June 29, 2007

Justice, Do It

Nike has gotten a lot of marketing mileage from its straightforward motto, "Just Do It." In part two of David Fitch's post on social justice his message for church leaders is equally simple - just do it. Fitch argues that instead of focusing on national or global justice causes we must begin by acting locally. To accomplish this requires pastors to teach justice as a practice, something we actively do, rather than simply a concept we agree with.

If we are to avoid making justice into another program in the church we must resist the urge to make justice primarily about national politics, and only secondarily about local politics. For inevitably we get caught up in national politics believing that finally we are doing something. This then becomes an easy program to establish in our churches, and the work of local justice becomes an after-thought because political activism is always easier than living as a presence with the poor. It may be admirable and glamorous to help Jars of Clay fight Aids in Africa or Bono fight for Third World Debt Relief, but in the end I would ask us how much is accomplished if we cannot witness to a way of life that compels justice in our own back yard.

The main culprit here is that we pastors teach justice as a concept instead of a practice. For instance, we often make justice about the concept of individual rights or equal opportunity. It's an easy default move when we don't have visible justice going on in the local body itself. Yet defining justice in this way, as a concept born out of democracy and capitalism, individual rights or equal opportunity, too easily enables us to forget about doing justice in our local church by deflecting attention to national arguments. If we wish to see justice take shape in our midst we must go beyond rights to seek the simple righteousness of God fulfilled in our immediate locale.

I remember becoming an advocate (along with others in our church) for someone who was poor and an ex-convict who was unable to pay the rent. He and his wife were being evicted out of their apartment. We could have advocated renter's rights. We could have brought the person to a point of contention between himself, the owner of the apartment and the church. Or we could bring everyone around a table to discuss the situation (even though the building owner had never been to our church gathering). We could pray, confess sin, seek reconciliation, offer to step in and make things right. We did the latter, with coffee and pastries. The building owner was amazed. He forgave two months rent. I saw a miracle happen there that changed the ethos of our entire church. Perhaps now we were ready to make a statement about renter's rights on a larger scale.

Now before every body gangs up on me, I still believe we must pursue justice outside the church. I am all for the efforts to make our social system and national politics more just. But what we must see from scripture is that justice in God's eyes is about a horizontal transformative reconciliation that brings people into restored relationship with one another as a result of the concurrent healed relationship we share with God. If we read the accounts of justice in Ezekiel 18:5-9, Isa 58:3-7, Amos 5:21-24, Micah 3, this kind of righteousness, both vertical and horizontal, is at the core of what justice means for the Hebrew mind of the OT. We therefore should engage in practices of horizontal reconciliation for one another and those outside in our neighborhoods before we go trailblazing on the national political scene.

I contend therefore that we should reverse the normal order of priority we often find in Christian politics: we should put our local politic first and national politics second. Others will surely argue that they can do both at the same time. However, I believe that without a Bodily presense in the world, there is little true engagement with the world except via individualist arguments. In other words, until we have communities of Christ's justice living His justice, it's just Jim Wallis arguing against Jerry Falwell.

To this end let us institute practices of Christ's justice in our communities. These practices might include a.) the sharing of excess wealth around the Table, b.) the practice of engagement with matters of injustice in our neighborhoods with the processes of reconciliation, and c.) the feeding of the poor and then inviting them over to our houses for a meal and fellowship. Let us be "justice-ified," not merely justified. Let us pursue righteousness as a way of life, not just a nation's individual rights. And let us cultivate a politic of justice at home in our communities before we advocate a politics nationwide.

Read part one of Fitch's post on social justice here.

Posted by UrL Scaramanga at June 29, 2007 | Comments (20)

June 26, 2007

Justice-ified by Faith

Recently we discussed Scot McKnight's belief that the gospel typically preached by evangelicals is too individualistic, and how it actually makes the church an unnecessary part of following Christ. David Fitch, pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community in Long Grove, Illinois and a professor at Northern Seminary, shares McKnight's perspective, and in this post he reflects on how an individualistic gospel makes our attempts at social justice a peripheral program of the church rather than an integrated part of our faith.

When we pastors think about leading God's justice in the church, our first inclination is to organize a ministry. It could be a soup kitchen or an outreach event to the poor "down in the city". Sometimes we will find ways to become active in policy making on the local or national governmental level. We are tempted to make justice into another program of the church.

If we are to avoid turning justice into merely a church program we must first resist the urge to make salvation "about me." Evangelicals (of which I am one) often describe salvation as a personal relationship with God. It is intensely individual. In Christ I am justified before God as an individual. And then, after being justified through faith in Christ, I pursue a personal daily relationship with God as well as personal holiness and then of course (if we get to it) social justice. It is an add-on. In this way we split personal salvation and social justice.

It is this split which allows us to essentially turn social justice into a program. Yet imagine what it would be like in our churches if there were no such division. If we were not invited to go forward as individuals to receive a packaged salvation from God that gets us out of hell, but instead came forward to become part of what God is doing in the world through Jesus Christ - the reconciliation of all men and women with Himself, each other and all of creation (2 Cor 5:19), which BTW inextricably must still include my own personal reconciliation/relationship with God.

There are two theological culprits that make possible this separation of personal from social salvation. The first is a narrow "penal" view of the atonement. The forensic penal view of the atonement defines the work of the cross in terms of Christ paying a penalty for my sin whereby I no longer am held liable for the just penalty of death for my sin. I have no desire to get rid of the substitutionary view of the atonement but there are many rich understandings of how Christ's sacrifice satisfied God's wrath within the ancient history of the church that avoid the potential to commodify (make available as a transaction) what Christ did on the cross. I think we should mine these resources.

I also think we should adhere more closely to the Christus Victor (Gustaf Aulen) and Classical Views of the atonement where Jesus is seen as the Victor, the King, the one who has defeated sin, death, and evil and now reigns in anticipation of the Final Kingdom of God. For here we cannot possibly receive salvation and enter into a relationship with Jesus as victorious Lord without participating in the victory of God and the Reign of Christ over sin, death, and evil. Here personal and social are so entwined we cannot distinguish them.

The second theological culprit is the Pauline doctrine of "justification by faith." Because here justification is often presented in terms of the individual standing alone before God receiving pardon by faith. I think we should pay heed to some broader understandings of what the apostle Paul means when he describes "justification by faith." In this regard, I believe the "new perspective on Paul" can help us. I am not in total agreement with all this literature, but I believe that Stendahl, E.P. Sanders, James Dunn and NT Wright have all helped us see that Paul's doctrine of justification by faith was not about the individual's battle to be good through self-effort through the law. Rather Paul's' doctrine was an argument against the exclusion of the Gentiles from salvation apart from becoming a Jew.

For the Jews of Paul's day, the law was the covenantal badge for being a member of the people of God. Paul claims that marker is now changed in Christ. The badge is now justification by faith as entrance into a new righteousness won by God thru the person and work of Jesus Christ. And so for Paul justification is not about relieving the individual Jew's guilty conscience (ala Martin Luther) who is always striving to maintain the standard of God's law. It is about the establishment of a new righteousness of God among a new people through Christ. This righteousness (justice) is both a vertical reconciliation with God as well as a horizontal reconciliation of all humanity and creation.

Once we see justification in this light it cannot be separated from being part of the new justice/righteousness God is working in the world. As a non-individualist (American) reading of 2 Cor 5: 17ff proclaims, "For anyone united in Christ, there is a new creation: the old order has gone, a new order has already begun. (REV). We have entered into the marvelous world of God reconciling all things to himself (vs.18) that we might become the righteousness (justice) of God (vs. 21).

If we are to resist the urge to make justice into another church program, then we must overturn this split between the personal and the social. We must go from preaching "accept Christ as your personal savior" to "you are invited to enter a relationship with God through Christ that changes everything". We must go from being justified, to being justice-ified. Justice should no longer be something we do, but who we are.

Posted by UrL Scaramanga at June 26, 2007 | Comments (15)

June 21, 2007

The Organic Bible

Previously, John Dunham from the International Bible Society wrote about the unintended impact of having scripture divided by chapters and verses. It's led to what he calls "verse jacking," taking scripture out of context and using it for a purpose it was never intended. In this follow up post Dunham responds to some of your comments, and introduces an alternative way to read the Bible.

Commenting on my previous post, Glenn Krobel wrote:

There are too many Christians in ministry today who thrive off attacking our heritage without offering a solutions to problems they address.

Thanks for bringing that up, Glenn. I agree. And despite many people thinking the current system is too ingrained to move away from, I think it's worth a try. On August 1, International Bible Society will release The Books of The Bible. Chapter and verse numbers? Gone. Topical section headers? Gone. Extra columns? Gone. On the page helps? Gone. Footnotes? Moved to the back of each book. What you are left with is a no-additives edition of the Bible.

Not only have we taken out the dubiously beneficial additives, but we have also humbly attempted to bring a more faithful structure to today's Bible. There is no doubt the Holy Spirit has worked powerfully throughout the centuries through God's word in the Messiah's church, no matter what form his word has taken. But form does matter as we display the beauty of God's word.

Topical section headers are shortcuts for finding a verse or letting us know what's going on. Therein is the problem. Too often we rely on them to tell us how to interpret a passage without regard to the larger story, and sometimes these breaks come at the worst spots. While trained leaders may easily look past them, most readers are better off without them. The Books of The Bible allows the literary structure of a book to spring out by inserting appropriate amounts of white space in places where the author shows a transition (e.g., the toledot formulae in the Torah or Matthew's five sections of Jesus' activity and teaching).

A single-column typesetting is what we expect when we open any non-fiction book or novel. But most Bibles have two columns. Rick Shott correctly commented that this is for conserving space and reducing white space. This ends up saving publishers about fifteen to twenty percent on paper. But at what cost? Books like the Psalms are absolutely decimated with no reasonable way of making sense of the poetic structure. A single-column text displays poetry more clearly and narrative more naturally.

At times throughout the Bible's development limits in technology forced scribes to separate books that were meant to be one. For example, the books we know today as 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings were originally a unified book telling a single narrative. In The Books of The Bible, Samuel?Kings is presented as the one book that it is. Luke and Acts are two volumes of a single history, so they have been placed together.

Historians have documented over 70 different orders of the books of the Bible. In the current Protestant Bible, poetry and wisdom literature are mixed up with each other and prophets are generally grouped together by the size of the books, the four gospels are grouped together, and Paul's letters are placed in the order of their length. As the reformers did, we asked, "Is this tradition helpful?" In The Books of The Bible, we have put poetry books in a group and wisdom books in another. We have put the prophets in historical order, and the same goes for Paul's letters. And we've honored the fourfold gospel tradition by grouping each gospel with other New Testament books by theme or audience. To see the complete table of contents, visit www.thebooksofthebible.info.

To revisit chapters and verses, in many ways they have become a crutch for us to quickly locate a passage. But recall what Jesus did in Luke's account: "He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ?The Spirit of the Lord is on me . . .' " Our Lord did not use a handy reference system. He had devoted his life to the study of Scripture and was able to find passages based solely on context.

I crave that sort of familiarity with the Bible, and I think it will help all people. In sermons and Bible studies, one can locate a section like any book club would: "Turn to page 362, second paragraph, where it says . . ." We already do just fine without chapters and verses in every other area of life. (We recognize, however, that chapters and verses are of limited benefit, so we have retained a chapter and verse range at the bottom of each page.)

We hope that God's image bearers will use this new (and in many ways, old) format of the Scripture to engage in more and better Bible reading. There is no question that God has worked in amazing ways throughout the history of the Bible. But it is time to revisit how we print and read sacred Scripture. By liberating God's word from some of the formatting constraints that have been placed on it, his people will be better equipped to tell his awesome story of redemption.

Posted by UrL Scaramanga at June 21, 2007 | Comments (17)

June 19, 2007

Faith & Politics After the Religious Right (Part 2)

Brian McLaren believes the Religious Right movement has lost credibility, but what will replace it? In part 1 of our interview McLaren called for a more mature Chrisitian engagement with politics, and warned about linking political ideology with our identity as followers of Christ.

In part two, he discusses the various models of Christian political engagement that have been attempted, and why a more imaginative model is needed.

You travel internationally quite a bit. Do you see a place where Christians are having that kind of positive impact on the government outside the United States?

Let me first say the same kind of religious right rhetoric happening here is being exported through religious broadcasting all over the world. I've been in countries where abortion is illegal and the church is constantly talking about it, even though it's already illegal, because they think this is what Christians are supposed to do because they hear it from the US. So it's strange. But to answer your question, yes, I do see it working out in powerful ways but most often in very local ways. In terms of national affairs I think it's a little harder to find, but that's also harder to do.

One of the issues I think we're really facing is that in the last sixteen hundred years we basically had three options. We've had the idea of the Holy Roman Empire where the church was the umbrella under which the state existed. And then in the Protestant era of civil religion the church existed to help the state achieve its goals. The third option makes the church into an isolated subculture where it withdraws from society and sees politics as dirty.

I think one of our great crises now is that we need a fourth option - a new option. It's an option that takes us back to the first three centuries of the church. I would call it more of a prophetic role. We often use prophetic to mean negative. It's thundering against sin. But the prophets were also poets, and a big part of what they did, as Walter Brueggemann says, is they funded the imagination with good possibilities. They created pictures ? like swords being beaten into plowshares ? that gave believers in God something to believe God for.

Prophets criticize and energize, I believe that's the way he put it.

Exactly. So we need that prophetic voice not just in the critical sense but also in the energizing sense. We have to imagine. We have to imagine what it would look like to have a nation where the gap between rich and poor was not so great. We have to imagine how that could that happen in an equitable way. I'm not saying in a painless way. The fact is we have a lot of pain now. You always have pain. But at any rate, that to me is the role that the church needs to have.

And I think one of our terrible realizations is that in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century mainline Protestants were the civil religion of America and evangelicals were more the isolated subculture. Then I think we had a shift. So now evangelicals have become the civil religion of America and mainline Protestants feel like the isolated subculture. And now the question is, are we willing to look for a new option, a better option beyond the either/or's we've been stuck with.

Posted by UrL Scaramanga at June 19, 2007 | Comments (11)

June 14, 2007

Faith & Politics after the Religious Right

Last month the politically polarizing founder of the Moral Majority, Rev. Jerry Falwell, died. Falwell has been credited with mobilizing millions of evangelicals to engage the political process. The religious right, as the movement came to be called, has been a dominant political force ever since.

With the passing of Rev. Falwell, and with the 2008 presidential campaign gaining speed, some are wondering if the religious right will continue to hold its political power. Or, is a new form of Christian political engagement on the horizon. We sat down with Brian McLaren to discuss the political scene and how he believes the church should engage.

What encourages you, and discourages you, about the church and its involvement in the political realm?
My sense is that the religious right has hit its high tide. I think on a whole lot of levels it has been somewhat discredited. But I think the true believers in the religious right will go down with the ship, and I don’t think they’ll be willing to change their thinking no matter what happens. It’s become a sort of ideology that has been absolutized and equated with gospel in their minds. I meet a number of people like this, and I like them but I can’t imagine them changing. No amount of evidence will change them.

My big concern is that with the collapse of the religious right there isn’t a mature and responsible Christian response that will fill the gap in a constructive way.

And I’m also concerned that the religious right will have left such a bad taste in the mouth of both the political world and the culture at large that there will be a reaction against any expression of faith in the public sphere. So this to me is a danger, but we have to do what we can.

What we should be asking is, how do we help our government be the kind of government that is pleasing to God? What I would hope is that people who are in the Republican Party who are followers of Jesus would use every bit of their energy and power to help the Republican Party reflect more and more the values of Jesus. And that Democrats who follow Jesus would do everything in their power to help the Democratic party do the same thing more and more. Now in that way, you are actually more aligned, you’re a stronger ally, with your fellow Christian in another party than you are with the people in the same party who have no higher allegiance than their partisan agenda.

So there should be a hierarchy of identity.

Exactly. A beautiful way to put it. But the sad thing is that in many cases because of this polarization of red and blue, liberal and conservative, left and right, people have shifted the hierarchy. So being a follower of Christ has become, in a way, a subset of being conservative or liberal.

Continue reading Part 2 of the interview with Brian McLaren.em>

Posted by UrL Scaramanga at June 14, 2007 | Comments (24)

June 12, 2007

Is Your Gospel Robust?

A few weeks ago Scot McKnight shared how the gospel we preach is having an adverse impact on the church. Last week at the Spiritual Formation Forum he spoke in greater detail about this problem. He called the standard evangelical gospel, outlined below, "right, but not right enough." Essentially, we've watered down the good news in a way that has marginalized the church in God's plan of redemption.

This fact was driven home recently by a friend of mine who teaches at a Christian college. He said a hand in the class went up in the middle of his lecture about the church and culture. The student, in all sincerity, asked, "Do we really need the church?" My friend was struck by the question, and by the fact that the classroom was filled with future church leaders. Something is amiss when even Christian leaders are questioning the necessity of the church. That something, according to McKnight, is the gospel we've been preaching.

Scot McKnight summarized the "Standard Gospel Presentation" this way:

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
Your problem is that you are sinful; God can't admit sinners into his presence.
Jesus died for you to deal with your "sin-problem."
If you trust in Christ, you can be admitted into God's presence.

He went on to say that the problems with this popular evangelical gospel include:

1. No one in the New Testament really preaches this gospel.
2. This gospel is about one thing: humans gaining access to God's presence.
3. This gospel creates an individualist Christian life.
4. This gospel sets the tone for the entire evangelical movement.
5. This gospel leads to spiritual formation being entirely about "me and God."
6. The evangelical gospel has created a need for evangelical monasteries.
7. The evangelical gospels turns the local church into a volunteer society that is unnecessary.
8. The evangelical gospel is rooted in Theism or Deism, but not the Trinity.

In contrast to this anemic gospel, McKnight believes a more accurate and "robust" gospel presentation would include the following features:

1. A robust gospel cannot be "tractified" (meaning, reduced to a formula).
2. God made you as an eikon (Greek for "image") to relate in love to God, to self, to others, and to the world.
3. The "fall" cracked the eikon in all directions.
4. Bible readers cannot skip from Genesis 3 to Romans 3.
5. Genesis 4-11 reveals the "problem" of sin: the climax is a society of eikons trying to build their way to God.
6. Genesis 12 begins to restore the eikon by a covenantal commitment and forming the family of faith. The rest of the Bible is about this elected family of faith.
7. The "problem" is finally resolved in "four atoning moments": the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
8. The "locus" of resolution is the family of faith: three big words in the Bible that describe this family of faith are Israel, the Kingdom, and the Church.

This understanding of the gospel does not marginalize the church, but instead makes the community the heart of God's work in the world. Is McKnight's more robust gospel better than the pervasive "4 spiritual laws" version? Is the tract gospel the source of our diminished ecclesiology and individualism? Are we even open to a wider discussion about the nature of the gospel, or is such a thing taboo - to only be permitted in "emerging" circles?

Posted by Skye Jethani at June 12, 2007 | Comments (18)

June 7, 2007

Success Covers a Multitude of Sins

Having a "successful ministry" can keep pastors from the hard work of character transformation.

This week I am attending the Midwest Regional Spiritual Formation Forum at Elmbrook Church near Milwaukee. The conference theme is "spiritual formation and the mission of the church." Most interpret "mission" to mean a measurable impact in the world. Are people coming to Christ? Is the church making a difference? But the first plenary speaker, Dave Johnson - pastor of Church of the Open Door in Maple Grove, Minnesota - says our desire for external impact should take a back seat to internal transformation.

Johnson spoke about the pressure that comes from being anointed for ministry. When God empowers us with the skills to powerfully carry out his purposes it is like a weight being put upon us, and it takes real interior strength to carry it for any amount of time. This interior strength is a character formed in the image of Christ.

Drawing from the life and downfall of Samson, he went on to tell the stories of men and women who were used powerfully by God to accomplish even miraculous things, but who eventually collapsed because their characters simply could not carry the weight of their anointing. These leaders had not made the transformation of their characters the first priority in their life and ministry.

The reason many of us ignore the formation of our character, says Johnson, is because it will slow us down. Many ministry leaders want success, a big church, or a crowd. But how many of us want a real life? How many of us want a life in God? We can have that, Johnson believes. We can have a character that produces love, peace, patience, kindness?but it will slow us down. It might mean the church won't grow as big as quickly. It might mean the crowd will get smaller.

But the alternative is both devastating and all too common. The alternative is a ministry of high impact but shallow character. As only Johnson could say it, "In the bible it was a miracle when God spoke through an ass. Now it happens everyday." Translation: God is speaking powerfully through many pastors, but their characters show nothing of God's life. These leaders, along with their anger, pride, bitterness, and cynicism, are tolerated by many churches because they are able to "fill the room." Their powerful spiritual gifts, like Samson's, deflect the flaws of their characters.

Johnson believes that many of us opt to ignore the slow, hard work of character formation because we simply don't want it. It is a matter of intention. We don't want to be slowed down in our pursuit of ministry impact and tangible achievement. In order to have a life in God, a life full of his character, we have to want it more than anything else.

Johnson concluded with this simple but haunting question - What do you want?

Posted by Skye Jethani at June 7, 2007 | Comments (21)

June 5, 2007

High Fructose Scripture

Is verse-by-verse bible teaching nutritious?

There are many dangers in ministry. Jesus warned about the yeast of the Pharisees. Paul warned about engaging foolish controversies. But what about enumerated chapters and verses in the Bible-are those numbers added by editors a threat to sound teaching? John Dunham from the International Bible Society addresses their unexpected impact.

What was the last thing you ate? If it came from a package, you could probably scan down the list of ingredients and find high fructose corn syrup. What is that stuff anyway? Suffice it to say, it's a readily available, cheap substance that makes food taste good. A manufacturer's dream. But is it good for you? Does it harm you? Think for a moment how ubiquitous this stuff is. We take for granted that our food will have high fructose corn syrup, so we eat it without a second thought.

You know what else is like that? The chapters and verses in the Bible. What was the last Scripture passage you read? While you were reading, you probably encountered various numbers strewn throughout. If you had seen those numbers in any other book, it would have seemed odd. But chapter and verse numbers have become part of the fabric of the Bible over the last few centuries. Are these numbers good for you? Will they harm your Bible reading? Chapter and verse markings have become ubiquitous, and people rarely stop to question the ramifications of their inclusion in the sacred text.

So why do we have them anyway? Chapter numbers were first added to the Bible in the 1200s to facilitate the process of reading Scripture publicly. The breaks were inserted to make the readings approximately the same length. Verse numbers entered in the 1500s in order to help scholars locate specific phrases as they worked in the burgeoning field of biblical commentary.

These additions to the text came from good motives, and were undoubtedly helpful to the people who used them for the reasons above. But are they helpful in all the ways we use them today? It's not like they are an inspired part of the text. There were, in fact, various number systems developed for Scripture. (Did you know that one version of Matthew had 68 chapters?) But once a particular system became standardized, we never looked back. Chapters and verses were here to stay.

Some people have recognized the deleterious effects of these numbers over the last few generations. (See for instance The Message or The Bible to Be Read as Living Literature.) Sometimes sentences are broken in unnatural places. Verse numbers cause oral readers to insert breaks where none was intended. And perhaps worst of all, the story of God and his creation becomes chopped into little bits as "God's Owner's Manual for Life" or "Bible Promises for Expectant Mothers Named Cathy." People naturally look to their favorite verses to provide comfort or instruction without regard to the author's point in the surrounding context. Similarly, chapters tell me where to stop reading, sometimes at the most inopportune times.

Verse jacking, taking verses and using them for something other than what was intended, is endemic to our culture.
I hear people quote from Isaiah (55:11, for those keeping score at home) all the time saying, "God says his word won't return to him empty." I too have used that sentence to assure people that their quoting a Bible "verse" will surely be effective given this promise. But what happens if we look at the context? When you read the surrounding stanzas of the oracle, it emerges that God is foretelling his people's return from exile, and further, even the removal of the curse from the creation. From Genesis and John we see that the very word of God is effective in creation. Isaiah says that God's word will bring about re-creation, restoration and renewal.

Think about the storied approach to the Bible versus the spoon-fed bits approach in the context of discipleship. When you started ministering in your current church, did you sit a staff member down and ask them to list all the inside jokes you might encounter? More than likely, you let the jokes happen, and as they did, someone explained to you why they were funny. They told a story. They discipled you in the story of your staff. Similarly, as you lead your church in seeing what God is doing in the Bible, help them to engage the story organically, not as a laundry list of anecdotes.

While a smaller understanding of a phrase of Scripture may be technically correct, it is tremendously helpful, actually necessary, to see it within the context of God's bigger story. In our bumper sticker culture, that's a tall order, but it's like choosing a natural sweetener over a cheap substitute. It's just better in the long run.

John Dunham is a WordWright at International Bible Society. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife Susan and learned recently that whitewater kayaking is really hard work if you paddle improperly.

Posted by UrL Scaramanga at June 5, 2007 | Comments (27)

June 1, 2007

Out of Context: Mike Breen

"In most evangelical environments, including mine, we have been overwhelmed with models and programs that are designed for local churches to grow bigger. Unfortunately, most really don't work...Many have also come to define Christianity by a set of beliefs. Churches are concerned that people know a set amount of doctrinal truth, and there is nothing wrong with that. But that set of knowledge is not Christianity."

-Mike Breen serves at Community Church of Joy in Glendale, Arizona. Taken from the Spring 2007 issue of Leadership journal. To see the quote IN context, you'll need to see the print version of Leadership. To subscribe, click on the cover of Leadership on this page.

Posted by UrL Scaramanga at June 1, 2007 | Comments (4)