ken wilson online

Thanks I needed that break.  Vacation did me a world of good as well as a mission trip to Costa Rica with our youth group.  Costa Rica, where the average income is $250 per month.  A week there convinced me of something: I’m greedy.

The greedy are nailed throughout the Bible as sinners of a serious variety.  The prophets denounce the greedy.   Paul has more than a warning or two.  The greedy are among those who shouldn’t presume on entrance to the kingdom. Jesus didn’t make it easy for the greedy to follow without leaving much of their stuff behind.
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Advice to young pastors: to be a pastor in the context of the evangelical landscape is a privilege. By all  measures evangelical Christianity is the most vibrant form of faith in the United States. Evangelical Christians volunteer more, give more money to their churches and give more to non-church charities than any other group.  Nothing says “I love you” like time and cash.  Evangelicals get things done, so you could do worse than to be a pastor in an evangelical setting. But there’s also a cross to bear and your being truly evangelical requires that you bear it. You must be willing to face and confront religious hostility in the camp.
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I stumbled into a concern for the environment.  It’s not something I sought out.  It was thrust upon me.  And my interest in this topic is fueled by my concern for the gospel, which has been getting a bad name of late.  For good reason.  Because we pastors have allowed the gospel to become polluted by political ideology. 
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Sure, Mothers Day is probably the invention of the florists and the candy makers.
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Been uneasy about hell for years now. But something coming clear. Softening or weakening the teaching on hell isn’t the long term answer. It’s completely understandable that it’s happening as it’s a response to a real abuse of the teaching (often terrifying the very people God means to comfort and comforting the very people God means to terrify.) But the fact is, Jesus is the figure in the Bible most closely associated with hell. Before he hits the scene, it’s the foggiest, the murkiest thing. But that’s the key. Jesus alone can be trusted with this. The teaching on hell is something we’ve abstracted; that is, taken out of context, removed from it’s intensely personal connection with Jesus. We’ve plucked it up like a piece of fruit and put it in our 12 point statements of faith, where it’s been separated from his voice; and there, it’s rotted. Jesus spoke on hell through angry tears. He spoke in the context, always I think, of defending the poor and oppressed, warning their oppressors of hell.
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Beside me for lo these many years. Is a believer. This past Monday, her birthday, we were on our way to the airport to go to the Vineyard national board meetings. It had been a harried and hurried morning, having discovered the kitchen sink pipes were frozen. So I’m under the kitchen sink with a hair dryer as we’re getting later and later off to the airport. Plus which it’s my day off, which I hadn’t had in a long while, and traveling to board meetings on my day off wasn’t putting me in a California frame of mind. So characteristically, as we’re late, and approaching the airport Nancy prays, “Lord, help us get to our plane on time, help us with the parking and the security lines….” and this lands upon my foul mood and I join the inner scoundrel chorus singing, “There is no God” or least not one who cares about us making our plane.
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Lauren Winner, author of girl meets god and real sex is coming to town and will be speaking this monday, Feb. 4 at 8pm. I’m not a big fan of Christian books of the inspirational variety. They don’t inspire me. But Lauren’s stuff is different. I bought girl meets god for my then 22 year old daughter, Amy. An impulse buy because I liked the cover and the author bio. Amy loved it–and she’s a lover of good writing. I mean loved it. So I read it. And loved it. The problem with much Christian writing is that it is often constrained by the tribal sensibilities of it’s intended audience, which these days is evangelical. This inhibits candor and inflames caution which takes the art out of writing.
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I’m off to our MLK day world cafe at church, then a blues concert at the Ark in A2 this evening. So I’ve got MLK on my mind today. Great op-ed piece in the NYT this morning with a wonderful quote from the man himself: “So this morning as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than kill you.’The love of enemies is the pressing concern of the Spirit, the challenge, the demand of the Spirit to the church in the 21st Century. We’ll be judged on this one, so I’m thinking we better bore down into it.
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Went to Cincinnati with Nancy on Vineyard business and checked into a local hotel. In the lobby I ran across a sign posted above the coffee pot; used my new iphone to take a picture of the sign because it contained a little mangled English. When I came down to the lobby a little later, the manager, from India, asked why I took a picture of the sign. (Didn’t realize he was looking on when I snapped the photo.) Because I’m a louse, I should have said. Instead, I pointed out the fractured English on the sign and he took it down. Ouch. Here’s this immigrant from India, probably knows two or three languages to my one, dissed by a smart alec iphoner taking a picture of his mangled sign. Love keeps no record of wrongs. Right! [Sorry about the photo quality; you are not dealing with an adept blogger here, by any means--reader (is that what a blog visitor is called even?) beware.]

It’s a beautiful thing when the same old same old doesn’t repeat itself. Like the rest of the planet I’m so distressed by what’s happened in Iraq. And the lack of any national leadership to face the fact of our dependence on fossils fuels. But tucked into all this disappointment is the plain fact that George Bush has led the charge to dedicate more money to AIDS relief in Africa than any other president. Article in the NYT quotes Kerry praising Bush as a matter of fact.

For all of Clinton’s rhetoric on Africa, the money didn’t come. I’m sure the Congress he was working with didn’t make it any easier at the time. Then Bono took the treasury secretary to Africa, and eyes started to open. Too bad ideologues have hamstrung the use of the money. The official teaching of the world’s largest Christian organization forbids the use of condoms, the cheapest and most widely effective means to slow the spread of the AIDS epidemic. I talked with a leader in World Vision, the evangelical relief agency, who said one of the most powerful evangelical lobby groups also pressed them not to distribute condoms.

All this hurts, but the money released under the leadership of the president helps, and credit should be given where it’s due. And Kerry praising Bush is something no one expected. If there’s no rejoicing in the good, the bad is left to make all the noise.