new blog name

blogging mostly over at nhpastor.wordpress.com now, I think. Same great stuff, only (hopefully) way more of it.

Larry Norman: The Great American Novel

I just downloaded “Only Visiting this Planet” from emusic. If you don’t know who Larry Norman is, you need to look it up. I could not believe the relevancy of this song, written in the 70s. Larry was a strange mix and as such was largely rejected by the Christian community, even as he earnestly sang about Jesus and life in general from a totally devoted perspective. As I think emusic said, many of the things he said and sang have since become cliches… but he was among the first to say them.

i was born and raised an orphan
in a land that once was free
in a land that poured its love out on the moon
and i grew up in the shadows
of your silos filled with grain
but you never helped to fill my empty spoon

and when i was ten you murdered law
with courtroom politics
and you learned to make a lie sound just like truth
but i know you better now
and i don’t fall for all your tricks
and you’ve lost the one advantage of my youth

you kill a black man at midnight
just for talking to your daughter
then you make his wife your mistress
and you leave her without water
and the sheet you wear upon your face
is the sheet your children sleep on
at every meal you say a prayer
you don’t believe but still you keep on

and your money says in God we trust
but it’s against the law to pray in school
you say we beat the russians to the moon
and i say you starved your children to do it

you are far across the ocean
but the war is not your own
and while you’re winning theirs
you’re gonna lose the one at home
do you really think the only way
to bring about the peace
is to sacrifice your children
and kill all your enemies

the politicians all make speeches
while the news men all take note
and they exagerate the issues
as they shove them down our throats
is it really up to them
whether this country sinks or floats
well i wonder who would lead us
if none of us would vote

well my phone is tapped and my lips are chapped
from whispering through the fence
you know every move i make
or is that just coincidence
well you try to make my way of life
a little less like jail
if i promise to make tapes and slides
and send them through the mail

and your money says in God we trust
but it’s against the law to pray in school
you say we beat the russians to the moon
and i say you starved your children to do it
you say all men are equal all men are brothers
then why are the rich more equal than others
don’t ask me for the answer i’ve only got one
that a man leaves his darkness when he follows the Son

church and the changing american family

Listening to a recent Mark Driscoll sermon on dating and something caught my ear … he said that for the first time in America’s history, there are slightly more single people than married. Just over 50% of Americans are single. Out of curiosity, I did a little poking around and it’s a legitimate and very recent statistic. The figure is 50.3% of American adults. Driscoll uses this to point out why it’s so important to be welcoming of single adults in church – he refers to them as ‘not a family yet’. My mind ran in a little bit different direction, though.

I was unable to find a clear statistic on how many of those single people have kids, how many are divorced vs. how many have never been married. However, it does look like 33% of first children are born to unmarried women.

So what’s my point?

Driscoll mentioned that many churches try to be ‘family friendly,’ which I think ours does. He then pointed out that if you focus solely on families, you’re missing over half the population … ‘who are not families yet’. What strikes me is that these two don’t necessarily go together. Again, one third of women are unmarried when they have their first child. (In Britain, it’s 40%) Factor in that over 40% of unmarried people living together have children under 18 in the house, and it starts to become clear that we do need to reach families, but that we may have a misconception about what the typical American family looks like.

I did a quick mental check of our church. Last week, among the several families with children under age 12, there were more single-parent than two-parent homes. Actually, there were twice as many – 6 to 3. What does your church look like? What does it mean for how we do ministry?

Primarily, it means we need to adapt our understanding of what the typical American family may look like. In some congregations, it may mean we need to stop excoriating the immoral society we live in where women have children ‘out of wedlock’ with no condemnation, and focus instead on introducing people to Jesus and helping them move forward into spiritual formation. We also need to move beyond the stereotype of the welfare mom. All of the single parents in our church last Sunday were working mothers with full-time jobs. The Cleavers are great-grandparents now, if they ever existed, and at least a couple of their grandkids are single parents.

When we try to reach families, we shouldn’t assume that both a mom and a dad are present … maybe our events need to be less couple-oriented. The division between between the ‘family ministry’ and the ’singles ministry’ will have to become a thing of the past.  In fact, this may even become yet another reason for simplifying our ministries programatically (that may not be a word, but it should be). Maybe we should try the approach of drawing people together by addressing needs that are universal, rather than trying to have a ministry to a dozen different demographics we’ve artificially created.

What do you think? Has this reality affected anybody else? Does it change your perspective at all?

Understanding Jesus for who he is, or, the problem of ultimate fighter jesus

Who do you love?
Girl I see through, through your love.
Who do you love?
Me or the thought of me?
Me or the thought of me?

- John Mayer, “I don’t trust myself (with loving you)”, Continuum

This lyric caught me when first listening through the album, because it directly addresses our tendency to idealize on some level the people we love, or more generally to see what we want or expect them to be instead of what they are. For that matter, it’s not even limited to the people we love. We do this with a wide variety of pretty much everybody. Our perception of a person is largely based on our own expectations, desires, and feelings regarding that person.

If we do this with people we physically see and interact with daily or weekly or monthly, how much more likely are we to do it with Jesus?

simplicity …

I just deleted about 200 words that were unnecessarily complicated. Lots of stuff about church. So let me just share what we want spiritual formation to look like in the near future at Living Hope.

a hodgepodge: or, when anything and everything seems more important than broadcasting yourself …

… that’s probably a good thing.

There’s a lot going on these days. We can look forward to a couple more months of Hillary and Barack beating each other over the head by proxy (or sometimes directly), an indeterminately long period of economic recession and $4 a gallon gasoline, and the continued ascendancy of Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus/the good girl of pop with a million names over all the world.

Also, lots of good movies out these days: There Will Be Blood, for which Daniel Day-Lewis totally deserved his Oscar; Gone Baby Gone, the well-directed and well-acted movie that kept me in the dark until very very nearly the end (which rarely happens); Atonement, which moves like an incredibly interesting glacier that in the end runs over your grandmother’s house (at least that’s how jolting it is); and Into the Wild, a fascinating story about searching for the meaning of life. Plus of course the ones I want to see but haven’t yet, like No Country for Old Men.

In slightly bigger news, I am very much looking forward to becoming a dad. Becky is starting to show her pregnancy in her ridiculously cute belly, and there’s a small heart pounding like mad in there. I know, because I’ve heard it.

I find myself thinking a lot about theological and ministry issues, like: What is the nature of Biblical inspiration? What did Paul mean when he said scripture is “God-breathed”? Why do I feel like even the best churches I see around me frequently marginalize women?

Trying to take more of a role in helping move in a positive direction at the church. Pushing certain steps to strengthen the ministry. Also starting a small group in my home to help develop relationships.

Did I mention Becky is having a baby? Yeah, that’s cool.

long time no blog …

I’m not sure what it is that makes it so difficult for me to maintain a blog consistently … I suppose I just have difficulty calling up the feeling of urgency required to blog when I have a lot of other stuff going on. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about the 2008 presidential campaign, so I think I’ll be posting on that soon.

bread alone?

My dear friend beaNie is doing a learning experiment based on Jesus’ statement that “man does not live by bread alone.” Which is to say, he’s eating nothing but bread for two weeks, or until he loses too much weight or gets sick, whichever comes first. Check out his user profile on youtube to see the entire series of daily video updates.

Check it out here.

Hagar in the Wilderness …God sees and takes care of the troubled

As a child, I was told “God is watching you all the time. He sees everything you do.” Unfortunately, this was communicated in a negative sense … ‘God is watching you, so shape up kid!’ So the idea of God watching me became a distinctly uncomfortable concept, because I knew I sinned fairly frequently and that God didn’t like that. My childlike response was just not to think about that.

But a few years ago, I noticed for the first time the story of Hagar. She’s the mother of Abraham’s other son …

what on earth is God thinking?

I am reading through Genesis at the moment, and getting ready to preach about Abraham on Sunday. And I never cease to be amazed at what a goober he is. It is so odd and wondrous to look at the biblical accounts of people like Abram and and realize that all throughout history, God has been putting up with people’s crap.