man.of.depravity

Yesterday seemed to be the day of blog posts on the millennial generation. I want to point you to three posts from yesterday:

1. Rhett Smith on millennials and how it effects the PCUSA (Presbyterian Church of the USA).
2. A response to Rhett’s post by Neal Locke at Presbymergent.
3. Scott at Read Scott on some unknown truths about postmoderns.

These are 3 of the best things I’ve read in a while, as far as describing my generation.

Now I’ll add a few of my thoughts.

• Rhett talked about the disinterest in issues surrounding homosexuality for millennials. I think that is right on.
• Authority is found within the consensus of those around you. Around you is no longer just those within your daily footprint. Your footprint reaches people around the world, just in a different way.
• I agree with Locke, in that some type of system of government or decision making is in place with every church or denomination. Some have a government hierarchal system, others rely on one pastor to make all decisions. I don’t think that postmoderns or millennials are necessarily drawn to one or the other.
• Scott is right on with the whole music thing. My generation loves music, good music. We often worry about doing new songs in church, but I think it applies less and less. Everyone can listen to everything (thanks iTunes)
• Reaching people for Christ comes through relationship and conversation. Most other forms are not as effective.

You might wonder why I talk a lot about the emerging church, or postmodernism, or the millennial generation (all kind of fall under the same umbrella). I have a passion for reaching my generation for Christ. Nearly all of my friends from high school no longer attend church or care about the Jesus they loved when they were younger. The church (all believers) has done a horrible job of finding ways to speak to my friends. I hope posts on this help you come to know how my generation operates.

I spent some time (a lot of time) yesterday listening to Mark Driscoll (pastor of Mars Hills Church in Seattle) on everything Emergent/emerging church/postmodern Christianity. Highly enlightening. Probably the best thing I have read or listened to on as far as information from a conservative theological standpoint. If you have 90 minutes and care about this stuff you have to listen to this podcast. This happened back in the fall of last year but I wanted to wait until I felt theologically schooled to understand what he was saying.

Driscoll uses a lot of difficult theological language that might be confusing for some of you, so I will try and make it easier to understand in my notes. If you want to talk in depth with me about some of the deeper issues he gets into I am total game to get together/email/chat. I am passionate about this stuff. What I will put here is summarizing what Driscoll has said, not what I think. However, nothing I put in this summary will be something I disagree with. This is a great follow up to my posts last week on postmoderns in church.

I do not think Driscoll is God or that he is the only one with good thoughts on this subject.

He comes up with 2 streams within postmodern Christianity: relevant and revisionist.

Relevant

• He does not go into much depth with this.
• He call this evangelical and lumps into this group Dan Kimball and Erwin McManus to name a couple. I think it would be fair to put Driscoll in here as well. I think he doesn’t go into depth on this because he agrees with it.
• It is not changing theology, doctrine, or an evangelical view of the Bible, it is changing ministry methods. “The truth is timeless, the message is timely.”

Revisionist

• Doug Pagitt, Brian McLaren, and Rob Bell (the other Mars Hill guy).
• This group is highly influenced by secular philosophy.
• He goes into a lot of depth on McLaren and his influences and basically rips them to shreads because these influecnes are men on the Jesus Seminar, which basically believes that the actual person Jesus is not the Jesus spoken about in the Bible.
• Driscoll goes after Pagitt’s stance on homosexuality. Pagitt does not see homosexuality as a sin and believes salvation is possible for the homosexual. How Doug comes to these opinions is a really distorted view of creation that I won’t get into this because it is very complex.
• Much of this group is made up of Emergent folks (the organization). This was a group that in a roundabout way Mark helped establish and now does not agree with. Much of Emergent is described as a conversation which Driscoll is fine with until the conversation is leading to heresy. To Driscoll, original sin in Genesis 3 is described as beginning as a conversation. This is what we need to be careful with.
• I’ll go in depth on Rob Bell. He is widely loved and accepted by evangelicals and I think Mark brings up some great points about him. Rob Bell uses rabbinical authority in producing his messages and in his theology. He believes they are a key to Bible interpretation and hermeneutics. John 5:38-39 seems to remind us that rabbinical focus was not as it should have been. Rabbis were men who studied text but were rarely followers and believers in Jesus. Bell also believes in what I will theological evolution. This came about when Bell instituted women elders in his church. He came to a point where he thought that culture had evolved enough to allow this to be acceptable to God. The problem here is valuing our culture over the words of Scripture. The line is hard to draw if we are constantly viewing God in light of our society. He also attacks Bell for some of his influences which include some Buddhists.
• He believes this group is drawing from panentheism or new age thinking. Defined as: the belief of “Process Theology” that there is one God who is greater than the universe but so immanent that he exists in and through it. God therefore is interdependent with the universe.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of my thoughts. Feel free to be forthright in your comments on this no matter where you fall on these issues. That is what blogging is for.

You can check out the first two posts here and here.

I read two posts by Tony Jones on the God Politics blog run by Jim Wallis. It is fair to say that both of these guys are fairly liberal, although some would say they are really liberal. I think they both have a strong sense about being emergent and the political changes occurring within orthodox Christianity. Here are parts one and two of “Emergent Politics” by Tony Jones. I want to highlight some of things he has to say because they are spot on.

Problem #1 with emergents and politics: “Emergents don’t have a problem with Lockean individual rights per se - their problem is with the fact that unalienable, individual rights is not a biblical-theological virtue. The Bible’s call is not to protect the self but to sacrifice the self.”

Problem #2 with emergents and politics: “Emergents have grown up in the dire shadow of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, who too closely allied with the Republicans in the 1980s and 1990s…many emergents have expressed to me great hesitation about the building momentum of leftward or progressive groups (such as Tikkun magazine, Sojourners/Call to Renewal, and FaithfulDemocrats.org). Their fear is that these groups will make the same mistakes that their conservative brethren did 30 years ago: lose their independence by aligning with a political party.”

Some thoughts of mine:

• As much as emergents want to deny that they are politically liberal, they can’t win this argument. It is however, possible to be emerging or postmodern without this political stance. I just don’t see how Tony can say that emergents are avoiding a political side, because it is obvious that right now they are behind Obama and he is liberal. I’m not even saying that this is wrong, but it is certainly mere lip service to say they are avoiding left wing groups. They are a left wing group right now.
• As I’ve felt myself moving to a more moderate stance within politics, I find myself more disheartened with the politics of the US. Our country is rooted deeply between two parties in which neither provide inherently Christian values. So what is the God blessing way to approach politics? Do we just not vote? Do we look past the things we disagree with? Do we try and figure out which things are “most important” and side with those? Doesn’t this just lead to a war of opinions?
• I think the emergent desire to be involved with our culture is great, but I wonder where we draw the line or if we even draw a line.

Chapter 12 of Irresistible Revolution is called “Growing Smaller and Smaller…Until We Take Over the World.” This title is inspired by mega churches. Shane is questioning what kind of gospel we are preaching in the US that allows us to have these huge churches. The Bible talks about it being harder for a camel to slide through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter into heaven. To him, clearly this message isn’t being portrayed in churches or they would be a lot less crowded.

I thought hard and I could not think of anytime in church where I had heard the idea of the Christian faith growing smaller (yes I know, that is weird wording he uses). Here is how he comes to this idea.

1. He thinks in America the church has offered cheap grace. This idea of “accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and come to church on Sundays and tithe.” There is little personal sacrifice needed except from the wallet.
2. Churches often have visions, plans, growth ideas, but lost in these huge ideas is caring for those around us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community (even if their intentions are ever so earnest), but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
3. To enter the kingdom of God we must become like little children.
4. Acts 6:1-6 talks about a community structure within the early church that provided for widows and orphans before anything else.

So while you might have been thinking Claiborne was talking about smaller in number he wasn’t. I see him talking about how our huge God decided to become human. He is talking about how the kingdom is inherited for those who become like children. Amidst our society that values big ideas, Shane is talking about a gospel that reaches out to the small.

One thought of mine is that Shane has spent a lot of this chapter talking about reaching the poor for Jesus. Going to the small of the world and serving them. I understand the gospel to be for everyone. Gay, straight, rich, poor, black, white…etc. He hasn’t given any talk to a churches ability to reach the rich (as difficult as the Bible makes it sound) in our churches. Do you have any thoughts on this in light of a gospel of small?

Research has shown that the more a person goes to church, the more they are likely to be sexist, racist, anti-gay, for wars and committed to a local church. Shane questions what Bible we are teaching. It is these things that cause many people to think of Christians as hypocrites instead of audacious lovers of people. Brennan Manning says, “The greatest cause of atheism is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door and deny him in their lifestyle. This is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” So how can we reverse this? Shane gives a few examples that can help us envision how to live as followers of Jesus who are full of grace.

1. If terrorists are beyond redemption, he says that we can rip out half of the New Testament, since half of it was written “by a terrorist who became an extremist for grace.”
2. Shane tells the story of a woman he met in Iraq whose son and husband was killed by an Iraqi police officer. In court the woman told the judge that she simply wanted to officer to know grace and love. She asked that he be ordered to come to her home in the slums 2 times a month.
3. Spin magazine did a feature on Shane and the community he is a part of named The Simple Way. He said after the feature ran he received hundreds of letters from non-Christians who were intrigued by the God he followed and many other letters from Christians who were upset that he would do an interview with such a secular magazine. It was at that point that he knew he had done the right thing.