Make an Impact on MLK

I was talking to a friend of mine a couple weeks ago and she told me about this interesting project that RETHINK Church is doing.  It's called America's Sunday Supper.  Basicaly, they're teaming up with Points of Light Institute and HandsOn Network for this program to promote community and involvement around societal issues. 

The event happens the Sunday evening before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  You decide to host a meal and work to bring people from diverse backgrounds together to share a meal and discuss issues that affect your community and possibly serve in some way.  What a great way to get your youth not only involved in community issues, but inviting all sorts of peers to dialogue about what is happening in their world.  

As I understand it, the goal is to get people talking or acting or both.  So how about hosting a dinner that focuses on bullying, cheating, discrimination, civil rights, or... you get the idea.  It is much easier to get non-religious and nominally religious[1] teens to an event with this sort of focus than some Christian band they've never heard of.  To sign up to host or attend one, just go to www.sundaysupperumc.org. Let me know how it goes!

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[1] Yeah, I stole that great terminology from Church of the Resurrection

Prayers Like Incense

This Is a eaching about many of he diverse and beautiful forms of prayer.  Prayer is all about forming us spiritually, and these can help us break out and commune with God!

The Future of the Church (or reaching for Trinitarian tension)

The world we live in today is one of increasing smallness.  It used to be that one could go their entire life without meeting someone from another country or even another religion.  Now, I can subscribe to the twitter stream of a Hindu monk in India.  This changes the game for religion.  It is no longer possible for a group to maintain hegemony through the ignorance of its adherents to other perspectives.  It requires a level of comfort with grey-ness, or tension, on a scale much larger than ever before.  The key to this life, as far as I am concerned, is to have and experience a faith that is centered on the Trinity.  For too long has the church ignored considering this central aspect of the faith.  For too long has it been relegated to chintzy metaphors that discount its profundity.  Now is the time to pick up the standard of the Trinity and hold it high before us as we march into the future.

However important this concept is, it has often been ignored because of the difficulty of relating it to the human experience.  My best understanding of Trinity is as the personification of relationship.  This is not personification in the sense of the literary device that gives human qualities to inanimate objects, but in the sense that the Trinity expresses relationship by creating a being that is explained best by relationship.  It is personification in the sense that it personifies (embodies, epitomizes, is the incarnation of) relationship.  This is a powerful way to understand and speak of God.  This would seem to indicate that as we relate to others, we are experiencing some piece of God, or that we are echoing the basic aspect of who God is.  In a world defined as much by globalization and social networking as anything else, a faith centered around the beauty of relationships is a powerful one.  It is in relationships with others that we grow, are challenged, are loved, and experience almost all of the deepest aspects of what it means to be human.

It is in its unique brand of relationship that Trinity exhibits another feature that is key to the future of the church: tension.  This tension is not merely the tension that exists in all relationships as we understand ourselves and our life in comparison and contrast to others. It is far deeper.  It is the tension created by two seemingly mutually exclusive concepts that find themselves held together in Trinity:  three and one.  Somehow those two concepts exist in the person of God, and that is exactly what a postmodern world needs: comfort with tension.  This demonstrates that God not only defies and exists in a dimension beyond logic, but that he is comfortable with things that seem to be true, yet are logically impossible.  In a non-tension based faith where logic is king, one has a difficult time reconciling the fact that evil exists in the same universe that an all-good, all-powerful deity exists.  However, when one finds life in tension, the response to that problem is to realize that beyond both existing, the truth of each confirms the existence of the other. Or you might say that there is creation and life in the  tension between those ideas.

It is in this tension that there exists a great mystery, the mystery of the Godhead.  The modern world has reached out its mind and tools only to be disillusioned with a world that might be fully explained one day.  Our race longs for something beyond us, something mysterious, something not describable by the scientific method.  That is the Trinity.  It is a being in which artist, flesh and spirit meet.  It is a being which stretches beyond the cosmos, beyond time, and beyond the finite, yet calls out to us in beautiful creations, captivating love, and extravagant action: O, great mystery.

If the church were to take hold of this distinctive concept and allow it to inform and infuse its ministry, there would be a connection and relevance that has not been seen for decades if not centuries.  No longer would we focus on impersonal programs where the priority is the anonymous dissemination of information, the church would focus on developing deep relational connections.  No longer would we demand to share the same logical explanation of God before eating with our brothers or sisters.  Knowing that life exists in the space between those in tension, we would welcome those of differing view points to our table, we would reach out and minister to the world together.  And, with the knowledge that our world desires mystery, we would let go of all the modern control issues and allow the Spirit to move in our midst.  We would open ourselves up to explore the mysteries of God and call others into that same exploration.  In short, we would be exactly what our world needs right now:  the Body of Christ.

Set World Records at Your Next Event

I was watching some podcast Brian Brushwood was on when I first discovered RecordSetter.com.  This is a online, user-generated world record site.  (I almost feel foolish writing anything else because I know your brains are already spinning on this one.)  It’s easy.  After signing up, you post a video as proof.  They review it and then confirm you made or broke the record.

After hearing about this, one of our students immediately went and broke the record for number of times saying “pretty” before “good” in one breath.  He was beaten soon after by a girl from Canada, but rest assured that he considered it a matter of national pride to get this  record back in American hands!

So, we hosted a world record event and set a bunch of great ones that are being verified as I type.  As a fun promo for the event our staff broke several records including my own world record:

From: YouthMinistryGeek

Expressing your Heart to God through Prayer Books

Today in the 9:15 Sanctuary service, I spoke on prayer and mentioned the fact that most of us are not great at expressing our hearts to God off the top of our head.  Luckily, there are brilliant writers and theologians that have gone before us and written books full of prayers that we can use.

Most of them are in the form of "The Hours."  Basically, "The Hours" are set times each day that many people all over the world take a moment and pray.  Most prayer books have some sort of calendar with the assigned prayers for each hour for each day.  Below are several protestant versions of prayer books that I like with links to amazon where you can purchase them.

Where's The Crisis?

I preached this Sunday morning in new song about God's love prevailing, and spent a bit of time talking about the overuse of the term crisis.  I used this graphic from Google Ngram that shows how often the word "crisis" was used in all english publications from 1780-2000.  As you can see, there is a sharp uptick that began about 1960 continuing through today which begs the question, do we have more crises today, or are we wearing out our welcome with this word.

To put forth an argument for wearing out the term, I added some data points to the graph.  This is not to suggest that there are no crises that are happening now, but to say that there is not as substantial an increase in crises as this line would suggest.

Why does this matter?  The point I was making in the sermon is that rather than being on a downhill slide as the graph would suggest, our world is in a state of improvement year over year in everything from public health to education.  While we want to maintain that improvement, we need to realize that in a very real, tangible way, God is moving in the world through his people to make "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" a reality.

Beyond that, I think it underscores our need as individuals and as a church to be cautious about getting sucked into this sensational negativity hole.  We need to be people proclaiming the rule and reign of God. Shouting from the rooftops his incremental victory over unclean drinking water and illiteracy so that people will give this God who cares about our life now a fair hearing.  Maybe, if the church was leading the charge on positivity, people would want to hear more about this life-giving, active God we serve with in the world.

Is the God of Muhammed the Father of Jesus?

This post is basically a summary of a chapter of the same title from the book Theoloogy in the Context of World Christianity by Dr Timothy Tennent.

What I like most about his chapter is that he takes a step back from this politically charged question and considers what exactly is being asked. Tenant comes up with three different, more specific questions that may be being asked, and addresses each in turn.  I will do the same here. The three questions are:

1. Are the English words "God" and the Arabic word "Allah" interchangeable? 
2. Do the subjects "God is..." and "Allah is..." refer to the same being? 
3. Are the predicates that Christians and Muslims use to complete these sentences the same (are the specific beliefs about God and Allah the same)? 

1. Are the words "God" and the Arabic word "Allah" interchangeable? In the book, Teennant traces the history of the words and shows how (before Muhammed) Christians used the word "Allah" to refer to their God. There are even existing translations of New Testament books that use the word to refer to God. However, the word was never used to translate the proper name of God (the tetragrammaton YHWH). So, by the time Muhammed came onto the scene, Allah was commonly used by both Jews and Christians to refer to their God the same way that we use the word "god" to refer to any diety of any religion in English.

You can make a qualified "yes" in answer to this question speaking from a purely linguistic standpoint as long as you clarify that you are not using the word 'Allah' as a proper name for God.  Muhammed moved the meaning of the word in that direction (using it as a proper name) which requires us to explore the next question.

2. Do the subjects of "God is..." and "Allah is..." refer to the same being?  Transitioning from the previous question, you might restate the question this way: "Is the 'Allah' of Islam the same as the 'Allah' of pre-Islamic Arabian Christianity?"  In this section, Tennent points out that if one is truly a monotheist they have to believe that God is the ONLY deity.  If that is the case, then one could say that anyone seeking God can only be seeking the one being.

This gives yet another qualified affirmative.  One could say yes, but would have to explain that just because someone is seeking God does not mean they are finding Him.  This leads us to the final question.

3. Are the predicates that Christians and Muslims use to complete these sentences the same (are the specific beliefs about God and Allah the same)?  Here is where we obtain some clarity.  The good news is that a lot of what the Qur'an says about God is in line with the Bible.  For example, Christians and Muslims agree that God is the creator (Surah 57:4), that Abraham is a great example of faith (Surah 16:123) that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary (Surah 3:45-47), and that Jesus was without sin (Surah 19:19).  However, Christians hold some very central and distinctive beliefs about God that are not in line with Islam; namely, the trinity, the deity of Christ, the diety of the holy spirit, the incarnation of God in Jesus, God in Jesus suffering on the cross, etc..  Likewise, there are several problematic beliefs put forth in the Qur'an like the fact that God is the deceiver who leads people astray.

We can finally come to a well reasoned conclusion.  While the word may have been used to refer to the Christian God before the time of Muhammed and while a monotheist cannot believe that there is another god to which a human can direct their worship, one has to say that the being described by Christianity and Islam cannot be the same being as central concepts about that being put forth by each religion lie well outside the bounds of the opposing religion's understanding of that being.

So, no, The God of Muhammed is not the Father of Jesus.

We must be encouraged by this.  One of the things we discover when looking at these two religions is that there is a large amount of overlap.  That is good news!  That means that we can be like the Apostle Paul at Mars Hill (Acts 17:22-34).  He surveyed their temple and found a bit of their religion that he could identify as true and used that to open up a conversation about the One True God!  May we seek to do the same sort of respectful evangelism in our world!