I swear I'm not schizophrenic. I did start a new blog at wordpress.com because they beat the heck out of blogspot. It's at http://bradedwards.wordpress.com/
Enjoy, it looks a heck of a lot sexier, and is a lot more fun. I would recommend wordpress to anyone interested in blogging or even writing for fun. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Cultural Relevancy and Gospel Centeredness
Partially due to the article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but also because we seminarians are strange, dorky people, I've had a few really good conversations in the past couple days about culture and theology. This of course was related to the discussion of the emerging church, but even more importantly it is a topic that absolutely MUST be understood by pastors and seminarians preparing for ministry. The following quote, by Mark Driscoll, is an incredibly insightful synopsis of this problem:
As Driscoll aludes to in this post, one must be Gospel-Centered. What is Gospel-centeredness? Well, this was a lot to chew on, so I'll leave that to the next post. Stay tuned. :-)
"Seminaries are, for the most part, terrible at understanding the culture in which ministry is done. While the seminary may be an expert in teaching the thinking and theology of great men of the past, they gravely mistake that we still live in the past alongside those men. They fail to understand issues of contextualization and missional theology that is rooted in a deep understanding of the gospel. As a result, they produce pastors that are as culturally irrelevant as the schools they attend. Our churches are filled with pastors who understand the gap theory, but fail to see the gap between their church and the cultural context it exists in... Pastors must study theology in order to understand the gospel, but they must also study culture in order to understand the people to whom the gospel must be preached.
Missionaries have known this for years. They have studied foreign cultures in order to understand the prevailing philosophies and customs inherent to the indigenous people they have been sent to. This can be no different for the church in America. Pastors must be missiologists who understand the language and thought systems of the people in their culture in order to preach the gospel in a language that is understandable. The problem by and large is that pastors have not considered the missional nature of church and have instead considered modern tactics of marketing in order to grow their churches to the size of a small country. All good marketing targets a certain segment of society with the product being offered. Most churches that operate through typical principles of church growth, market themselves to those in particular sub-cultures leaving the people in the broader culture completely unreached."
Fortunately, I firmly believe Covenant is a huge exception to this statement. Being surrounded by the likes of cultural warriors like Dr. Jerram Barrs, Anthony Bradley, Dr. Phil Douglass, and others, it is easy to see that this seminary at least, is rising to the contemporary challenge of cultural relevancy.
But cultural relevancy is just one part of a bigger issue. It is easy to be culturally relevant if your theology and doctrine is sacrificed upon the altar of "tolerance" and "diversity." Liberal theology (and various other compromises, such as prosperity theology) "pads" the truth because they don't want to "offend" a culture by something as "gory" or "violent" as a Christ who died for us.As Driscoll aludes to in this post, one must be Gospel-Centered. What is Gospel-centeredness? Well, this was a lot to chew on, so I'll leave that to the next post. Stay tuned. :-)
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
SBC v. The Journey
Dr. Sean Lucas, professor at Covenant Seminary, wrote a glorious analysis on the Post-Dispatch article I wrote about in my previous post. PLEASE READ. It is well worth your time.
Holy Week Hoopla
Someone commented a few days ago about how Holy Week always puts Christianity in the spotlight in media. For whatever reason, I have since noticed it far more predominately this year. Here are a few of my favorite highlights:
Strike One. In Naugatauck, Conn., a store owner put a sign out that says "Easter: Honk for Jesus." The neighboring tattoo parlor artist and owner put out a sign next to it that says "Honk twice for..." and has a picture of a devil below it. In defending his decision, he stated that he wasn't a satanist himself, but he didn't want his customers thinking that his business put out the Christian sign. "More people have been killed in the name of God than over anything else, and so I don't think people should fight about religion," he said. "Satan is part of the same religion as Christ, so it's a contrast, not a competing religion." Well, how very postmodern of him.
Strike Two. Here in Missouri, a heavy-weight bout of a different kind is being waged between the theologically and culturally conservative Missouri Baptist Convention (and also the Southern Baptist Convention) and the theologically conservative but culturally liberal emerging church (specifically, The Journey Church in St. Louis). "Missouri's Most Powerful Baptist," Roger Moran, is using his politically established platform as a lay leader in the MBC to blast the practices of emerging churches, such as The Journey, who use alternative methods to reaching the unchurched in today's young adult culture. Apparently, holding official theological discussions at Schlaffly Bottleworks (and enjoying a brewskie or two) is specifically outlawed and condemned in his version of the Bible. He must have missed the part where Jesus turned water into wine... or where He stayed in the houses of tax collectors... or the time when he counseled a prostitute at a well and told her that He loves her in spite of her sin... but I guess that's not important when you have "conservative values," right?
Strike Three. In New York (come on, you knew it was coming!), an artist famed for truly brilliant ideas like spraying 5 tons of pepper jack cheese on a Wyoming home, or "festooning" a 4 poster bed with 312 pounds of processed ham, has been forced to take down his sculpture of a nude, anatomically correct 200 lb. Jesus that was planned to open in a hotel art exhibit. The appropriately named "My Sweet Lord" sculpture caused such an outrage, that the artist was sent death threats and the hotel who planned on hosting the exhibit received hundreds of phone calls. Artist Cosimo Cavallaro, says that it was not his intent to create outrage, but if people would just "listen with open minds..."
I'm sure that many more interesting stories highlighting Christianity will come about as the week goes on. I didn't pick these stories from a group, but are just the first few that came to my attention. I find it interesting that, at the core, each highlights a different manifestation of conflicting beliefs. Why is this the focus of our interest? Why are we looking for conflict? I don't know.
The Post-Dispatch's story on the MBC and the "emerging church," however, I found to be particularly interesting. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, "emerging church," it is a very loose network of interdenominational churches who's association is primarily their shared vision for the future of the Christian faith. Their vision is a return to "the basics" of scripture in loving our neighbors without agenda, and showing how the Gospel is relevant to contemporary culture instead of forcing culture to conform to their own idea of what culture should be. Awesome examples of this are Mars Hill Church in Seattle and The Journey here in St. Louis. I don't want to go into a huge amount of detail in this post because 1.) I want to write more about it later, and 2.) I need to do some more digging to be able to give a better definition. My intent with bringing it up here is in my desire to see this conflict played out and resolved in the church so it can be incorporated into our theology. For too long we Christians have built our fences and walls, creating a system of rules to which we can fulfill and pridefully declare "I'm a good person." Once we realize that being a disciple of Christ is anything but comfortable, pristine, and painless, we will finally be living out the Gospel of grace to our fellow man. Love hurts. But it rocks too.
If you are familiar with the emerging church and would like to learn more, check out Mark Driscoll's "Radical Reformition" or "Listening to the Beliefs of the Emerging Church" (one which I still need to read myself). I know that the last half of this post was as clear as mud, so stay tuned for more entertaining attempts to figure this out and put it to words.
Strike One. In Naugatauck, Conn., a store owner put a sign out that says "Easter: Honk for Jesus." The neighboring tattoo parlor artist and owner put out a sign next to it that says "Honk twice for..." and has a picture of a devil below it. In defending his decision, he stated that he wasn't a satanist himself, but he didn't want his customers thinking that his business put out the Christian sign. "More people have been killed in the name of God than over anything else, and so I don't think people should fight about religion," he said. "Satan is part of the same religion as Christ, so it's a contrast, not a competing religion." Well, how very postmodern of him.
Strike Two. Here in Missouri, a heavy-weight bout of a different kind is being waged between the theologically and culturally conservative Missouri Baptist Convention (and also the Southern Baptist Convention) and the theologically conservative but culturally liberal emerging church (specifically, The Journey Church in St. Louis). "Missouri's Most Powerful Baptist," Roger Moran, is using his politically established platform as a lay leader in the MBC to blast the practices of emerging churches, such as The Journey, who use alternative methods to reaching the unchurched in today's young adult culture. Apparently, holding official theological discussions at Schlaffly Bottleworks (and enjoying a brewskie or two) is specifically outlawed and condemned in his version of the Bible. He must have missed the part where Jesus turned water into wine... or where He stayed in the houses of tax collectors... or the time when he counseled a prostitute at a well and told her that He loves her in spite of her sin... but I guess that's not important when you have "conservative values," right?
Strike Three. In New York (come on, you knew it was coming!), an artist famed for truly brilliant ideas like spraying 5 tons of pepper jack cheese on a Wyoming home, or "festooning" a 4 poster bed with 312 pounds of processed ham, has been forced to take down his sculpture of a nude, anatomically correct 200 lb. Jesus that was planned to open in a hotel art exhibit. The appropriately named "My Sweet Lord" sculpture caused such an outrage, that the artist was sent death threats and the hotel who planned on hosting the exhibit received hundreds of phone calls. Artist Cosimo Cavallaro, says that it was not his intent to create outrage, but if people would just "listen with open minds..."
I'm sure that many more interesting stories highlighting Christianity will come about as the week goes on. I didn't pick these stories from a group, but are just the first few that came to my attention. I find it interesting that, at the core, each highlights a different manifestation of conflicting beliefs. Why is this the focus of our interest? Why are we looking for conflict? I don't know.
The Post-Dispatch's story on the MBC and the "emerging church," however, I found to be particularly interesting. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, "emerging church," it is a very loose network of interdenominational churches who's association is primarily their shared vision for the future of the Christian faith. Their vision is a return to "the basics" of scripture in loving our neighbors without agenda, and showing how the Gospel is relevant to contemporary culture instead of forcing culture to conform to their own idea of what culture should be. Awesome examples of this are Mars Hill Church in Seattle and The Journey here in St. Louis. I don't want to go into a huge amount of detail in this post because 1.) I want to write more about it later, and 2.) I need to do some more digging to be able to give a better definition. My intent with bringing it up here is in my desire to see this conflict played out and resolved in the church so it can be incorporated into our theology. For too long we Christians have built our fences and walls, creating a system of rules to which we can fulfill and pridefully declare "I'm a good person." Once we realize that being a disciple of Christ is anything but comfortable, pristine, and painless, we will finally be living out the Gospel of grace to our fellow man. Love hurts. But it rocks too.
If you are familiar with the emerging church and would like to learn more, check out Mark Driscoll's "Radical Reformition" or "Listening to the Beliefs of the Emerging Church" (one which I still need to read myself). I know that the last half of this post was as clear as mud, so stay tuned for more entertaining attempts to figure this out and put it to words.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
