Wednesday Link List

Some extra graphics this week for your Facebook page or tumblr blog.

• UPDATE from yesterday’s post here concerning Two-and-a-Half Men actor Angus T. Jones: Journalist Maria Cowell has asked all the right questions in this interview posted at Christianity Today.
• Christmas songs: How soon should they start and how many should you do? For worship leaders, Jason Hatley offers a programmatic approach to building Christmas music content. (Mainline churches don’t have this problem as tradition pretty well dictates content.)
• Or you could do this song. (Nobody would ever forget it.)
• Which reminds me, our 2010 post, Should Audiences Stand for the Hallelujah Chorus still gets a lot of readers and the odd comment. (But you should probably stand for And Can It Be and All Hail The Power, too.)
• Lots of music-related stuff this week, like Rich Kirkpatrick’s list of questions about worship ministry that weekend service attenders might like answered. (Some of which I hadn’t thought of before.)
• Of course you can’t please everyone with church music; here’s a classic Perry Noble response from 2007 — five years ago — about loud music in the church.  (He’s running a top ten list from each of the last seven years of blogging.)
• Or you might prefer Perry’s 2006 post on seven reasons why Jesus wouldn’t qualify as a pastor in most of our churches. (He’d certainly be under review by now.)
• Mark O. offers some great advice for the parents and youth leaders of middle-school teens on how they see themselves.  (It actually does involve using a mirror.)
• I’m not sure why I made this a ‘page’ and not a ‘post’ — probably the extreme length of it — but we still get lots of hits on The Eight Things That Destroyed Our Marriage, culled from eight different blog posts by Justin and Trisha Davis. (I think Justin turns up occasionally on Pete Wilson’s Sunday service online feed.)
  
• Sometimes the things that turn up in a week of faith-based web-surfing are just bizarre, like this April-released movie, Seventh Gay Adventists. (I think it’s more about gay than the SDA church.)
• Greg Boyd — a major proponent of what’s called ‘open theology’ — defines the phrase in terms of ‘unrealized possibilities’ in this four minute video.  (But does God know if you’re going to click on this link or not?)
  
• Here’s another review of a 2009 book that is proving to be the sleeper title of 2012: The Lost World of Genesis One. (Note to friends and family: Since you can’t get review copies of 3-year-old books, this one is at the top of my Christmas list.)
  
• A word of the week for preachers and public speakers: Fermata.  (Hint: It’s a music term.) (HT: Darryl Dash‘s Saturday Link List for pastors.)
• Ken Ham responds to a website written for teens who need encouragement in living as atheists, including a section on how they can ‘come out’ to their parents. (He encourages parents to have a counter-response.)
• There’s an app for The War Cry, the Salvation Army magazine that traces its history back to 1879 enters the digital age. (Canadian readers: Ours is a different edition; not sure if it’s online.)
• Are there people at your church you try to avoid? Just asking. (Maybe I’m the guy everybody else is avoiding.)

I love this well-marked Bible; it’s my current desktop theme.

Skye Jethani: Multi-Site is Biblically Counter-Intuitive

This quotation is from the Phil Vischer podcast (episode 23) and occurs starting around the 32:00 mark, with this text around 35:00

If I’m going to go and sit in a room with a bunch of strangers and watch a screen anyway, why not just sit at home and watch the same thing and not have to deal with the parking headaches… Here’s the irony: In my mind: of all the religions out there, Christianity is the one for whom incarnation is absolutely essential. It’s the foundation of our faith; God became flesh and dwelt among us. That’s the incarnation. And now we are disincarnating the Church … the pastor’s just a projection of pixels on a screen, I don’t really know the people around me because it’s such a massive community that I’m just anonymous in it. And I think, frankly, that although these trends are happening… I don’t think it’s going to last…

Here’s the thing… I can come in as a guest speaker. I know a little bit about your community, a little bit about that congregation. I can say some things, I can drop some bombs, I can fly away. But when you are incarnate in that community, like this pastor [where I was last week] he’s telling me what’s going on in this church, people who are sick, families that are struggling, the nitty gritty of living life together in community and he knows these people… He takes that knowledge of his sheep into the pulpit with him as he crafts a sermon and studies the word of God, brings the reality of his congregation’s unique challenges and struggles together with the word of God. This is what you see Paul doing in Paul’s letters writing to specific churches. He’s combining the truths of the gospel with the reality of the church… The reason why God has given leaders to the church, shepherds in particular, is so that somebody on the ground is incarnate, who knows God’s sheep and can help them each with his word and the reality that they are experiencing individually and corporately in the body.

~Skye Jethani

Weekend Worship: We are at a Crossroads

For several months now I have had some misgivings about the sustainability of our present worship paradigm. Now someone has confirmed it…

They’ve grown up dancing, so they long to kneel.  They’ve grown up with masterfully orchestrated services, so they long for worship that may be planned, but never rehearsed.  They’ve grown up with the latest, so they long for the oldest.  They’ve grown up with, “God is here, let’s celebrate!”   They long for “God is here, let’s kneel and be silent.” 

They’ve grown up being urged, “Now, everyone can just worship God however you might want.  Just let the Holy Spirit move you.  We are all different.”  So now some are seeking worship where the implied advice is, “Now, everyone leave your hyper-individuality at the door.  Let’s say words together.  Let’s make gestures together.  Stand together.  Kneel together.  Let’s listen to the wisdom the Holy Spirit has given over the centuries.”

continue reading Sneaking Into Worship by Tom Lawson at Adorate

Wednesday Link List

This week’s links include:

• A consideration of “spontaneous” baptisms.  That’s how they did it in the book of Acts, so why not now?
• A look at the “spoken word” genre in church. It’s not poetry because it isn’t meant to read, but rather spoken.
• A suggestion that when the sermon is over, the church should stand and affirm one of the classic creeds. (Used this at C201 this week, too!)
  
• A 30 minute podcast with uber-blogger Michael Hyatt on responding to negative people.
• A warning about wolves! Lee Grady reminds us all that there are Christian con-artists out there.
• A video from a 100 Huntley St. interview with Ravi Zacharias Ministries lead Canadian apologist Andy Bannister. 
• A post in a continuing series of reminders that sometimes the serious side of Jon Acuff has as much to offer as the humorous.
  
• A website for Steeple Envy, a new book on the obsession some pastors have with church and building size by pastor and author Victor Cuccia.
  
• A CT article with three views wrestling with voting for a Mormon for U.S. President, if that’s an issue where you live.
  
• A somewhat related history article about the original Mormon vision for the state of Deseret.
• A video obituary for the founder of the Unification Church, Rev. Sun Myung Moon who died on the weekend.
  
• A website devoted to very early contemporary Christian music from the 1960s; and…
• A YouTube channel devoted to very early CCM from the ’60s and early ’70s.
• A word of encouragement and hope at the blog Pursued by God for Christian Singles.
• A rather amazing interview with Justin Lee, author of Torn:Rescuing The Gospel from the Gay vs. Christian Debate, and founder of the Gay Christian Network.
• A good “…and finally in the news” item: A mixed martial arts fighter and reality show host was jailed on suspicion of burglary last month after deputies responding to reports of a break-in said they found him naked inside a Southern California church.
• A thank-you to our two graphics providers (top and bottom) whose links are found when you click the images.
  

Kent Dobson Succeeds Rob Bell at Mars Hill Grand Rapids

First, Rob Bell was on the pastoral staff at Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, working under Pastor Ed Dobson. Then he departed to start Mars Hill and as the story goes, launched the first Sunday with over 1,000 present to hear the first of a year long series on Leviticus.  Yes, Leviticus. For one year. “That’s in all the church growth books, right?” Bell has quipped.

This week, Mars Hill Bible Church announced that Ed Dobson’s son, Kent Dobson would assume the senior teaching pastor position. The Dobsons are both no strangers to Mars Hill; the elder often occupying a place in the congregation after leaving Calvary Church, the younger serving as a worship director in the church’s early years.

More details in this Christianity Today story.

—

Like the person he is replacing, Kent Dobson is no stranger to controversy as outlined in this 2008 local news story.

Wednesday Link List

If you missed the bonus edition of the link list this week, be sure to click over to Monday.

• Quotation of the day, from Arminius, after whom Arminianism is named: ““Next to the study of the Scriptures which I earnestly inculcate, I exhort my pupils to peruse Calvin’s Commentaries…” (appropriately, as quoted on an Arminian blog.)
  
• Canadian author, apologist and television host Grant Jeffrey passed away on the weekend. His independent publishing catalog was purchased years ago by Random House subsidiary Waterbrook Press, with Wikipedia listing 34 titles including one scheduled for next January.
  
• At Age 30, Chris Galanos is the youngest person to pastor a megachurch in the United States. Needless to say, it’s in Texas.
  
• If you have ever struggled to sing the bridge to “Blessed Be The Name” — the “You give and take away” part — you might resonate with this article and many comments.
  
• On the 20th anniversary of New Wineskins magazine, Keith Brenton deals with the emotional issues that arise when one reaches a crossroads in terms of their committment to their church home. To stay or to go, that is the question. 
• Julie Clawson learns the hard way that when you’re in the fitting room trying on swimsuits, you’re a captive audience for the woman who wants to stand outside the door and share her faith. Not sure if this would work at the menswear store.
  
• Lots of Bible-related links today; that’s a good thing, right? Now picture yourself sitting alone in your room reading your Bible. In the grander scheme of things, you’re not really alone.
  
• Francis Chan makes a rather provocative statement about mission and worship, and — just like Andy Stanley’s fifteen minutes of controversy last week — the words get wrenched from the heart of what he’s saying. Gee…that’s never happened before.
  
• How does a Bible translator feel when a new English version is introduced, knowing so many people still don’t have a Bible or even a complete New Testament in their language.
• The Amish weren’t supposed to have cars, but did anybody say they couldn’t fly? In a community where the official ruling was still pending, a young man takes up flying in 1917, and where the Great War is going on, he also is an exception to the practice of exemption from military duty. All this makes The Wings of Morning a rather interesting looking novel.
  
• The Gay issue. It’s the toughest challenge the church has faced in years. And each gay person is going to have contact — good or bad — with professing Christians. And for every 17 interactions, you have to hope one of us gets it right.
  
• Pete Wilson boards a helicopter for a flyover of a piece of property central to a complete relocation of Cross Point in Nashville, and also celebrates a God-blessed history in this 15-minute video.
  
• Sports Department: Victor Goetz is a championship golfer, however he’s also quite blind. He typically finishes with a score of 105. He also earned a Paralympic gold medal in lawn bowling.
  
• Pop goes the music department: A new Owl City EP released yesterday with help from Matt Thiessen of Relient K.
  
• A Lutheran (LCC) pastor thinks you can preach a perfect sermon but still get a failing grade if you’ve answered all the wrong questions or left people with the wrong mandate.
  
• Michael Hyatt sits down with the originators of a rather unique new English Bible translation, The Voice. This edition uses a dramatic script format where applicable, and I’m hoping at some point to get a copy so we can delve into it here in much more detail. (There’s a page sample from one month ago at this blog when the usual suspects got upset about a particular phrase translation choice.)
  
• For those who follow the Fundy Follies, Right Wing Watch blog is doing a series based on the student handbook at Liberty University; this link deals with the policy of random drug testing. Too bad thought-monitoring hasn’t been invented yet.
• Which is a great lead-in to twelve easy steps the rest of us can follow that provide an absolute guarantee that we’ll never be mistaken for a Fundy.
  
• ‘You and I in a little toy shop, buy a bag of balloons for the Bibles we bought…’ — They weren’t red balloons, but they carried Bibles into North Korea, and GPS tracking devices verified that they reached the target.
  
• You’ve seen the line, “If you love Jesus click ‘like.’” Does that mean that if I don’t click, I don’t love Jesus? Is Facebook theology becoming shallow, or were the FB-ers who post this drivel spiritually shallow to begin with?
  
• Now then, as to that Archie comic above. If you’re old enough to remember the “even then it was awkward evangelism” Spire Christian Comics and want to relive those memories, Carp’s Place has them waiting for you on .pdf files…
  
• …And since one Archie deserves another, I thought we’d end with TV favorite 1970′s bigot, Archie Bunker; and if you dare, a link to Archie reading the creation story from Genesis, which isn’t quite the same as Linus reading the Christmas story.

The Hat Debate

I really want you guys, especially North American readers, to click the comment section on this one, okay?

Church has changed a lot in the past 15-20 years.  In many churches, the music rocks, parishioners are dressed workplace casual, people sip coffee during the sermon, and drama often replaces formal liturgy.  A mainstream blogger writes:

There was a time when all men wore hats, they knew how to wear them and they knew when to wear them. They also knew when to remove them. There was a certain hat etiquette that everyone followed. Generally, a man did not wear a hat indoors, and there were no exceptions, except in lobbies or hallways of office buildings. A man could keep his hat on in the elevator, except if a lady were present. A man never — ever — wore a hat in a movie, restaurant or concert theatre. Ever.  Under any circumstances.  Besides, hats were the reason that restaurants, theatres and concert halls had hat checks.  Men were supposed to check their hats at the door.  “May I take your hat, please?”

So what about men (and boys) wearing baseball caps in church?  Traditionally, one removed their hat in formal settings, but modern church services ain’t exactly formal. 

So two questions in particular:

• Does the rule still apply?
• Should a church directly confront — as one did here last month — a young man in his 30s over his hat wearing?

Maybe you find this trivial, but take 30-seconds to let your voice be heard.

Crystal Cathedral Property Sold to Chapman University

In the end, the university bid was the one the Schullers approved.

The board “had to reluctantly vote to accept a plan due to the deadlines required by the court,” Sheila Schuller Coleman, senior pastor of the Crystal Cathedral Congregation, said in the statement.

The story is summarized at the San Fransisco Chronicle.

The church will continue to have the use of some of the buildings, but the Orange County Register reports that the annual Christmas production won’t be happening for 2011.

Crystal Cathedral’s iconic “Glory of Christmas” pageant is unlikely to happen this year with the pending sale of the 40-acre property, even as a dark cloud of uncertainty hangs over the 60-year-old ministry founded by Robert H. Schuller.

On Wednesday, Crystal Cathedral Ministries’ board announced their decision to “reluctantly endorse” Chapman University as the preferred buyer over the highest bidder, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. Chapman is offering $50 million for the campus and options to continue the ministry on the property and buy back core church buildings in five years. The university plans to start a satellite campus there which will offer health science courses.

Even the Wall Street Journal followed this epic tale.

In the suit, filed Sept. 30, the creditors insist that claims filed in the bankruptcy case—related to everything from employee salaries to alleged copyright infringement—should be bumped back in the line to be repaid. Most of the 10 defendants targeted in the suit are related to the Schullers by blood or marriage.

“R. H. Schuller used his control and influence to cause the debtor to enter into the above-described agreements that benefitted himself and his family, to the detriment of the creditors of the debtor and in breach of his fiduciary obligations to the debtor,” the creditors said, referencing deals that governed everything from compensation for a Schuller son-in-law charged with executing the church’s “Glory of Christmas” pageant to the transition that installed Robert H. Schuller’s son as senior minister for a time…

Though the founders continue to do battle with the creditors regarding their claims, they seem to be on board with the recent turn in the case. Even though their first-choice ending for the proceedings—raising enough money for Crystal Cathedral to remain in control of the entire campus—didn’t materialize, the couple are now set to “embrace Chapman,” according to a statement released Wednesday.

“If Chapman emerges as the owner of the Crystal Cathedral campus, we will welcome the future students and faculty with all that our positive faith has to offer,” Robert H. Schuller said, adding that the board’s decision to tap Chapman as the preferred buyer “took weeks of deliberation and prayer.”

End of story?  Methinks not.  The drama, which has been faithfully recorded on this blog — type “Crystal Cathedral” into the search field at the top of the sidebar — is really a multi-dimensional story involving:

• overspending, bad management
• a family feud gone very public
• the lack of substance, or spiritual shallowness of the Cathedral’s core message
• the traditional vs. contemporary (and Mainline vs. Charismatic) music wars involving congregational and choir (performance) music
• the untold story of the Cathedral’s thriving Hispanic church

…and much, much more; though for some, the middle one, the relentless self-help message of possibility-thinking that overshadowed more profound Biblical teaching, was the Achilles Heel that eventually caused the ministry organization to come undone.

No, this story is a continuing drama.

Stay tuned.

Saturday Silliness: How to Tell if You’re a Megachurch

Carlos Whitaker at Ragamuffin Soul, a definite insider on this issue, nails it with this checklist:

• You might be a megachurch is your green room looks nicer that 95% of your attendees living rooms.

• You might be a megachurch if you film sermon video illustrations on location in other countries.

• You might be a megachurch if people take celebrity pictures of the pastor during his sermon.

• You might be a megachurch if you have more people on staff to run a Sunday than American Idol has on staff to run a Wednesday.

• You might be a megachurch if kids throw a tantrum when the moving lights aren’t working in their Sunday School.

• You might be a megachurch if your pastor has had more work done than most of the women in your church.

• You might be a megachurch if your worship department has not one single ugly person in it.

• You might be a megachurch if your pastors security detail mimics the Secret Service.

• You might be a megachurch if there are more police officers directing traffic into your parking lot than manning the streets of your neighborhood on a Sunday morning.

Thanks, Carlos.  Now then, click over to his blog and read the additional definitions his readers came up with…    No, really, you must read the comments.

Wednesday Link List

Not the most focused list this week — certainly nothing like the one two weeks ago — this one is rather random.  But it will take you to places you might not otherwise have visited…

• Jeff Fischer guests at Near Emmaus and suggests that Adam — as in Book of Genesis Adam — is actually a metaphor.
• Tom wants to ban the use of the word ‘church’ in North America for five years.
• The ever provocative Mark Driscoll apparently preached a sermon titled God Hates You, so Sarah wants him to know that, despite this, God loves him.
  
• It’s bad enough getting hate-filled comments at your blog, but even worse when you trace the IP address back to what is almost surely someone from your former church.
  
• Bible aficionado J. Mark Bertrand spends some time sniffing the pages of The Arion Press NRSV Bible which is actually too heavy to be carried in the processional.
  
• Jennell Williams Paris — who never met a topic she couldn’t tackle — thinks online dating sites are appropriate for Christians.  But Leslie Ludy disagrees strongly.
  
• Another one of those articles promoting the idea of not delaying marriage, i.e. marrying young.
• Kent Shaffer profiles the Water of Life filtration system being implemented by Compassion International.  This one works with water sourced from less desirable places than water obtained from wells.
• Matt attends the Catalyst Conference and walks away feeling uncomfortable about the idea of ‘big church’.
• Jesus said we could ask for anything and He would do it, but it’s hard to see results while we maintain traces of doubt that would appear to nullify the offer. So what did Jesus mean?
• When his 28-year old gay son arrives at a midweek meeting with his boyfriend, the pastor yells “Sic ‘em,” as the two are kicked and punched. (Note: This source isn’t a Christian blog, but I feel we need to be aware what is taking place and how it is perceived.)
• A Wiccan claims she learned all about astrology from C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy series.   (Note: This one ain’t a Christian blog either, or even close, but again, if you’re open to reading, the first seven or eight paragraphs will give you an idea of how some people view the world.)
  
• Christian bookstore owners find out why the DVD series based on Janette Oke‘s eight book Love Comes Softly series suddenly has a # 9 and a #10.
  
• I’m not sure who the Reeds are, or how they originally got on my blogroll, but Joe Reed’s family of missionaries in South Africa got robbed this month, which can take awhile to sort through.
  
• I guess that wraps up this week, except for the weather forecast: Slightly overcast with a chance of passing showers, but we don’t expect the rain to last –