This illustrates it perfectly

Check this out from Pursuing Titus 2...

By now the outrage has gone viral. Suze Orman told a young couple that they couldn’t possibly afford for the wife to stay home when they have another baby because, among other things, when they have a new baby, their expenses “will go up $700-$1000 a month” due to having to pay for “diapers” and “this and that.” I don’t want to go into the whole financial situation of this particular couple (like the fact that they are already spending more than the two of them make together and, therefore, probably need way more help than this post is going to provide), and I don’t really want to criticize Suze Orman. Maybe she just pulled that number out of her hat, but also maybe it reflects the misguided norm of our Western consumer culture as applied to babies. And that’s what I really want to talk about. That $700-$1000 a month somehow sounded reasonable enough to throw out there on national television, and the young couple (who already had one baby) meekly nodded their heads. Plenty of seasoned thrifty family types are arguing that it’s ridiculously high. But I, being a details person, wanted to explore how high it really is and how much better a creative family could do.

She goes into a great deal of detail and is quite reasonable I think. You should read the whole thing to see how silly and dangerous Ms. Orman's statement truly is. We are not as thrifty as Mrs. Parunak but no way adding a new baby added $700-$1000 per month. Did our kids wear brand new clothes? Nope. Did my boys occasionally wear pink jammies? Yep! A lot of the expenses that people think are "necessities" are really just frivolous. Now some kids have special needs and cost a lot more but those same kids are the ones who need their mom more than others.

So many families are indoctrinated with the dogma that you simply cannot afford to have children and if you do you can't have very many of them and if you somehow manage to have a kid or two there is no way you can stay home.

It is a lie.

Worse it is a lie swallowed hook, line and sinker by many a Christian. Enough is enough! You can have as many children as God blesses you with. You can stay at home with them and raise them up. You can make ends meet and make sure you kids have everything they need. You can do it!

The vocation of motherhood

Doug Wilson has a series of videos on the theology of work that I just stumbled across and they are pretty interesting, coming as they do from a particular worldview and doctrinal position. The most recent one is fascinating, an interview between Doug and his daughter Rachel Jankovic on Motherhood and Work: The Vocation of Motherhood. There is a lot that I disagree with Doug Wilson on, from the role of elders to infant baptism, but I loved this interview...


1--The Vocation of Motherhood from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

I found one line she said to be very interesting. She suggested that the work of staying at home is what drives women to the workplace (at around 1:17). That may not be true in every case but I can't tell you how many times women I work with have made remarks about there being no way they could deal with staying at home and caring for their kids "full-time". When I tell co-workers that my wife stays at home with our eight kids and also homeschools them, they get a look of horror on their face, as if somehow there is something intellectually stimulating and satisfying about working in a cubicle festooned with pictures of your children. 

As a culture we have so stigmatized motherhood as a vocation and calling and created such a horrifying picture of stay at home motherhood of the constantly weary, covered in drool and wearing frumpy clothes mom that we have made mothers afraid of motherhood. Rather than women seeing motherhood and child-rearing as the preferred state to be abandoned only as a last resort, women seem to default to working outside of the home and only reluctantly coming back home when they simply can't afford the child care any longer.

The devaluation of motherhood and marriage is all around us. It was reported yesterday that the percentage of married people in America has hit an all-time low and is heading for minority status. I am hardly surprised that is the case, in fact I am a little surprised that it is not even worse. Why would we expect unregenerate people to embrace an institution created by God for His people and as a picture of His Son and the church indefinitely? What troubles me is that the church, rather than standing in opposition to this trend and seeing family, marriage, motherhood and fatherhood as opportunities to witness to the world instead seems more interested in embracing and outdoing the world at its own game. Some of the most popular women writers in Christian circles seem to take delight in denigrating and mocking the Scriptures because they find that Biblical teaching on motherhood interferes with their own "gifts" and ambitions.

We should recognize and honor motherhood as the high calling that it is, in a realistic fashion recognizing how very difficult it often can be, but supporting and equipping women in this great service to God and the church. We hardly need yet another writer telling women that they need to be more than "just a mother" or "just a wife", as if those are degrading and unimportant things. Of course we should also realize that in this world merely telling young women to stay home and let us know how that works out for them is not proper either. The church exists in large part to equip every member for maturity and ministry and few ministries require more equipping, encouraging and maturity than the raising of children. The church should be pulling out all of the stops to encourage young women to embrace being a wife and mother but also making sure that we are supporting them in that vocation with love and wisdom, especially from older women (Titus 2:3-5). Unfortunately fewer and fewer older women have much experience in this area as more and more of the older generation of women have spent their mothering years working outside of the home.

Being a mother is every bit as important as being a missionary to far away lands even though few churches will put your picture up on their missions board. I wish they would! I would love to see a bulletin board in the foyer of churches with pictures of moms and their kids at home. We should love them and support them. I think it is a far better use of our offerings to financially help out a family in need so mom can stay home than it is to pay for another professional minister or supporting some denominational bureaucracy.

Honor moms. Support them. Love and encourage them. Nothing will have a greater impact on the future witness and mission of the church in America than strong families.

Repost: Gospel Grocery Stores

I put this up last year and I think it helps to get at the way different "forms" of church function in either helping or hindering the intent of the church gathering....
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An interesting story recounted in Total Church:

The Bible calls the church a family. It describes the church as a community that shares together. The church is a body whose members perfectly fit together. We belong to one another. Our friend's church was neither a family or a community. It had no vision for involvement in its immediate community. The truth is, it was not really a church according to any New Testament definition. It was a preaching center. You drove to their large parking garage for your weekly dose of religion just as you traveled to the out-of-town supermarket for your weekly groceries.

(Total Church, pg. 194)

That definition describes an awful lot of churches, big and small. We have had a similar experience in a large Baptist church in northern Kentucky. We sat in the same place every week, down to sitting in the same pew, and we sort of recognized the people around us. The people on the other side of the "sanctuary"? Not a clue. They were anonymous people in their Sunday best. We kind of knew the people in our segmented (younger married adults w/ kids) Sunday school class but virtually everybody else was just an anonymous guy in a suit or woman in a dress we jostled with in the foyer while collecting our kids from the nursery. We went there because they had a big youth and childrens program and because the preaching was consistently decent (unlike our prior smaller church where the preaching was poor at best, the fellowship was sketchy and the only kids in the church were ours and the pastors).

Why do we go to grocery supermarkets? Why is there a new Super Wal-Mart springing up daily? Because it is easy, quick and convenient. We go to a supermarket instead of raising our own food because it costs us less, it is predictable and it takes less time. Rather than work all week to grow, harvest and prepare our own food, we go to the store and get what we need in one fell swoop. I can walk into a store right now and in half an hour get enough food, in sufficient variety, to feed my entire family of ten for a week. I don’t know the other people shopping and I don’t need to because knowing them is irrelevant to what I am there for.

The church is treated much the same. We can get all of our religion in one stop and it only costs us some time and a check in the offering plate. I can go to one of dozens of local traditional churches on Sunday morning and drop my little ones off in a nursery to have a little activity but more importantly keep them out of my hair so I can “worship”. My middle school kids have classes, my high schoolers get classes with a hip youth pastor. My wife and I can go to a prepared Sunday school class and then sit in a pew for an hour, sing a few songs, listen to a prepared talk and then head out in time to be home for lunch.

Many (most?) institutional churches are grocery stores for religion. Quick, easy, in and out and plenty of different ones to choose from. This one makes you mad? Go shop somewhere else. Your only attachment is selection, price and service or in the case of a local church music style, preacher and denomination. It makes little difference to me if I go to Wal-Mart, Meijer or Krogers for my groceries. It impacts the store but only a little. There are lots of local churches I could go to that would be the same way, ranging from hip churches with cool music to somewhat more traditional, orthodox churches. No one would notice us if we were careful (although with eight kids, when we show up at a church it is like chum in shark waters and it is hard to blend in). We could show up a few Sundays at one church and then go somewhere else for a few weeks. We could maintain a great deal of anonymity beyond a smile and handshake.

The church should be more like a community garden and less like a supermarket. That might mean we need to spend a lot of time together. We might get a bit dirty in the process and there are going to be disappointments. Things might not turn out like we hope. If you have a garden and plant tomatoes, sometimes some of the tomatoes will have bugs in them or turn brown or fall off the vine before they are ripe. Sometimes it rains too much and sometimes it rains too little. If you go to the grocery store, you can pick just the best looking tomatoes and pretty much know what you are getting. It may not taste as good as a home-grown tomato and it might have been soaked in pesticides before it was shipped from California to Michigan but it is predictable. We demand too much predictability in the church, we want to know when to show up, what to expect and in what order. Deviate from the “order of worship” in the bulletin and people will be in mass confusion. Lots of people defend the institutional church by pointing it out that it is full of imperfect people but we try to make the gathering of the church as homogenous and easy as possible.

Gardening is hard work, dirty and unpredictable but the rewards are often wonderfully and immeasurably better than “store bought” produce. The church works in much the same way. Unplanned and unscripted is scary because you don’t know what you might get but I would much rather have somebody stumble over a thought or endure periods of silence than sit through another carefully scripted service designed to deliver the maximum religion for the minimum cost. The church is not something we can cram into a couple of hours a week and the goal of church should not be to get in and get out as quickly and efficiently as possible so we can mark a check box on our religion shopping list. Sermon? Check. Singing at least three songs? Check. Shaking the preachers hand? Check. Out at noon and lunch away from the rest of the church by 12:30? Check.

The church is not a list to be completed, it is a life to be lived with one another.

Yet Another Reason Politics and Faith Don't Mix

The political world is abuzz with news that a staffer for Newt Gingrich referred to mormonism as a cult during a focus group, a statement that led to his firing from the campaign of Newt Gingrich, moral paragon. This is reported in the Iowa Republican but it is national news. From their webpage...

A participant in a focus group organized by TheIowaRepublican.com and McClatchy newspapers lost his job because of comments he made during the event last week. Shortly after participating in the focus group, Craig Bergman was hired as the Iowa political director for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.

The controversial comment came in regards to Mitt Romney’s prospects, if he captured the GOP nomination. “There is a national pastor who is very much on the anti-Mitt Romney bandwagon,” Bergman said. “A lot of the evangelicals believe God would give us four more years of Obama just for the opportunity to expose the cult of Mormon…There’s a thousand pastors ready to do that.”

There is an awful lot going on with that statement and none of it good.

First and foremost. Mormonism is a cult. In terms of its theology as well as its overtly cultic practices mormonism is a textbook example of a pseudo-Christian pagan cult. That is obvious to any student of that religious group but it certainly is not something that is going to be acceptable in the secular world of politics. In order to navigate the world of national politics with any success, you need to be very careful about what you say and calling the faith of a candidate a "cult", even if it is true, is simply unacceptable. Ironically the man Mr. Bergman signed on to work for prior to being fired is a Roman Catholic convert, a religious organization that long was considered "the whore of Babylon" by most Protestants (see the sort of non-PC language used to describe Rome in the older Protestant confessions and creeds, they make calling mormonism a cult sound like a Hallmark card)

The other biggie is the notion that God is more concerned with American politics than He is almost any other issue. I am not sure that the Presidential election season in America is more important to God than the ruler of Saudi Arabia or the mayor of a town in Japan. Far too many "pastors" seem more interested in who wins the White House in 2012 than they are in the lost, the hungry, the orphan and the widow right in their own neighborhood.

Being entangled with the world is more than cable TV and video games. Some of our deepest entanglements with the world happen in the world of politics but it is far easier to rail against Harry Potter from the pulpit than to risk insulting influential church members by adopting political neutrality. That doesn't mean that government and politics are without value but we need to always keep in mind that the Kingdom of God doesn't rise or fall based on the GOP nominee for President.

Even more on giving

Given the last few posts on giving, I think this is a good time to link back to Alan's posts on giving in the church from last October....

Introduction

Christians giving directly to others because of need

Christians giving indirectly to others because of need

Christians giving to other Christians who are traveling from place to place

Christians giving to other Christians in response to some service

I think Alan does a great job in breaking down the way the church gave/shared with one another in the New Testament. Take a look at his series and ask if that is what we see in sharing and giving in the church today?

People are not budget items

I mentioned yesterday that world famous Canadian blogger Tim Challies is doing a series on giving in the church. As I expected most of it is little more than a regurgitation of the cultural understanding of “give to the local church to support the local church” dogma. Today he covered the “where” and “how much” question and his answer and more importantly his rationale for answering “where” with “the local church” was quite telling. His first two points were not terrible…

First, the church appoints certain people to be aware of need and responsive to it. In most churches this is the job of deacon who are called and equipped to be both proactive and responsive when it comes to need.

Second, the leaders of the church can identify the most important needs. The elders and deacons work together to identify and determine how to meet whatever needs arise.

That seems reasonable. We see that the early church sold their belongings and gave them to the apostles’ feet to be doled out….

There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.(Acts 4:34-35 ESV)

I would point out that elders in local churches today are not exactly the same as the apostles but that is a minor quibble. Now I have never been a deacon in a church except in the sense of deacons being servants and I certain strive to serve wherever I am but I wonder how accurate the assumption is that, i.e. that the deacons are aware of the needs of the church and ensuring that they are being met. I question this for a couple of reasons, one being that in most churches we have been associated with there is not the level of close fellowship that would be required to really know what the needs of every Christian in a local church are (plus our American pride that prevents us from seeking help from friends). The other reason is that in a church budget, benevolence or mercy ministry is but one line item and is rarely (again in my experience) a very substantial one compared to clergy salaries and building maintenance. Still, those first two points seem defensible from Scripture. His third point is that often more can be accomplished by big gifts to a relatively small number of ministries, which seems to fly in the face of the reality that $500 to help a family with heating and food in your local community is probably more Biblical than a $5000 donation to some massive bureaucratic ministry.
Then take a look at reason number four (emphasis added)….

Fourth, the New Testament makes it clear that the church is to set aside certain men to the work of the ministry and some of these are to be set aside to vocational ministry. Most Christians take this to mean that they are to be paid for their work. By making the church your primary means of giving, you are supporting your pastors in the ministry. And, of course, you are also supporting all the ministry of that church, from paying salaries to paying for a building and Bibles and everything else that is needed to keep a church going. If you are at a church week-by-week but giving your money to another cause, you are not supporting and sustaining your own church.

Most of it is typical pay clergy rhetoric but the second from the last sentence was really telling. The mindset that says we need salaried professional clergy and “church” buildings in order to keep going is so prevalent in the church and it is really damaging because the actual people of the church become a line item on the budget and often that line item falls far down the pecking order on the budget. We have to pay for the building and the pastor because without those how could we possible have a church?! Sure the Jones family is beingevicted or having their heat turned off but at least they can come here on Sunday and listen to a sermon in a comfy pew!

This is so contrary to Scripture where sharing within the church and caring for one another was not one of the financial priorities of the church, it was the priority of the church. In the midst of false teaching, violence and persecution against the church and the generally poor conditions of the first century, the church didn’t just “keep going”, it thrived. Today in the midst of unimaginable wealth and cultural acceptance the institutional church in the West is largely spiritually dead and everyone knows it but the proposed solution is always more of the same. More programs, more and better buildings, more clergy.

This is not the time for business as usual. Playing church for centuries has gotten us in serious trouble in the church to the point that the world we are supposed to be reaching associates us with hypocrisy, money grubbing, anger, jealously and politics rather than grace, mercy and love. I can't say that the world is wrong. For all of our talk about “loving one another”, our budgets and financial decisions scream just the opposite. We love religion, we love performance, we love private property. Our fellow members of God’s elect, His adopted family which we were brought into by the blood of Christ and the grace of God? They are just a budget item, somewhere between snow removal and office supplies.

Why do we marvel that unbelievers want nothing to do with “Christianity”? Much of the time I don’t either.

Giving and sharing: Are They The Same Thing?

Tim Challies is doing a series on giving over at his blog. So far it is pretty much boilerplate stuff and you can see where it is heading (i.e. give 10% to your local church first and then to other ministries or direct giving if you have anything else above and beyond that). As I read over it, I started to think about how much I dislike the term "giving". Is "giving" the same thing as "sharing"? Do we see the model of the New Covenant church as "giving" or as "sharing"?

First a couple of definitions, at least in my own interpretation of the terms.

Giving implies that what I have is mine and I give some of it to whatever cause I choose, whether that is a church or the Salvation Army or the National Rifle Association. I give a certain percentage and the rest is mine. It is a gift I choose to give.

Sharing implies that within the community of faith what's mine is yours. I make no claim on what is "mine" because truly nothing is mine. Anything I have is available to any brother in need at any time, without strings attached and without the need for budgets or committees to determine where it goes.

Those are clumsy definitions but I think they are a starting point. When we look in Scripture what do we see, specifically in the New Testament is the church giving or sharing? Clearly the Old Testament/Old Covenant model is "giving" but what about the New? Do we see our traditional notion of "storehouse giving" or is the church "sharing"?

In the one case where the church gathered up money, the example often cited as "proof" that Christians should "give at church", 1 Corinthians 16:1 (see also Rom 15:26 and Acts 11: 29-30 dealing with the same issue), Paul is telling the church in Corinth to set aside money to take to Jerusalem. The church was sharing with their brethren in Jerusalem who were in need and not keeping the money "in house".

In Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:32, perhaps the most uncomfortable passages for many Western Christians in all of Scripture, I think what is happening is "sharing", not "giving". They were not writing a check on Sunday morning at church. They were sharing directly to those who were in need and perhaps as importantly were not paying operating expenses but rather meeting the physical needs of the church (presumably food and clothing?)

I have argued in the past that we never see the church in the New Testament treating money as we do, i.e. the giving of offerings to the local church where it is primarily used to fund the offerings of that local church with a small portion being distributed outside of the church organization. I think the distinction between Christians sharing with one another and giving to the local church is enormous and very, very important. What do you think? Is there a difference between giving and sharing and is the way we understand and view money important to how we relate to one another?

I am not sure which is worse

I read this and wondered.....

Perry backs constitutional change for school prayer

(CNN) - Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Sunday for a constitutional amendment to allow prayer in public schools.

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," the Republican presidential hopeful went a step further than his previous calls for the Supreme Court to reverse its 1962 decision that banned organized prayer in public schools.

Perry said he would support "a constitutional amendment that would allow our children to pray in school any time that they would like."

Is it worse that Rick Perry thinks that American evangelical voters are such saps that we would be swayed by an empty promise to amend the Constitution of the United States to allow prayer in public schools or that he is probably right?

Speaking of ornaments

Here is my new favorite!

Jealous? Don't be, you can get your very own from The Haiti Orphan Project Store!

Christmas Ornament Giveaway!

Bubbling Brook Farm is giving away some cook Christmas ornaments, jump over and check them out and enter to win!

Christmas Ornament Giveaway

On calling and ministry among Christians: limited or universal?

I deeply appreciate Al Mohler, reading his blog whenever he posts anything, listening to both of his podcasts on a regular basis, etc. (Now you know that whenever someone says that, they next thing they say is going to be a disagreement! That is true here.) Dr. Mohler posted the text of his talk to be delivered at the 208th commencement of Southern Seminary. Most of the talk is a fairly typical application of Paul’s letters to Timothy as directly and uniquely applicable to professional ministers but one thing he wrote late in the talk jumped out at me.

In every believer, the perfect patience of Christ is demonstrated, but in the life and calling of the minister, it is demonstrated all over again.

Did you catch that? God’s patience with us is demonstrated in each person who believes, presumably the patience of withholding His wrath against the unrighteousness of sinners. But a guy who goes to seminary and gets a certificate of ordination? That is a second demonstration of God’s patience that is apparently unique to clergy.

It is gravely disturbing that the commencement address heard by seminary graduates this morning tells them that they are unique in the church by virtue of the sheepskin they will receive in return for gobs of money and the ability to pass graduate level coursework. What does that tell the Christian who cannot afford seminary for whatever reason or lacks the academic prowess to pass Greek or Hebrew classes? Good enough to sit in the pew and contribute, not qualified for "real" ministry?

What is it about professionally trained clergy that demonstrates God’s patience a second time? This notion that there is some sort of divine, supernatural calling that is unique to those Christians who feel compelled to pursue a seminary degree is so foreign to Scripture that to proclaim it requires an enormous assumption based solely in our traditions and church culture. Yet we hear it over and over again even from those who ostensibly hold to a doctrine of the priesthood of all believers that in practice means the priesthood of all some believers more than others.

Again and again we see on the one hand bemoaning of the general apathy of the Body of Christ and on the other  hand embracing church traditions that provide fertile soil for the exact sort of apathy we decry. When we describe those who have elected to attend seminary and pursue vocational clerical ministry as being called in the same manner as Paul: “In the same way, they, like Paul, know that the ministry they have received is just as much a demonstration of God’s grace and unmerited favor.”, we should expect to get the results we see all around us.

I have no intrinsic problem with seminary. If someone wants to spend a bunch of money and three years of their life to get an advanced degree, that is their business. I do have a problem with those who do so being treated as somehow above the rest of the church. Even if we dress it up with the language of service, the reality is that we still see certain men as uniquely called and apart from the rest of the church and that dichotomy is unhealthy and unbiblical. Church leaders, elders and deacons, are servants who lead by example, not rule by virtue of an amorphous “calling” or educational achievement or ecclesiastical paperwork.

I need your help once again

The other night while at the pregnancy resource center I was browsing through a catalog from Christianbook.com. You have to love a catalog that has the John MacArthur study Bible and a book by Joel Osteen on the same page! Anyway, I saw a product and I am afraid I just don't quite get it. The item is called: New Covenant Prayer Shawl, English/Hebrew with Bag 72 x 22 . What exactly is this you might ask? Well here is what it says:

Add meaning to times of ceremonial prayer with Hebrew tallit (prayer shawl) in white with striped accents in blue and metallic gold. The collar features the Messianic roots symbol and and Hebrew prayer which reads: Blessed are you O Lord, King of the Universe, who has fulfilled all of the law through Jesus the Messiah and has covered us with his Righteousness. Each of the four corners is accented with a different Scripture verse in English - taken from Matthew 14:36, Isaiah 53:5, 2 Corinthians 5:21, and Malachi 4:2. Fashioned of acrylic; measures 72" long x 22" wide. Exquisite in design and workmanship, with tassel trim and ceremonial fringes. Also includes matching zippered bag with embroidered roots symbol; measures 11" x 10.25".

So here is my question. What exactly does that have to do with the New Covenant? See I thought that under the New Covenant there is neither Jew nor Greek (Gal 3:28). I also wasn't aware that under the New Covenant we were called to ceremonial prayers, with or without $25 prayer shawls.

So here is the question. What possible purpose could this serve?