Stout is Better for you than Lager
According to the BBC, a University of Wisconsin study shows that a pint of stout is good for your health… while lager apparently does not produce the same health benefits.
Here’s to staying healthy!
Coram Deo Blog
Archive for July 2009
I Lied to the Librarian
Yesterday I had to confess my sin to the librarian. I lied to her. And not even for a good reason, either.
In our city the only decent theological library is at Grace University, which also happens to be where Coram Deo leases space for our Sunday gatherings. I often spend a half-day each week in said library doing research for my sermons and trying to avoid the Bible-school kids who want to talk about church planting. I often check books out and take them with me. I often forget to return said books on time. I often get fined. But those fines are so minimal that they’re really more annoyances than penalties.
So last week I was checking out a book and the very kind woman who helps to run the library paused after she scanned my library card. “Looks like you have a fine of $1.60.”
“Yeah, can you just put that on my tab?” I said wryly.
“Do you have $1.60?” she asked.
“No,” I answered. Even though I had a $20 in my wallet.
She kindly handed me my books and allowed me to delay payment until another day.
But as I left, the Holy Spirit was working on me. I could have been honest and told her that I just didn’t want to break a $20 for my $1.60 library fine. I could have told her I’d clean out my couch cushions and bring the fine in next week. But instead, I lied.
In my sermon last week, I asked, “What sin do you need to confess or confront?” As I was asking myself that question in prayerful preparation, it was clear that I needed to confess to the librarian.
But I didn’t really want to. Mainly because it was going to be embarrassing. I mean, who ever confesses that sort of thing? It would just make for a real awkward conversation. She wouldn’t quite know what to do with it. It would be easier just to pay the $1.60 and be done with it. Which is exactly why I needed to have the conversation. Because part of repentance is humility – dying to the awkwardness and being willing to be known as a sinner who needs to repent. Even if that repentance seems silly and trivial to the observer.
So yesterday I said to her, “Hey, I need to confess for lying to you.” Her eyes got real big. I went on to explain. I think it was a little out of the ordinary for a library patron to confess sin to the librarian. Usually people just ask how to find books. The only thing she really said was: “Really, you just didn’t want to pay $1.60?” (read with emphasis on “1.60,” emphasizing the trivialness of the amount)
It was awkward and embarrassing. And sanctifying.
3 Books Every Aspiring Church Planter Should Read
The growth of Coram Deo and of the Acts 29 Network is putting me in contact with more and more aspiring church planters across the country. And while I’m encouraged about how God is moving to raise up new leaders, I’m not as encouraged about the preparedness of said leaders missionally or theologically.
I believe that being a good learner (and therefore a good teacher) doesn’t mean knowing what to think, but knowing how to think. Many of the young men who are looking to plant churches only know what to think. They know that Mark Driscoll embraces Reformed theology, and they like his preaching (and John Piper’s too), so they label themselves Reformed. They worked in an attractional church once and didn’t like it, so they’re all about missional church planting. They read blogs from other aspiring church planters who haven’t actually planted any churches yet and get excited about novel-sounding concepts (“missional community” being one of them) with little grasp of the theological or contextual factors that ground them.
For this reason I’m motivated to recommend three books that every aspiring church planter should read. This is a dangerous list to compile because everyone will argue for good books that are left off the list. So note these caveats: First, this is not intended as a theological A-list. I’m not saying these are the first books or even the most important books a church planter should read. I assume (perhaps naively) that a planter is also saturating himself in the rich theological heavyweights (Augustine, Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Grudem, Piper, etc). Second, these books are ‘how to think’ books, not ‘what to think’ books. I value the work of men like Driscoll and Stetzer in delivering the more pragmatic, what-to-think resources, which are greatly helpful and should be widely read and disseminated. But in my humble opinion, unless a church planter can work well in the field of ideas – meaning he can read intellectual/conceptual writing, distill its root themes, and then contextualize them in helpful ways for his own context – he’ll plant a clone of someone else’s church by parroting their ideas instead of developing his own. And that makes him a marketer, not a missionary.
So read the what-to-think stuff. But dwell in the how-to-think stuff. The three books below are a great place to start. I’m sure thoughtful commenters will recommend others. But I’m writing this, so my opinion gets front page.
Dynamics of Spiritual Life by Richard Lovelace – a theology of renewal… one of the best books you’ll ever read on how the gospel brings renewal to people and churches.
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Lesslie Newbigin – don’t be throwing around words like ‘missional’ until you’re familiar with Newbigin’s work and understand why it’s a watershed.
Renovation of the Heart by Dallas Willard – Willard isn’t the most Reformed of theologians, but he’s a master of spiritual formation. And if your goal isn’t to form people spiritually as Jesus would want them formed, then you shouldn’t be planting a church. Don’t read Willard as a how-to manual; read him as a wise mentor who will force you to think about spiritual formation.
An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day (Harvard Business Review)
Does the following paragraph sound familiar? If so you might find Peter Bregman’s post on time management useful.
Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people’s problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I’d been ambushed…
More on Church Discipline
In studying Matthew 18 these past weeks I came across these insightful points in an article from J. Hampton Keathley on bible.org. Good stuff, plus the added bonus of nice alliteration (4 ‘P’ words)!
A church that fails to exercise discipline experiences four losses:
- The Loss of Purity: Church discipline is vital to the purity of the local body and its protection from moral decay and impure doctrinal influences. Why? Because a little leaven leavens the entire lump (1 Cor. 5:6-7). This is the “rotten apple” problem or the “snowball” effect.
- The Loss of Power: Sin in the life of the church grieves the person of the Holy Spirit and quenches His power. If sin remains unchecked by the loving application of church discipline in a body of believers, the Holy Spirit must abandon such a church to its own carnal resources. The unavoidable result will be the loss of the Lord’s blessing until the sin is dealt with. The defeat of Israel because of the sin of Achan in Joshua 7 illustrates the principle. This is just as true for the church today, especially when we know certain things exist but ignore them or simply look the other way because it is difficult to deal with or because it involves one of our friends and we do not want to risk causing problems in the relationship.
- The Loss of Progress: A church that refuses to practice church discipline will see its ministry decline. The church may want to grow and reach out and it may try all kinds of stop gap measures, promotional campaigns, and programs in an attempt to turn things around, but if there is sin in the camp, it will all be to no avail. See Revelation 2:5 and 3:16 for illustrations of this principle.
- The Loss of Purpose: As His ambassadors to a lost and dying world, God has called the church to be a holy people, a people who, standing out as distinct from the world, proclaim the excellencies of the works of God in Christ (1 Pet. 1:14-16; 2:9-15). If this is to occur, we must be different from the world and church discipline helps us to both remember and maintain that purpose. One of the recurring judgments against the church today as demonstrated in various polls taken across the country is the fact there is little or no difference between the church and the secular world when it comes to attitudes, values, morals, and lifestyle. We have lost our sense of purpose.
Gospel-Centered Life FREE for 1 more week
In order to get the word out about the Gospel-Centered Life small-group material, our partners at World Harvest Mission have been offering a free full-length review copy of GCL to anyone who requests one by July 31. That means you have one more week to get in on the action. After the promo period is over, you’ll only be able to preview the first 3 lessons and not the whole study.
Endorsed by Mark Driscoll, Darrin Patrick, Steve Childers, and other leaders in the world of church planting, the GCL material is designed for use in churches, campus ministries, missions agencies, and ministry leadership teams. Please help us get the word out about the free copies before the deadline hits. You can point interested parties to the Coram Deo blog or directly to the WHM site.
Review: “Unfashionable” by Tullian Tchividjian
It took me 7 years to get through seminary. I did it on the side while working full-time, back before there were accredited online programs. Which meant I spent a lot of summers driving with my wife and kids to Orlando, Florida, to spend my vacation time sitting in week-long intensive courses (40 class hours crammed into 5 days).
In the summer of 2000 I sat in the back row of a New Testament class with two guys who seemed to be somewhat well-known to the professor. He was always cracking jokes about their family members – things like “I disagree with your dad on this one” or “Your grandfather probably knows more about this than I do.” Being slower than the average guy, it took me a while to figure out that I was flanked by Elliott Grudem (son of well-known theologian Wayne Grudem) and Tullian Tchividjian (AKA Billy Graham’s grandson). I made their acquaintance as we worked through the exegesis of Hebrews and have maintained loose contact with them since then. Elliott is now an A29 church planter in Raleigh, NC, and Tullian, after planting a PCA church in South Florida, made headlines this past year by being selected to fill the shoes of D. James Kennedy at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
Obviously Tullian’s family connections have opened some unusual doors for him. But he is a good, articulate theologian in his own right. His short booklet called The Kingdom of God was required reading for Coram Deo’s membership process in the early years. Most recently, he’s released a new book called unfashionable which explores what Christian cultural influence should look like.
Tchividjian’s writing is less erudite than that of Tim Keller, who penned the foreword for unfashionable. So he won’t win style points with some critical readers. But he does get high marks for clear, cogent, accessible prose. For those who are deep into Keller’s work on contextualization or who have read giants like Abraham Kuyper or Francis Schaeffer, Tchividjian probably won’t tread any new ground. But unfashionable is an excellent tome for those who find Keller a little too heady, for evangelical Christians who are just awakening to the importance of culture-making, or for skeptical young Christians who felt homeless in the ‘religious right,’ voted for Obama mainly to spite James Dobson, and are wondering if they should even care about evangelism.
Tullian’s basic hypothesis is that Christians have mistaken being “cool” for being influential. In our desire to impact the culture, we have sold out to hipness at the expense of the gospel. (I think we at Coram Deo need to hear his rebuke squarely.) His contention is that true cultural impact will require us to be unfashionable – to be against the world, for the world. If we are truly following the biblical pattern, we will not be accepted as cool or desirable in the culture. But we will be compelling by the very virtue of our unfashionableness. His concern is summed up in this pregnant quote from Charles Spurgeon: “He who marries today’s fashion is tomorrow’s widow.”
In spite of its diagnosis of the problem, unfashionable is not primarily a work of critique. It’s an apologetic for a return to rich, robust, theologically rooted cultural impact. Tchividjian unpacks the biblical storyline of Creation-Fall-Redemption and shows how a proper view of the future (restoration, not rapture) gives purpose to our efforts at redeeming culture:
God’s ultimate purpose for Christians is not to bring them out of this world and into heaven but to use them to bring heaven into this world… God wants those he’s redeemed to work at transforming this broken world and all its broken structures – families, churches, governments, businesses – in a way that reflects an answer to the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” God has called Christians to play a role by celebrating what’s good and true and beautiful, working for change in what isn’t, and looking forward in hope to God’s redemption of all things.
Along the way, he teaches and trains, offering helpful insights from theologians past and present:
It’s been helpful for me to understand the distinction Abraham Kuyper made between ‘persuasion’ and ‘coercion.’ For Kuyper, persuasion is the Christian’s role and responsibility toward culture here and now – seeking to influence every sphere of society (such as the family, government, education) for Christ and bringing the standards of God’s Word to bear on every dimension of human culture. Coercion, on the other hand, is the role and responsibility of Christ, not Christians. Jesus alone possesses the right and power to ‘coerce,’ or force, culture in a Godward direction, and this is a right he will fully exercise only when he returns to make ‘all things new’ (Revelation 21:5). Understanding the difference between persuasion and coercion – between our role and Christ’s role – helps us serve God with realistic expectations.
My overall recommendation: this might not be a “buy it immediately” book, but it’s definitely a “put it on your Christmas list” book. Especially for those of you who work in education, art, media, government, and other culture-making institutions, unfashionable will help you better understand the how and why of being against the world, for the world. I am jealous for all of us in Coram Deo to have a solid grasp on how the gospel informs our interaction with culture – and in these matters, Tullian is a reliable guide.
We Need People in Lincoln
If you have been hanging around our blog or our church for long, you know that our God-ordained vision is to saturate our region of the country with gospel-centered, Jesus-exalting, neo-Calvinist missional churches. We are always promoting church planting, training church planters, networking with potential church planters, and also telling over-eager guys who haven’t exercised dominion over their backyard yet that they probably aren’t ready to plant a church.
So we are excited about what’s happening in Lincoln, where Todd Bumgarner is preparing to launch a new Acts 29 church next year. Todd is right now in the process of gathering a launch team… holding vision meetings, laying out the plan, and praying for God to draw the right team together. Yes, we’ve blogged about this opportunity before. But I’m mentioning it again because we want to keep casting the net out there for people who are in Lincoln or who know people in Lincoln who might want to be part of this venture. Please get in touch with us at Coram Deo, or contact Todd directly via his blog.
Todd preached this past Sunday at Core, our sister church here in Omaha. You can give it a listen to understand more about why we plant churches. One of most significant ways you can help is to get the word out, and to pass along contacts in Lincoln who might be interested.
This Fall at Coram Deo: Colossians
Starting in August, we’ll dive deeply into the New Testament book of Colossians at Coram Deo’s Sunday gatherings. In case you want to get a head start, here are some suggestions.
First, just read Colossians. Read it multiple times. It’s a short book – 4 chapters. If you set aside 20 minutes a day to read through the book, you could read it 20 or 30 times between now and when we start the series.
Second, study Colossians. Bible study, like any practice, has to be learned. Walker has put together a great, short resource for basic Bible study that I’ll ask him to post later. But getting started is fairly easy. We often suggest using the Internet to print out a clean copy of Colossians on white paper with large margins. Then grab some colored pencils or pens and start making your way through the book, reading slowly and thoughtfully, marking important terms (repetition, contrasts, cause/effect statements, commands, and summary statements are a few good things to mark) and writing in the margins whatever questions come to mind. DON’T consult your study Bible – that’s a shortcut! Wrestle with the text yourself.
Third, try to answer your questions by cross-referencing Scripture. For instance, what does it mean that Jesus is the “firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15)? Your first step in answering this question should be to look at every other place in the Bible where the term “firstborn” is used. What this term means in the rest of the Bible is key to what it might mean in this passage. Bible Gateway’s keyword search is a good resource for this step.
Fourth, consult some good exegetical and theological resources. For questions you can’t answer on your own, God has provided His church with an abundance of resources put out by good pastors and scholars. But these tools will only be useful to you if you’ve wrestled with the text yourself. The fact that you can parrot back what someone else says doesn’t make you a good Bible student. I recommend Douglas Moo’s commentary on Colossians, released in 2008 in the Pillar Bible Commentary series. Moo is a first-rate scholar whose writing is lucid and helpful to the average person. (The only weakness is that he bases his commentary on the TNIV, which is a trendy but poor translation of the Bible.)
The past year has been great fun in the area of preaching as we’ve tackled Objections to Christianity, the God Who Is, and the book of Lamentations. But I’ll be honest: I’m excited about making our way verse-by-verse through Paul’s letter to the Colossians and dwelling in it together.
A29 Quarterly in STL – Aug 18
I’ve been invited by the guys at The Journey to train some church planters and missional leaders at the next Acts 29 Quarterly event in St. Louis. I’ll be joining Jared Wilson, author of a new book called Your Jesus is Too Safe. I haven’t read the book yet, but the title has me interested.
If you’re a Coram Deo member, please pray for me as I serve these pastors and leaders. If you’re in or near St. Louis, come join us for the quarterly. And if any of you aspiring planters in Omaha are interested in buying a ticket and winging down to STL with me for a day, let me know. The folks at the Journey are great hosts, and quarterlys are always a great time to interact with some of the region’s best missional leaders.
