Theology Lite: Max Lucado on Pretzels

So there I was driving home and listening to one of six Christian radio stations I can now get in my car, when Max Lucado’s Upwords radio minute came on.  This is essentially a sponsorship opportunity for radio stations; a vehicle for them to sell additional advertising.

Now, I don’t want to seem ungrateful for all the books Max has written and the contribution he’s made to Christian literature, in fact I’ve given a few favorable reviews here.  Furthermore, I especially like Max on video. I think the warmth and tenor of his personality comes through the camera better than through the printed page, though, I must confess, I now read his material hearing his voice in my head.

But as I listened to Upwords, I thought, “As fluffy content goes, this is more fluffy than usual.”  So I looked to see if the text was available online to share here, and it was:

Years ago I was traveling with my daughter, Jenna.  When I realized she and I weren’t seated together,  I asked the fellow sitting next to her to swap seats with me.  Surely he’ll understand, I thought.  He didn’t.  I was left separated from my 12 year old on a long transatlantic flight.

I began plotting how I’d trip him if he dared walk to the restroom during the flight. I turned to intimidate him with a snarl and saw, much to my surprise, Jenna offering him a pretzel. What?  My daughter was fraternizing with the enemy! As if the pretzel were an olive branch, he accepted her gift and they both leaned their seats back and dozed off.

I learned the lesson God had used my daughter to teach me. All of us are here by grace and, at some point, all of us have to share some grace. So the next time you find yourself next to a questionable character, don’t give him a hard time—give him a pretzel!

That’s the full text.

Now my goal here is not to take this apart letter-by-letter, punctuation-mark by punctuation-mark. (We’ll leave that to discernment ministry bloggers.) I did make note — especially if I’m ever near him on an airplane — that Max was considering tripping this stranger, and that even in the final paragraph, he still ranks as a “questionable character.”  Of course this is the same man who recently, in his book Grace, confessed to a week of drinking beer out of a paper bag in a convenience store parking lot, and an attempt to bribe an airline official.  Truly, I’m not making that up.

No, I was just concerned that the whole broadcast was a tad light, as in lite. No Biblical text, though I suppose that’s not the goal of Upwords. No deep theology. Not even a teaser for an upcoming book.  (This story is in fact from an older book, The Great House of God.)

I guess I have no major complaint other than perhaps I’d like my sixty-seconds back.  I do think the radio airtime could be better used. I think that Max himself could use it better. Especially in view of the program’s mandate as outlined on his website:

In 1991, Max Lucado was presented the idea of developing a radio broadcast that focused solely on Jesus Christ.

Perhaps there’s a philosophy to this radio vignette; possibly Max builds a listener following and then hits the spiritual home run on Fridays, or at the end of the month.

I just think people are tuning in for something more substantive than pretzels.

Wednesday Link List

Who needs LinkedIn when you’re linked in here?  The picture, Gasoline Gospel is from Shorpy.com; captioned “August 1937. ‘Gas station and gospel mission in Cleveland, Ohio.’ In addition to Koolmotor ‘Gasolene,’ a long-defunct Cities Service brand, we also seem to have at least a couple of the major food groups represented here, as well as two verses from the New Testament. Photo by John Vachon.” Click the image to see the entire picture full size along with more glimpses into history.

• Start with this one: 33 Ways to Know You Were a Youth Group Kid.
• Nick Vujicic, born without arms and legs, is the father of a newborn baby boy! 
• Got 19 minutes? Meet Atheism 2.0, an atheism for people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic side, but can’t stand the doctrine.
  
• First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas is just days away from the opening of its new $130 million facility. And don’t miss the three videos which rationalize that expense.
• A sixteen-year old in Texas is suing her parents who are trying to coerce her to have an abortion she does not want. (See update in comments section.)
  
• Rick Warren has shied away from TV and radio, but is launching a 30-minute daily radio show to air in the top 25 U.S. markets.
• Early artwork has surfaced for the new Left Behind movie; which is actually a remake of the original (book one) story; this one with Nicolas Cage.
  
• Also at Todd Rhoades’ blog: Should churches have Tweet seats? 
• When a U.S. Lutheran pastor attended an interfaith prayer event following the Sandy Hook shooting, he violated denominational rules against ‘joint worship’ with people of other faiths. Now the LC-MS denomination is embarrassed by the reaction on social media.
  
• Veteran Christian music artist Carman reveals to his Facebook followers that he has an incurable cancer.
• Here’s info on an upcoming conference (April 11-13) in Virginia that I would love to be able to attend; presented by Missio Alliance, it’s titled The Future of the Gospel. 
• Home-schooling is banned in Germany, so a family there fled to the U.S. for asylum which was granted in 2010. But now, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking the family’s deportation, which would lead to persecution back home.
• There are some new posts at The Elephant’s Debt, a website devoted to issues of alleged financial improprieties involving James MacDonald and Harvest Bible Chapel.
  
• An alternative wording to The Lord’s Prayer — the Kiwi version, perhaps — you never know what you’ll find in used bookstores. 
• Here’s what I wrote to my colleagues in the Christian book trade about the dwindling relationship between bloggers and publishers seeking book reviews.
• And since we’re ending on a book theme, here’s the chart — including one title error, if you can spot it — of what people in my part of the world purchased in 2012:
  

The Go Deep Link List

The Go Deep List Lynx

It’s like the regular link list but for people who want something they can really chew on.

• If you read the Wednesday list here, you saw a brief reference this week to Becky.  Becky is a fictional prototype of the ideal listener to Christian radio who, according to Sean Palmer, is more than just a media marketer’s target, but she is also setting the agenda for the modern church.  And then there’s this damning statement:
  

  Every element in a church worship service; each program or each new area of ministry has to pass the Becky-test. This means milk toast, predictable, and less engaging worship experiences. The depths and riches of Christian experience go ignored because Becky has no framework to understand them and Christian sub-culture is happy to allow her her illusions of faith provided those illusions are accompanied by her patronage.

  No wonder the article is called Killing Becky.

• Although youth ministry guru Mark Oestreicher — I’m getting to where I can type his name right on the first take — wrote this with youth ministry in mind, it has much broader implications for church ministry as a whole. Mark had me from the first paragraph:
  

  I see the Kingdom of God in less black-and-white frames these days. To say it’s a full gray-scale doesn’t even do it justice. The Kingdom of God deserves a color palette so broad, deep and rich that we don’t have names for all the nuance and variation.

  And also

  In the U.S. church, we want so desperately to be independent mavericks, a Christianized version of the Marlboro Man, riding through the landscape of culture, needing no one, emulating no one. But if we look carefully at the American church in the last 40 years or so, we’re really not all that original. Most of the time we are acquiesce-ers, copiers. We copy culture, and convince ourselves we birthed it.

  The article is actually the first in a series. The main link here is to Presence in Youth Ministry Part One, but there’s also a part two and a part three.

• And then there’s this one, which connects to the graphic below. Basically the idea is that rock hard empirical evidence can only take you so far, and beyond that, whether you choose Atheism or Theism, it involves a major step of faith.
  

  …the relationship between strength of belief and theism/atheism could be visualized as independent variables in a bivariate function, and that doing so might shed some light on my own perspective.

  And this insight

  …Although it is not a linear relationship, I would say the inclination of the individual to proselytize–that is, to attempt to win others to camps that occupy the same region on the curve–increases proportionally with the level of certainty.

  While he uses words like ‘bivariate’ this is a very concise article that is quite easy to follow, and has implications for your next conversation with someone who you’ve seen as having an opposing worldview, but who you now know shares more in common with you than you thought.  Check out Dan Martin’s The Belief Matrix.

Thursday Link List

Thursday List Lynx

Because it’s more interesting than the story about trying to replace a headlight on our car.

• Vitamin Zach had this really unique music video on his blog yesterday with the group Kings Kaleidoscope using a tune you might recognize. Check out All Glory Be To Christ. Refreshing!
• I have some friends who were talking about the whole idea of rethinking the annual choir cantata at their church, when suddenly I came upon this story, Killing the Christmas Pageant.
• In 1854, a young Charles Spurgeon preached his Christmas Eve sermon on Isaiah 7:14-15; the wonder of the ages, God with us — a 4-minute video somewhat reminiscent of “That’s My King.”
• C. Michael Patton offers his fellow Calvinists some advice on how not to respond to tragic events, including trying to overly theologize (it’s a word now) the moment.
• Having done new year trend predictions myself, I’m always interested when someone suggests what 2013 will look like in The Church.
• Did a Christian radio host predict his own death? Frank Pastore succumbed to injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident.
• “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.” If that lyric fragment matches up to a tune in your brain, you’ll want to know that singer Frankie Valens is now a church pastor.
• You can’t have prayer in school, but you can have yoga. As parents protest, what is at stake is the definition of religion.
• For the kid who has everything, Eric Metaxas now has a website selling his Uncle Mugsy series. Yes, Uncle Mugsy, a confirmed bachelor — bachelor bulldog that is.
• Who’s up and coming? Brad Lomenick’s Young Influencers list for December is now online.
• It’s not new, but I’ll leave you with a modern worship song that was running through my mind all day yesterday: Great Are You by Downhere.

Redefining “The Written Word”

The picture above is of a scripture selection my eldest son chose to write out by hand almost a year ago and post on his bedroom wall. It’s remarkable for two reasons, the first being that a few years earlier his efforts at cursive writing would never have produced anything so legible, the second being the love that he has for the Word of God, evidenced by the time he spends in scripture each day.

Writing out Bible passages by hand has become somewhat archaic in a world of word processing. But it’s just one of a number of subtle changes taking place within Western society in terms of our relationship with the printed word:

• Many of us leave our Bibles at home on Sundays, finding it more convenient to use Bibles provided at weekend services
• Many choose to use Bible apps on their smart phones instead of following from a print text
• Many have their devotional and Bible study time driving to work using a devotional on CD or listening to a preacher on the car radio
  
• Scripture memorization has become less commonplace in our children’s and youth ministry programs
• People like myself often ‘absorb’ scripture throughout the day through online articles and blogs but don’t directly read anything at source
• Our worship music is ‘vertical’ which can derive from psalms and similar passages, but is therefore less reliant on the ‘Scripture in Song’ type of choruses that were based more directly on a wider spectrum of scripture passages
  
• The giving out of tracts has died as a practice; many of these began with scripture and contained several Bible passages
• The reading of Christian books has diminished in a screen-saturated world
• Scripture plaques, often seen in the living rooms and kitchens of homes have been deemed inadequate in a world of interior decorating and replaced by “inspirational” wall art with single word admonitions like “dream,” “believe,” “hope,” etc.
• Where once people would add a scripture verse by hand to a greeting card, today we purchase Christian cards with a verse already included

Combine all these, and the handwriting my son did might seem rather quaint. But I’ll bet that taking the time to do this means he knows this passage well.

Of course, more than writing scripture on the doorframes and gates of our houses, God desires for us to write his words on our heart. But how we do this if we don’t know the passages and precepts in the first place? God is revealed to us first and foremost in scripture; this is the primary revelation of God in our times.

So here’s the challenge. Take a passage and write it out by hand today. I did this a few weeks ago with Titus 3: 3-8 or you might consider Colossians 1: 9-14 or the Galatians passage above, or a passage of your choosing. (Those are just two that I’ve done myself, so I’m not asking you to do anything I haven’t done.)

And then allow the words to be written on your heart.

Christian Media in the Home

I’ve previously written here about how we’re big fans of sermon audio when we travel, and as someone who works in the Christian bookstore environment, it’s a given that I’m a huge booster of Christian books and music.

But today I want to approach this from a slightly different perspective.  Over the past few days I’ve written about the battle that goes on for our thought life, and how this takes place on a moment by moment basis.  Back in June, I posted a great analysis of the types of thoughts, that are going on in our heads at any given point in time.

I don’t spend a lot of time commuting, but I am increasingly aware of the contrast that exists between the mental processes that take place when I omit to turn on the radio — which is mostly presets for Christian stations — and the times I have worship songs playing. This is a giant contrast, not a mild difference.

Listening to Bible Teaching

Yesterday we listened to sermons from North Point and Crosspoint.  We tried to find another “point” but left it at those two, plus what we heard in church that morning. The day before I listened to one at Mars Hill (MI), a few days earlier it was a conference talk streaming at Elevation.  You can find all these churches linked in the sidebar of this blog.

Life was not always so.

I can remember asking my parents why they had to constantly listen to more preacher programs. Their media of choice was WDCX, an FM station in Buffalo, and WHLD, a Buffalo AM outlet. Of course, my choice would have been Top 40 rock station 1050 CHUM in Toronto. I think that was the real issue.

But today, although I hunger to learn and grow and discover more about Christ through what others have learned, I also am acutely aware of what happens in the absence of Christian media in the home.

Bible teaching can come in other forms besides radio and television. There are the aforementioned sermons-on-demand and live-streaming church services on the internet, plus some teachers, like Bruxy Cavey at The Meeting House often do a separate podcast. But there’s also CD audio and of course books.

Listening to Christian Music

For some Christ-followers, the dominant form of uplifting, inspirational and wholesome media is Christian music; which may consist of hymns, mass choirs, southern gospel, adult contemporary, Christian rock in all its various genres, and the current favorite, modern worship.

Again, these can be accessed in various forms. Some choose mp3 files which can be played back in the car and in the home. Many people are still buying CDs. Christian music song videos abound on video sharing sites like GodTube, Vimeo and YouTube. There is an abundance of Christian radio available online, and here in North America, most people live within range of a broadcast station that plays music, teaching or a mix of both.

But I have to say that as a worship leader, nothing compares to the songs that you experience in a worship environment with your faith family. Maybe it’s because I was playing in the band yesterday, but one particular song — an original song written by our guest musician — stuck in my head for hours yesterday, and in a good way.

For a listing of some of my favorite songs with video, visit the sidebar in the right margin at Christianity 201.

Listening to God

These varied media I find to be a positive alternative to anything else, and in fact fulfill a direct instruction from scripture:

^{Phillips – Col. 3: 16-17} Let Christ’s teaching live in your hearts, making you rich in the true wisdom. Teach and help one another along the right road with your psalms and hymns and Christian songs, singing God’s praises with joyful hearts.

What will control your thought life this week?

This History of Contemporary Christian Music

Most the “histories” you hear on Christian radio only involve material the production staff were able to source on CD, and of those, some are limited to items still available for purchase on collections, since record companies are actively involved in “helping” the radio guys create these specials.

My purpose at the YouTube collection I created for the SearchlightBooks YouTube account — our sponsor, so to speak — was to find things that nobody had posted on YouTube to date, or possibly any other video service, either…

The Mass for Peace was originally written in Italian in 1963, so if you think Jesus Music began with Larry Norman or the Calvary Chapel concerts around 1969 and following, forget it; the Catholic folk masses really got there first. This one got translated into English in 1967.

The Christian festival scene began with Explo ’72 in Dallas, but was refined by a series of different events in rural Pennsylvania, including Jesus ’75 and ’76 which took place on a diary farm in the western part of the state.  Regulars at this event were the group Hope of Glory, and this 1975 song took it’s cue from a Hallmark Cards advertisement, “When you care enough to send the very best.”

No history of CCM’s early years would be complete without mentioning The Archers. (No, you’re thinking of the Archies…) Tom, Steve and Janice Archers recorded this song later in the career for a concept album by Dony McGuire and Reba Rambo based on the Lord’s prayer.

Contemporary Christian radio took a different form back in the day. There were a few dedicated stations, but many organizations had to settle for purchasing block airtime on secular stations on the weekend, or providing free programming features for use during the week, or even public service announcements like this one. Long before there was Lifeline Productions, there was Chuck Blore Creative Services.

Some people say that today’s modern worship grew out of CCM, while others argue that with groups like New Zealand’s Scripture in Song, the two movements were set on a parallel track and modern worship simply overtook CCM and became the more dominant genre. Here’s an independent recording by Tom & Candy Green that is typical of things people were recording way back when.

We’ll do more of these, or you can visit the YouTube page and see more, but I need to warn ya, it’s an extremely eclectic collection. I have a couple of thousand albums I can access for this, and I’m willing to look at requests for songs not online, but the material has to be both (a) old and of historical interest, and (b) not on a label which may have renewed the copyright.

A Message to Elder Evangelical Statesmen: Retire Graciously

I’m not sure the mystery writer known as Bene Diction has connected the dots on the last three (almost) consecutive posts that ran on his blog on March 6th and 7th. To me the common theme is inescapable.

First, we have John Piper make pronouncements as to the message behind the run of tornadoes in the U.S. heartland that left dozens dead and thousands homeless. This is nothing new. Piper is required to have a take on everything. It’s in his job description. Just as sure as the morning DJ on the local radio station will fill time between commercials pontificating on the events of the day prior, so also does JP feel compelled to weigh in on everything from soup to nuts.  Bene D links to Chaplain Mike at Internet Monk, who in one of his most heated posts ever, spares no words to express his disdain for Piper’s analysis:

After directly attributing these devastating, death-dealing storms to the sovereign, all-controlling God, Piper comments on what he might be trying to teach us. Despite his own warning — “We are not God’s counselors. Nor can we fathom all his judgments. That was the lesson of Job. Let us beware, therefore, of reading the hand of providence with too much certainty or specificity.” — Piper goes on to read three lessons in the storms:

• Like Job, we should just submit and say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
• We should heed Jesus’ words in Luke 13:4-5 and take every storm as a divine warning to repent.
• We should not think that God’s people themselves are exempt from such judgments.

This is a pastor’s message in the immediate aftermath of a terrible disaster.

How comforting. How helpful. How sympathetic. How sensitive. How pastoral.

Not.

But then, a day later, Bene D. reports on the firing of three family members from the Crystal Cathedral/Hour of Power; a media ministry conglomerate now just a shadow of its former self. Lesser people would have waved a white flag at this point, but apparently the church and its television broadcast are soldiering on.  Bene links to the Orange County Register:

…On Sunday, Sheila Schuller Coleman is expected to give the sermon.

Meanwhile, the Hour of Power program, which once reached millions of viewers across the world, will replay previous episodes for the next few weeks while leaders “determine a new direction for the show.”

“Organizational changes affecting ministry leaders are never easy to make, especially when it involves individuals who have devoted their lives to this ministry and have served with great distinction,” John Charles, president of the Crystal Cathedral Ministries, said in a statement. “This was a very difficult decision the Crystal Cathedral Ministries board of directors prayerfully deemed was necessary in order to make a change in direction for the ‘Hour of Power’ and reverse recent declining donations and viewership.”

Five other individuals were expected to lose their jobs in the reorganization.

“Because of privacy concerns, we won’t identify them,” the spokesman wrote in an e-mail.

This is the latest shake-up for the troubled ministry. Last month, Schuller Coleman was removed as the chief executive officer and president of the Ministries and replaced by Charles, who had previously held different positions with the Cathedral.

Then, on the same day, Bene D. reports the apology (sort of) from end-of-the-world date-setter Harold Camping, with the spin emphasis on the people who delved into Bible prophecy as a result of his flawed prophetic calendar. For this, he links to the Family Radio ministry website via Strang News:

Yes, we humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing; yet though we were wrong God is still using the May 21 warning in a very mighty way. In the months following May 21 the Bible has, in some ways, come out from under the shadows and is now being discussed by all kinds of people who never before paid any attention to the Bible.

Do you see the connection? All that’s missing is Fred Phelps and the guy who was going to burn the Qur’an, whose name we have thankfully forgotten.  

Ministry organizations and individuals who have contributed greatly to the spiritual life of many have a sell-by date, and it’s time to disappear graciously and start writing memoirs. Memoirs that can be edited by others, as opposed to media statements and blog posts which appear all too quickly.

I say this with empathy. Having already reached an age where I have been sidelined from certain activities — worship leading is apparently now a young man’s game — I know that being silenced is not easy to take. But in the case of the men and women at the center of these three stories, it’s necessary.

Time does not permit me the luxury of fleshing out this topic as fully as I would like, but perhaps some of you can continue in the meta. Meanwhile, I want to add one extra story.  James Alexander Langteaux is a former senior producer for The 700 Club, who is the author of the forthcoming (April) book, “Gay Conversations with God – Straight Talk on Fanatics, Fags and the God who Loves Us All.  In an interview with Phil Shepherd at Huffington Post, he’s asked how he thinks his former boss, Pat Robertson will react when he comes out of the closet in a major way:

“…Well, after the uproar that resulted from Pat’s comments of dementia being grounds for abandonment in a marriage union, I’m not sure that really matters much…”

In other words, in Langteaux’s eyes, Robertson has already lost his voice.

Joining the dots in Bene Diction’s stories, John Piper, the Crystal Cathedral and Family Radio have lost their voices, too. 

Just as today’s younger communicators need to earn the right to be heard, the elder statesmen of the Christian church need to see that the ‘wisdom of age’ is not a respect automatically granted. Rather, it needs to be proven on a regular basis by statements that continually reflect that the person in question is wise.

In the end, the only expiry dates on credibility in ministry life are the ones we create for ourselves.

Martin Luther and Augustine on Christian Radio

Imagine with me: The apostle Paul, John the Baptist, the prophet Isaiah, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Hudson Taylor all sitting in a room together.  The year is 2012, and they’re listening to a mainstream Christian radio station.  After listening for an hour, someone finally speaks up:

Isaiah:  um….

Paul:  Wow.

Luther:  THIS IS CHRISTIAN?!?!

Augustine:  Did that song just say ‘God you are super neat’?!?

Taylor:  Haven’t heard a song about the cross yet.

John:  This is embarrassing. [Bites into a bug]

Musician Matt Papa has just begun a multi-part series about Christian radio.  Talk about biting the hand that could be feeding you. Link here to get in on part one of the series, Jesus Isn’t Safe, and also a free download of Matt’s newest song.

 

Kamp Krusty: The Sequel

If you’re new to the Christian Blogosphere, you missed out on some classics, including Letters From Kamp Krusty from then WAY-FM radio guy Brant Hansen.  But I’m pleased to announce that Brant is back blogging — a rather alliterative phrase don’t ya think? — as part of the team at AIR1.  Plus, if you’re lucky enough to live in a city where AIR1 has a broadcast station, you can catch him regularly.

Anyway, here’s the link to Brant Hansen’s Blog on Faith, Life and…

And if you have no idea who we’re talking about, here’s Brant’s video for I Am Second.  I hope you’ll get to know him, too.

(Don’t know AIR1? Think a heavier version of K-LOVE from the people who brought you… oh yeah… K-LOVE.) (To my fellow Canadians: Tough luck; AIR1 is geo-blocked just like the BBC.)

Nothing Matters But The Weekend… Some blogs pretty well shut down on the weekend, but weekends can be a rather quiet time for those who miss the pace of work or school; so Thinking Out Loud frequently ramps it up with extra posts on Saturdays. You can be a part of doing something similar. Find a need that’s not being met. Find a group of people who need connection. Find a place where every sign says ‘closed.’ And then step up. Make a difference. Swim upstream. You can have a part in changing lives.