Archive for category General
Bloggers and Church Authority
Out of Ur posted an interesting discussion from the Elephant Room that touched on non-pastor bloggers and authority in the church.
In the panel discussing the topic are a couple of my favorite pastors: Matt Chandler and Perry Noble. I have respect for their ministries primarily because they have respect for God’s word. Also present were David Platt and Mark Driscoll, both of whom are also solid (if Driscoll is annoying and rude sometimes, he comes from a long tradition of cranky, rude preachers I have known and even liked).
What intrigues me about this conversation is that several of these guys blog extensively, especially Perry Noble. I felt that the article tried to give the impression that these guys were attacking blogging. I don’t think that was the case. They were, however, expressing concern about bloggers who God has not placed in pastoral ministry who are challenging and attacking those He has.
This is a very real issue. While I have several online friends who are not pastors and blog on Christianity, I do not view them in the same way I do other pastors. Whether people want to accept it or not, the Scriptures are very plain that pastors are uniquely gifted among the church (Ephesians 4, 1 Peter 5). We should never take leadership cues from those God has not chosen, gifted and called.
It is simply too easy to sound authoritative when you have no biblical authority.
That might upset the online Christian community, but it is biblically true.
Reflections the Super Bowl
Three observations about the Super Bowl last night:
#1 The Patriots got nervous and crumbled under pressure. No denying it.
#2 Chris Collinsworth may have officially become the most annoying commentator in professional football.
#3 For $3.5 million a spot, the commercials were pretty awful. And even as awful as they were, they were better than Madonna’s halftime disaster.
Loss Leaders
According to Amazon.com, their profits are down this year. This is despite a wildly successful Christmas season? How can you be wildly successful and sell a record number of products and still come up short, profits-wise? Because Amazon is selling their biggest and best items, the Kindle lines, at a loss.
The underselling of the Kindle Fire is something businesses learned from Thomas Edison. He sold his incandescent light bulbs at a loss for three years until he got manufacturing costs down under the retail price. By the end of the fifth year, he had made back his losses and a little extra.
We tend to think that you make money by charging more than it costs, but just like Edison and Amazon, sometimes you make money by building a sold customer base – what modern marketers are calling a “tribe”.
I have written on this whole idea of tribal marketing before. I am not sure I buy into it as it is sold, but there is no doubt that people’s loyalties can be won through a product gateway. For Edison, it was the bulb which then caused people to buy wiring and electricity service and maintenance – all of which Edison provided. For Amazon, it is books, music, cloud services, and other sundries all of which you buy through their site.
A product gateway is not deception. It is a legitimate, quality product that drives sales of other, connected products. You can lose money for a little while as long as you recap it later on and it solidifies your position in the marketplace.
I can only imagine the church growth books that have been written or are being written about this subject. Every time something happens in the business world, the church world feels it needs to follow suite. Here’s the thing about church and why marketing and stuff ultimately doesn’t work.
We don’t have a product to sell.
We shouldn’t anyway. Sadly, a lot of supposed churches have developed products and made their organizations more like businesses than gatherings of sinners worshiping their God. Pastors and lay people a like a culpable in this deviation that I doubt Jesus would have approved of.
You can’t sell people the Gospel. You can only show God’s glory through worship and work.
Tebowing and the Prosperity Gospel
Tim Tebow is every evangelical’s favorite NFL player right now. In only his second year in the NFL and his first as a starter, he has garnered widespread acclaim for his “miraculous” fourth quarter wins. The son of a Baptist minister, Tim’s outspoken Christian faith has been well-known since his college years.
So I was a bit taken aback to see him speaking at a conference sponsored by people who teach a false gospel.
I am not one to criticize other believers, but I have spent a lot of time studying the work of Rod Parsley and Kenneth Copeland. I have listened to their messages, read their doctrinal statements and watched them on television.
Let me be as plain as I can be. The message they preach is not the message of the Scriptures. They are the kind of ministers that we have been warned about before. They preach a Jesus that will make you healthy, wealthy and popular as long as you “uncover” the spiritual keys to success. They sell a self-help, prosperity gospel that has nothing in common with the message of the one who came to redeem mankind.
Rod Parsley is a particularly off-center preacher of a wildly unbiblical gospel. He is a disciple of Mike Murdoch who I have never seen do anything but hock his own books and call them wisdom. These are dangerous men preaching what Paul called “another gospel” in Galatians. They believe that prayer and righteousness will make God conform to their will – what my dad used to call “blab it and grab it preachers.”
At first glance, I was more than a little disappointed in Tim Tebow, but I had a feeling that he was unaware of this booking. Like I have said before, I like Tim Tebow but I despise the machine around him that is willing to manipulate and tweak him for gain and press.
Sure enough, the news broke on Thursday that Tebow had not known of this booking and his brother Robbie had confirmed that Tim would be canceling this appearance.
All of this has confirmed in my mind that Tim really is a good guy who is completely oblivious of the hype people surround him with. The machine that is Christian media will take a good man and grind him to the ground with compromise. Tim should continually thank the Lord for his family and friends who insulate and protect him.
Standing Up
After reading an article from Michael Hyatt about working at a standup desk, I have been considering it for a couple of weeks. Last weekend, I asked one of the guys from our congregation to help me move a piece of furniture to my office so I could set it up as a standup desk. I have worked at it for most of the day today (January 31) and I have a couple of thoughts.
- Typing standing up definitely requires a correct posture. You can’t do it standing straight up or your lower back will hurt like crazy after a couple hours.
- Good shoes are essential. Your feet kill after four or five hours of standing up and doing anything.
- Standing up means I can access my whiteboards much easier. Since I write ideas on the various whiteboards in my office before committing anything to paper (I rarely commit my sermons to paper anyway), this is convenient for me. Once I get my articulated arm for my screen, this will work even better.
- Standing allows you to move around when you think. I walk around a lot when I am working through a concept, so this standing thing definitely has its advantages.
- Make sure you keep a couple of chairs around. Sometimes, you just need to sit down.My screen will soon be mounted on the wall, which will allow me to sit down from time to time and watch Netflix if I want. That has its appeal.
Overall, I am very pleased with standing. Since I am in a bit of pain at the moment from all this standing, I am much less prone to waste time on Facebook or doing something that doesn’t pertain to work. This is a good thing.
I’ll let you know in a week or so as to whether your back or feet get used to the additional strain. I have a feeling that mine will. I spent hours on my feet when I was a teacher, doing much the same thing – well not typing into a computer, but standing in one place, thinking.
Showrooming?
This past Christmas shopping season was unlike any before it. The proliferation of the iPhone and Android-based phone, as well as the apps from leading online retailers, created a unique comparison shopping environment. Mashable linked to a study from the Wall Street Journal that showed over half of holiday shoppers used the brick and mortar buildings of retailers as showrooms. Instead of purchasing items there, they would get to touch and feel products before buying them for a lower price on an online retailer. In some cases, they even purchased it from the same retailer – just at a discounted online price.
I have done this kind of comparison shopping for years, but it never occurred to me to actually do it in the store. For example, when we bought Ariel her first “big girl” Bible, we went to our local Christian retailer so she could check them out. But there was no way I was going to pay their unbelievably high price for the Bible. I bought it online for half of what the local store was charging. But doing this online, while in the store? That’s genius.
Think of how much of a deterrent this kind of shopping is for the impulse buy? You see that flat screen TV you have been coveting (shame on you!) on sale at Best Buy. So, you jump on the amazon.com app on your phone and see that they have the same model at a 5% savings, including shipping. No brainer!
As always, Apple has been ahead of the curve on this. They have had their online store and retail stores integrated for some time. Since no one can sell Apple’s products below their own store prices, there is no competition. Other retailers need to stop complaining and come up with an approach to selling their products that will allow them to do the same thing.
We live in an ever more connected world. You can’t get away with poor business practices for long.
Churches should take a lesson from this. Isolation simply does not exist anymore. You can’t pretend to have the best just because everyone is ignorant of anything else. All you have to do is look around a little bit, and you can see the flaws in that argument. The threat to your ministry isn’t that church down the road. People are willing to drive a little further, spend a little longer if they can hear a more applicable message or be more engaged in their worship.
The answer is not to commercialize the church, but rather to 1) seek greater unity in the Church as a whole and 2) be honest and realistic about your congregation. We have to stop being lazy about what we can do well, and stop trying to do the things we can’t do well. Otherwise, people will just come to shop and then find something “better”.
Do what you do, and do it well. Drop pretense and program in favor of relationship and intimacy.
How Pastors Get Rich
A good article from Tall Skinny Kiwi on everything that is wrong with some pastors who use their place to make money.
We’re Not Designed for This
So, here’s a scenario for you.
Say that you are a thirty-three year old female diagnosed with thyroid cancer. You have your thyroid surgically removed, but there is no way to remove all of the tissue so the recommended course of treatment is to receive radioiodine treatment.
You go to the hospital and while you’re enjoying the liberating embarrassment of a hospital johnie, you are met by four men carrying a lead-lined briefcase. They present you with a single capsule which contains an isotope of iodine known as iodine-131. What else is there to do? You take the pill.
The small quantity of iodine-131 you are ingesting has come a long way. It used to be a different element altogether. For thousands of years, it was tellurium-130, an element as rare on earth as platinum. It was happily bonded to some other earth mineral, most likely quartz, since the formation of the continents.
Then an engineer dug it up out of the earth, made it into a target and gave it to a physicist who bombarded it with neutrons. The tellurium atoms mutated and changed quickly, with many of them turning into unstable tellurium and xenon atoms that break down almost instantaneously. But some of them pick up an extra proton, which in turn attracts a loose electron from the mess, and the result is the relatively unstable iodine-131 molecule.
Every 8.02 days, half of the iodine-131 atoms in any mass will have a breakdown of sorts. One of its 78 neutrons will split into an electron and a proton shedding energy in the form of a gamma ray. The protons and electrons stay in the nuclei, turning the iodine into xenon. The radiation, which no one really understands fully, streams out of the atom. What happens next is still a bit of a mystery, but one thing is for sure. The thyroid cells holding the iodine during this process are destroyed.
This is a complex, nuclear event. Lots of stuff is happening. There should be a mushroom cloud or something – but there isn’t. This complex, nuclear event is the antithesis of an atomic bomb. You are stuck in isolation. Even your television is wrapped in plastic. Your nurses rush in and out of the room to prevent exposure.
Your neck swells as tissue is destroyed and cells disintegrate. The escaping gamma radiation is ionizing DNA molecules, knocking electrons out of orbit in atoms and causing the atoms of amino acids to lose their grip on each other.
What was once living (even if cancerous) tissue is now dead, inert chemicals. The body has a system for dealing with this, flushing the unusable xenon and iodine into the excretory system and recycling what it can.
But all of that takes time and occurs on a microscopic level. Meanwhile you feel like someone punched you in the neck.
You have to live in quarantine for at least three days, one of which you spend at the hospital. When the physicist – not a physician but a physicist – tells you that your radiation levels are below 5 millirem per hour.
You don’t know that a millirem is 1/1000th of a roentgen or that it is a measurement of gamma radiation. After all, gamma radiation is what turned Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk.
But the physicist knows that the people around you will be exposed to the gamma radiation being given off by the iodine-131 in your system. You have become a source of harmful radiation, so he wants to make sure that your husband and daughter will not be exposed to harmful amounts.
When you’re no longer harmful, they release you. You drive home and get to spend the next three days in isolation – unable to touch your loved ones.
That has been my wife’s week.
Let me explain something in case you didn’t know. Cancer sucks.
Even a very treatable form of cancer like the cancer my wife has or the form her sister fought last year is still awful.
Here is what cancer is.
It starts with a single cell is produced with an altered DNA sequence. The altered sequence can be from genetic mutation or radiation exposure or even (believe it or not) a fungus or virus. That cell ceases to produce healthy, productive cells and instead produces non-functioning ones.
You should know that everyone has cancer cells. Our bodies are marvelous at producing new cells, but with ten trillion cells in a human body, there are bound to be errors. For the most part, your body is very good at identifying and destroying these faulty cells.
But sometimes the body simply cannot keep up. In that case, the mutated cancer cells replicate unchecked. They grow faster than healthy cells and in time can cause healthy organs to fail.
What is truly astounding is that there is absolutely no reason your body cannot deal with these mutations. The cure for cancer should be very simple. Just tell the cells to stop producing bad copies and then tell the healthy cells to replace them.
Believe it or not, this is the entire impetus behind the human genome project. It is the driving force behind billions upon billions of dollars of drug research. To stop cancer, you don’t have to destroy it. You simply have to get the body to do what it is supposed to do and your body should heal itself.
But nobody can do it.
So for no reason, inexplicably, cancer strikes. It hits kids and seniors, men and women. It is indiscriminate because it is not an it. It is your own body turning against you.
The way I see it, cancer can be one of two things:
1. It is evidence of evolution. In other words, the existence of cancerous mutation is evidence of the way in which life changed and altered over the epochs. My problem with this is that cancer is never good for the organism. It is always harmful.
2. It is evidence of sin in the world. When we look at cancer, we see our need for restoration and redemption. We realize the frailty of life and the necessity of a Savior.
I choose the second, although not everyone will agree.
Should Church Be Like Summer Camp?
Christian summer camp is something of a sore point for me. I never got the spiritual high that all the other kids got when I went, probably because I was a very introverted kid with some medical issues that created a lot of embarrassment. Even beyond that, at a very young age I was very aware of the manipulative techniques used by so many in that industry. They were well-intentioned folks, don’t get me wrong; but there was just something disingenuous about corralling kids in small groups and using all kinds of weird reinforcements and rewards for their acquisition of Biblical information.
“Memorize ten verses this afternoon and you get a free soda at the snack bar!”
“If your team wins the Bible trivia challenge, your counselor will eat a goldfish!”
There was this one year – I think it was my last – when the speaker was exhausting himself on the sins of drunkenness and excess every night. On the final night, he called for all the campers to come forward and pray at the altar because “The Spirit is moving.”
Well, he wasn’t moving me. I didn’t feel any kind of spiritual prodding or emotional need to go forward. So I didn’t. Over the course of about eight hundred verses of “Just As I Am”, I sat there quietly with my head respectfully bowed while all of the other kids in the pavilion went forward. At least half a dozen adults tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I wanted to go forward. They looked genuinely frustrated that I wasn’t stirring.
The experience troubled me. I came from a home where the highest spiritual discipline was not emotional responses but in-depth study of the Scriptures. (The previous year, I had astounded my counselor by translating John 1:1 from Greek when he wrote it on a napkin. It never occurred to me that other kids couldn’t do that.)
In my church, we didn’t go up front unless God was convicting you of sin, so I would have been dishonest if I had answered that altar call. But everyone wanted me to anyway.
I stopped going to Christian camps around the age of ten and never looked back. I have been in a lot of ministries where camp has been a big deal, and I have supported the work. But deep inside, I know that most of those emotional appeals won’t last long. The message only resonates in the echo chamber of isolation. Outside of the campground, the kids will most likely lose the “fire” they acquired.
I bring this up because Tall Skinny Kiwi posted a thought-provoking article about a summer camp that has been converted to something of a monastery in New Zealand. He writes:
I also have very fond memories of New Zealand camps when I was younger.
Camps are where you can hang out late at night, dress badly, discover yourself, fight the giggles at 2 in the morning, watch the uninhibited speaker embarrass himself publicly, eat poorly cooked food, get up surprisingly early to pray, create and perform silly skits, pee in a freezing cold cement toilet block, and share your life-changing decision with your new friends as bonfire flames lick your eyelashes.
He goes on to write about this camp-turned-monastery and how it has become a big hit among the Anglicans. People travel from all over the islands to spend time there for renewal and retreat.
I guess that is good, and I am glad that people have found a way to recharge their spiritual vibe. Personally, I have a hard time with this idea of part-time monasticism that drives both summer camp and trends like the ones Kiwi is writing about.
Is there really such a thing as part-time monasticism? Can a brief period of “retreat from this world” really do that much good in someone’s life? Am I just quirky?
It just seems to me that this kind of temporary retreat doesn’t really fix anything. It just seems that for the majority of people, it gives a hit of “spiritual” crack without really creating life change.
Don’t be Wrapped Up in Fame
Who has ever heard of Joseph Swan?
He invented the incandescent lightbulb.
What? You thought Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb? Actually, he and Swan worked independently on the project. Swan worked in England and had illuminated his home in the city of Gateshead before Edison learned of Swan’s use of carbonized thread filaments. Edison grabbed the idea and ran with it. Swan even developed an improved cellulose filament that Edison knew to be superior to the bamboo material he finally settled on, but Edison refused to use the improved material.
Because he also had the Sprengel pump (to create a vacuum in the bulb) and a plan for implementing electric lighting across large areas, Edison is often credited for the invention. And Edison was enough of a glory hound that he never led anyone to believe otherwise.
It might not have hurt that Edison’s General Electric Company also bought Swan’s company in the 1880′s and merged its interests with its own.
What about Nikola Tesla?
Among other things, Tesla invented the radio transmitter. You were probably taught that Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio transmitter. That’s what almost all American history textbooks say even though at the time that Marconi “invented” the radio, he did so by flagrantly ripping off seventeen of Tesla’s patents. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court even ruled that Tesla was indeed the inventor of the radio transmitter, but that was in 1943, long after long repetition had awarded the honor to Marconi.
It is Tesla, and not Marconi, to whom we are indebted for the invaluable technology that powers our televisions and our mobile phones, transmits information to both airliners and our computer wifi cards.
Why One and Not the Other?
I could go through an endless list of people who got famous from or got credited for the work of other, perhaps greater minds. Christopher Columbus was not the first European to sail to the Americas. He was just the first to publish the trek. Martin Luther wasn’t the first to protest the excess of the medieval Catholic church. He was just the first to use the printing press to broadcast it. Isaac Newton did not come up with the laws of gravity. He simply refined something one of his rivals had already come up with, and of course, he published it.
The way I see it, there are those who cannot live without credit and fame, and then there are those who do because they can. We innovate and initiate without a desire or need for broad acclaim. We do because we can, because we stand at the intersection of creativity and conviction and think different.
Don’t ever forget that Thomas Edison – he of the phonograph, the mimeograph, the incandescent light bulb – also sunk millions into a complete failure of an idea to pour concrete houses, complete with furnishings and invested a fortune in a DC electrical system that he ultimately replaced with the AC systems we know today.
Be content to be where you are, doing what you’re doing. Change the world around you and if it changes the larger world – great. If others take what you do and make it better, then let them. For every Edison, there is a Swan. For every Marconi, a Tesla.
The measure of a man’s greatness is not that others long to be him, but that HE longs to be him. To be who you are where you are is better than to try to be someone you are not in places you should never try to go.
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