ken wilson online

I came of age under the spectre of wars and rumors of war.  My father fought in WW2, and I grew up with the movies of victory over tyranny. My generation learned to hide beneath our desks as the rumors of nuclear holocaust swept over us during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Then I watched my city burn with helicopters circling overhead and tanks rumbling down eight mile, a block away from my house. I sweated out the draft during Vietnam as a young father and lucked out with a low (or was it a high?) lottery number.  No surprise then, that my generation, approaching mid-life, fueled the culture wars.  So I wonder what’s to become of a generation coming of age in a time of bursting bubbles and collapsing towers?
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Something is happening.  After centuries wrestling with the “doctrine of biblical inspiration” believers have worked themselves into an exhausted lethargy about this book.  We’ve been so busy either debunking or defending it, that we’ve forgotten to simply enter it on it’s own terms to know what punch it packs.  But what I see happening is a growing body of people who have no dog in that old fight.  They don’t approach the Bible with any pre-conceived notions about its inspiration or lack thereof. They could care less about words like inerrancy or form criticism.  They may be completely uninformed about the Jesus seminar and reactions to it. They are outside the camp of insitutional religion, but not outside the reach of Jesus.  They are simply readers without rubrics, responding to the text as it is given to them and they are as disparate a group as Reynolds Price, the novelist, Leon Kass, the bio-ethicist at University of Chicago and Layzie Bone, the rapper.
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There is a struggle underway among American evangelicals. Thank God. It’s a struggle to regain the heart of Jesus, which is a heart that leans toward the poor. Evangelicalism is a movement fueled by spiritual awakenings.

These awakenings typically begin with the poor and spread to the rich. Without the poor, there would be no evangelical movement in the United States. So this struggle is for the existence and the future existence of the evangelical church here.
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Since the average age of the Ann Arbor Vineyard is 33, I do a lot of hanging out with people half my age.  Ebony, who is less than half my age, citing The Fourth Turning, told me recently that we boomers have some important work to do that her generation is depending on our doing.  I think she meant in the culture at large, including the church.  I’ve been feeling the same thing lately.  The boomers have some work to do for the sake of their children and grand-children.  Hence this first of a new blog category: the boomer files.  First up: we boomers better find a way to trust the institutions that cannot work unless someone finds a way to trust them just a little.  The global financial crisis tells us so. 
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Maybe you noticed my silence of late in the blogging department.  I was listening in to the conversation prompted by the previous post, between Brenda, Archie, Billabong, Trenton, Metler and others.   People want to talk to each other about these things don’t they? They want to convince each other, poke, and prod, question and offer themselves in response to each other.  At stake in the conversation were questions of who gets to lead and why, who’s in and who’s out, what the gospel is and isn’t, and how we are to understand and engage the Bible.  Since the Bible touches on all the Big Questions–life and death and immortality among others–there is plenty to get worked up over in a conversation like this.  So now I want to ask, what would please Jesus in these matters?
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