Wednesday Link List

This week’s links include:

• A project that Church Relevance linked to last week, The Refuge OKC (as opposed to OC) a group of people sent to live in an interact with downtown Oklahoma City.
• A very focused blog reflecting a Christian surgeon’s perspective on the subject of sleep.  Surrendered Sleep is must-reading for those struggling with insomnia. 
• A news story concerning 12-year old Christian girl in Pakistan is found with burned pages of the Quran, which constitutes blasphemy and is punishable by death.
• A book review of Out of the Comfort Zone, the authorized biography of Ray Comfort, apologist and evangelist and partner-in-crime with Kirk Cameron. 
• A ratings report on American Bible Challenge, a new Bible knowledge show on The Game Show Network (GSN) hosted by Jeff Foxworthy.
• A publishing industry story on author Dee Henderson who returns to Christian bookstore shelves in October after a long absence. 
• A consideration that begins with the similarity between introverts in the church and people who go to monasteries.
  
• A rather sad but very accurate satire from SFL on the nature of scandal in the fundamentalist movement, Church Sex Scandal Bingo.
• A second link involving Church Relevance, this one an original piece about the need for generalists in a specialist world.
  
• A new music artist that Brad Lomenick linked to last week, Ryan Edgar, complete with 30-second previews of several songs.
  
• A not-so-new music band that specialized in heavy metal turns up at Christianity 201 singing a ballad about Jesus’ crucifixion.
• A link first seen on Challies.com for Scott Fillmer’s excellent Five Reasons We Should Still Read The Book of Leviticus Today.
• A second steal from Challies — sorry, Tim — is this unnamed individual who finds a unique way to protest a Joel Osteen appearance. ¹
  
• A book trailer for Steven Furtick’s second title — reviewed here last week — Greater: Dream Bigger, Start Smaller, Ignite Gods Vision For Your Life.
• A church website for people who complain that church websites are only about maps and service times. The location is there if you look hard. ²
  
• A song — I Believe — from the musical The Book of Mormon which showed up on our radar after the LDS feature on NBC’s Rock Center. ³
  

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¹ Be sure to click the link inside to the .pdf of the actual pamphlet he created. I wonder how other preachers and evangelists would fare if their language was under the microscope in this manner?

² It could be argued that this website exists only for the convenience of the people in the church’s local community, but ‘online church hopping’ is becoming a global phenomenon. True the address is actually there in plain sight, but the usual maps and directions escaped me after ten minutes of searching. If I had just moved to the area…

³ This link is valid until after the next show is broadcast, probably tomorrow (Aug 30). There are versions of the song elsewhere on YouTube but this one had the lyrics.

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)

The Law and the Gospel

One of the joys of blogging is that you get to experience sectors of the Christian world that you might otherwise miss.    Even if you’ve been walking with Jesus for years — or in some cases, like mine, decades — there is always something new to learn.

Several weeks ago I linked to the YouTube postings of a BBC documentary on 13-year-old Deborah Drapper.    Her story is a mixture of elements:  A somewhat isolated, innocent, homeschooled girl in rural England who somehow has no fear when it comes to wading into a group of partying teens on a Friday night to ask them some serious faith questions.    Her style is forceful and direct; a style gained from listening nightly to podcasts from Ray Comfort’s Way of the Master website.

So when I learned this week that Deborah had a blog, I took a few minutes to scan it, and in that short time a phrase somewhat jumped out at me several times:

The Law and the Gospel

Having seen the entire BBC show helped here, and if you haven’t you’re at somewhat of a disadvantage,  but Ms. Drapper’s style begins — always — with the Ten Commandments as an example of how peoples’ beliefs that they are “good” can never possibly line up with God’s “Big Ten.”

That’s a fair approach.    I’ve heard Bill Hybels and Andy Stanley do the same, and I was on the same track a few weeks ago when I preached in a Toronto church on the story of the rich young official (or rich young aristocrat, or rich young bureaucrat, or rich young ruler.)   He felt he had kept all ten commandments, but then Jesus helps him to see the impossibility of human righteousness — “there is none good but God.”

But watching Deborah, I got a slightly different vibe.    I’m not sure if it was just a reaction to her formulaic approach — she is only 13, after all — but I think it was her total reliance on the “big ten” as the basis for her verbal witness.   The British Teens she spoke with would wake up the next morning  remembering the message of the Ten Commandments, and not the grace of God in sending Jesus, or the ability of Jesus to meet us at our point of need.

(As an aside, this is why we don’t hire high school students where I work.   There are too many complex “life issues” that people are facing that younger people haven’t necessarily dealt with.)

Unsure what vibe I was sensing, I was finally able to articulate it when I saw the phrase “The Law and the Gospel,”  or “The Ten Commandments, The Law and the Gospel” so clearly printed on her blog.   The nuances of adding “The Law” so distinctly to the presentation are not part of my previous experience.  (Google the phrase for examples of other places where it’s used online.)

Again, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want to quench everything that God is doing through Deborah.    And I’m not here to debate the effectiveness of The Way of the Master, or even The Four Spiritual Laws, or even apologetics in general.

The only point I want to make today — and ask your response to it — is that there seemed to be something awkward about going out for an evening of evangelism with the premise that you’re going to share “The Law” with people; and I say that recognizing that “The Gospel” is only good news in light of the condemnation that the law puts everyone under.   There seemed to be something definitely not postmodern about it.     Read the first page currently up on her blog, and tell me if I’m over-reacting.

Visitors:  You may not be here by accident! If you got here from a WordPress or search tag and you’re not a Christ-follower, please understand that in critiquing the approach I’m not minimizing the message or its urgency.   All of us are constantly looking for ways to help the broader population confront the eternal questions that need to be faced.    At the end of the day, Deborah, Ray Comfort and I would have you reach the same conclusion, namely that Jesus’ claim to be God was true, and therefore his message needs to be clearly heard and individually applied.     God is a righteous judge, but also rich in grace,  mercy and compassion.   To hear a presentation like Deborah’s, continue to this site.