Imagine yourself getting the call to evacuate. You, like myself, would probably get as much as you could pack into a couple of bags and head for a relatives house, thinking to return in a week or so. Except imagine that you have no nearby relatives, or no means of getting to them.It makes apologetics look a little stupid, doesn't it? I know something about Brad -- and I am CERTAIN he didn't make this fellow feel like a bum. But whatever this anonymous victim of the flood had, he should not have to trade dignity for a pillow for his daughter.
Here you are, plopped down with your wife and children in the midst of hundreds of strangers, sleeping on a concrete floor. Such a scene should arouse the compassions of the basest pagan in the world. How then ought the children of God react?
The indignity of it is pitiful. Last night, a man tried to pay us for a pillow for his daughter. They had been plucked off of a roof. We didn't want or need the money, and he knew it. But I could see clearly that he was trying desperately to hang on to the one thing he had left: some shred of pride and decency. No, I'm not talking about a works oriented, sinful pride. I'm talking about a man who did not wish to be viewed as a bum. I'm talking about a man who, after he had lost everything, still wanted to provide something for his family.
This is far worse than most people realize. We have over 200 New Orleans residents staying here in our local high school. They are devastated. They've lost everything.Well, it turns out I have some experience with this. Back in the late 90's, there was a blizzard in Upstate NY -- particularly the Adirondacks region -- which knocked out power for everything north of Albany into Montreal. At that time, I was the GM of a SAM'S Club, and my Director of Operations got on the phone with the Home Office to do what any sane person would do: supply the things people needed most. In this case, it translated into Coleman generators -- 3 truckloads of Coleman generators.
We are currently gathering as many of the basic necessities as we can to bring them there to donate. Please give to the Red Cross or SBC. The needs are overwhelming.
Just as a footnote, as I hurriedly write this off, Wal-Mart refused to discount anything for us. That seriously irked me. They told me that "they had already given". It strikes me as evil to max out profit on suffering people.
Those trapped in the city faced an increasingly lawless environment, as law enforcement agencies found themselves overwhelmed with widespread looting. Looters swarmed the Wal-mart on Tchoupitoulas Street, often bypassing the food and drink section to steal wide-screen TVs, jewelry, bicycles and computers. Watching the sordid display and shaking his head in disgust, one firefighter said of the scene: "ItÂ’s a f---- hurricane, what are you do with a basketball goal?" Police regained control at about 3 p.m., after clearing the store with armed patrol. One shotgun-toting Third District detective described the looting as "ferocious."So while WMT may not be handing out its cans of corn and loaves of bread, it also is facing its own problems. <SARCASM> I'm sure unionized workers would have done a much better job protecting their work site than these ununionized workers did </SARCASM>, but WAL*MART is taking as great a hit in this region as anyone. More than 80 stores are closed due to this catastrophe.
"Given that Christ is our only possible Savior, how is it that Christians believe that Christ can be banished from our public life, while simultaneously believing that sin and disobedience can be kept out of our public life by some other means, some other savior? How can we reject Christ in this way and not have homosexual marriage?" (Black and Tan, p. 20).I know where he takes this from here and I don't agree with all of it, but I think he's onto something here.
Have you ever noticed that wacky conspiracy theories are presented in rhetorical questions?On my way home I'm buying canned goods, bullets and liquor.
Do you think it's time I came up with a new one?
Have you actually been to Louisiana in the last day or two?
Have you seen the hurricane?
So how do you KNOW that there's really a bad storm down there?
Isn't it strange that the authorities are herding people into the Superdome for shelter?
(Aren't these the same "authorities" that were deployed in Florida on Election Day 2000?)
Isn't it stranger still that the Superdome doesn't have any windows?
As for us, who aren't in the area, can we really believe the corporate-owned media in its coverage?
You think maybe that this so-called hurricane will drive up oil and gas prices?
Just whose buddies will benefit from that?
Don't you just know that Karl Rove is behind all this?
"At least you've got the acting president of the United States," Sheen said as the crowd of more than 300 people cheered. "I think you know what I do for a living, but this is what I do to stay alive."Here's what I think: they should get some Muslim clerics out there praying to Allah to help out with Mrs. Sheehan's protest. That makes about as much sense as praying to Mary over this -- maybe moreso, since Allah is the god of the men with whom we are at war.
Then Sheen led anti-war demonstrators who are Roman Catholic in reciting the rosary.
In a stated act of "self-cleansing" on January 22, 1998, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Grand Inquisitor for the Roman Catholic Church and head of its Congregation fro the Doctrine of the Faith, speaking for the church, said that their archives (4,500 volumes) indicate a death toll of 25 million over the centuries. That's just those killed by the Catholic Church for being heretics. (An likely two-thirds of the original volumes are lost).25The astounding irony of footnote 26, btw, is that Rutz has the audacity to cite Machen's Christianity and Liberalism as a source for this point -- as if Machen would agree with Rutz about any of his other theological points. But to stay on-point here, notice that this is one continuous stream of text -- no ellipses. This is the thesis as Rutz presents it: The church "made" systematic doctrine to combat heresy even though human minds cannot fully explain the issues at stake, but on the other hand doctrine is based on the Bible and anyone who doesn't have "conservative" doctrine is in a "sinkhole" of liberalism. It's complete blather -- you can't make heads or tales of what he means here.
How could the followers of the gentle Savior cause such a death toll? It all started with doctrine. Following the early church's struggles with heresies, finely tuned systems of doctrine were hammered out. Eye-crossing, i-dotting precision was achieved, even in issues like the nature of the Trinity, the incarnation of Christ, and predestination vs. free will, all of which are beyond the ability of men's minds to fully explain.
This battle-hardened theology was bequeathed to succeeding generations of Christians, right down to our parents. Doctrine was a war banner, a flag we waved to flaunt our differences from other denominations. Thus, out most cherished truths became our prime sources of distrust and division instead of unity and love.
Today, however, doctrine is more likely a foundation under our feet or an anchor to keep us from drifting away from the truth. We've learned to unite around the core doctrines we have in common.
Unfortunately, many of the large U.S. and European denominations are dying out because they have abandoned the pretext of conservative doctrine and dove into a sinkhole of liberalism, whose tenets are 180 degree off from the truth.26 Lead astray by their leaders, they have lost touch with the bedrock verities of the Bible. They have followed the perennial pattern of error crashing into the church from the theologians and power players.
25Women's Summit 2000, unpublished 2000 manuscript by Bindu Choudhrie, page 18.
By striking and destroying this symbol of spiritual apartheid, God gave us a peek inside His heart. Tommy (Tenney) tells me it was "a slap in the face for overly tight human control of the church."Well, maybe this is the case, but at the same time, Rutz is adamant that a church be based on a five-fold ministry -- which, for those of you not familiar with such a thing, has a system of church government with apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. These two distinct models -- "open" services and church government on one side and 5-fold government on the other -- can't be reconciled, but that doesn't stop Rutz. He just says they are compatible, and the reader is not expected to ask any questions. Apparently, because God said so.
The burden of this reply lies, however, in actually producing a linguistic theory that sustains a principled class of sentences that could seriously be regarded as analytic in this way. This, as yet, it is by no means obvious that it can do. Some of its most prized examples, such as (10) in set II, linking killing to death, have been contested on linguistic grounds (see Fodor (1970, 1998), but also Pietroski (2002) for a recent, technical reply). And many linguists (e.g., Jackendoff (1992), Pustejovsky (1995)) proceed somewhat insouciantly to include under issues of “meaning” and “conceptual structure” issues that are patently matters merely of ordinary belief or even merely phenomenology. For example, Jackendoff and others have called attention to the heavy use of spatial metaphors in many grammatical constructions; but, of course, from such facts it doesn't begin to follow that the many domains to which these metaphors are extended, say, the structure of the mind, social relations, or mathematics are, themselves, somehow intrinsically spatial.{Emph added}I wonder: does this paper itself have any sentences that can be classed as analytic? If not, do the words in this paper actually do anything epistemologically, or are they just some linguistic gaussian cloud which barely maintains existential weight?
With unmistakable clarity and an apparent lack of self-consciousness, Robertson simply called for an assassination, presumably to be undertaken by U.S. military forces in violation of U.S. law.Now why was I wrong when Dr. Mohler's point harmonizes with my earlier statements on this topic? Because there was no Christian backlash against Roberston's heartless, mindless, useless comments.
In so doing he gave the Venezuelan leader a propaganda gold mine, embarrassed the Bush administration, and left millions of viewers perplexed and troubled. More importantly, he brought shame to the cause of Christ. This is the kind of outrageous statement that makes evangelism all the more difficult. Missing from the entire context is the Christian understanding that violence can never be blessed as a good, but may only be employed under circumstances that would justify the limited use of lethal force in order to prevent even greater violence. Our witness to the Gospel is inevitably and deeply harmed when a recognized Christian leader casually recommends the assassination of a world leader.
Your life is about to change. Something your were expecting is not going to happen, and something you didn't expect will materialize instead. Love is always a possibility, but caution is always advised.That applies to all signs and all birthdays. Don't waste a click on a horoscope that won't be any more specific or insightful than the one I just gave you.
Yeah, you've definitely got a better blogheader than the PP. I like the splash of color on the latest edition.Now, because Phil is a Pastor, and due double honor and all that, I am not going to point out that I warned all the MSIE users a long time ago that they were going to have problems rendering this blog, and that they could get a browser for free that would give them better web browsing results not just for us but for all men. Instead, out of deference to a greater man who is almost single-handedly responsible for the popularity of my blog in the first place, I spent my morning mucking up the blogger template so that MSIE users -- who, like lemmings, still comprise 66% of all visitors -- get almost exactly what they ought to be seeing and my sidebar doesn't drop down to the footer of the page. I can't make the post subject lines render in all-caps in Arial Black in MSIE. I have tried everything, and IE 6.X just won't do it. Sorry 'bout that.
The right column is still messing up in IE, though.
Phil Johnson | Homepage | 08.22.05 - 5:30 pm | #
[Snoop Dogg], whose real name is Calvin Broadus, also has deep roots in youth football. He remembers the life lessons he learned while playing for the Long Beach Poly Junior Jackrabbits.You all read my blogging about Christian hero Bono, right? I'm waiting for somebody to start calling Snoop Dogg a Christian hero. Who's got that kind of moxie?
"It taught me how to work with other kids," he says, "how to have a relationship, how to learn. My coach taught me about religion as well as football, about keeping God in everything we did." (emph. added)
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The people of this country, the people who make this country work differ from you in tremendous ways. They are religious. They are God-fearing. They respect values and morality. They know what's right and they know what's wrong, and they do their best to abide. You are offended by all that, claiming they don't have the right to make such decisions, while you sit around and make no decisions whatsoever because you're willing to totally put your life in the hands of some liberal politician and that will take you off the hook for having to make any decision about your life or anybody else's. Well, that's not how the country works. This country works on the basis of an educated and informed public seeking excellence in their own lives to whatever degree they wish it. People pursuing life the best they can, using freedom, God-given freedom -- and for you to call here and to come up with something as irrelevant as to say this war is not worth it because the president's kids aren't there or because nobody from Washington's kids are there doesn't say a thing about the war effort, doesn't say one thing about it, doesn't make it noble, doesn't make it ignoble, doesn't make it anything, because the war is taking place. Whether you agree with the fact that it's going on or not, we all have come to the decision that it's best that we win it. You haven't even joined us on that. You hope we lose it. You want to lose it because you want to embarrass the leaders of the country. What must your lives be like?And that wasn't scripted -- as far as I know or as far as I have been able to discover. I kinda got sick of Rush about 6 or 7 year ago, but this monologue tells us something about him. It tells us that Rush really believes this stuff.
Faith Voices serves its diverse member organizations by enhancing community interconnections. We are the exclusive provider of the powerful new technology, Synanim, a dialogic, collaborative internet technology that enables large numbers to create consensus.Apparently, they are religious activists, too -- but of a stripe from which Steve and Jonathan (and me) would distance themselves. Now here's the question:
Through our unique technologies and services, we help our membership contribute to the renewal of American democratic life.
Strengthen Organizations
* Encourage dialogue and synthesize consensus among members
* Coordinate event planning and information sharing among members
* Deliver a unique fundraising method that broadly enfranchises donors
Engender Ideas and Leadership
* Spark new thinking about values, religion, and public policy
* Broaden the public role of theological schools and religious scholars
* Prepare emerging religious and activist leaders
I dispensed with 1.238 billion nice folks who comprise the mainline denominations plus the highly overlapping 1.330 billion souls whose only "problem" is that they are capital-E Evangelicals, meaning they are not charismatic or pentecostals. My sincere apologies to my evangelical friends (now perhaps ex-friends), but my numbers cover 1970-2000, and they show that during those 30 years, charistmatics and pentecostals grew worldwide at a blistering 8.8% annual rate, while Evnagelicals limped along at 1.1%.That's an interesting assertion, but what does it mean? Let's look at a quick chart for one group, the Southern Baptists:
607132 / 7,400,000 = 8.2%
YEAR MEMBERS BAPTISMS %
---- --------- -------- ---
1980 1,297,418 109,935 8.47%
1981 1,457,477 127,239 8.73%
1982 1,560,566 142,394 9.12%
1983 1,683,573 144,224 8.57%
1984 1,867,993 156,255 8.36%
1985 2,000,847 158,626 7.93%
1986 2,032,193 185,689 9.14%
1987 2,145,113 203,824 9.50%
1988 2,105,066 197,863 9.40%
1989 2,450,884 227,564 9.28%
1990 2,661,668 208,381 7.83%
1991 2,988,052 233,334 7.81%
1992 3,456,900 251,901 7.29%
1993 3,735,949 262,758 7.03%
1994 3,918,915 302,132 7.71%
1995 4,111,979 287,806 7.00%
1996 4,100,923 283,674 6.92%
1997 4,112,181 283,100 6.88%
1998 4,432,292 333,034 7.51%
1999 4,917,088 363,703 7.40%
2000 5,624,018 451,301 8.02%
2001 5,834,043 395,773 6.78%
2002 6,237,706 421,436 6.76%
2003 7,042,714 510,357 7.25%
2004 7,451,242 607,132 8.15%
The direction of world events has made a sharp turn. Before the mid-1980's, Christians were growing about 2% a year, barely above the world population growth rate. Now God has stormed on the scene like a tornado. Compare today's annual growth rates:You can take your favorite quote about statistics and apply them to this chart - because we're not looking at a rigorous study of fact in Mr. Rutz's illustration. In the first place, his "source" for these number behind the chart - according to his endnote #14 - is a place called uscwm.org. Their "fact" is that "for the first time in history, there is one believer for every 9 people worldwide who are not believers." Mr. Rutz does the math, and comes out with "707 million switched-on disciples".
Core Apostolics are the new saints who are at the heart of the mushrooming kingdom of God.
My tiny contribution today to church statistics is that I've been able to put a frame around the growing heart of Christianity - a very rough and ruthless frame, but a sensible one:I am certain anyone reading this blog - friends and whipping-boys alike - can see where this is going, or at least where it is coming from. However, it's instructive to see him spell it all out. It's actually funny if you approach it from the perspective that he clearly no idea what he is talking about.
A. I've place the entire church on a continuum. On the left side, you have the denominational folks. At the far left end, you have a vast pile of tradition-bound, liberal, ancient, highly-centralized, and strategically-useless organizations that haven't grown much since the 1940's.
On the right side, you have the independents, composed of overlapping groups know by such labels as post-denominational, neo-apostolic, radical, restorationist, free, etc. Bartlett and Johnson trace their origins to 61 AD, starting with the Celts, then flowing onward through the Montanists, Donatists, Monophysites, Arians, Cathari, Bogomils, Waldensians, Lollards, Lutherans, Puritans, Methodists, etc.(World Christian Trends, Part 6, p. 293) Eventually, most of them have either turned into denominations or been stomped out of existence by their better-armed brothers in the faith.See: when I read somebody lumping "Montanists, Donatists, Monophysites, Arians" in with "Lutherans, Puritans, Methodists", I wonder how this book got past the editor. And that's just his "A" methodological prop. Check out his "B":
B. I've pin-pointed the groups at the growing heart of Christianity. But hold the applause, it was not through a stroke of brilliance by isolating some magical quality that sets the core apostolics apart from everyone else. It was through the far-cruder tactic of lopping off the slow-growing groups at both ends of the spectrum en masse.So this fellow apparently lays out the classes of "Christians" on a spectrum based on organizational characteristics, and then lops off the ends of the spectrum based on the criterion of "slow growing".
Why is membership important?Stanley isn't playing games about discipleship of believers. My personal opinion is that he learned a lot from watching his father (the mistakes as well as the good things), and if (BIG "if") the megachurch is useful in God's kingdom, Pastor Stanley is someone to watch to do it well.
* Membership helps the staff to identify the people in whom we can trust to lead and care for others.
* Membership identifies that a person has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and that he/she is willing to go public with that faith through baptism.
* Membership identifies that a person is willing to support this ministry with their time, talents and treasure and to be held accountable to the values of NPCC. With the added requirement of participation in a strategic service team or community group, it also identifies that the person will partner with us in our strategy of "Foyer to Kitchen".
Why is it important to be a member in order to be in a leadership role?
* Because of what membership represents, members are the most qualified people to be in a leadership position.
* Often, if people are not willing to be held accountable, to go public with their faith through baptism, or to commit to leading people into a relationship with Jesus Christ, it can be an indication that they are not ready to lead others within the church environments.
“The Aristocrats” might have made a nice short subject. At 87 minutes, it's like the boozy salesman who corners you with the Pinocchio torture. I am left with three observations. (1) If Buddy Hackett were still alive, he could have told it better than Gilbert Gottfried. (2) Whatever happened to Andrew Dice Clay? (3) The punch line stinks. These are better:FWIW, I can tell you what happened to Andrew Dice Clay. The Diceman is an entertainment outcast. When he came out with "The Day the Laughter Died", he crossed a boundary that people who want to stay employed in entertainment should never cross: he made the audience the joke.
“The Brothers Two.”
“The Mellow Tones.”
“Penn and Teller.”
As you undoubtedly noticed, I like comics. I wouldn't call myself a "fan boy" because I don't give a flying FOOM what they are worth. That said, almost all the images on my blog are scanned from comics I own -- so they are scanned from comics I own and are used under what I assume is the basic tenets of "fair use" under copyright law. It would be frankly impossible to tell you where each images comes from specifically.
Many are © and/or ® Marvel Comics Group, with all rights reserved.
Others are © and/or ® DC Comics, which is an arm of Time/Warner, and not only are all rights reserved but they are a little jealous about it, so if I get "the letter" from them, those images are just going to turn into blank spots until I configure out what to do about that.
There are also the occasional images from Valiant, Image, Defiant, Dark Horse, and some indies which I'm not sure even have a name, and they are all also © and/or ®, all rights reserved.
All other images not covered by this disclaimer are the property of their respective owners, and if you are one of those people and you see your image on my blog, tell me what you want me to do about it and I will. No sense making people angry.
Hope that helps.
