Wednesday Link List

We’re back with another mid-week link meeting! Here’s what your brothers and sisters from random parts of the big ‘C’ church were up to this week. Clicking any of the links below will take you to PARSE, the list’s benevolent patron.

• What’s the difference between a canoe and a Christian in a restaurant? A canoe tips. [Rim shot!] Now a website is dedicated to giving food servers a chance to describe their experiences with church people at Sundays Are The Worst.
• Pastors: Be careful what you offer in a sermon, especially if it’s not in the church budget.
• Marketing Christianity: A special offer from pastor and radio host Steve Brown allows you Three Free Sins.
• A funeral director whose blog deals with how we face death offers suggestions as to the proper etiquette of dealing with loss on the internet…
• …The same author once noticed that at funerals, almost all pastors are universalists.
• A secular news website looks at the various blogs that highlight survivor stories of spiritual abuse in fundamentalist sects.
• Strange Cloud Conference: It doesn’t sound like John MacArthur will be buying a ticket for the Heaven is For Real movie adaptation.
• Gay Christians in same-sex marriage are now eligible for employment at World Vision…
• …but the World Vision shift brings a quick response from Baptist ethics writer Russell D. Moore.
• Pastors often suffer from depression. Here are seven ways God can use that.
• Essay of the Week (1): When it comes to personality tests, I think I’m an HIJK. Is that a thing? Anyway here’s Why English Majors Make Lousy Fundamentalists.
• Essay of the Week (2): Two lesbians walk into a church. No, it’s not a short story and there is no punchline. But there is quite an ending.
• Houston Crime-Stoppers will pay you $25,000 for information leading to an arrest in the theft of $600,000 at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church.
• For a member of The Newsboys, his involvement in the movie God’s Not Dead is the continuation in a chain of events begun when Billy Graham visited Australia in 1959…
• …while the movie’s opening weekend landed it in the top five.
• With everyone in the U.S. thinking basketball, I thought we’d take a different route and offer this delightful religious gift idea for the football fan. (Pictured above.)
• The British Law Society is one step closer to a legal system that accommodates Islamic law.  (Wait, what?)
• Meanwhile, Jewish News Service is reporting that in countries where they are a minority, there has been a major exodus of Christians in the face of religious extremists.
• So who’s up for a good debate? On Moody Radio a look at the decline of altar calls in Baptist churches.  (Click the link for the 54 minute program.)
• YMin: One of the big challenges to youth ministry is the reality that the kids all attend different schools.
• Intermission: A pause while we pay a tribute to church basement coffee.
• Thanks for the Complementarian: Is Cedarville University planning to restrict a particular course to women only?
• Jamie the Very Worst Production Consultant breaks her Non-Disclosure Agreement and tells what was going on in the desert that day.
• Analogy of the Week: To this writer, fellowship is like oxygen.
• While reading Brad Lomenick’s latest list of young influencers, I learned that on Hillsong’s popular song Oceans, the lead vocal belongs to Taya Smith.
• Since PARSE is part of Leadership Journal which in turn is part of Christianity Today, I’m sure they weren’t happy with this shot taken by Frank Schaeffer…
• …but I did think that Karen Spears Zacharias had an insightful, deeper look at the late Fred Phelps and what he is now experiencing…
• …and in Fred’s home town of Topeka, Kansas, the local newspaper provides a family tree of sorts.
• Source Unknown Department: Every pastor’s prayer.
• A Spanish church occupied the first floor and basement of a building that was destroyed in the New York City gas explosion. Some church members perished in the blast.
• Book Review: A look at Renegade Pastor, a book encouraging those in ministry not to settle for average.
• Time Warp: Michael W. Smith is releasing a new album.
• Here’s another infographic from Josh Byers, this one showing the harmony of the gospels’ telling of the Passion Week narrative.
• Internet Diversions Department: 27 indicators you grew up Evangelical. (Yes, I know, the whole internet is a diversion.)
• Finally, specialization has hit the automotive fish industry. Now your car icthus can have special meaning.  (Including a Southern Baptist fish icon.)

Stay in touch with Paul Wilkinson during the week on Twitter.

Our closing cartoon is rather interesting, don’t you think? The artist is Jess MacCallum and you can click the image to see more.

Newsboys Still Got It

Faced with five hours in the car today, I downloaded recent sermons by Rob Bell and Greg Boyd which I played once each, and the new album by The Newsboys, which I listened to at least three times, parts of it more than that.

In The Hands of God released on Tuesday in North America — I’m not sure how that compares with the U.K. and Aust. — though the title song has been on Christian radio for several weeks.

I’m the kind of person who likes to review an album with all the facts in front of me, as well as having completely studied the lyric booklet.   While that was not possible while driving, it also wasn’t possible when I got home because the typsetting is so miniscule that I don’t think even the kids to whom this album is targetted could read this without a magnifying glass.   This did however confirm the old adage that if you listen to rock music you’ll go blind.   I think that’s the adage…

So I really don’t know what the song RL 1984 is about, but I’m sure someone will inform me in the comments section.    That leaves me room for just a few observations.

1. Michael Tait:   You’re gonna fit in really well in this band.   …For those who already know about this, note that it’s Peter Furler on the album; Michael took over after its recording.   But you can already hear a new direction in the band’s sound.
   
2. It’s nice to hear great Christian music that isn’t modern worship or vertical worship; not that I have anything against worship.   These guys are the kings of Christian pop for good reason, and I appreciate them being who they are and what they and not trying to cave in to pressure to release what everyone else is doing.
3. That said, “Glorious” and “Lead Me to the Cross” are worship songs, but to my ears, so is the title song.   I envision “In The Hands of God” with a soloist doing the verses and then the chorus projected onscreen for a congregation to join in.
4. “The Upside” is much fun musically.   Reminds me of many of the best great pop anthems.
5. I have no fifth point.

So there you are.    Just for reading this far, here’s a bonus link to the title song on one of those homemade videos where they provide the lyrics superimposed over stock photos.   (The lyrics are appreciated to help focus on the song, but the pix are often crying to be removed from the web due to overuse.)   Truth-in-video purists can choose this link to a live version.   I’ll take the studio quality audio.

Link:  Exhaustive Newsboys bio and discography at Wikipedia

Tuesday Links: Life in Blogland

Lots to see in the blogosphere today:

• Jeff at Losing My Religion is celebrating a birthday today (5/5) and this week has a great, lengthy interview with Michael Frost, missional church guru and co-author (with Alan Hirsch) of the book ReJesus.
  
• Video book promos on YouTube are somewhat mandatory these days if you have a new release; and Tony Morgan‘s gives an excellent preview of his book Killing Cockroaches without any hype.  (HT: Church Relevance blog)
  
• If you want to re-write the definitive standard for an over-the-top church website, the one for Evangel Cathedral should do it.  (HT: Pragmatic Electric blog.  Be sure to check out his Apr. 25 post, If Jesus Returns Tonight, Who Will Feed Your Pets?  It contains a vital link to Post Rapture Pets.)
• Jim Upchurch has renamed his blog, Christ: His Work and His Word.   Last weekend he wrote an excellent devotional piece, What if You Knew How and When You Would Die?
• Quoted on Bob Hyatt’s blog:  “In a faster world, maybe we need a slower church.” ~ Leighton Ford
• Two entire chapters of Hebrews.   Totally memorized.    Shared with passion by Ryan Ferguson.    Takes eleven minutes.   Google Video link here.   (HT: Tony Miano’s blog, Lawman Chronicles)
• Finally, on the lighter side; Michael Tait isn’t the newest member of Newsboys after all, as the blog Backseat Writer makes visibly clear in this post.   That’s it for today’s links.
  
• Almost every time I do links like this, I always include a link to my unpublished book The Pornography Effect: Understanding for the Wives, Mothers, Daughters, Sisters and Girlfriends, because every day there’s someone new who needs to read it.   It’s online and it’s free to read.
• Since you asked, I’m currently reading The Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight (Zondervan) and the revised — 14 years later — edition of The King James Only Controversy by James White (Bethany House).   Both deal with the Bible and how we both read and translate it, so I don’t mind reading the two books at once.   If you want to make it a hat-trick, you’d have to add How To Choose a Bible Translation For All It’s Worth by Gordon Fee and Mark Strauss (Zondervan).
  
• Today’s cartoon is from ASBO Jesus.  Now with over 700 thought-provoking, intriguing, controversial and sometimes frustrating cartoons served.   Never a dull moment at that cartoon blog.   (It’s Brit-speak for Anti-Social Behavior Order.)
  
• Since this post is a potpourri already, the survey, which follows, is from Christianity Today and reflects that readers of its various websites have a rather secularized view of how we all got here.  If you’re going to comment on something here, this would be the one.
  Christianity Today Poll
  What best describes your view of the origins of creation?

  Young-earth creationism 10%

  Old-earth creationism 10%

  Theistic evolution 10%

  Naturalistic evolution 62%

  I don’t know 3%

  None of the above 4%

  
  Total Votes: 4153

The Newsboys, Michael Tait, Oral Roberts, Bill Hybels, The Pollen Index and the Coming Evangelical Collapse

They Don’t Do Weather Forecasting Like This Where We Live Barbeque Index Details Arthritis Index Details Cold Index Details Lawn Index Details UV Index Details Flu Index Details Frizz Index Details Pollen Index Details Asthma Index Details But then again, maybe they should.  How useful would these three factors be to your situation?

And the Commencement Speaker At Oral Roberts University This Year Is… …(wait for it)…BILL HYBELS!   Yes, that Bill Hybels.   ORU continues to try to rebrand itself as a little less charismatic will Willow Creek founder Hybels as this year’s speaker.   You can read more here.

Michael Tait as a Newsboy? It’s official.  The man we’ve come to identify with DCTalk is officially replacing Peter Furler with the Newsboys.    Furler leaves the band after 22 years but will make several guest appearances with the band throughout the coming year.  You can read that story here.

The Coming Evangelical Collapse There’s been a lot of talk this week about Michael Spencer (aka Internet Monk) and the article he wrote for The Christian Science Monitor.   I especially appreciated these comments, blended from his second and sixth points: Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith. You can read that article here.   Or if you have time, link to all the original articles in Michael’s blog.