I'm proud to be an evangelical. I think we do many things well.

Some will roll their eyes at those first two statements. Why? Criticizing evangelicalism is fashionable and evangelicals have joined the fashion, sometimes with apocalyptic fervor. I wonder if the relentless critique of (sometimes hardheaded) evangelical pastors, theologians, and authors--not to mention blogs and internet sites--is not the place we ought to urge the beginnings of reform. I'm sure that most critics have their heart in the right place: they want evangelicalism to be more biblical and more robust. (I hope those are my motivations in my own critiques.) But there sure are a lot of critics. This is what I mean:

by Skye Jethani

Many people feel that the greatest threat to Christianity today is postmodernity. Others zero in on relativism. Some believe the enemy is secular humanism. And others believe Islamic fascism is the boogey man. I disagree. In my view the greatest challenge facing the contemporary church is consumerism. By that I do not mean consumption. It's not wrong to consume things. In fact, as contingent beings we've been designed to consume for survival. The only human that doesn't consume is one that has reached room temperature, in which case they are now being consumed. (Do I hear "The Circle of Life" in the background?)

The consumerism I'm concerned with is the one that functions as a worldview. It forms the uncontested assumptions of our lives, and when it intersects our faith our perception of worship, mission, church, community, belief, and even God is fundamentally altered. These are all subject I tackle in my forthcoming book, The Divine Commodity (Zondervan, 2009).

One aspect of consumerism that is particularly powerful is branding. (Add to it commodification and alienation and you've got the unholy trinity of consumerism.) Douglas Atkins, author of The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers Into True Believers, says, "Brands are the new religion...They supply our modern metaphysics, imbuing the world with significance.... Brands function as complete meaning systems."

Without question one of the most potent brands in America today is Apple, and new research has shown that Apple has achieved the same impact on the human brain as religion.

You may have noticed that the blog has a slightly new look. The revised banner is a simple way for us to celebrate Out of Ur's third anniversary. In October 2005, Leadership embarked on a digital journey of conversation. Since then this blog has grown to become a meeting place for church leaders and a think tank for cultural missionaries.

But that was just the beginning.

The second reason for the new look is to symbolize changes that we're making to Out of Ur as it moves into its fourth year. We'll be unveiling those changes in style, format, and content in the days ahead, so stay tuned. For today we are happy to introduce a new slate of regular voices to the site. We hope you benefit from the wisdom of these Urthlings in the days ahead.

Url Scaramanga is the facilitator of Out or Ur and an adjunct professor of interdisciplinary pseudonymology at the College of Creative Writing in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. He is the son of circus performers but left to pursue ministry. Url nearly earned a seminary degree but was "encouraged to seek another calling" after an unfortunate incident in hermeneutics class involving a pigeon. He retains a keen interest in issues of theology, culture, carnivals, and ministry, and believes blogging is the best use of his gifts for the church.

Dave Gibbons is the pastor of NewSong Church in Irvine, California. NewSong is a multi-ethnic church with locations in Irvine, Los Angeles, Northern Orange County, and Bangkok, Thailand. Gibbons is helping NewSong shift from a megachurch model to a church of smaller congregations called "verges." He first met Url one night in Bangkok.

In an earlier post, I outlined the content of Scot McKnight's new book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking how you read the Bible. Here are a few reflections on what I consider the book's primary strengths and weaknesses.

First the strengths.

There is much about The Blue Parakeet that is praiseworthy. McKnight's conversation about reading the Bible as story is immensely helpful. I was in college before I learned (in a Bible interpretation class) that the Good Book is really one giant narrative that runs from Genesis to Revelation. That insight changed the way I understood and approached the Scriptures. What McKnight adds to that observation is the idea that each of the 66 books of the canon is a wiki-story - a unique retelling of the metanarrative.

The major benefit of thinking about the Bible in this way is that it forces us to recognize that the later writers (like Paul) are translating and applying the older writers (like Moses). Growing up, I thought of the relationship between the books of the Bible in this way: picture all the authors of the Bible standing on the platform at your church. When Moses finishes his part of the story, he hands the microphone to the writer of Joshua, who talks for a while, passes the mic down the aisle, and so on until Paul takes over the story. If each author is simply giving one part of the whole story, then it gets really confusing when the author's seem to contradict each other. But if we think of each author as retelling the single, major story from his unique context and perspective, then we get a real sense of the way God's relationship with his people has developed over time. So Paul doesn't contradict Moses' teaching on the Law; he interprets it in the first century.

While the majority of academics won't - or can't - write for a popular audience, Scot McKnight is willing and able. And in The Blue Parakeet (Zondervan, 2008), he opens the complex issue of biblical interpretation to the uninitiated with a great deal of grace.

Because the issue is complex, I'm going to tackle this review in two parts. In this one, I'll just describe the book. Next time I'll identify what I consider its key strengths and weaknesses.

I'll let the author tell you how the blue parakeet became his metaphor for exegesis. For now, suffice it to say that the bird represents biblical passages (and even personal experiences) that "make us think all over again about how we are reading the Bible." For example, evangelicals tend to be fairly lax about resting on the Sabbath (whether we observe the right day is another question). Yet right in the Decalogue God says, "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy." Our task as Bible readers is to decide whether this is a valid command for today or a context-specific regulation that we can more or less ignore. How you answer that question says a lot about your understanding of biblical interpretation.

And that appears to be the primary objective of McKnight's book: to help the reader recognize that all of us pick and choose which of the Bible's commands apply to us and which ones do not. In other words, the book is not a how-to manual for exegesis. Instead, it offers insights into three foundational principles of biblical interpretation.

A couple of weeks ago, Leadership assistant editor Brandon O'Brien spent a day talking with Out of Ur friends and contributors in Chicago. The result of his efforts is a series of podcasts we'll be releasing on Ur over the coming weeks. Today we present the first of those.

Brandon spoke with a regular contributor to Out of Ur, David Swanson. David writes the monthly Urban Exile column, which chronicles his experiences and reflections as he adapts from suburban ministry to urban ministry. In this session, David discusses what he perceives as the differences in values between the urban and suburban congregations he has served in.

To download this episode of Audio Ur, click here.

Has the economy got you worried? When pundits are throwing around statements like, "The worst market since the Great Depression," it's natural to get concerned. But Andy Crouch has a different take. He's written a really insightful article for our friends at Books and Culture titled "Why I am Hopeful." Here's an excerpt:

I am not hopeful because I envision an easy way out of the current economic mess. We are entering into the Great Deleveraging, where an entire country of consumers will have to pare back their reliance on cheap mortgages and abundant credit cards. (Remember when your mailbox was stuffed with credit card offers? Seen any lately?) The national savings rate might even rise above 0% - yes, that is zero percent, the proportion Americans have been collectively saving for several years now. But that means that consumption, a major engine of our economy, will have to decline dramatically.

I am not hopeful because I have confidence in whoever will be elected president in 15 days. I have grave concerns, as a Christian and as a citizen, about both candidates and will in all likelihood vote for neither. (Not for the first time - in 2004 I wrote in Colin Powell.)

I am not hopeful because I think we are well prepared for what is ahead of us. We are not. We are a terrifyingly unserious people, our heads buzzing with trivia and noise. This is more true, if anything, of American Christians than the rest of our country. The stark contrast between what I experience among Christians anywhere else in the world - and not just the "Third World," because Canada and Germany and Britain and Singapore come to mind as quickly as Uganda and India - and American Christians is astonishing. We are preoccupied with fads intellectual, theological, technological, and sartorial. Vanishingly few of us have any serious discipline of silence, solitude, study, and fasting. We have, in the short run, very little to offer our culture, because we live in the short run.

I am not hopeful because I think life is going to get easier in America. I am hopeful because I think it is going to get harder, and in a very good way. And I am hopeful because I think this means my children and grandchildren will live in a deeply and truly better world than I would have thought possible a few years ago.

Read Crouch's entire article here.

Election time again and, once more, we face a big decision. No, not the decision about our vote. That one is big, but this one is even bigger. It's the decision about our integrity.

I watch in amazement as every four years, well-meaning Christians who are otherwise committed to values of truth and controlling our tongues descend into the pit of partisanship, smears, and tale-bearing. You know how it goes. You have genuine concerns about the other guy (or gal) and so, with few qualms, repeat whatever was told to you by someone in the parking lot or that you heard on the talk radio show or read on that extremely well fact-checked source, the Internet. Of course, all the stuff the other side is saying about your candidate? Yellow journalism and lies.

People who balked at the Left's mention of George Bush's alcoholism repeat at the drop of a hat Obama's admission of drug use in his younger days. And people who on any other day are likely to decry the sexism of American politics suddenly become concerned that Palin went back to work too quickly after giving birth and that she can't be both VP and a mother of a special-needs child.

We believe whatever our side says, refuse to even listen to the other side, and generally put critical thinking aside.

The Fall 2008 issue of Leadership contains a new feature: The Golden Canon book award. One of our finalists was Andy Crouch's Culture Making: Recovering our creative calling (IVP), the much-praised contribution to the ongoing conversation about the relationship between Christianity and culture. Here's a taste of Andy's prose, a tidbit to spark conversation.

The postures of the artist and the gardener have a lot in common. Both begin with contemplation, paying close attention to what is already there. The gardener looks carefully at the landscape; the existing plants, both flowers and weeds; the way the sun fall on the land. The artist regards her subject, her canvas, her paints with care to discern what she can make with them.

And then, after contemplation, the artist and the gardener both adopt a posture of purposeful work. They bring creativity and effort to their calling...They are creaturely creators, tending and shaping the world that original Creator made.

I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I'm afraid so. Why aren't we known as cultivators--people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the harsh and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren't we known as creators--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?

The Friday (Oct 10) edition of the Wall Street Journal contained an article whose title and deck pretty much say it all: "The Mystery Worshipper: To try to keep their flocks, churches are turning to undercover inspectors, who note water stains, dull sermons and poor hospitality."

The numbers aren't staggering. Alexandra Alter, the article's author, references "at least half a dozen" consulting firms that have sent covert church-goers to between 20 and 50 churches each. So we're talking about somewhere between 120 and 300 documented instances. Not a trend; not yet. But this is just the sort of thing evangelical church staffs seem to love - it's an opportunity to quantify, qualify, and create an action plan for maximizing ministry impact.

And I understand a church's wanting to know a first-timer's impressions upon visiting its services. Just as you don't recognize how weird your own family is until you bring a girlfriend or college buddy home for a holiday, churches can easily become so introspective and insular that they forget how other congregations operate or how they are viewed by "outsiders." For that reason, I see value in outside consultation, if the consultant is helping an otherwise myopic group of folks recognize its own dysfunction. It would be great, for example, for a visitor to tell you that women seemed underrepresented in the service, that the children appeared marginalized in worship, or that the congregation communicated a tangible sense of dissatisfaction.

But what concerns me about the professional mystery worshipers in Alter's article are the types of observations they are making. In one church, consultant Thomas Harrison noted "a water stain on the ceiling, a ?stuffy odor' in the children's area, a stray plastic bucket under the bathroom sink and a sullen greeter who failed to say good morning before the worship service" among that church's chief infractions. One pastor praises Harrison's attention to detail in this way: "Thomas hits you with the faded stripes in the parking lot?If you've got cobwebs, if you've got ceiling panels that leak, he's going to find it."

by Skye Jethani

This morning kicked off with a time of singing led by the worship band from Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas - one of the churches being highlighted at the conference for their strong REVEAL survey results.

One of the often repeated findings from REVEAL is that frequent engagement with church activities does not predict one's spiritual growth. That being the case, I was curious to see how they redefined the purpose of the Sunday/weekend worship gathering. Many churches, especially the seeker-driven variety, have seen the worship event as the center of the church's missional solar system. Would that still be true in a post-REVEAL era?

The answer seems to be, Yes. Robert Morris and David Smith, both pastors from Gateway Church, were interviewed about their worship services. Morris said, "Worship is not about observing God, it's about experiencing God." Both Morris and Smith talked about the importance of giving people the opportunity to respond through a "ministry time" when people can come forward for prayer.

Gateway's church members expressed a high level of satisfaction with their church's worship services in the REVEAL study. REVEAL also showed that people in most churches want to be more challenged and given practical applications.

by Skye Jethani

Last week it was Catalyst in Atlanta. This week's it's Willow Creek's REVEAL Conference in South Barrington, Illinois. (At least I'm closer to home.) I'll be here for the next two days with a number of updates from the conference. First up: Bill Hybels.

Greg Hawkins began this morning with a recap of the mission - to move people who are far from God toward being fully devoted followers, which means increasingly loving God and loving their neighbor. In churches we create services, classes, small groups, etc. He said, as people participate in these activities, we assume, they will become disciples - those who love God and their neighbors. REVEAL was designed to measure how effective the church's programs have been in order to refine programs and allocate resources to those that work best.

Willow first conducted the REVEAL survey with its members and attenders in the fall of 2003. The results, says Hawkins, showed that "participation in [church] activities doesn't predict whether people have a heart for God and a heart for other people." Instead, one's maturity was not related to activity but intimacy.

After the opening remarks, Bill Hybels took the stage to talk more about REVEAL's impact from his perspective. He began by noting that this past weekend marked the 33rd anniversary of Willow Creek Community Church, and how one kid reminded him that Jesus lived for 33 years and "then they killed him." The laughs showed Hybel's strength - his amazing ability to connect with an audience.

"Most people go to conferences to get their current way of ministry reinforced," he said. But he promised that the REVEAL conference would screw with our heads and cause disequilibrium.

I've noticed a trend lately among Christian writers, thinkers, and leaders: they are framing their approach to faith as an alternative to left/right categories. Some stake out a via media between two poles, while others critique the very essence of the polarity altogether.

I'm not alone in noticing a growing third way sentiment. Scott McKnight's excellent Christianity Today article, "The Ironic Faith of Emergents", points to the same trend. He notes that McLaren and other emergent Christians offer him hope of a third way of faith - a faith without the strictures of neo-Fundamentalism that also avoids the loss of theological clarity.

I've also spotted third way thinking in the works of N.T. Wright (his approach to eschatology in Surprised by Hope comes to mind), Tim Keller (see his introduction to The Reason for God), and Tony Jones (The New Christians testifies that emerging types don't fit liberal or conservative molds). There's even a British magazine devoted to the Third Way.

by Skye Jethani

6:20pm
Groeschel encouraged us all to believe that there is "more in you." And to focus on a simple prayer: "God stretch me." But, he added: "Before God can stretch you, he's got to heal you. Before he can heal you, he's got to ruin you." Groeschel drew from Joel 2 and the imagery of weeping and brokenness and fasting. We must repent in order to get "it" back in our lives.

6:00pm
Some of Groeschel's puns: "It's about the Holy Spir-IT." "Some people are full of IT." And "IT happens." Irreverent humor, clever communication, or slick product placement? You make the call.

5:52pm
Craig Groeschel is on to talk about "It." (Also the title of his book.) He defines "it" as "that something special of God." Not much definition beyond that. "You know it when you see it."

5:33pm
A plug about a new film, "Call and Response," dealing with the trafficking of sex slaves around the world. Social justice issues are very prominent at Catalyst--even the complementary coffee is attached to a cause. Many of the booths around the arena are plugging global causes, and there are large containers near the front entrance for donations. I'm not sure you would have seen that 10, or even 5 years ago at a conference for evangelical church leaders.

4:55pm
Slide from Godin's PowerPoint:

Leadership = Marketing
Marketing = Leadership

4:49pm
Godin: "I am begging you to become heretics." [Cheering] To be different, new, and innovative is to be heretical. Godin doesn't mean this in a doctrinal sense, but in a cultural one. He says, "A huge problem in your industry is control." Religion tries to control rather than influence and lead.

4:19pm
Back in the arena for session 4. The trampoline slamdunk basketball team just left, and now Seth Godin has taken the stage. He's the #1 business blogger in the world. (And I must confess a mistake from this morning ... Jim Collins is not the only person here in a jacket and tie.)

Godin is Mr. Marketing. He says traditional marketing, like commercials that interrupt people, isn't working anymore. We must go back to the idea of people talking to people. He frames this around the idea of "tribes." Talk to consumers, and they'll spread the idea all over the world themselves. "People want to belong to tribes.... Fitting in, being with people like us, is so important." The goal should be connecting people to each other, and then get out of the way.

1:45pm
I finally got lunch...oh, blessed fried calories. I'm out during the next session for a meeting. I'll trust other Urthlings to fill in some details. (Sitting on the floor of the mezzanine outside the arena, I can hear the band fire up "We built this city on rock and roll." Well, I guess it's sorta like Jesus saying he'd build his church upon this rock. Wait, where am I again?)

Skye is offering a terrific play by play. Let me offer a word of commentary on one entry he mentioned.

One of the people I was most interested to meet at Catalyst was William Paul Young, the author of "The Shack," the self-published novel that was given a spectacular endorsement by Eugene Peterson, got amazing word-of-mouth distribution and rocked the publishing world, selling millions and sparking a heated blogosphere debate among Christians over whether the book is heretical in its depiction of God or whether it's a helpful and clarifying portrayal of God's three-in-one character.

Today Paul (he goes by his middle name) was interviewed on the main stage. At yesterday's Catalyst lab, Paul explained to a mostly supportive audience the origin of the novel. He said it was NOT written to make a statement about the Trinity. Instead, he said, it was written to be given to family members to help them better grasp issues of God and gender! To work through the pain of earthly fathers who are distant or absent during times of Great Sadness.

Oh, my, I thought. If anything is more volatile than the Trinity, issues of gender would be on a fairly short list of things guaranteed to be impossible to address without offending a whole lot of people. The intricacies of describing the Trinity will offend the theologically trained, but the suggesting God has gender issues will disturb just about everyone.

by Skye Jethani

Day 1 at Catalyst in Atlanta is dominated by the Labs. These smaller breakout sessions give conference attendees a more intimate setting to hear from authors, thinkers, and leaders in a more interactive environment. My first stop was Scot McKnight's lab "The Blue Parakeet" based on his new book by the same title. The book advocates a "third way" of reading the Bible. (Scot is a friend and a regular contributor to Out of Ur.)

Next week, Brandon O'Brien will be posting his review of The Blue Parakeet so you should stay tuned for a more in depth discussion of McKnight's ideas. For now, I'll just mention a snippet from his lab I found helpful.

McKnight outlined five flawed ways many people read the Bible:

1. The Morsels of Law Approach
These people search the Bible and extract ever commandment. They see Scripture as fundamentally a book of rules to be obeyed. The problem, says McKnight, is that no one really obeys - or even tries to obey - every commandment. And we're not just talking about some obscure stuff in Leviticus. Scot mentioned a number of New Testament commands that many Christians dismiss as well. We are all selective.

by David Swanson

As on any other Tuesday, my wife and I hosted our weekly small group on Election Day of 2004. A quick scan of the TV stations after the Bible study showed that we'd have to wait until the next day to learn the results. "Just pray that John Kerry doesn't win," said one of the members on his way out that November night. Over early morning coffee a few weeks later another church friend expressed his relief that George Bush would serve a second term as president.

More recently, after a pizza dinner with some volunteers from church, someone asked where Barak Obama's home was. Soon a small caravan was driving through Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood to see the house of what many of these volunteers hoped would be the next president. A few weeks later I watched one of our worship leaders tactfully cover her Obama t-shirt with a jacket before our Sunday service began.

What happened between 2004 and the current election season to account for this shift in the political sensibilities of our community? Maybe the political priorities of some folks have changed. Maybe churchgoers feel taken for granted by the "Grand Old Party." Or perhaps Americans, including those within the Evangelical tradition, are just ready for change.

Or maybe not. What changed was that between these two elections we moved from an established suburban church to a 6-year old-church plant in Chicago. And that, as they say, has made all the difference.

by Url Scaramanga

I would like to thank Mr. Victor T. Cheney for recently sending me a copy of the second edition of his self-published pamphlet titled "Celibacy Guaranteed: For a Safe and Happy Future." Mr. Cheney has asked us to share parts of his pamphlet with you.

From page 3:

There is only one way to be sure of permanently eliminating the sex drive and guaranteeing the purity of our priesthood, and that is to remove the source of the hormone which causes it and the aggressive instinct which is its cohort?. Removal of the testes for the purification of the priesthood is not some new idea or experimental notion; it has been used for millennia. The history of this means of assuring purity is still traceable in spite of the suppression of information on the practice since the First Nicaean Council in 325 A.D.

A cornerstone of Mr. Cheney's argument is Mark 9:42-46:

You can listen to every stump speech and read every position paper, but nothing compares to evaluating presidential candidates side-by-side during a debate. Their contrasting styles and views emerge in ways you hadn't noticed during the long primary season. The candidates practice their lines and prepare their strategies, but the format allows for precious moments of spontaneity and even humor. The best candidates deftly address issues in ways that lodge them in the public consciousness.

Perhaps the best example of this is President Reagan, who in 1984 famously said, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." His 56-year-old opponent, Walter Mondale, could only look on in laughter.

The first debate between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama provided no such memorable moments. But it did highlight important distinctions between the Republican and Democratic candidates. Namely, McCain and Obama represent key differences between modern and postmodern cultures. Analyzing their debate through this lens reveals similarities to the church's own debates about how to respond to shifting cultures.