From Theologygrams by Rich Wyld. There are two books available in the series.
Learn more about this book in today’s first link. Subtitle: How the Bible’s Problems Speak to Its Divine Authority.
A somewhat music-focused WedCon this week, along with the usual news and opinion pieces I truly hope you haven’t seen elsewhere, plus a few I know you have. I’ve brought back the New Music feature this week with five good selections and there are also that many music-related links.
■ I watched all 96 minutes: A week ago today, Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy took questions from their church family concerning Greg’s new book, Inspired Imperfection. Before you can view this, you need to a little about the book’s premise. It’s a fresh look at the Bible which bypasses words like inerrant and infallible to arrive at the same place Andy Stanley did: Equipping the kids we sent off to college or university to withstand attacks on the reliability of God’s word. (In one sentence: Don’t sweat the alleged contradictions; embrace them!) However, unlike Stanley, he takes a whole different route to get there. If you haven’t heard about the book, watch the introductory sermon first, and then, dive deep into this Q&A.
■ On the morning of his death, several sources confirm Kobe Bryant went to church. “He attended the 7am mass prior to going to the Orange County John Wayne Airport… I imagine he went straight to the airport, because the mass was 7-8 am. I’m told generally 7 am was his Mass… He was very discreet… He would come in and stay at the back, and his family too, and then he would usually leave a little earlier prior to the very end of the service. He was very much loved at the church, and he was very devout, very dedicated to his faith.”
■ Christianity Today offers a full exposition on the subject of tax exemption for American churches.
■ In the Willow Creek culture, he’s known simply as “Dr. B.” He was a mentor to Bill Hybels and the café off the church lobby is named after him. Now Gilbert Bilezikian is being named as part of the story of sexual inappropriateness at the church.
■ The Bible returns to Bolivia:
Hoisting a large leather Bible above her head, Bolivia’s new interim president delivered an emphatic message hours after Evo Morales fled under pressure, the end of a nearly 14-year presidency that celebrated the country’s indigenous religious beliefs like never before.
“The Bible has returned to the palace,” bellowed Jeanine Añez as she walked amid a horde of allies and news media cameras into the presidential palace where Morales had jettisoned the Bible from official government ceremonies and replaced it with acts honoring the Andean earth deity called the Pachamama.
What you see, as in many places in Central and South America, is a blending of two religions.
■ Podcast of the Week: Why was there a model of the Tower of Babel inside the church lobby? …Power isn’t inherently bad, but how should pastors relate to it, both inside and outside the church? Julie Roys talks to author Kyle Strobel. Kyle is the son of Lee, who you may know, and co-author of The Way of the Dragon or the Way of The Lamb—Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that has Abandoned It. Sample: “I can’t tell you how many churches I’ve met that have never bothered asking a future hire if they pray and what their prayer life is like. It just never came up.”
■ Short Essay of the Week: Evangelism may be sharing a gospel presentation and seeing immediate results. Or it may be being a link (what I’ve called elsewhere, ‘the chain of grace’) in introducing someone to the person who takes it to the next level. “A person’s coming to Christ is like a chain with many links.”
■ In the news: “A South Dakota legislative committee approved a bill this week that would penalize medical professionals who prescribe hormone treatments or perform sex change surgeries for gender dysphoric children under age 16. Supporters of the measure argue the listed interventions are not healthcare but rather criminal acts against children too young to understand the long-term, irreversible effects.”
■ Fringe Christian movies:
- Mentioned this one a month ago, but there’s been another promotional push for The Road to Edmond.
- And even though it’s now supposedly released, we still don’t have a proper trailer for Faith Based (just the teaser already featured here.)
■ Two large-scale arenas have dropped Franklin Graham’s UK tour for reasons I’m sure you can imagine. Okay, we’ll spell it out: “It’s hard for many American Christians to get their heads around how much most people in Britain loathe Trump, and how that revulsion is also felt by many godly British believers…”
■ Essay of the Week: Philip Yancey was this year’s pick by Nicholas Kristof for his annual Christmas column on the Christian faith. The article received 830 comments. Yancey reflects (and includes screen shots) on some of those and explores their opinions, most of which providing consensus that we’re dealing with the nature of doubt.
■ You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone: For many, the top religion news story of 2019 was the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral.
The New York Times reported that the cathedral came within twenty minutes of being lost. Notre Dame was saved only because a team of firefighters volunteered to carry fire hoses up the spiral staircases of the burning bell towers after another team had refused because of the danger…
What can we do when everything is on fire? Perhaps we can recognize that not all structures of belief are the same. Some deserve to be condemned, some need to be deconstructed, some are not worth saving. But other structures of belief are worth risking everything in order to try to save them.
■ “The Drop Box” wasn’t just the name of a movie, it was a concept that was adopted at the Seymour Fire Department in Indiana. Last week it was used for the first time, 224 days later, and a child’s life was saved.
■ New Music: A new song about grief and healing. Audrey Assad – Shiloh.
And now as your tears flow
Let them be cleansing
Washing your heart so
You can be mending
■ New Music: The Reckless Love guy returns! Cory Asbury – The Father’s House
Lay your burdens down
Here in the father’s house
Check your shame at the door
‘Cause it ain’t welcome any more
You’re in the Father’s house.
■ Not New Music: This video clip is dated 2017, and yet, this is currently the #1 song on my local Christian radio station, Life 100.3. Equippers Revolution – Better With You.
And I know
Life will only get better with You
And my soul
Makes its stand to keep praising You
■ New Music (Canada): “In 2018 Jeremy Benjamin and family set out on a year long tour of Canada raising money to reduce local and global poverty through music. For the next year Jeremy performed over 150 solo concerts in churches and schools across Canada... The tour raised over $500,000 for charities and Jeremy ended up recording over 20,000 voices on the powerful worship song that closes his [new] album, Wonderlove, …released in October 4th on True North Records.” (The same label which brought us Bruce Cockburn.) Jeremy Benjamin – Wonderlove.
■ Important Music: The singer writes, “This song is a lament. It’s a loving rebuke. It’s a plea for the 81%, to come home to the way of Jesus.” Daniel Deitrich – Hymn for the 81%.
■ Catholic Corner: When I’m sixty-four. Listening to The Beatles, the writer realizes that, “Jesus is literally bombarding us with His teachings at every turn, if we will only seek to encipher them.”
■ Worship peeps: If you’re not already doing so, share your setlists using the #SundaySetlist hastag on Twitter.
■ Who’da thunk it? One of the five Grammy awards in the Christian categories went to a pairing of the band King and Country and Dolly Parton. (King and Country won two of the five; Kirk Franklin also took home two, and the fifth one went to Gloria Gaynor for an album and video she did for Gaither Gospel Group. Yawn.)
■ Breaking — A modern worship musician has been accused of playing a song the congregation already knew. (This should have been in The Bee.)
■ Another American Anomaly: There should never have been exemption in the first place allowing churches, charities, etc., not to have to file Form 990, not to practice full transparency. I like this article by Julie Roys about RZIM, BGEA and FOTF, but it accepts that the loophole exists, which is in my view the main problem.
■ They hired him to guard their Egyptian church. Then he shot and killed two of its members.
■ Finland says that Christianity is not monotheistic. With new curriculum from the country’s Ministry of Education, “The new lesson plan states Christianity is polytheism covered with a thin veneer of Judaism… A snap poll of Jews and Muslims show 93% agree Christianity may be a lot of things, but it isn’t monotheism.”
■ Sadly, our Tweet of the Week. Watch for conservative women skiers to get frostbite this winter.
■ Pure Whimsy: If you’ve got the tune American Pie fairly fixed in your mind, you’ll enjoy these parody lyrics we missed back in August: Facebook Pie by Keith Edwin Schooley.
■ Finally, the quote heard everywhere this week: “…We command all Satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now. We declare that anything that’s been conceived in Satanic wombs that it will miscarry, that it will not be able to carry forth any plan of destruction; any plan of harm…” – Paula White, spiritual advisor to the President.
The Bee, of course. Click here to read.
Pregnancy books for couples abound, but You Got This, Dad is just for guys. With self-deprecating honesty, plenty of humor, and amusing asides from his lovely wife, Elaina, Aaron steers soon-to-be dads through the complex events and emotions surrounding pregnancy. Releasing February from Harvest House Publishing.
Top clicks from last week’s Wednesday Connect:
- The Rainbow Cake Girl
- Highest Paid Ministry Executives
- Matthew Pierce: Beth Moore Baseball Cheating
- Michael Frost: Australia Fires – Losing Your Country
- Canada: Not a Christian Country Anymore
- Scot McKnight Moves Jesus Creed Blog to CT
- Undoing Trans Surgery
- Andy Stanley TV Show
Correction: The Missing Link
■ Two weeks ago subscribers to this blog received a version of Wednesday Connect containing a reference to Christ and Pop Culture’s Top 25 of 2019 for which the link did not appear. If you were interested in reading it, click this link.
Thinking Out Loud 
I listen to Inspired Imperfection. I like what he has to say.
Comment by Angie — January 29, 2020 @ 7:25 pm
I like the WedCon abbreviation. I tried using the hashtag “MastTab” on Twitter and other places to abbreviate Master’s Table but it never really caught on. Same with HapMon.
That “Armour of God” cartoon is going straight into Happy Monday. Call me out if I fail to link the books as you did.
My take on tax exemption is that it’s the only way to have separation of church and state. Tax exemption keeps the church from funding government activities it stands in public opposition to, from healthcare procedures to military operations. The church does not participate in government activities, including paying for them, and in return the state stays out of church business, such as not passing legislation on what topics can be taught and preached. The two remain sovereign of each other which cannot be the case if one has the power to tax the other. That clearly makes the church a subject of the state.
I posted the full video for God Only Knows on my blog last year. That King and Country/Dolly Parton mash up was one of my favorite releases of 2019.
Comment by Clark Bunch — February 1, 2020 @ 8:13 am
“Tax exemption keeps the church from funding government activities it stands in public opposition to…”
That’s a good point. I always looked at this the other way around, that by being tax exempt the Church can do so many of the humanitarian things it does, so that government doesn’t have to.
But if the churches were funding the government to do those same things — partly because, out of necessity, with money now going toward taxes, they would have fewer funds available — we would no doubt come to places of disagreement as to how those things are done, just as surely as over time, Christian organizations which started accepting public funding softened their Jesus-centeredness, or had to bow to the consequences of full inclusion. (Trying to think of a clearer way to say that, but hoping you get the idea.)
Comment by paulthinkingoutloud — February 1, 2020 @ 10:29 am