Having a Worldview

Last week, in his speech at the National Archives, President Obama spoke of the “so-called enhanced interrogation techniques” that

... undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. ... In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts ...

And, on closing the prison at Guantanamo:

Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. ...
[I]nstead of serving as a tool to counter-terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.

Almost simultaneously, in another part of Washington, Vice President Cheney, began and ended his speech with 9-11 as the justification for everything that followed: “9-11 made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat ...” He defended the “enhanced interrogation” by arguing that:

The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, and the right thing to do. ... to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.

And Cheney’s view of values was that:

... no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them. ... For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings.

We can thank God the Cheney/Bush years (as someone put it) are over. Let's pray that the Obama years bring more commonsense, good will, and real health to the nation of America.

Reading the Numbers Rightly

On the Albran Rountable blog, Wayne Floyd writes: Americans are notorious for trying to quantify everything; we take our numbers very religiously. [I think, New Zealanders are not much different]

“Clergy Voices: Findings from the 2008 Mainline Protestant Clergy Voices Survey” is one recent and provocative encyclopedia of statistics profiling the ordained leadership of current Mainline Protestants. A colleague just plopped the hefty 45 page report on my desk, and I’ll resist commenting on it until I’ve actually read it!

Even then, it’s not easy to decide the significance of the quantitative ‘facts’ we’ve read.

Floyd then goes on to look at the problems with numbers - and how we read them. For example, did the United Church of Christ really triple in size between 1990 and 2001, and then halve again before 2008 - or were the questions asked to learn these figures completely different?

Dave Gibbons asks:

In the light of increased costs (as much for New Zealanders as for Americans), are we spending our money on the wrong things? Dave Gibbons looks briefly at the issues in a post on Out of Ur:
Buildings for one...
The largest expenses for most churches are facilities and staff. First, let’s consider the stewardship of our space. Is it really the best to buy as much land as possible and erect large buildings, when the same dollars could be better deployed in other initiatives that prove more impactful? How much of our space is actually utilized during a given week? In expensive urban centers, every square foot comes at a very high purchase price, and we can’t forget about the cost of furnishing and maintaining the space.
Or staff...
How about staffing? As culture moves from a hierarchical model to a more flat, open, or wiki model, how should we staff? When I looked more closely at our budget, I realized that over 55% of our budget was staff related. While our staff is amazing, it had unintentionally created a bottleneck in our mission—it impeded the development of our people because we were “staff-driven.”
Read the rest of his post to see what his thinking is.

Making It New

In his review of Andy Crouch's new book, Culture Making: recovering our creative calling, Gideon Strauss writes:

[Andy] Crouch argues that American Christians adopted broadly four stances in relation to culture during the course of the 20th century, in each case taking an appropriate gesture toward certain elements of culture and inappropriately expanding it into a comprehensive posture toward the common culture in general. While some cultural products (like sex trafficking) demand outright condemnation from Christians, a posture of condemnation fails to account for the goodness of culture, warps Christian testimony to hope and mercy, facilitates hypocrisy, and—particularly in response to artistic works—comes across as "shrill and silly." Critique, by contrast, is an entirely appropriate response to works of art, the more so the better the art. But a posture of critique diminishes the delight to be taken in many good products of culture, and encourages a certain kind of cultural passivity that overemphasizes analysis and underappreciates participation and production. A pot of tea, a loaf of bread—the best first response to these is savoring consumption. But a posture of consumption limits us to living "unthinkingly within a culture's preexisting horizons of possibility and impossibility." Consumerism is capitulation to the existing culture at a deep level, allowing our very identity to be defined by what we can purchase. Copying from a culture is, at best, a recognition of "the lesson of Pentecost that every human language, every human cultural form, is capable of bearing the good news." But copying as a posture produces inauthentic, dated, and tame results.

Instead, Crouch says, the cultural postures Christians should adopt are those of cultivation and creation. Cultivators are "people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done." And creators are "people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful."

Andy Crouch has a blog site, also called Culture Making

Heard of LifeChurch?

Heard of LifeChurch.tv...? Can't say I have, although the name kind of rings a bell. Anyway, LifeChurch.tv is:

#1 on 2008 America’s 25 Most Innovative Churches

#31 on Outreach magazine’s 2007 101 Fastest-Growing U.S. Churches

#5 on Outreach magazine’s 2007 100 Largest U.S. Churches

#5 on The Church Report’s 2007 50 Most Influential Churches

• LifeChurch.tv meets in twelve locations in six states, reaching over 22,000 people weekly through 49 worship experiences every weekend
  
• Has an Internet Church
• Has started a church in Second Life (don't know what that is? Check out the notes below.)
• Has developed an interactive online Bible: YouVersion
• Hosts One Prayer - a daily devotional focused on prayer
  
• Gives all their resources away for free to other churches

Second Life is an Internet-based 3-D virtual world which enables its users to explore, socialize, participate in individual or group activities, and create and trade items and services from one another. In Second Life, users create avatars (3-D characters) that they use to interact and communicate with each other via a text chat (audio chat is coming soon) or by making gestures.

Second Life was launched in 2003 and has grown significantly in recent months. In October 2006, Second Life reached the 1 million registered accounts mark and quickly grew to over 6 million registered accounts by May 2007.

What is significant about all these items: Internet, Internet, Internet. (While I don't agree entirely with Tony Morgan that print is dead, Internet is certainly alive.)

Perspective

As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, "That's a terrible statement," I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had ... more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

- Mike Huckabee, offering his perspective on the preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The interview this comes from can be seen on You Tube. or can click on the arrow in the screen below.

The Revolution Misses You

Tim Keel, in a Christianity Today online article, An Efficient Gospel?, writes:

A socially progressive journalist named Zack Exley has been documenting a massive cultural shift that is happening among young, theologically conservative evangelicals. Writing for the left-leaning, semi-socialist magazine In These Times, Exley has chronicled his journey into the surprising world of socially conscious, justice-oriented evangelicals who are living out their faith in increasingly radical and sacrificial ways. In his article "Preaching Revolution" (complete with a Che Guevara-ized portrait of Jesus on the red magazine cover), Exley wrote:

"Recently, I blogged a series of essays titled 'The Revolution Misses You' in which I called for progressives to revive the forgotten dream of practical yet radical change. Friends and colleagues immediately scolded me for using 'extreme' terms such as 'revolution' and 'radical.' 'You'll only alienate people,' they said. 'This will come back to haunt you.' At first I was surprised by what felt like a dramatic overreaction. But I soon realized why I had fallen out of sync with the progressive mainstream on the use of the R-words: I had been spending time listening to and reading evangelical Christians who are preaching revolution."

Exley's blog, "Revolution in Jesusland," has followed his pilgrimage across America to communities that embody this spirit of demonstrating the kingdom of God—not just for themselves in the transcendent then and there, but also for others in the immanent here and now. He is one of many people who would otherwise have written off Christianity who are ready to give the gospel another hearing (or perhaps better, viewing). They are realizing that salvation is more than what had previously been advertised.

Exley's essay has been removed from his blog and is now available in book form. You can read a 'draft' version
of it online, or buy the finished version for US$6.95.

Quote from Albert Mohler

“The same culture that has developed the microwave oven, the CAT-scan, and the vaccine for polio has also produced social pathologies which threaten the very existence of the culture.”

Albert Mohler, in the article, Transforming Culture: Christian Truth Confront Post-Christian America.

Mohler has also published a book just this year:
Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues with Timeless Truth. Published Multnomah, 2008.
“Thoughtful Christians seeking to engage the culture from a well-informed and thoroughly biblical perspective will find an impressive resource in this new work by R. Albert Mohler. Culture Shift is an outstanding contribution, which I heartily recommend.” David Dockery
“Dr. Albert Mohler brings his intellectual brilliance, moral wisdom, and theological insight together in a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who is interested in both understanding the shifting sands of morality in our culture and how to deal with it. If you are in that category this is a must read.”
—JAMES MERRITT