Because Mars Hill never does anything but entertain ...

... they provide a web site formerly known as "zhubert" which is now called Re:Greek. Because Greek plus the NASB plus the ESV is only a sideshow.

For VoxPop visitors, that's sarcasm up above. Reading this blog once is like coming into the middle of a soap opera -- you can't even tell who all the characters are in one episode, but if you stick around the right ones will grow on you.

chicken or egg?

Alert Reader Joel G. sent me this link and asked me to comment. My comment is a question: "Who's fault is this -- the pastors who are going through the meat grinder, or the congregations calling pastors to stick their hands into the meat grinder?"

I also have a second question: when was the last time your church read Titus, 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy together, in that order? Could any of you give the main points of those 3 letters and explain how those points work out in the daily life of your church?

I'm just sayin' ...

A pet peeve

I have this thing about the local church -- and I have no idea when or where I developed this condition, but it's probably going to be fatal to me in the long run.

See: I spend a lot of time here at the blog giving the local church a hard time -- mostly for surrendering its obligations to religious circuses and media sideshows. I think it's not just a shame but shameful when the local church is doing the sociologically-Christian version of watching MTV and eating chips on the couch.

So far, so good, right? Everyone in the blogosphere is prolly saying "amen" to that.

Here's where I get under people's skins: I think that's no excuse for leaving the local church for nothing at all. You can't find a proof-text for becoming a spiritual lone ranger in the Bible, kids. It doesn't exist.

Before we go any farther here, I want us to think about the book of 1 Corinthians for a minute, because it's relevant to this issue. Paul writes to this church which he established because they wrote to him, and they have apparently sent him a laundry list of "stuff" that they can't figure out. For example, they can't figure out who they should follow -- they have factions, and some are Paul disciples, some are Appollos disciples, and some (I am sure these were the protobaptists in the crowd) make the clear claim that they are followers of Jesus and not men -- very pious types, I am sure.

But these people, who apparently have many teachers all of whom has a claim to fame, can't seem to stop bickering. They have disputes which roll over into (what we would call) the secular courts; they don't have the will or the guts to discipline sin for the sake of turning a brother away from destruction; they use daGifts as if they were for entertainment or self-sulfillment; they abuse the Lord's table -- and worth of all, they just don't understand the Gospel.

Your church may be this bad. I am sure many churches today are this bad. Some -- a handful, lead by actual heretics who deny the Trinity or gloss over sin with either self-help psychology or legalism -- may be worse. The problem of having broken or sloppy churches is not a new problem: it is literally as old as the faith. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in c. 55 AD, so in the last 1952 years it's not like this is a new problem.

But let's listen to 1 Cor for a second. Of all the things Paul says to our brothers in Christ there -- the ones Paul says are "sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ", the ones "enriched in [Christ] in all speech and all knowledge ... so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift" -- he does not say, "and if you can't fix these things, people need to leave the church because it is broken beyond repair."

Paul says to fix what is broken -- which is only possible (he demonstrates) by understanding the Gospel and the consequences of the Gospel. And one of the consequences of the Gospel is the local church. But the other consequences of the Gospel -- for example, in 1 Cor 3, "let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future--all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's" -- are to be carried out inside the local church.

So let's imagine that you belong to a Purpose-Driven, First [non-denominational denomination] Community Fellowship Tabernacle of Praise and Holy Spirit theme park church, and you've been dutifully reading the blogs and the various Confessions, and your Bible, and listening to John Piper and John MacArthur and (because you're above average, but under 40) Mark Driscoll and Darren Patrick (or if you're over 40 but still above average) and the White Horse Inn and Mark Dever, and suddenly, your church looks a little small and mundane -- or worse, it looks like it worships its programs more than it worships Jesus.

That is: you have deep pangs of conscience -- and rightly so -- that your church is a disciple of Rick Warren, while it ought to be a disciple of Mark Dever, and a person who used to work for the church (and still attends the church) is suing the church for this or that, and the way your church treats baptism is a joke, and the Lord's table is barely practiced at all, let alone practiced as a solemn remembrance of the New Covenant, and last Sunday your pastor warmly received the text of Your Best Life Now as edifying reading.

Is it your duty to split from that church because it is a disgrace? Paul doesn't even consider that an option. He doesn't put it on the table for the Corinthians. So why is it an option for you?

This is going to come at at DebateBlog pretty soon, so I want you to think about something: how necessary is the local church? That is, do you have an obligation to belong to it, or not? And if you do, how far does that obligation reach?

And no, I have not forgotten the Zens paper. It's right here next to me on the desk. I'll get to it this wek.

Some People ...

Go read this, and then ask yourself: which of the claims made on this page are verifiable? If none of them are, how pious is all this talk in fact? If any of them them are, and they are proven false, is there any kind of consequence for the person or people who are making these statements publicly?

And think on this, please: can you find the Gospel anyplace on that page? If you can, would you point me to it?

Other Loudness

Joe Thorn gave us a link yesterday (it's about time, Joe), and I thought I'd clean up some loose ends regarding what I said there. Because the problem, really, is what we think we ought to be doing about culture. On the one hand, we have all kinds of people who want to view the internal church culture with an open hand, making the culture of the church somehow "like" the culture at large in order to get some people off their duff, so to speak, to come in and maybe hear about Jesus even though they really came for the coffee or the band.

And that sounds like a criticism of the "emergent" folks (and it is), but think about this: there are plenty of nondescript, nondenominational megachurches out there which fit this mold, so let's not pretend that the biggest problem here is the "innovators": the biggest problem is that our idea of innovation (if such a thing is rightly said about the preaching of the Gospel) is to get a new logo for "new Coke" in the hope that it's the logo people hate and not the crappy, too-sweet taste.

But on the other hand, we also have the view that somehow it's the culture we have to save. You know: this gets underscored in this week's Rolling Stone magazine as they do a little 3-pager on Ron Luce's Acquire the Fire empire. I always turn on a second light and get out my reading glasses whenever I see someone who graduated from Oral Roberts University, and I always break out the air fresheners whenever I see someone who is endorsed by Jerry Falwell, but look at what Rolling Stone reports about Luce's view of things -- which is reiterated, btw, at the Acquire the Fire website:

"This is a real war," Luce preaches. When he talks like that, he growls. "This is not a metaphor!" In Cleveland, he intercuts his sermons with videos of suicide bombers and marching Christian teens. One of the most popular, "Casualties of War," features an elegiac beat by a Christian rapper named KJ-52 laid over flickering pictures of kids holding signs declaring the collapse of Christendom: 1/2 OF US ARE NO LONGER VIRGINS, reads a poster board displayed by a pigtailed girl. 40% OF US HAVE INFLICTED SELF-INJURY, says a sign propped up over a sink in which we see the hands of a girl about to cut herself. 53% OF US BELIEVE JESUS SINNED, declares the placard of a young black man standing in a graffiti-filled alley.

Yes: all of the things listed here are bad -- some morally, some theologically. But the question is this: is it the secular culture we have to win? See: I thought that Jesus came to establish a new Heavens and a new Earth, not to try to make the one we have wrecked into one in which Victoria's Secret only sells stuff to married women, but doesn't target unmarried women because that would be profitable.

Jesus didn't come here, giving up His rightful place on the throne of Heaven and the active praise of creatures which will make you cry out in fear because they are flames of fire, and die on a cross so we can have a global America. Middle Class American culture is not the reason the Son of God spilled His own blood. He did not walk out of the tomb to hand you the keys to a new SUV or a house with a nice, flat sod yard.

Jesus came to die for sinners, and it wasn't because He was angry but because of Love. It is because God loved the world that He gave His only son -- you know: "for God so loved the world ...". "For" here means "because" or "on accout of". So the smack-talk about war and opposing cultural terrorists is just as stupid as capitulating to a passive-aggressive culture which will just not talk to you if you disagree with them. Because you're mean.

This Jesus is a crazy person by any normal standard. He thinks that if He dies, many will be saved -- He doesn't think that if he calls down 10,000 legions of angels and frees Himself anyone will be saved. He doesn't demand His rights -- which would be the rights of the King and Ruler of everything -- but gives them up to accomplish something else. And He calls us to be like Him.

He thinks that if we are obedient, the world will hate us, but those who are called will come. Think about that: Jesus doesn't want us to win an argument but to tell the truth and then accept the disdain of those who reject the truth. He doesn't want us to kill our enemies but to love them, and he doesn't want us to attack them but to die to sin daily. If we have seen the enemy, we know that he is Us -- and in that, the wrong thing to do is to call those like whom we once were the real enemies of the Gospel.

If there are enemies of the Gospel, they belong to a group who has access to and in some way posseses the Gospel. The single-mom stripper doesn't possess the Gospel. The Victoria's Secret district manager doesn't possess the Gospel. MTV not only does not possess the Gospel, but it couldn't trip over it if they were standing in the middle of it blindfolded and the Gospel was wrapped in concentric circles around them.

And if I can get this off my chest, there's something wrong with a guy who runs stadium events and lives like Tony Robbins in very nice hotels and has a staff of hundreds who tells kids that they are the ones who need to give up the materialistic luxuries of this world. Heh bub: when you fire your personal hair stylist, stop buying relevant updates to your wardrobe, establish a local church and some personal accountability for yourself among the people of God rather than appealing to phony authorities like James Dobson and Pat Robertson, then you can credibly start the organ music against secularism, materialism, idolatry and immorality and set the monkey to dancing.

So listen to me: this statement -- this thesis which my pastor has proposed and is working out in his own life and the life of our local church -- that "The Gospel is the solution to culture" is not just a slogan which you have to contemplate with some kind of zen-like objective of becoming nothing. This is the serious business of first being utterly humbled by the hands that were pierced through by the nails which we deserved, and the head which was mocked and slapped and crowned with thorns instead of the perfect diadem it deserved, and the side from which blood and water flowed to prove He had died from the punishment; then it is a matter of being that humble before people who aren't that humble, and who think you are stupid and weak for being humble -- until they either kill you for being like the firstborn of many brothers, or they finally see His loving face and feel His loving hands and hear His loving voice in your declaration that they know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus who was crucified.

That doesn't get us a republican majority in the House or the Senate, and it won't get us a pro-life President who will actually seek to protect the innocent and the oppressed: it gets us killed for the sake of our fellow men -- economically, socially, emotionally, professionally, in all the ways our heart and minds and souls can manifest this truth. It doesn't earn us the respect of those who say they like our Jesus but can't understand us: it makes us witnesses -- martyrs -- to truth.

Don't buy the t-shirt. Don't get the plastic symbol for your car. Don't pretend that you can join the club and once you have a membership card it's all good. Get real. Get serious about whether the death of Christ means something more than entertainment and personal gratification.

Thinking Out Loud

I've been thinking about some of the things people on the emergent side of the blogosphere have been saying lately about why people like Jesus but hate the church. Many of them sound suspiciously familiar, but let's admit a few things about the sociological group in the U.S. known and recognized as "Christian":

There is no effort to think about substantive differences inside the sociological loaf of bread. That is: when Pat Robertson says something stupid, everyone from Marginal Mike and Lukewarm Lisa to John MacArthur, John Piper and J. Ligon Duncan takes a credibility hit, and nobody comes out to say, "Pat, please shut up." The leadership of the church has to be more open and public about its repudiation of kooks -- whoever they are. In the American Christian loaf, there is a lot of bread, a lot of vacuous pockets, and enough whole-grain nuts to make the whole loaf full of, um, high fiber, if you see what I'm saying.

There is no effort to systematically and publicly underscore meaningful theological differences. You can prove this yourself by asking any nominal Christian or any non-believer this question: "Is there a substantive difference between what the Bible teaches and what the Koran teaches?" There's no way to approach even the Protestant/Catholic divide -- let alone the Presbyterian/Baptist divide -- when most people can't even identify the uniqueness and superiority of Christ.

There is no effort on the part of denominational leaders across the board to repudiate men who reject denominationalism for the sake of building private empires. The slogan, "I follow Jesus" (and its ugly brother, "I follow the Holy Spirit") ought to be treated in exactly the same way Paul told the Corinthians to treat that slogan -- which is, to reject it from people who use it to garner favor and position inside the church. The exact same thing ought to be true when men embrace denominationalism to raise their own personal capital.

There is also no attempt to distinguish between the actual stumbling block of the Gospel and phony stumbling blocks which people erect to protect themselves from evangelism. For example, it's a phony stumbling block -- a ruse, a red herring -- when someone says they think the church is "too judgmental". Too judgmental about what? When was the last time there was a book burning at a local church that you didn't have to hunt up via Google? How about a live protest against -- let alone public evangelism toward -- homosexuals which was meaningful? The church is not one-tenth as judgmental as the radical political left in this country, and that is to its shame.

And let me be clear about something, before I get misquoted: book burning and public picketing of objectionable events is judgmental. Yelling at homosexuals who are walking around at their version of public worship is judgmental and antithetical to the Gospel. Tearing up books and throwing them into a fire in front of TV cameras is ignorant and mean-spirited. But when does this happen, really? Who has personally witnessed such a thing? Nobody I know -- and I have lived both in large, metropolitan cities and now in the Bible belt.

[UPDATED: To be fair, James White experienced some really amazing stumbling blocks this weekend, so I do actually know somebody who has been a victim of "too judgmental". My suggestion, James, is to post old women in electric wheelchairs outside the church next week and let Lonnie see what kind of stuff he's made of.]

However, at the exact same time, the church is also not 10% as involved in influencing the culture as the radical political left. We live in a bunker, and we behave in public like people who live in a bunker -- which is to say, we have no idea how to act. We look away when people look us in the eye; we stammer, and don't understand the cadences of normal human speech. We act like we have never seen a person outside of our own family before. So on the one hand, we have no idea how to object to things we know are wrong, and on the other hand we don't even know how to treat other people like human beings because we live in the 21st century versions of caves.

I think these are true things -- this is how it really is in the world. And this is not to the church's credit by any leap of the imagination. But what concerns me about these things is that somehow they are used to leverage the good conscience of the church (irony: you'd think that a church like the one above doesn't have a good conscience) to listen to people who are not in or of the church to motivate some kind of change.

Listen: the reason to change is that we are being disobedient to God. There is a great side effect of doing that -- we will decimate the criticisms of those outside the church, and win people by our love rather than by our slogans or arguments. But the method for change is Gospel-centered reformation, and the motive for change which sticks is God-ward love and obedience. So if you have the complaints, above, you're right: those things are true. The question is whether becoming what the culture wants us to be is the answer, or will we be the solution to culture.

Brilliant

We were talking about the Mega Church last week, and this portion of an audio from 9Marks is extremely useful on that topic.

Listen and learn something.

Thus Saith Rick

Adrian Warnock must be running low on blog matter because he e-mailed me (yes: he e-mailed me -- I'm still a little stunned that I get an e-mail from a guy like Adrian) this link to his own blog regarding T4G article 4, including a quote from Rick Warren.

Let me say this: when we quote a guy like Rick Warren, we have to make sure he's doing what he says he's doing in his own quote, rather than just saying, "wow: that seems like a perfectly benign statement from someone the reformed blogosphere thinks is a kook."

Specifically, let's take one phrase from Pastor Warren in hand:

The only way lives are changed is through the application of God’s Word. The lack of application in preaching and teaching is, I believe, the number one problem with preaching in the United States.

That actually sounds pretty good to me, all things being equal. But, as in all real-life situations, all things are not equal.

So here's my challenge (to Adrian, or any reader who has an opinion): can you tell me the difference between exegeting Scripture to find application for the congregation and peppering a pep talk with verses of Scripture which seem to agree or amplify the point one is making?

See: I don't think I (or any of my friends at TeamPyro, or any of the men I admire and link to either permanently or from time to time) disagree that there is a real-time application of Scripture which the right-minded teacher of God's word must expound to his congregation. No question. The problem is when a pastor (for example, Rick Warren) will write a book or present a sermon in which he fishes through every kind of English translation to use Scripture like a magic 8-ball of apparently-Godly slogans.

It is one thing to preach through the book of Titus and never direct anyone's attention to Paul's exhortation of Titus to get people to teach rightly and how that relates to doing good works; it is another altogether to excerpt Titus 1:5 from the Message ("I left you in charge in Crete so you could complete what I left half-done") and apply that to mean that God wants men to clean up the messes their pastor makes. [Nota Bene: I am unaware that Rick Warren has ever done this specifically, so don't imagine I am accusing him of using this verse this way] Sound application of God's word requires sound interpretation of God's word and not an AWANA approach to the Scripture.

Video killed the radio star

I was reading this about Mark Driscoll (which is by Mark Driscoll), and here's the thing: video campus?

Listen: I think it's a sham when people read blogs or listen to the radio or watch (A-HEM) TBN in place of actually belonging to a local church. Your TV isn't a substitute for a local pastor and/or elders and a local church. Period.

But what's up with these pastors who think that if the TV is a Jumbotron and it belongs to the church they have somehow "planted a church"? Yeah, I know there's more to it, but what ever happened to raising up dsciples who are Godly men to staff these churches and let them preach and teach? The problem, if I may be so bold in speaking directly to Pastor Mark, is that somehow men think they are important enough that the work cannot go on without them.

The work could go on without the Apostle Paul: it can go on without you.

Just put some gargoyles up in the front, dudes, because you have found a way to beat out the medieval Catholics for missing the point and going "high church" without going all sacralist. Your sermons are not that good -- no matter who you are.

UPDATED: Before it is even posted, even. Pirate at BHT makes essentially the same point I do here, which scares me. Or maybe it should scare him. Or somebody.

Double-Secret Update: go to AOMin.org, and download the 3/20/2007 Dividing Line, and listen to the show beginning around 00:47:00 to get exactly what I'm talking about. Big Amen.

Aw Geez: I agree with iMonk.