Eccesiastical Beauty

Take a tour of the 10 most beautiful churches in the world. Should we build churches like this today, or should money be spent elsewhere?

(HT: Think Christian.net)

Worship Leader Essentials

Blog.worship.com has compiled a list of links for all their posts in a series entitled, "Worship Leader Essentials". You can find it here.

The Reunion You Have Been Waiting For

One of the greatest bits of news in rock and roll history.

A Christian Worldview for Music

CCM magazine is redefining it's definition of Christian Music. I think this could be a good thing.

Encouragement for Reading

Pastor John Piper writes in, "Brothers We Are Not Professionals",

We think we don't have time to read. We despair of reading anything spiritually rich and substantial because life seems to be lived in snatches. One of the most helpful discoveries I have made is how much can be read in a disciplined blocks of twenty minutes a day.

Suppose that you read slowly, say about 250 words a minutes (as I do). This means that in twenty minutes you can read about five thousand words. An average book has about four hundred words to a page. So you could read about twelve-and-a-half pages in twenty minutes. Suppose you discipline yourself to read a certain author or topic twenty minutes a day, six days a week, for a year. That would be 312 (days) times 12.5 (pages) for a total of 3,900 pages. Assume that an average book is 250 pages long. This means you could read fifteen books like this in one year.

Further on he writes,

This astonishing discovery freed me from the paralysis of not starting great, mind-shaping, heart-enriching books because I lacked enough big blocks of time. It turns out that I don't need long periods of time in order to read three masterpieces in one year! I needed twenty minutes a day, six days a week.

"Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him."

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

(HT: Seth)

What Am I To Do?

From John Piper, on the folly of comparing ourselves to others:

Jesus will not judge me according to my superiority or inferiority over anybody. No preacher. No church. No ministry. These are not the standard. Jesus has a work for me to do (and a different one for you). It is not what he has given anyone else to do. There is a grace to do it. Will I trust him for that grace and do what he has given me to do? That is the question.

(HT: Worship Blog)

Killing Church Politics

Mark Lauterbach has a very insightful post here, entitled, "Killing Church Politics". Church leaders need to read this one.

JAM

John Mayer with a good word for musicians:

Jimi Hendrix, whether by chemical escapism or by the luxury of singularity that discovery offers, never played guitar sheepishly. He was so rooted in 'now' (which unfortunately at its most immediate sounding is still only best known as 'then') that he never read over his own ticker tape while he played. Maybe after, sure - that's where self-betterment stems from - but in the act, when thinking about yourself does you no good, there was no judgment. By not considering the expression worthless, he made it momentous.

And maybe that's one of the many things I have left to learn. Maybe I need to bend a note without concurrently wondering if it's going to reach the right pitch; maybe I just start closing my eyes and bending away. And with statistics showing that over 90 percent of my readership doesn't know what a minor pentatonic scale is, I bet this is worth transposing into non-musical terms. So here goes: close your eyes, get out of your own way, and JAM.

Read his whole post here:

We are not that unique

I love this statement from Mark Lauterbach:

I do not think we live in times that are all that unique. I do not think post modernism is all that new and different. I do not think that relevance is found in cultural cleverness. I think God is always relevant because he is unchanging. I think humanity is basically the same in the depths of our existence. I think we remain a race of people corrupted by sin and fundamentally opposed to the humiliations of the cross. We are only able to see and believe by grace.

Natasha in Calcutta

Recording artist Natasha Bedingfield recently took a sabbatical from her recording career to serve in an orphanage in Calcutta.

Here is what she had to say:

"The past few years have been devoted to my career. So it was great to do something less selfish. It filled me with a lot of hope. In the past, I have felt there were so many horrible things in the world I just wanted to shut it out - what can one person do?

Especially when it just takes so much effort to survive, keep your own life afloat, pay the bills. But to see the things that people are doing to help others, the smiles on the kids faces - those kind of things stay with you."

At her record company's request, she agreed to a phone interview with a fashion magazine during her sabbatical. "I'm in the orphanage, my heart is kind of in shock, and they're asking me, 'What's the most you've ever spent on an item of clothing?' I said, 'Thanks for reminding me how materialistic I am.'

Read the whole article here.

Subwoofer

Denver Seminary Prof, Doug Groothuis doesn't like your rap music. Here is his poetic polemic:

Subwoofer

March 14, 2003 by Doug Groothuis

Thumping, bumping from nowhere—louder, deeper, unmistakable,
unavoidable.

Now from everywhere—pounding, roaring, bursting into my
unprotected being, uninvited, unstoppable.

A rolling, prowling object
radiating meanness, rudeness, crudeness, lewdness.

Sonic stench of thick machine noise
Putrid pulsations penetrating the unwary sensorium.

Subwoofer
Sonic-ravager
Noise-blaster
Rudeness-amplifier
Rudeness-accelerator
Boom-bomber
Bombast-er

Nowhere to hide
No shield to wield
No escape from the quake.

Vibrations vitiating body and soul
No cover for the ears
It roars in through the pores,
the spores of sonic death,
disintegration, degeneration.

At last, the beastly roar retreats
from the scene of the cultural crime.

The wounded remain
dazed, angry, helpless

On it thunders, to terrorize, victimize all in its audio wake
More sensoria to scuttle
down the wretched road

Shalom undone,
plundering peace, ravaging reason,
ear by ear, soul by soul.

Subwoofer
Sub-humanizer
De-humanizer
Anti-humanizer
Uncivil, uncivilizing
profitable, popular, poisonous

Subwoofer

Nowhere to be seen or heard or feared or hated
in the Kingdom that is to come!

Living Smaller in Bigger Spaces

Here is an interesting stat:


(HT: My Money Blog)

Still too busy?

Dan at Cerulean Sanctum continues his discussion of busyness for Christians. He says:

Jan at The View From Her asked why Christians are demanding more and more Christian movies and TV shows. Isn’t it all just preaching to the choir?

That question fits here because I feel that our discipleship in this country is so poor we’re failing to create disciples who can stand on their own two spiritual feet. They need constant propping up in order to walk the path of Christ. So instead of developing an inner life filled with the Spirit, they surround themselves with pleasant Christian messages they believe will strengthen them.

Unfortunately, that misguided belief resembles going into battle clad in pillows rather than armor. Yet in a frenzied environment packed to the gills with this activity and that, we flop to the couch with nothing left and turn on our sweet little Christian movie before we doze off.

Read the whole thing here.

Have you seen this?

I have two main problems with this commercial:

1. The implication of these commercials is that if you are a wiz at exegesis then that means you you have no idea how to reach lost people. And if you don't believe in seeker sensitive ministry then you are equated with a tightly wound dork in a bad suit? The false dichotomies abound! In my opinion these commercials are overly simplistic and present very unhelpful characterizations.

2. Christians need to spend way less time copying the culture and spend more time thinking about how we can be uniquely creative for the glory of God. No one is impressed by our feeble attempts to be "relevant" by performing a copy job that is half as good as the original.

Does anyone know who produces these?

(HT: Think Christian)

The Implications of the Reign of Christ

Doug Wilson says,

The Lord Jesus Christ is seated at the right hand of God the Father. That should affect things down here.

Further on...

But for too many Christians, this is done in a superficial "Honk if you love Jesus" way. For example, when the faith is taken into the business world, nothing really happens unless you count putting that little fish in the corner of the yellow pages ad. This means that when other Christians look at the ad, they think they ought to take their business there -- "And because we are Christians, maybe he'll give us a discount." I wonder why no one ever says, "Look! A Christian business. Why don't we take our business there so we can add ten percent to our bill -- help out a brother a little." This sort of "religious club" mentality is not the result of submitting our businesses to the authority of Christ; it is simply clannishness. In those businesses where Christ is truly honored, affecting the approach to debt, making payroll, etc., the results are a wonderful testimony to the reign of Christ. So we should long for the day when evangelical Christians have the general reputation for hard work and honest dealing that the Huguenots had in France. We are not there yet.

Read the whole post here. It's good.

Only 10 Christian Calories

Brant Hansen writes about the 1in3Trinity sports drink:

Sometimes, after a Christian jog through my secular, master-planned (but not by the real Master) community, I feel a need for refreshment. Christian refreshment.

A beverage that has repented of its sins.

That's why I drink 1in3 Trinity. Like the makers say, it's made of a special formula "handed down from the flourishing vines and trees of the Holy Land."

It's packed with 1000 mg of Christian Taurine, plus 50 mg of Biblically-based Glucuronotactone. (Ecclesians 4:21). And it takes seriously Jesus's call to consume 180% of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin B-12.

The makers say if it reaches "just one person", it's worth it.

MuteMath in ABQ

I went to the MuteMath show in Albuquerque last night. It was their second show here in 6 months or so. They never fail to to entertain. Flips over the Rhodes, drums gear flying all over the stage, guitar player "playing" his pedal board, drummers climbing up the main speaker stack, and overall music madness contained in an overall groove and melody that will make you respond is recipe for an amazing show to take in.

You have to see these guys live. Unreal.

Faith in Iraq

Newsweek has an interesting story about the faith of soldiers in the war in Iraq.

The Real Emerging Church

But I would just say to you that there really is another emerging church that people don’t talk about that much, and that is the church in the East.

It’s the real emerging church. I don’t think emerging church is the right word here in the West, I think it is deconstructing. And that’s not bad. The church always needs to be deconstructed in the sense that this is what it meant to our fathers, now what does it mean to me and what is it going to mean to my children and grandchildren?

The emerging church that I deal with the most is in Asia and Africa and that part of the world and it is truly an emerging church, where Christianity for the first time is exploding on that side of the world, like we haven’t seen here for millenniums or centuries.

China is the greatest church growth story the world has ever known. But here’s what’s different in the two churches: the church in the East, it’s not deconstructing, it’s constructing; it’s not frustrated and disillusioned, it’s excited and positive, it’s just a totally different response. It’s not old faith and vintage faith that’s being reinvigorated, it’s new faith with a tremendous amount of passion.

I think the whole dimension of what we’re going to see from the emergent church in the East is far more significant on us than the Western emergent church is going to be on the rest of the world. For the first time in the history of the church we’re going to be affected more by the East than us affect the East since the split between the Orthodox churches, I’m convinced of that.

-Bob Roberts, pastor of NorthWood church, author of Glocalization and Transformation

(HT: Relevintage)