serious mojo there…difficult, but serious mojo

Still, I’m glad I didn’t know how much it would take. I might have taken my eyes off what God was saying to me in it that day and started worrying about my ignorance. I might even have thought I’d never be able to get it.

Or maybe not. The Bible is relational, after all, and I was always conversing with God through it in one way or another. That kind of keeps you coming back.

He said to me the other day, “You know, whenever I want to watch a tragedy [kara like romantic comedy, no deep movies, ever], I think to myself, ‘Kara and I really don’t get along very well.’ But when it comes to important stuff – God stuff – we are right in sync.”

Case in point.

Thanks for your blog, Ken. I doubt you intended it, but you provided some internet space for a romantic moment for me and my husband today.

I would love to see a church in my area that addresses the issues of science and Christianity as Ken does. As it now stands, there are hardly any evangelical churches in my area, and those that do exist are not attended by many/if any scientists. I am married to a scientist, who feels as most scientists do, that Christianity excludes reason and logic. This prevents him from ever wanting to darken the door of a church. As a scientist and follower of Jesus, this has always frustrated & paralyzed me as to how to change this idea that people of faith can’t be people of logic or reason. I know as a scientist/Christian I have to do better and so should the church as a whole to reconcile our faith with science.

I am glad I found your blog and your essay, Ken.
Thank you for your insight!

Consider the last several election cycles. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Tea Party… for the most part, same voters. Data tracks actions, not motives.

Politicians should be obsessed with exit poll data. Christians should be obsessed with following Christ.

I’m at the A2 Vineyard, not because it tracks trends, but because I hope it doesn’t. It is painfully rare to find a church that follows Christ that doesn’t passively or aggressively demand political affiliation.

I don’t need, week to week, to be reminded of culture wars. I need to be reminded, weekly at least, of Christ’s example – his grace, love and call to follow in sacrifice for the world he loves. I need to be reminded of what it is to be a Christian so I can strive live as one, deeply and fully.

Here’s what the data doesn’t tell you. The only reason I’m at the A2 Vineyard is it’s the first church I found that doesn’t preach a party platform, but preaches Christ risen.

I don’t need a party.
I need the resurrection.

I pray that the Church, on all sides, abandons the former for love of the later.

The beauty of the Lord.

“If there is any purpose at all you do not have randomness … Random chance and purposeful intent are not compatible.”

This appears to me to not be true at all. 1. Roll dice in a monopoly game. I am purposefully using a random process (unpredictable and uncontrolled by me in detail to accomplish a purpose. 2. Peter cast lots to choose the 12th post-Judas apostle. 3. I (and others of course) have used random processes on the computer to design molecules and processes for specific purposes.

It is very interesting to think about what a random process means to an omnipotent God and to consider why He might use such a process to accomplish some purpose.

First, Jesus offered the Woman at the Well “living waters.” What I see in many churches isn’t very living. Anemic worship, homogeneous membership, and ways of being community that don’t speak to the life conditions and aspirations of younger members (insert joke about Methodists and Jello here).

So I think part of the challenge is to be a living spiritual community that reaches young people where they are, just as Jesus reached fishermen, the sick, and even tax collectors and centurions where they were. Some of this is about liturgy, but part of it is also how we practice community.

(and for the record, the church that I’ve been part of that best practiced community was a fundamentalist Calvary Chapel in New Mexico)

That said, I do think the culture wars have turned a lot of people away from institutional religion. I have heard many people who see the Church as a place where people say “love” and practice hate and see religion as something people start wars over to settle which is the religion of peace.

Critiquing Evangelical Christianity because it has embraced conservative politics is not the same as advocating for “liberal” politics, or that Evangelicals should go the way of the Episcopals on theological issues. Vineyard comes from the Evangelical quadrant, so Vineyard pastors will tend to speak prophetically primarily to other Evangelicals. It wouldn’t be too helpful to have a Vineyard pastor critiquing other denominations, eh? That’s for them to do.

A conservative theology is, in my understanding, one that is more literal in its Biblical interpretation than liberal theology.

I think every church is within a spectrum between 2 extremes, ultra conservative (Pharisaical attitudes) and ultra liberal (Christian in name only).
My worry about efforts to reach the ‘nones’ is that it might require the church to lean too close to a liberal extreme and thus lose its ’saltiness’, becoming no different than the surrounding culture.