Closing One Chapter, Starting Another

Last night I posted that I was closing up shop at my political blog, The Arsenal Of Liberty, for a number of reasons. While I am going to leave the blog up I will probably not be publishing anything there going forward. Based on the page views for that blog, no one is going to notice! I have been finding that my focus on politics and using the world's methods to try to achieve what can at best be described as a perversion of Kingdom priorities has been an unwelcome and unhelpful distraction. The political detox process is going to take some time so those who read my tweets or are friends with me on Facebook will still have to suffer.

Closing that blog doesn't mean a disengagement entirely. I still will be writing about how politics impacts the church but not so much from a partisan standpoint but more as a warning. I will still write about militarism and patriotism in the church and how it damages our witness. I will try to engage popular theories like "Two Kingdom" theology, theonomy/dominionism, "Just War", etc. There is a lot to say and think about without picking sides especially since I have come to realize that there really is only one side in American politics, the side that panders to the "Bigs" in our society: Big Business, Big Labor, Big Military, Big Religion. Left behind are the majority of us who pay so the elites can play.

In some ways I am hopeful that the sea change in politics we are witnessing will lead evangelicals to turn away from our obsessive focus on politics and start to focus on cleaning our own house, removing the many planks from our own eyes. For far too long we have worried about getting "prayer back in schools", keeping homosexuals from "marrying" and preserving our favorable tax treatment from Caesar while demanding Caesar leave us alone. Meanwhile the church is in disarray. Our kids by and large look indistinguishable from the world. We spend and borrow and hoard money with the best of them. We are divided and fragmented and getting worse in that respect seemingly every day. We are not reaching the lost and we are not feeding the poor. So many of us are hurting inside with plastic "Sunday morning smiles" on the outside. We have lost our way and we need a major course correction beyond the next election cycle.

Turning leftovers in bacon

I do plan to start writing about issues of food and farming and how they impact family life. I am just more concerned right now with raising my own pork than I am with how much pork barrel spending happens in Washington. I am mostly interested because I see it as a way to instill lost values of simplicity and quiet labor in my children and also because my family, although getting better about food with home raised eggs, raising our own meat chickens, turkeys and pigs, getting fresh, real raw milk from our own cow, still eats really poorly.

I do take seriously the concerns raised in a post I read a few weeks ago, The Dangers Of Christian Agriculture. Having a small farm and living a semi-agrarian life doesn't make one more godly and even being self-sufficient and prideful in that lifestyle can be a dangerous trap. I never want to assume that a certain lifestyle is a replacement or substitute for being filled with the Spirit and deep in the Word. I also realize there are myriad crackpots, kooks and outright heretics in the "Agrarianism" movement. Eyes wide open here!

So expect to hear less, much less, about anything even vaguely political and more about horses and cows, food and community, farming and simplifying. We are blessed to live in an area of the country that fascinates us and fits us so well, surrounded by farming and Anabaptists, close to family and the area where we grew up. You should start to see some posts starting right away, initially with a review of the movie Farmageddon that we watched last night. Just a very disturbing film even if you don't care about raw milk or where your food comes from.

I am also considering changing the name of the blog as it doesn't make much sense anymore since we live way outside of the 'burbs. I am open to suggestions on that!