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Preface.¹ Read more

An acquaintance recently wrote me a facebook message about the value of KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. It was intended as a rebuttal to what he perceives to be the inaccessible, academic tenor of this blog. Among other things, he commented, “Sometimes ya gotta oversimplify things to make a point & reach people where theyre at. Do it with my sermons all the time.” I wrote back and asked if he meant “simplify” or “oversimplify.” Read more

1. When speaking truth we have to remember that content, tone, and community are all co-equal in importance. Read more

The fall of my senior year of high school I was livid toward the institutional church. I’d been deeply wounded by some Pentecostal Christians and simply stopped participating in formal church. Friends kept telling me I needed to talk to Wally Glucklich, pastor of Elim Mission Church. So one afternoon while I was skipping school I burst into his office and declared, “I’m pissed off at God. I’m pissed off at the Church. And want to meet with you to talk about it.”¹1.Keep in mind I looked like a hippie at the time. His mellow response: “And your name is?” Well played, good sir. It was the perfect disarming response. Read more

Click here to read Part I.

Before my first session last night the counselor asked me to reflect on this question: What needs to happen in counseling for it to be successful for you? I thought about it a lot, coming up with a number of things I feel need to happen. Ultimately what I decided is that they all fit under the larger umbrella of simply getting my reservoir back. Read more

Preface.¹

The comments that follow are in response to this video: Read more

Last night I finally accepted that the events of the last four years have left me psychologically battered. I wouldn’t describe myself as broken, but definitely on the verge of collapse. Read more

How many times have I been told that I need to lower my (mental) standards for church settings? This doesn’t make the least bit of sense to me. Why is it that even smart Christians act as though you’re suppose to turn off, or at the every least dial down, your brain at church or when you’re around the church community? Read more

Introduction

While no expression of Christianity has ever been monotone in its beliefs and practices, the Anglican tradition in particular has long been known for its variety. Hints of this are found at least as far back as the English Reformation. Read more

The Pledge of Allegiance when I was 9:

I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Amen. Read more

Broadly speaking, my experience in an array of churches is that American preachers pretty well stick to 1, or perhaps some combination of 2, of 10 major categories in their homiletical approaches. They are: Read more

Of late I keep having people presume I have some sort of personal beef with them because their strongly conservative or liberal perspectives are at odds with my own moderate outlook. I’ll offer a civil rebuttal to a facebook comment and it’s like they somehow mistake it for an obscenity laced tirade. What they don’t seem to grasp is the difference between being challenged and being attacked,¹1.They can’t seem to delineate between disagreement and antagonism. so when they’re at all challenged they switch into self-defense mode and absolutely wig out. Then, when you call them on their belligerence, they assert that they’re doing the exact same thing you did and are hypocritical. Read more

Preface: This post really doesn’t contain anything new. It merely fleshes out what’s been written previously. Read more

Yesterday Sarah and I traded in our ’02 Mazda MPV demonic lemon with just 97K miles for a ’09 Toyota Corolla with 34K. In celebration, here are the Top 10 things I’ll miss about that occasionally functional bucket of bolts: Read more

The old adage says, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” There’s an important thread of wisdom in that. It’s far too easy to become a slacker who complains about everything and offends just about everyone yet offers nothing helpful or edifying to the larger conversation.¹1.Griping is easy. Helping is hard. People like that sap your soul. The saying, then, is useful in verbally body checking them into shutting up. Plus it speaks to some biblical wisdom about learning to control you tongue. The trouble arises in the anti-intellectualism it breeds. Over the years a lot of people from coaches and Sunday School teachers to pastors and professors have told me I’m too critical.²2.They’ll often bust out the aforementioned colloquialism as their exclamation point. Personally, I tend to think it says far more about their own mental apathy (or atrophy) than it does anything about me. Meanwhile I’m sitting there looking at the situation, belief system, political philosophy, or what have you and can see obvious fatal flaws in them. They’re going to fail and/or hurt people in the process. But people don’t want to hear that. They want you to either avoid identifying the problem to begin with OR identify it while providing immediate solutions. What I keep wondering is how on earth one does that. For just about any area of life it’s going to take time to put forth even a semi-coherent, reasonable solution.³3.Do we tell researchers who spend their lives studying cancer in order to find cure that, ya know, they’re just too gohl darn negative? Of course not. So why the crap do we do with matters of faith, culture, politics, psychology, economics, art…? My contention is far too often critical thinking gets a bad wrap. It’s one thing to wallow in a critical spirit, never seeking to accomplish anything and instead being content to grumble about how much the world sucks. It’s quite another thing to exercise a critical spirit, acknowledging and thoroughly exploring problems in order to find a better way. I’ve come to rather enjoy the befuddled look on people’s faces when they tell me I have a critical spirit and I reply, “Why, thank you.”

This seems seasonally appropriate. HT, Joshua Trujillo. I recommend jumping to 8:30.

Over the years I’ve quite intentionally sought out friendships with a diverse group of people.¹ Clearly it hasn’t been a perfect attempt but I have made a concerted effort to not be surrounded by Yes Men. That is, those who do little but pat themselves on the back–mutually reinforcing everything they already think, believe, and assume while singing their own praises. Read more

A few weeks ago I went on Baylor University’s Civil Rights Tour over spring break. Our bus full of students and AmeriCorps members as well as Dr. James SoRelle from the history department traveled all across the South, making stops in Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, Jackson, and Houston.¹1.Our destinations include Central High School, National Civil Rights Museum, 16th St. Baptist Church, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Southern Poverty Law Center, Dexter St. Baptist Church, Rosa Parks Museum, National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, the Viola Liuzzo memorial, COFO Center, Jackson State University, Texas Southern University. It was simultaneously one of the most convicting and inspirational experiences of my life. I came home emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically exhausted, but in a good way. If any of you ever get an opportunity to go on a similar trip, I cannot encourage it highly enough. Read more

Wait, isn't he supposed to be disheveled and bloodied with bandages?

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Philip Yancey has written about how he’s been in continual recovery from his formative experiences in militant, racist Baptist churches. I feel much the same way about my church background. Thankfully, God has healed me to the point that I’m no longer angry, bitter, distraught, or even hurt. Yet for a while now I’ve noted that I remain hyper-sensitive to the hot buttons of preoccupation with sign gifts, fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, extreme piety, radical biblicism, ahistorical restorationism, the politicization of the Church, eschatological obsession, utilitarian business model practices, and trite self-help books and sermons. Read more

Preface¹

This semester I’m taking a course in sacramental theology. The experience has simultaneously deepened my sacramental perspective and made me highly critical of rigid, systematic sacramentality. Read more

There’s a tension that I’ve been wrestling with for years without resolution. On the one hand, an important philosophical principle is that the abuse of a thing doesn’t negate its proper use. On the other hand, when a particular practice, belief, worldview… whatever… ends in the same result time and again, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that there’s likely a causal relationship of some sort. Read more

Here are four interrelated thoughts about why I feel no need to offer an apologetic of my church tradition: Read more

Speaking for no one but myself, I make a concerted effort to speak/write with something of a prophetic, i.e. forthtelling, voice into the church and public sphere.¹1.This blog evidences that on a regular basis. Yet I try to keep in tension passion with discernment, truth with civility. At the same time, having spent all of last week on the Baylor Civil Rights bus tour of the South, I presently have a heightened awareness about civil rights issues and cultural milieu surrounding the murder of Trayvon Martin.²2.Which I hope will never wear off. Read more

Two days ago Rachel Held Evans put up a blog post entitled “15 Reasons I Left Church.” It cut me to the heart. I deeply empathize with each and every point on that list and cannot express the degree to which it troubles me that people like her feel like they have no good options for a local church community. That’s a tragedy because the American Church desperately needs people like her who have a heart like King David’s and are painfully honest about their lives of faith. As I read the post I felt this deep sense of confirmation not only that people like her are precisely why I feel led to become a pastor, but that this is why I need to start the new paradigm of church I’ve written so much about.¹1.That is, I’m compelled to act because people like her–people like me and many of my friends–feel as though we have no where to go. With an appreciative hat tip to Rachel, I’ve adapted her list to convey my own perspective: Read more

Have you ever noticed how commonly people say, “I feel” and “I think” almost interchangeably? This causes problems, especially for me as a future pastor who strives to be challenging yet irenic, critical yet gracious, forthright yet civil, principled yet discerning. Quite honestly, it’s a major struggle of mine to figure out how to respond when people’s emotions are entangled with factual inaccuracies. Read more

It has been my experience, both as an advocate and critic, that few if any modern Six-Day Creationists are aware of the historical development of their position. Correspondingly, there’s this intertwined, two-fold popular assumption that a) conservative evangelicals have consistently resisted all elements of Darwinian evolutionary thought and b) young earth creationism was the dominant view among the mid-19th conservative evangelicals and early 20th century fundamentalists. Both serve as powerful presuppositions undergirding much else. Minor problem: Both are patently false. Read more

On the whole, I found Mark Noll’s 2011 book Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind to be a disappointment. Admittedly, this is because I had enormously high expectations. Not only is he my favorite author writing about one of my favorite topics–the life of the mind–but the publisher billed it as the sequel to the book that saved and transformed my faith, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. This latest work, however, seemed to me to be more of a loose collection of reflections with more Reformed bias than its tight, inspired predecessor. I’d probably give it a B- and can’t say I’d highly recommend it, which is saying something coming from this Mark Noll fanboy. Yet it remains a Noll book, and therefore inevitably contains flashes of lucid brilliance and insight, especially in those occasional instances when he unleashes his inner curmudgeon. As the second post of my “Stars in the Margins” series, what I’m sharing below are the quotes that I found too excellent not to share. I hope they’ll encourage, challenge, refine, and/or help you as much as they did for me. Read more

This afternoon I came across the Calvinists version of this popular meme. Thought I’d share what was my internal commentary as I read it the first time. Just so we’re all clear, however, I know this was created with tongue planted firmly in cheek. And I wrote this post with a smile on my face. My larger point is that although this is intended to be more comedic than poignant, there’s several important threads of truth that ought not be casually dismissed. Much in the same way I laugh at Seinfeld but then critically think about the deeper implications, so I’m doing here.

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*Preface:¹

In the summer of ’09 I went on something of a spiritual pilgrimage. After having unknowingly been on the Canterbury Trail since high school, I’d spent the whole year exploring the Anglican tradition.1.Given the present upheaval within North American Anglicanism, it’s important that I preface this post by stating that I’m not offering an argument for or against affiliation with any particular Anglican body. This is a personal reflection on my own experiences. Nothing more and nothing less. Moreover, I believe that our incomprehensibly complex God is probably calling different individuals and churches to take different paths forward. Oh, and here’s a translation guide for those unfamiliar with the alphabet soup: ACNA: Anglican Church in North America; AMiA: Anglican Mission in the Americas; PEARUSA: Outreach of Rwandan Province It had come time for a decision one way or the other. Since the historical connection was the #1 thing drawing me, it stood to reason that one of the oldest churches on this side of the pond, Christ Church Savannah, was a good place to determine whether this was life’s next path. Read more

My thoughts and feelings about systematic theology have long been conflicted. On the one hand, not once have I enjoyed reading a formal systematic text. From Aquinas to Luther, Barth to Schillebeeckx, Grudem to Grenz, I find it be a laborious task that saps my soul.¹1.It’s about as enjoyable as being hung from your eyelids. On the other hand, I genuinely like the topics explored by systematic theology. Whether ecclesiology or justification, sacramental theology or the work of the Holy Spirit, it all fascinates me.²2.Well most of it, anyway. The thought of eschatology makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. Thank you, Jack Van Impe, for ruining Daniel and Revelation for me. Thus, you see my confusion. Read more

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Anglican polity has been an area of constant reflection these past couple months. This shouldn’t be unsurprising. After all, I’m taking a course in Anglican polity this semester, was a part of AMiA when it broke from PEAR and split, and have now transitioned into PEARUSA. Read more

Today is a day of realizing anew just how far I’ve come–or digressed, depending upon your interpretation: Read more