Wednesday Link List

As Harpo Marx once said, “

• A mother of four is yanked out of a Georgia church for breastfeeding. Meanwhile, Caryn at ThinkChristian wonders how Jesus handled this situation (if there was one) say, while giving the Sermon on the Mount.
  
• Also at ThinkChristian, Karen says we shouldn’t sweat the new TV show, GCB, because it doesn’t have the right mix of ingredients to last.
  
• I though we’d send some traffic to Reylo, the latest blog at Alltop Christian, and to get you there, he’s got the official trailer for the Blue Like Jazz movie.
  
• “Ring by Spring or Your Money Back” — If you’re at a Christian college and not yet engaged, you just have a few weeks left.  Brittany Johnson guests at SCL.
  
• 50 people, representing 10% of the head office staff, have been laid off at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, as the organization focuses more on online initiatives.
  
• “I can do all things through Christ…” says the opening part of Phil. 4:13. But Bill Mounce points out that for Paul, it wasn’t true. “There are many things Paul could not do. He couldn’t fly. He couldn’t remove the thorn in his flesh. He couldn’t get released from his second Roman imprisonment…”  So in a departure from every other translation, check out what the NIV 2011 does with this text.
  
• Kirk Cameron does his best to defend his beliefs as Piers Morgan relentlessly goes after Cameron’s views on gay marriage and homosexuality. Here’s a response to the show’s repsonse from Denny Burk: “Are we really at a place where a Christian who is pressed for his views on a matter can no longer state those views without being tarred and feathered?”
  
• Worship Leaders: Carlos Whittaker offers you ten-plus-one ways to improve your worship leading. Of course, his title was a little more blunt.
  
• Digging deeper into worship, Internet Monk has an article expressing the limitations modern worship has expressing lament.
• At the above article, a reader offers this song as an example of worship in the wilderness. (click the mp3 link to play)
• Catch the irony: A pastor loses his temper while preaching about God’s love. Or did he? The scene is one every church-goer would like to see happen at least once. The blog is A Brick in the Valley.
• William Hamilton, the Oregon theologian who declared in the 1960s that God is dead, is dead. Another individual for whom, “The image of God as all knowing and all powerful couldn’t be reconciled with human suffering, especially after the Holocaust.”  Story at Oregon Live. 
• An new Amish ‘fish out of water’ story, though not sure who is the fish and who is the water. An Amish woman decides to raise money by teaching quilting to a mix of people from the broader community. The new book by Wanda Brunstetter really should be made into a film.
• In other publishing news, Justin Bieber’s mom, Pattie Mallette releases her own story Nowhere But Up, in September with Revell Books and a foreword by Justin…
  
• …Meanwhile, basketball sensation Jeremy Lin has the book Linspired coming in May from Zondervan in both an adult edition and kids edition; though the latter is not even on the corporate website.
• “You can’t get to heaven in a mini-skirt.” A good devotional post, but with a lead line like that, I just wanna see how many clicks it gets. The blog is called Moment of Selah.
• Another edition of David Platt’s Secret Church happens on April 6th and you can simulcast the six-hour event where you live. Check the website or read more at Desiring God. In the book Radical, David admits that there’s nothing like seeing thousands of people quietly taking notes in church at 12:30 in the morning!
• In Ontario, the most populous province in Canada, you can’t shop on holidays, which include New Year’s Day, Family Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. The City of Toronto, the most populous municipality in Ontario is surveying residents to see if they want that to change.
  
• The cartoons today are classic Rob Portlock, from Way Off the Church Wall (IVP, 1989)

As the Celebrity Pages Turn

Well maybe. Maybe not.

On the last day of our vacation, the hotel where we were staying just outside of Ottawa offered me a free copy of The Saturday [Toronto] Star.   As is my habit, I tucked it away to read in detail when we got back home, which I did late that night.

On page three was the story of Benny Hinn and Paula White with which many of you are already familiar; though the picture — showing them holding hands — made the story almost unnecessary.  [Though the article tried to press the Toronto angle of Benny’s early ministry in the area, it was inaccurate on a few points.]

This morning, commuters boarded mass transit trains in many North American cities and picked up one of the many commuter newspapers available free.   Chances are, up to 20% of the page count was taken by celebrity news.    This is what people want to read about.    The program Entertainment Tonight once was an interesting course in entertainment media, the visual “how it’s done” manual on all things related to movies, music, television, and stage.   Instead, it gave birth to a host of television programs which try to feed the insatiable desire for more knowledge of who is bedding down with whom.

Most of the time however, the news originates in Hollywood, not the Bible Belt.   The Benny and Paula story — they were seen together on the streets of Rome —  really looked no different than countless others, but we need to recognize that on some level, both of them are part of the superstar culture.

How did we get there?

For starters, here are some obvious reasons:

• the rise of mega-churches, which suddenly made certain pastors significant nationally, and others less so;
• the established past history of certain pastors or evangelists with respect to moral failure and the media feeding frenzy that these events are now certain to bring;
• the outrageously excessive income and/or lifestyle of certain Christian “stars;”
• the desire of certain Christian authors and artists to see their books or music “cross over” into the mainstream market; and,
  
• our obsession with celebrity.

We created this mess ourselves, somewhat.  We conformed to the world.   We wanted our alternative Christian culture to be just as glitzy as theirs and we worshiped at the feet of anybody with a big church, a TV show or a best-selling book or CD.

Of course, both parties have issued denials that anything untoward is happening.   Is it just me, or are both denials the work of the same copywriter?

A great day for Movie-of-the-Week screenwriters and producers.

A sad day for the Kingdom of God.

My advice to Benny and/or Paula?  It’s peaked.  The season is over.   Shut it down.   All of it.   The television ministry.   The crusades.   The books.   Pay the staff a decent severance.   The TV contracts you can’t get out of, give the airtime to another ministry.    The arena contracts you can’t get out of, give to another [type of] evangelist, or even a Christian band.   Retire somewhere nobody can find you.

And Benny, take the Nehru jackets to a local thrift shop.

Related post on this blog:  My Day With Tiger Woods and Benny Hinn

Best place to follow this story (if you must):  The other “Benny;” the blog, Bene Diction Blogs On

Picture:  National Enquirer article.  Who else?