortable here in the big city and lost track of my Survival Mode. She put me on the bus she was taking tickets for, which was headed to the same place, and told me I could transfer to the Express bus in Milwaukee

I was pretty upset when I got on the old Sans-WiFi bus to Milwaukee. I didn’t think there was any way it was going to make it in time to transfer me to a faster newer express bus that had already left.

My attitude quickly changed when the driver got on the PA system though.

“Hello passengers this here’s your captain speaking. We’ll be driving to Milwaukee Wisconsin today, it’ll be a non smoking drive, if you got any electronic devices just keep those attached to some headphones and at a volume where only you can hear it. Two of ya’ll are here on the wrong bus, you should be going to Madison, so when we get off you’re gonna talk to me and I’ll make sure you get on the right one. That’s it! If you’re in the back of the bus kick back relax kick your shoes off. If you’re in the front of the bus, relax, but leave you’re shoes on, so I can relax. This is a Nonstop trip”

Something about her sassy and self assured attitude stood in direct contrast to everything I’ve seen from Greyhound employees so far. So I relaxed and took a nap in the seat.

Before I knew it we were in Milwaukee ahead of schedule. We’d even beaten the New Blue Express bus. I’ve been waiting for it as I write this entry.

So I arrived in Chicago at about 8pm. The bus leaves for Madison at 6 am. For those of you who are bad at math that’s 8 hours I have to spend alone in downtown Chicago in the middle of the night.

I’ve been in Chi once before, on a cross country road trip with my dad, when I was 18. I can’t exactly say I “know the town” but that’s okay, I’m a city boy, this may not by my jungle but it’s a jungle all the same, and I can handle it.

First order of business is to get some real deep dish pizza.

Giordianos is highest rated on Zaget.com and only a couple blocks from here

Make sure you see the sears tower while you’re here, you wouldn’t want to miss it

…Of course it’s the tallest building in the states so to accomplish that you really just have to look up

Annnd then find a place to hole up for the night. Luckily that Express Bus was comfortable enough that I don’t need to sleep, that would be conspicuous. Still, should find someplace I can relax where I won’t stick out. Preferably somewhere with power and WiFi.

Luckily it’s not my first time being homeless for the night in an inner city. When this happened in LA I caught a Rail Line to Fuller Seminary and passed out in a lounge with my laptop open.

Say where’s University of Illinois?

This is just too easy!