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The Power of Child Sponsorship

If you are sponsoring children in another country be encouraged by the potential of life change.  I am thinking of the hundreds of children that we sponsor as a church in Uganda.  This is a great moment.

Internships and Theological Education

We have recently interviewed for "internship" positions at OBC only to be turned down twice by prospective candidates.  I admit that this bugs me.  I like most people do not handle rejection well.  Especially when I see the obvious benefits of coming and serving in a church like OBC while preparing for vocational ministry.  We are willing to pay, spend time mentoring and coaching, and provide leadership experience.  The years of experience and maturity on our staff ministry team and their willingness to invest in the "next generation" are an amazing bonus.

So, I don't get it. 

Why are we finding it so difficult?  Is it because we are too far away?  Is it too cold?  Perhaps it is because of a lesser value on praxis in the scope of theological education.  Frankly, I don't know any process of theology that is not practical.  I don't mean that in a utilitarian way.  I mean all theology is informed by praxis and vice-versa.  It seems to me that it is imperative to learn how to "do theology" within the context of the local church along with the practice of critiquing the church environment and the conclusions arrived at in that environment.  It is a necessary theological art form.

So, when one of our candidates says they don't think they can handle studies and working in a church at the same time, I think they are missing the point.  Spread your education out a couple of more years.  Make the sacrifices that you need to to get the experience that is necessary for your life and future.  Drive the extra distance.  Do whatever it takes but get the input of the local church in your life.

Looking for a new church?

This time of year it seems like there are a number of people checking out various church options.  Some are thrust into this because of changing circumstances like relocation into a new community or starting university/college.  Many of us face the awkward challenge of doing this at least a few times during our life time.  Unfortunately some engage in this ritual frequently.

What to look for?  Relevant Magazine's article, "Church Shopping" is a good read and will be helpful to many. 

I would suggest that if you are considering making OBC your church that you consider the biblical truth that church is not about a place that you go to but a family you belong to, a family on mission whether we are together or dispersed.  If church for you is just about coming to the gathering on Sunday and filling a seat then we aren't the people for you.

 

During our series on the Psalms we encouraged people to write out their own "psalm-like" thoughts to God, whether it was praise, thanksgiving, or lament. Psalm Boards will be on display in the main entrance of the church for the next couple of weeks.

The difference between biblical lament and a pity party

We had a meaningful morning of ministry as we gathered together on Sunday. I spoke with so many who experienced a new level of freedom in their spiritual journey. We need to regularly experience together lament in our corporate worship.

For that to happen will require a growing depth in our trust of one another and of God. We hide much too often behind our smiles when we are together. I totally understand why we do that. Being real together requires safety in relationship. It means getting beyond self imposed expectations of what we need to appear to be like in public. It requires giving space and freedom to those who are experiencing misery. Being happy all the time is not required. Tears do not always entail something is wrong. Tears are the marks of a real relationship.

Lament like so many other good things in life can migrate into something else, like pity. The difference as I see it is in how we are approaching God. Trust is the essential ingredient that leads to intimacy. As I see it whining has nothing to do with trust. When I whine I am really just listening to myself express my own pain. When I lament I am bringing my complaint, questions, anger, and pain to God. This is biblical lament. It is built on a trust in the God who it seems is silent. When we yell and scream out to the heavens we, at its basic foundation, are crying out to the God we believe hears and acts even though it feels like he is totally absent.

Doing this together will require extreme empathy. God help us to be real.
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How Should Believers Read the Bible?

I am reading Mark Noll's book "The New Shape of World Christianity" and I was struck with the following question. "What is the biblical norm by which the rest of the Bible is read?". Noll's point is that historically and presently around the globe Christians are choosing different sections of scripture as "normative in such a way as to enlighten the rest".

It seems to me that this is an accurate assessment. While we are encouraged to read all of scripture where should one start? Gospels, Pauline letters, Acts? Where you start or what you emphasize will no doubt shape your interpretation and Christian practice.

The recent focus on a post-modern read of Jesus in the Gospels while reacting to an emphasis in modern Pauline biblical studies is a case in point. Perhaps this is inevitable and what is needed is a skill set that is able to identify foundational biblical bias.
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Another New Bible Resource

Just came across another Bible resource called the Glo .  Take a look at it and you may find it helpful for your Scripture meditation. 

Psalm 88

 

I am over my head in lament psalms this week.  I am ready for some "happy songs".  Hard to believe that Israel sang these songs of lament as worship.  Actually it is refreshing to know that corporate worship is rooted in real life and that nothing is out of bounds with God.

Psalm 88 (The Message)

^1-9 God, you're my last chance of the day. I spend the night on my knees before you.
   Put me on your salvation agenda;
      take notes on the trouble I'm in.
   I've had my fill of trouble;
      I'm camped on the edge of hell.
   I'm written off as a lost cause,
      one more statistic, a hopeless case.
   Abandoned as already dead,
      one more body in a stack of corpses,
   And not so much as a gravestone—
      I'm a black hole in oblivion.
   You've dropped me into a bottomless pit,
      sunk me in a pitch-black abyss.
   I'm battered senseless by your rage,
      relentlessly pounded by your waves of anger.
   You turned my friends against me,
      made me horrible to them.
   I'm caught in a maze and can't find my way out,
      blinded by tears of pain and frustration.

 ^9-12 I call to you, God; all day I call.
      I wring my hands, I plead for help.
   Are the dead a live audience for your miracles?
      Do ghosts ever join the choirs that praise you?
   Does your love make any difference in a graveyard?
      Is your faithful presence noticed in the corridors of hell?
   Are your marvelous wonders ever seen in the dark,
      your righteous ways noticed in the Land of No Memory?

 ^13-18 I'm standing my ground, God, shouting for help,
      at my prayers every morning, on my knees each daybreak.
   Why, God, do you turn a deaf ear?
      Why do you make yourself scarce?
   For as long as I remember I've been hurting;
      I've taken the worst you can hand out, and I've had it.
   Your wildfire anger has blazed through my life;
      I'm bleeding, black-and-blue.
   You've attacked me fiercely from every side,
      raining down blows till I'm nearly dead.
   You made lover and neighbor alike dump me;
      the only friend I have left is Darkness.

Sometimes the only answer we get from heaven is the silence of God (Michael Card).

What Can Miserable Christians Sing? by Carl R. Trueman

This Sunday we will be experiencing lament as worship.  In general we tend to not equate lament with worship.  We are much more comfortable with praise and thanksgiving as acceptable forms of corporate worship.  Lament psalms, however, form the majority of the Hebrew hymnbook, the Psalter.  Consider Trueman's words as you reflect on the role that the disoriented life has in worship.

“Having experienced — and generally appreciated — worship across the whole evangelical spectrum, from Charismatic to Reformed — I am myself less concerned here with the form of worship than I am with its content. Thus, I would like to make just one observation: the psalms, the Bible’s own hymnbook, have almost entirely dropped from view in the contemporary Western evangelical scene. I am not certain about why this should be, but I have an instinctive feel that it has more than a little to do with the fact that a high proportion of the psalter is taken up with lamentation, with feeling sad, unhappy, tormented, and broken.

In modern Western culture, these are simply not emotions which have much credibility: sure, people still feel these things, but to admit that they are a normal part of one’s everyday life is tantamount to admitting that one has failed in today’s health, wealth, and happiness society. And, of course, if one does admit to them, one must neither accept them nor take any personal responsibility for them: one must blame one’s parents, sue one’s employer, pop a pill, or check into a clinic in order to have such dysfunctional emotions soothed and one’s self-image restored.

Now, one would not expect the world to have much time for the weakness of the psalmists’ cries. It is very disturbing, however, when these cries of lamentation disappear from the language and worship of the church. Perhaps the Western church feels no need to lament — but then it is sadly deluded about how healthy it really is in terms of numbers, influence and spiritual maturity. Perhaps — and this is more likely — it has drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries and regards them as little short of embarrassing. Yet the human condition is a poor one — and Christians who are aware of the deceitfulness of the human heart and are looking for a better country should know this.

A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party — a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is — or at least should be — all about health, wealth, and happiness silently corrupted the content of our worship? Few Christians in areas where the church has been strongest over recent decades — China, Africa, Eastern Europe – would regard uninterrupted emotional highs as normal Christian experience.

Indeed, the biblical portraits of believers give no room to such a notion. Look at Abraham, Joseph, David, Jeremiah, and the detailed account of the psalmists’ experiences. Much agony, much lamentation, occasional despair — and joy, when it manifests itself — is very different from the frothy triumphalism that has infected so much of our modern Western Christianity. In the psalms, God has given the church a language which allows it to express even the deepest agonies of the human soul in the context of worship. Does our contemporary language of worship reflect the horizon of expectation regarding the believer’s experience which the psalter proposes as normative? If not, why not? Is it because the comfortable values of Western middle-class consumerism have silently infiltrated the church and made us consider such cries irrelevant, embarrassing, and signs of abject failure?

I did once suggest at a church meeting that the psalms should take a higher priority in evangelical worship than they generally do — and was told in no uncertain terms by one indignant person that such a view betrayed a heart that had no interest in evangelism. On the contrary, I believe it is the exclusion of the experiences and expectations of the psalmists from our worship — and thus from our horizons of expectation — which has in a large part crippled the evangelistic efforts of the church in the West and turned us all into spiritual pixies.

By excluding the cries of loneliness, dispossession, and desolation from its worship, the church has effectively silenced and excluded the voices of those who are themselves lonely, dispossessed, and desolate, both inside and outside the church. By so doing, it has implicitly endorsed the banal aspirations of consumerism, generated an insipid, trivial and unrealistically triumphalist Christianity, and confirmed its impeccable credentials as a club for the complacent. In the last year, I have asked three very different evangelical audiences what miserable Christians can sing in church. On each occasion my question has elicited uproarious laughter, as if the idea of a broken-hearted, lonely, or despairing Christian was so absurd as to be comical — and yet I posed the question in all seriousness. Is it any wonder that British evangelicalism, from the Reformed to the Charismatic, is almost entirely a comfortable, middle-class phenomenon?”

–Carl R. Trueman, from “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” in The Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historical and Contemporary Evangelicalism (Christian Focus: 2004) pp. 158-160.

 

 

Here are a couple of resources that will help you in your attempts to have God's Word the foundation for your life.

You Version allows you to download your favourite version of the Bible to your handheld or computer.  You can even develop your own plan for daily reading.  Fantastic stuff.  I still like being able to see the verses in context and I am still waiting for a better handheld application to do this.  I really enjoy the online version of the ESV that I was able to access when I bought my hardcopy of the ESV Bible.  I love how the cool mellow voice reads the text to me as I follow along.  Point is there are tons of resources now that give us great access to making meditation of God's Word that much more available to us right where we are.

Another resource is Verse Card Maker.  Now you can put the reference in and then "bam" out comes the verse on your printer.  Fantasic resource.