Saturday, May 18, 2013
Happiness Is....
...a huge bag of free leaf lard! We got this from our Amish guy who butchers and processes our hogs. The bag must weigh 35-40 lbs and we have our first batch chopped up and in the crock pot rendering down!
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Our Double Standard Is Showing (Again)
There was quite an uproar a few days back when President
Obama addressed an event for Planned Parenthood and closed his comments with
"God bless you", a "blessing" aimed at Planned Parenthood. The uproar was
understandable. Planned "Parenthood" is the face of the American
abortion industry, a business that is responsible for unimaginable butchery on
a daily basis. To invoke God's blessing on their endeavors, even in the throw
away manner that politicians typically say "God bless ", is an affront. George Weigel writing for First Things described it as blasphemy in his essay yesterday, Tribulation Compounded by Blasphemy:
But there was worse. For President Obama concluded his remarks as follows: “Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you . . .”
And that is nothing short of blasphemy.
Too harsh? No. For in its discussion of this grave sin against the Second Commandment, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 2148) teaches that “it is also blasphemous to make use of God’s name to . . . reduce people to servitude, to torture persons or to put them to death.” That is precisely what happens in Planned Parenthood abortuaries. And on that, the president of the United States called down the divine blessing.
Pray for him. Pray for the United States, which is in very, very serious trouble.
But there was worse. For President Obama concluded his remarks as follows: “Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you . . .”
And that is nothing short of blasphemy.
Too harsh? No. For in its discussion of this grave sin against the Second Commandment, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 2148) teaches that “it is also blasphemous to make use of God’s name to . . . reduce people to servitude, to torture persons or to put them to death.” That is precisely what happens in Planned Parenthood abortuaries. And on that, the president of the United States called down the divine blessing.
Pray for him. Pray for the United States, which is in very, very serious trouble.
Now I don't put much stock in what the Catechism of the
Catholic Church has to say on a topic but it is interesting that it says that it
is blasphemous to use God's name to put people to death. I would agree that invoking God's name in the
process of putting people to death is blasphemy (an irony I will leave unexplored for now). To ask for God's blessing on a
group that murders children for money on a daily basis is a perversion and
gross blasphemy indeed. No issue there but that also raises a sticky question
that most Christians in America
not only refuse to consider but get awfully mad when someone else does. Many,
many Christians and generic religious Americans alike pray loudly and fervently
for God to "bless our troops". What is the connection you ask?
We don't say "God bless the troops of every
country". No, often Christians in America thank God for our soldiers,
the soldiers that "keep us free" and ask God to "bless our
troops". A quick Google image search for "God bless our troops"
brings up some pretty extensive results as a testimony to the notion that
somehow American soldiers are more deserving of blessing and serve in a
more righteous capacity than soldiers of other nations. After all America is a
"Christian nation" founded on "Judeo-Christian values" so
of course our soldiers are carrying out God's will.
If someone were to say "God bless Planned
Parenthood" and mean "God bring repentance to those engaged in their
bloody work of murder for profit" that would be one thing. Likewise if our
desire for God to bless our troops was a call to change hearts and bring repentance
that might be something else indeed. However I cannot imagine that is what
President Obama meant in his attempt to invoke God's blessings on the mission
of Planned Parenthood nor is that what American Christians mean when they pray
for God's blessings on "our" troops to prevail over "our"
enemies. The blessing in both case is for a blessing on their current efforts to continue and that is problematic.
Just as I cannot divide my loyalty by pledging allegiance to
a flag, I cannot pray for God to intercede on behalf of one side of a secular
military conflict over another side. I don't see that God calls me to be concerned
over a "way of life" or state sponsored "religious liberty"
or the various economic, territorial or ego driven reasons we go war. I understand the
very substantive difference between the military which has a legitimate secular
function even if I don't agree with the policies and a business that makes
money from carving up unborn children in the womb. They are not the same but
that doesn't change the very real double-standard in play here where we place
our loyalties to nation on a pedestal and pray for God to bless the armies of Caesar
because we are terrified that we might lose our precious "rights" or
have to pay more for gasoline. We have not faced a real threat to America proper
since the beginning of the 20th century but those intervening decades are
filled with war after war that American Christians have dutifully and often
eagerly participated in not just by praying for our troops but by filling the
ranks of those troops with our sons. In spite of this, if you dare to ask the question of why God should bless our troops you can be sure that you are in for a hostile response.
The double-standard in our pro-life position is glaring and
if you think that the world we are called to reach doesn't see it you are
fooling yourself. We pray outside of abortion clinics but cheer when
unbelievers die. We talk about loving out enemies on Sunday and pray for God to
smite them or at least assist our troops in smiting them on Monday. We worship
a Savior executed by the state and have no problem with the state executing
others. We speak of the sanctity of human life, especially children, but turn a
blind eye to the dead children who are "collateral damage" in
American wars. The often hurled charge that American Christians only care about
children until they are born is spurious but we seem bent on trying to prove our accusers right. After Kermit Gosnell was convicted of the heinous crimes of which he was accused, some Christians seemed to be tripping over themselves to call for his execution while the majority of the church seemed disinterested once the cause of the day left the headlines. Even while it was going on the church in America was largely silent on the killing in our name of innocents abroad. Out of sight, out of mind I guess and after all when it comes to "national security" you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.
Few things undermine our witness more than hypocrisy and even when it is in our blind spots, the world sees it clear as day. People reject Christ because of the hardness of their unregenerate hearts but they reject "Christianity" because they see our hypocrisy and double-standards, preaching one thing and practicing another. No matter how much we cherish our American identity and the privileges that come along with our worldly citizenship, it pales compared to the holy and eternity impacting mission we are called to. If our loyalty to our land of birth impedes our witness, it is unhealthy and needs to be cut out of the church. If we can rail against President Obama asking for God's blessing on an organization of butchers and do so while driving cars asking for God's blessings on those we send to kill and die on our behalf for secular reasons we shouldn't be surprised at the derision of the world.
Being pro-life means all life. Loving our enemies means all of our enemies. The commandments of Christ don't change at the borders of America.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Control the food, control the people
The older I get, the less crazy some conspiracy theories sound to me...
You can live without cars or cell phones or cable TV. In fact a lot of what people think are necessities are little more than luxuries and a many of them are actually harmful. But food? You simply cannot live for very long without food. Food, water and shelter are the essentials of life but with each passing year all three become less free and more controlled by the government.
Our food system is completely and almost inextricably linked to our government control. For the vast majority of Americans, even families that raise some of their own food like we do, it is virtually impossible to feed your family without eating food that has been regulated, controlled and subsidized by the Federal government. Walk through a supermarket with me and I bet that you would be hard pressed to find a single food item that didn't get handled, subsidized or regulated by the government. Now that may not seem like a big deal, after all don't we all want "safe food"? Sure but at what cost? I am not talking about the price sticker on a bag of Doritos, I am talking about the real costs of food that you don't see at the checkout line but that we all pay.
Thanks to onerous and usually unnecessary regulations that make smaller scale (and more local) operations economically nonviable, more and more of our food is produced hundreds or thousands of
miles away. Have you ever stopped to wonder how it is that you can buy virtually any food you want, regardless of where you live and what season it is? We used to live in one of the northernmost towns in North America, a place where the growing season is very short and winter is very long, but I could still buy "fresh" fruits and vegetables year round even though the nearest place that could raise strawberries in February was over 1000 miles away. I wasn't buying produce that was "produced" locally, I was buying food that had been trucked from all over the country (and outside of the country) to provide me with whatever food I desired, whenever I desired it (and at a low price of course). Gone is any sense of the seasonality of food, something that makes sense when you realize that the harvesting that happens in fall now is mostly field corn and soybeans that are completely inedible for humans. The crops that are harvested in the fall will be shipped off to a food processing plant or a feedlot somewhere far away or stored until the prices hit the right level.
Of course to move that food efficiently requires a key ingredient, namely cheap fuel. If we paid $7 or $9 per gallon for diesel fuel you can be sure that it would be far more expensive to buy food from far away processors and you wouldn't be able to obtain produce in the winter, or at least not at such a low price. One of the most insane features of our modern food system is that it is built not so much on sun and soil as it is on petroleum, petroleum that we on the one hand refuse to extract from our own domestic sources but on the other hand are perfectly willing (and often eager) to sacrifice countless lives and limbs of our young people and innocent by-standers overseas to keep the river of cheap oil flowing. If we ever suffer a real petroleum crisis you can be sure that a food crisis will follow right behind. Our food system is dependent more on oil than on crop yields or biotechnology or the good old American farmer. Without oil, cheap and plentiful, we could not continue to feed ourselves as we are used to doing. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. It also shows what a farce the idea of cheap food really is. Between crop subsidies, disaster insurance, trade deals, military interventions around the world, etc. we pay an enormous cost for our food supply but the difference is that it is an indirect cost, something lost in the morass of the income tax system.
Another way that Uncle Sam controls food is simply having the government become the provider of food for many Americans, more now than at any time in history which is a symptom of the bitter irony of the "War on poverty" that has made poverty generational and more common rather than reducing it in any meaningful way. There are over 23,000,000 American households receiving food assistance via the SNAP (Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program) program administered by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Broken out by actual people and we see that over 47,000,000 people or 15% of the population is enrolled in the SNAP program with some states like Mississippi and the District of Columbia having over 20% of their population enrolled in the "food stamp" program. The modern day United States Department of Agriculture is mostly involved in regulations and in supplementing tens of millions of Americans food purchasing budgets rather than anything having to do with actual agricultural practices, having long ago abdicated the development of agricultural practices to international food and agriculture companies like Monsanto, Tyson and Conagra as well as land grant universities funded in large part by those same companies. This isn't a knock on people who legitimately are in a position to need food assistance but it is an accusatory finger pointed right at the same organization that on the one hand provides "free" food for some while perpetuating an economic system that leaves so many people in need in the first place, namely the United States government. Not only can you not really buy much food that isn't controlled by the government, many families simply cannot afford to feed themselves at all without that assistance.
So what is my point other than conspiracy ranting? Not much other than pointing out that the majority of Americans and the citizens of other industrialized nations are more or less completely dependent on the government for feeding themselves to the point of being completely incapable of procuring even the most basic food needs without the assistance and permission of their government. It is easy to assume that the government will always be there but given the troubling instability of European nations and the incredible debt level of our own government that permanence is no longer a given. The seemingly steady and secure food system we enjoy is actually on pretty shaky ground and any disruption could have serious, potentially catastrophic consequences.
Each little step toward food independence, no matter how small, is important. Whether you have a small square foot container garden or a few backyard chickens or you raise most of your own food yourself you take a small step of peaceful, lawful rebellion against those who would enslave us by controlling our food supply. Cheap food is anything but inexpensive and a people cannot be free when they are not able to even feed themselves without a by your leave from the government.
You can live without cars or cell phones or cable TV. In fact a lot of what people think are necessities are little more than luxuries and a many of them are actually harmful. But food? You simply cannot live for very long without food. Food, water and shelter are the essentials of life but with each passing year all three become less free and more controlled by the government.
Our food system is completely and almost inextricably linked to our government control. For the vast majority of Americans, even families that raise some of their own food like we do, it is virtually impossible to feed your family without eating food that has been regulated, controlled and subsidized by the Federal government. Walk through a supermarket with me and I bet that you would be hard pressed to find a single food item that didn't get handled, subsidized or regulated by the government. Now that may not seem like a big deal, after all don't we all want "safe food"? Sure but at what cost? I am not talking about the price sticker on a bag of Doritos, I am talking about the real costs of food that you don't see at the checkout line but that we all pay.
Thanks to onerous and usually unnecessary regulations that make smaller scale (and more local) operations economically nonviable, more and more of our food is produced hundreds or thousands of
miles away. Have you ever stopped to wonder how it is that you can buy virtually any food you want, regardless of where you live and what season it is? We used to live in one of the northernmost towns in North America, a place where the growing season is very short and winter is very long, but I could still buy "fresh" fruits and vegetables year round even though the nearest place that could raise strawberries in February was over 1000 miles away. I wasn't buying produce that was "produced" locally, I was buying food that had been trucked from all over the country (and outside of the country) to provide me with whatever food I desired, whenever I desired it (and at a low price of course). Gone is any sense of the seasonality of food, something that makes sense when you realize that the harvesting that happens in fall now is mostly field corn and soybeans that are completely inedible for humans. The crops that are harvested in the fall will be shipped off to a food processing plant or a feedlot somewhere far away or stored until the prices hit the right level.
Of course to move that food efficiently requires a key ingredient, namely cheap fuel. If we paid $7 or $9 per gallon for diesel fuel you can be sure that it would be far more expensive to buy food from far away processors and you wouldn't be able to obtain produce in the winter, or at least not at such a low price. One of the most insane features of our modern food system is that it is built not so much on sun and soil as it is on petroleum, petroleum that we on the one hand refuse to extract from our own domestic sources but on the other hand are perfectly willing (and often eager) to sacrifice countless lives and limbs of our young people and innocent by-standers overseas to keep the river of cheap oil flowing. If we ever suffer a real petroleum crisis you can be sure that a food crisis will follow right behind. Our food system is dependent more on oil than on crop yields or biotechnology or the good old American farmer. Without oil, cheap and plentiful, we could not continue to feed ourselves as we are used to doing. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. It also shows what a farce the idea of cheap food really is. Between crop subsidies, disaster insurance, trade deals, military interventions around the world, etc. we pay an enormous cost for our food supply but the difference is that it is an indirect cost, something lost in the morass of the income tax system. 
Another way that Uncle Sam controls food is simply having the government become the provider of food for many Americans, more now than at any time in history which is a symptom of the bitter irony of the "War on poverty" that has made poverty generational and more common rather than reducing it in any meaningful way. There are over 23,000,000 American households receiving food assistance via the SNAP (Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program) program administered by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Broken out by actual people and we see that over 47,000,000 people or 15% of the population is enrolled in the SNAP program with some states like Mississippi and the District of Columbia having over 20% of their population enrolled in the "food stamp" program. The modern day United States Department of Agriculture is mostly involved in regulations and in supplementing tens of millions of Americans food purchasing budgets rather than anything having to do with actual agricultural practices, having long ago abdicated the development of agricultural practices to international food and agriculture companies like Monsanto, Tyson and Conagra as well as land grant universities funded in large part by those same companies. This isn't a knock on people who legitimately are in a position to need food assistance but it is an accusatory finger pointed right at the same organization that on the one hand provides "free" food for some while perpetuating an economic system that leaves so many people in need in the first place, namely the United States government. Not only can you not really buy much food that isn't controlled by the government, many families simply cannot afford to feed themselves at all without that assistance.
So what is my point other than conspiracy ranting? Not much other than pointing out that the majority of Americans and the citizens of other industrialized nations are more or less completely dependent on the government for feeding themselves to the point of being completely incapable of procuring even the most basic food needs without the assistance and permission of their government. It is easy to assume that the government will always be there but given the troubling instability of European nations and the incredible debt level of our own government that permanence is no longer a given. The seemingly steady and secure food system we enjoy is actually on pretty shaky ground and any disruption could have serious, potentially catastrophic consequences.
Each little step toward food independence, no matter how small, is important. Whether you have a small square foot container garden or a few backyard chickens or you raise most of your own food yourself you take a small step of peaceful, lawful rebellion against those who would enslave us by controlling our food supply. Cheap food is anything but inexpensive and a people cannot be free when they are not able to even feed themselves without a by your leave from the government.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Having A Baby Is Not A Disease
I saw this video linked the other day and liked it a lot....
Again, we had all eight of our kids in hospitals, the last couple attended by a midwife. We have never given birth at home. We also don't think that women who choose to should be seen as backwoods kooks and furthermore don't think that midwives who assist a woman in doing one of the most natural events in life should be criminzalized for doing so.
There might be a point when more and more drugs and c-sections and inductions and extraordinarily expensive hospital care might be overkill, frightening women into thinking they are incompetent to deliver their own child. Sometimes the old ways are really better.
Again, we had all eight of our kids in hospitals, the last couple attended by a midwife. We have never given birth at home. We also don't think that women who choose to should be seen as backwoods kooks and furthermore don't think that midwives who assist a woman in doing one of the most natural events in life should be criminzalized for doing so.
There might be a point when more and more drugs and c-sections and inductions and extraordinarily expensive hospital care might be overkill, frightening women into thinking they are incompetent to deliver their own child. Sometimes the old ways are really better.
My How Things Have Changed (And Not For The Better)
Sometimes the best blogging is the simplest and I love Dave Black's lists. This morning features a great list of bullet points, each one dead on the money and worthy of extensive study in its own right (and I would love to see him do a point by point on each topic below) about how the church has changed from the New Testament model.
All true I am afraid. Then he simply adds this:
The New Testament shows us that the need great of modern Christianity is to return to biblical faithfulness and the profound simplicity of the New Testament.
Indeed. Many of us tend to blog in great volumes about the church but that simple statement kind of captures it. Anyway I don't have anything to add to that (well I do but it probably can wait!) but I think it is worth pondering.
- The Lord's Supper has changed from a celebration to a ceremony.
- Worship has changed from participation to observation.
- Witness has changed from relationship to salesmanship.
- Leadership has changed from servanthood to professionalism.
- Mission has changed from being missionaries to supporting missionaries.
- Body life has changed from edification to entertainment.
- Buildings have changed from functional to sacred.
- Child care has changed from the hands of parents to the hands of strangers
All true I am afraid. Then he simply adds this:
The New Testament shows us that the need great of modern Christianity is to return to biblical faithfulness and the profound simplicity of the New Testament.
Indeed. Many of us tend to blog in great volumes about the church but that simple statement kind of captures it. Anyway I don't have anything to add to that (well I do but it probably can wait!) but I think it is worth pondering.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Pray For Kermit Gosnell
The news is abuzz with the verdict of guilty for Kermit Gosnell. Caesar has meted out a just verdict and now will carry out the wrath of the state on an evil doer. While many who kill children for profit still walk free, a mockery of justice, at least in this one account justice will be done. As far as what is to happen to Gosnell next, there remains the possibility of a death sentence. Many will cheer if that is the sentence.
I will not.
First, Mr. Gosnell is 72 and unlikely to live long enough to have a death sentence carried out. More importantly, as heinous and inhuman as his actions were no one is too great a sinner for Christ. I will not call for his death because he is already dead in his sins. I will instead pray for his life, a new life in Christ where he can receive forgiveness for his crimes. Mr. Gosnell, a butcher of children, is no more deserving of hell than I and if a killer of children is not the sort of enemy I should pray for I don't know who would be.
Pray for this man that while he still draws breath that God will call him to Himself. If God chooses not to, He will see to it that Gosnell faces the eternal justice that he deserves (and that I do as well). Regardless there is hope for Kermit Gosnell in Jesus Christ and I am far more interested in seeing his salvation than I am in seeing him strapped to an electric chair.
I will not.
First, Mr. Gosnell is 72 and unlikely to live long enough to have a death sentence carried out. More importantly, as heinous and inhuman as his actions were no one is too great a sinner for Christ. I will not call for his death because he is already dead in his sins. I will instead pray for his life, a new life in Christ where he can receive forgiveness for his crimes. Mr. Gosnell, a butcher of children, is no more deserving of hell than I and if a killer of children is not the sort of enemy I should pray for I don't know who would be.
Pray for this man that while he still draws breath that God will call him to Himself. If God chooses not to, He will see to it that Gosnell faces the eternal justice that he deserves (and that I do as well). Regardless there is hope for Kermit Gosnell in Jesus Christ and I am far more interested in seeing his salvation than I am in seeing him strapped to an electric chair.
Replay: Christians and the sword
Why the anger at the suggestion, from Scripture, that Christians should not take up the sword and commit violence toward others? Do we love bloodshed so much? It is not a difficult case to make from the Bible, a case made from the teachings of Christ, the manner of His life and His death, the testimony of His apostles and the witness of His people throughout the ages who have gladly laid down their life for the sake of the Kingdom. Nevertheless I get more backlash from this topic than almost any other.
I would hope that I would not be misinterpreted as saying that those who take up the sword are not Christians, I simply ask if we should not seek the way of the towel and basin rather than the way of the sword and not just when it is safe and convenient but especially when it is not safe or convenient. It is easy to talk about loving our enemies in theory but many of the teachings of Christ are easy in the abstract. It is when we are faced with a situation where following Christ means great cost to us that we find out where our allegiance lies and who our trust is in.
The sword is the tool of the world, a tool that wields the power of finality by taking the life of another. That is what it is made for and that is what the powers of the world have always used it for. It is what the Jews expected from their Messiah, that He would lead them in overthrowing their oppressors. Jesus showed them a different way, a way that makes no sense to the world. He showed them and the Romans and His sheep throughout the ages that love of enemy can overcome the sin of the world.
Anyway, here is the series presented for your enjoyment and consideration.....
--------
The state, the sword and Christians
Can Christians take up the sword? - Intro
Can Christians take up the sword? - The pro-sword view
Can Christians take up the sword? - The anti-sword view
Can Christians take up the sword? - Conclusion
Thursday, May 09, 2013
What Does Success Look Like?
How do we know if "church" was a success on Monday morning? We often ask questions like: Was the sermon good? Did people pay attention? How was the music, uplifting and tailored to the sermon? How many people showed up? What was the offering?
Dave Black offered some pertinent thoughts last Sunday on the critical importance of what happens after Sunday:
If, then, the ministry of the laos is God's means of fulfilling His mission in the world, it is necessary that we view what we do on Sunday mornings as merely the beginning, not the climax, of our work. In other words, we need to change the basis for evaluating the effectiveness of the ministry of our churches. The question is not "How many attended on Sunday?" but "What did those who attended on Sunday do during the week to advance God's mission?" This is what it means to be the People of God. It is a people who understand that the mission of the church is to fulfill God's redemptive mission. Our calling is to join God's army and become aggressively involved in His mission in the world.
My point was that God's call to salvation and His call to mission/ministry are one and the same. To follow Christ in this way is not optional for the one who is truly born again. It is to this life of mission/ministry that we must respond. Not only is this possible and practical in this day of over-professionalization; an emphasis on anything else is, I think, a perversion of the Gospel.
That is a powerful but accurate statement. God does not call us to salvation and then expects us to run out the clock sitting in pews until we die or Christ returns. As Dave says the call to salvation and the call to mission are one and the same. No one who is called to saving faith in Christ is not likewise called to ministry. To truly know if the gathering of the church accomplished what it should have on Sunday we should look to how the church lives Monday through Saturday. A major reason we are exhorted to gather together in the first place is not to "worship" but to "stir up one another to love and good works" (Hebrews 10:24). if people are not encouraged, equipped and exhorted to mission work when the church gathers, you might as well stay home.
There has been some backlash recently against the calls for a more "radical" Christianity. In the response to the Platt/Chan radicalism, which isn't really terribly radical, I fear that many Christians are having the "show up, pay up and shut up" model of "church" reinforced. For example a recent article in World magazine, The 'new legalism', seems mostly designed to comfort people who are content with "going to church" as the sum total of their Christian life. The problem with the "new radicalism" is not that it makes people who live comfy middle-class suburban lives interspersed with a couple of hours of "worship" feel bad about themselves, it is that the definition of radical doesn't go nearly far enough! What passes for the life of disciples of Christ in the west is so radically (pun intended) different from what being a disciple meant to the 1st century church, to the Reformers and later the Anabaptists and for all of those who live in places of the world where being a disciple often means laying down your life, that those saints who went before wouldn't even recognize it. Can you imagine an Anabaptist who watched friends tortured, drowned and burden at the stake for their faith being told that a suggestion that Christians don't need multiple iPhones was excessively radical and "legalistic"? I don't think they would be very sympathetic.
Calls for radical discipleship, every member ministry must be coupled with a proper theology of justification so that we don't confuse exhortations to ministry and good works as somehow aiding our justification but that is no excuse to not call every Christian to engage in the privilege and solemn and sacred duty of being on mission for Christ. The church exists for mission and the mission is too big for any by-standers, too all encompassing to be subcontracted to a select group of professionals, too critical to be left to chance. Our faithfulness in this generation of the church will not be judged based on political victories or bank accounts or membership statistics. It will be judged on how faithfully we carried our the Great Commission and lived out the Great Commandment. If the Lord was passing out mid-term grades to this generation I am afraid we would all be looking at summer school.
Dave Black offered some pertinent thoughts last Sunday on the critical importance of what happens after Sunday:
If, then, the ministry of the laos is God's means of fulfilling His mission in the world, it is necessary that we view what we do on Sunday mornings as merely the beginning, not the climax, of our work. In other words, we need to change the basis for evaluating the effectiveness of the ministry of our churches. The question is not "How many attended on Sunday?" but "What did those who attended on Sunday do during the week to advance God's mission?" This is what it means to be the People of God. It is a people who understand that the mission of the church is to fulfill God's redemptive mission. Our calling is to join God's army and become aggressively involved in His mission in the world.
My point was that God's call to salvation and His call to mission/ministry are one and the same. To follow Christ in this way is not optional for the one who is truly born again. It is to this life of mission/ministry that we must respond. Not only is this possible and practical in this day of over-professionalization; an emphasis on anything else is, I think, a perversion of the Gospel.
That is a powerful but accurate statement. God does not call us to salvation and then expects us to run out the clock sitting in pews until we die or Christ returns. As Dave says the call to salvation and the call to mission are one and the same. No one who is called to saving faith in Christ is not likewise called to ministry. To truly know if the gathering of the church accomplished what it should have on Sunday we should look to how the church lives Monday through Saturday. A major reason we are exhorted to gather together in the first place is not to "worship" but to "stir up one another to love and good works" (Hebrews 10:24). if people are not encouraged, equipped and exhorted to mission work when the church gathers, you might as well stay home.
There has been some backlash recently against the calls for a more "radical" Christianity. In the response to the Platt/Chan radicalism, which isn't really terribly radical, I fear that many Christians are having the "show up, pay up and shut up" model of "church" reinforced. For example a recent article in World magazine, The 'new legalism', seems mostly designed to comfort people who are content with "going to church" as the sum total of their Christian life. The problem with the "new radicalism" is not that it makes people who live comfy middle-class suburban lives interspersed with a couple of hours of "worship" feel bad about themselves, it is that the definition of radical doesn't go nearly far enough! What passes for the life of disciples of Christ in the west is so radically (pun intended) different from what being a disciple meant to the 1st century church, to the Reformers and later the Anabaptists and for all of those who live in places of the world where being a disciple often means laying down your life, that those saints who went before wouldn't even recognize it. Can you imagine an Anabaptist who watched friends tortured, drowned and burden at the stake for their faith being told that a suggestion that Christians don't need multiple iPhones was excessively radical and "legalistic"? I don't think they would be very sympathetic.
Calls for radical discipleship, every member ministry must be coupled with a proper theology of justification so that we don't confuse exhortations to ministry and good works as somehow aiding our justification but that is no excuse to not call every Christian to engage in the privilege and solemn and sacred duty of being on mission for Christ. The church exists for mission and the mission is too big for any by-standers, too all encompassing to be subcontracted to a select group of professionals, too critical to be left to chance. Our faithfulness in this generation of the church will not be judged based on political victories or bank accounts or membership statistics. It will be judged on how faithfully we carried our the Great Commission and lived out the Great Commandment. If the Lord was passing out mid-term grades to this generation I am afraid we would all be looking at summer school.
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Who Doesn't Love A Baby Horse?!
We have a couple of visitors to the farm, an Amish friend's Halflinger mare who is going to be bred to our Percerhon stallion and also her week old baby that is also from our stud horse! He is awfully cute and you can tell that his daddy is jet black from his coloration. Dad is not very interested in the baby but he is quite happy to see momma horse!
Monday, May 06, 2013
The One Place We Should (But Still Don't) Find Unity In The Church
Over at Eric Carpenter's blog he raises a very good point, namely that if there is one place the church should be unified it is in missions. He says in his post,Church Unity and World Missions, that our agreement in the Gospel should lead invariably to unity in the field of world missions and he is planning on series on that topic. I am looking forward to his series but I also am reminded that even though we ought to be unified when it comes to reaching the lost around the globe, this is an area where factions and denominations still are largely disunified. Would the Southern Baptist Convention support and send a Presbyterian missionary to Belize? Would a Reformed group send and support a charismatic missionary? Or do we only send out missionaries that meet our standards for doctrinal purity?
Maybe I am being overly cynical or perhaps my inexperience in world missions is showing. I know that there are groups, especially aid and mercy groups, that cross denominational lines but I have to wonder if we are as concerend with reaching the lost with the Gospel as we are with spreading our own theological positions to the ends of the earth? Check out Eric's post and subsequent series, maybe we can find out together...
Maybe I am being overly cynical or perhaps my inexperience in world missions is showing. I know that there are groups, especially aid and mercy groups, that cross denominational lines but I have to wonder if we are as concerend with reaching the lost with the Gospel as we are with spreading our own theological positions to the ends of the earth? Check out Eric's post and subsequent series, maybe we can find out together...
The Ethics of Fertility
Apparently some people think you can, as if we can tell God that we know better than He. Enter Sarah Richards in an essay in the weekend Wall Street Journal, Why I Froze My Eggs (And You Should Too). She has a new book coming out titled Motherhood Rescheduled: The New Frontier of Egg Freezing and the Women Who Tried It and it promises to raise a whole host of questions that should be troubling. Her essay comes out swinging:
Between the ages of 36 and 38, I spent nearly $50,000 to freeze 70 eggs in the hope that they would help me have a family in my mid-40s, when my natural fertility is gone. For this baby insurance, I obliterated my savings and used up the money my parents had set aside for a wedding. It was the best investment I ever made.
Egg freezing stopped the sadness that I was feeling at losing my chance to have the child I had dreamed about my entire life. It soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn't want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn't sure he even wanted children. It took away the punishing pressure to seek a new mate and helped me find love again at age 42.
I decided to freeze on the afternoon of my 36th birthday, when I did a fresh round of baby math on the back of a business card at Starbucks. Even if the man I was dating at the time agreed to start a family in the near future, I was cutting it close to have one baby, let alone a second. Several months later, after injecting myself for nearly two weeks with hormone shots, I was in surgery at a Manhattan fertility clinic as my doctor pierced my ovaries, suctioned out nine eggs and handed them to the embryologist to freeze until I was ready to use them. As soon as I woke up in the recovery room, I no longer felt as though I were watching my window to have a baby close by the month. My future seemed full of possibility again.
The ethics around issues of infertility and intentional delaying of childbearing are perilous ground indeed. Enter into this debate the practice of intentionally pre-planning to have children after a woman's normal window of fertility and you take the debate to a completely new level. I am not talking here about a woman facing cancer treatments or women who are naturally infertile. We are talking about yet another step to commoditizing children, making them into something that can be quantified on a financial ledger and manipulated into being as convenient as possible for busy parents.
Let me make sure I am getting what Ms. Richards is proposing because it doesn't seem to add up based on what real life tells us. Women should put off marriage and child
bearing until they are established in their careers and presumably financially secure (without having to rely on a man) which means that they can then spend tens of thousands of dollars in a desperate attempt to thwart nature and have children on their time frames rather than the time frames God has ordained. Freezing eggs, fertility treatments, etc. are hugely expensive as well as unnatural but they are becoming the norm for many women who have been convinced that they need to chase a vague notion of financial security and relational stability before starting a family. This strikes me as a symptom if a deeper problem in our culture.
It is not just a matter of a "biological clock". There are very real consequences to delaying child bearing that go beyond merely not being able to get pregnant.
Delayed childbearing is rarely coupled with delayed sexual activity, leading to a perfect situation for perpetual male adolescence (a very lengthy post on that topic has been in the works for some time). Women have bought into the theory of delaying marriage and child bearing, two events that have historically aided the maturation process of young men but are largely unable/unwilling to avoid companionship which invariably leads to sexual activity. So young men get the sex they want without the need to “settle down” by getting married and grow up to care for a family. In fact with such a huge number of women in the work force the numbers of men who not only don’t bother to get married also don’t bother to get a job, leaching off their girlfriends or parents indefinitely enjoying a life of perpetual casual sex and X-Box. Viva la feminism!
It is also simply a fact of nature that raising a family is best suited for the young. Not to suggest that older parents are not great parents, in some ways I am a better parent as I get older thanks to a modicum of maturity and experience gained by making mistakes as a young parent. When it comes to the daily routine of parenting children though, from sleepless nights as the parents of a newborn to the endless energy of toddlers and preschoolers, younger parents have decided biological advantages. When I was in college and my wife and I had our first two children those sleepless nights weren't a big deal. After all that is part of the college experience! When we had our last child in the latter part of my 30's? That was a different situation for my wife and I. Everything in how God designed men and women points to a very specific time when getting pregnant is easier and raising children less exhausting and no amount of biological tinkering can change that.
Missing from this conversation is a deeper discussion of how our views of family and specifically children has changed. In a world where more and more we view children as a hassle and burden to be managed, controlled and avoided for as long as possible it is no wonder that we see conversations about egg freezing given serious consideration. What I find especially of concern is what seems to me to be a delayed but very real acceptance of these same norms and attitudes in the church. Sure we might talk a big show about family in the high level conversations but when you look at the way church going parents raise their children it often seems like the expectations are very similar. Career and financial stability take priority over family, children need to be kept to a "reasonable" number, both parents working, etc. The result in the church are families, like mine in many ways, that look almost exactly like the world. Before we publish yet another book/blog/article on why "kids leave the church", we need to examine why they would want to stay.
You can save money in a 529 plan, have just the perfect nursery and thought out birth plan, pre-registered your as yet unconceived child in the best preschool in town but you cannot turn back the clock or change the fundamentals of human biology. I understand that some women just don't want kids. That is their choice just as some people choose celibacy. What I find troubling is that so many women, and especially so many of my sisters in the church, have been deceived into denying what is a deep seated longing that God has placed in their hearts for the sake of capitulating to a sub-culture that hates children, delaying parenthood until it is too late and hugely expensive and ethically sketchy steps need to be taken to fulfill a yearning for children that was suppressed for most of a woman's natural child bearing age.
The fruits of radical feminism include empty wombs and empty hearts. No amount of financial security can offset that. The same movement that promotes artificial birth control as a great advancement now finds itself scrambling to find a way to undo the results of generations of women who bought into the lie that they can "have it all" and now are facing a childless future. In this quest to change the rules is anyone asking the question posed in Jurassic Park, in our quest to find out if we can has anyone stopped to ask if we should? I am sure there are plenty of women who are quite content to be childless and others who struggle with infertility who cannot have children naturally but there are also countless other women who waste their twenties and early thirties in cubicles and relationships that are going nowhere because they have been fed these lies for generations. The church has a responsibility to provide a counter-culture, a culture that cherishes children and gladly, even joyfully, accepts and embraces the glory of bearing each others burdens, including caring for children when they are young and in turn caring for our parents as they grow old.
Between the ages of 36 and 38, I spent nearly $50,000 to freeze 70 eggs in the hope that they would help me have a family in my mid-40s, when my natural fertility is gone. For this baby insurance, I obliterated my savings and used up the money my parents had set aside for a wedding. It was the best investment I ever made.
Egg freezing stopped the sadness that I was feeling at losing my chance to have the child I had dreamed about my entire life. It soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn't want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn't sure he even wanted children. It took away the punishing pressure to seek a new mate and helped me find love again at age 42.
I decided to freeze on the afternoon of my 36th birthday, when I did a fresh round of baby math on the back of a business card at Starbucks. Even if the man I was dating at the time agreed to start a family in the near future, I was cutting it close to have one baby, let alone a second. Several months later, after injecting myself for nearly two weeks with hormone shots, I was in surgery at a Manhattan fertility clinic as my doctor pierced my ovaries, suctioned out nine eggs and handed them to the embryologist to freeze until I was ready to use them. As soon as I woke up in the recovery room, I no longer felt as though I were watching my window to have a baby close by the month. My future seemed full of possibility again.
The ethics around issues of infertility and intentional delaying of childbearing are perilous ground indeed. Enter into this debate the practice of intentionally pre-planning to have children after a woman's normal window of fertility and you take the debate to a completely new level. I am not talking here about a woman facing cancer treatments or women who are naturally infertile. We are talking about yet another step to commoditizing children, making them into something that can be quantified on a financial ledger and manipulated into being as convenient as possible for busy parents.
Let me make sure I am getting what Ms. Richards is proposing because it doesn't seem to add up based on what real life tells us. Women should put off marriage and child
It is not just a matter of a "biological clock". There are very real consequences to delaying child bearing that go beyond merely not being able to get pregnant.
Delayed childbearing is rarely coupled with delayed sexual activity, leading to a perfect situation for perpetual male adolescence (a very lengthy post on that topic has been in the works for some time). Women have bought into the theory of delaying marriage and child bearing, two events that have historically aided the maturation process of young men but are largely unable/unwilling to avoid companionship which invariably leads to sexual activity. So young men get the sex they want without the need to “settle down” by getting married and grow up to care for a family. In fact with such a huge number of women in the work force the numbers of men who not only don’t bother to get married also don’t bother to get a job, leaching off their girlfriends or parents indefinitely enjoying a life of perpetual casual sex and X-Box. Viva la feminism!
It is also simply a fact of nature that raising a family is best suited for the young. Not to suggest that older parents are not great parents, in some ways I am a better parent as I get older thanks to a modicum of maturity and experience gained by making mistakes as a young parent. When it comes to the daily routine of parenting children though, from sleepless nights as the parents of a newborn to the endless energy of toddlers and preschoolers, younger parents have decided biological advantages. When I was in college and my wife and I had our first two children those sleepless nights weren't a big deal. After all that is part of the college experience! When we had our last child in the latter part of my 30's? That was a different situation for my wife and I. Everything in how God designed men and women points to a very specific time when getting pregnant is easier and raising children less exhausting and no amount of biological tinkering can change that.
Missing from this conversation is a deeper discussion of how our views of family and specifically children has changed. In a world where more and more we view children as a hassle and burden to be managed, controlled and avoided for as long as possible it is no wonder that we see conversations about egg freezing given serious consideration. What I find especially of concern is what seems to me to be a delayed but very real acceptance of these same norms and attitudes in the church. Sure we might talk a big show about family in the high level conversations but when you look at the way church going parents raise their children it often seems like the expectations are very similar. Career and financial stability take priority over family, children need to be kept to a "reasonable" number, both parents working, etc. The result in the church are families, like mine in many ways, that look almost exactly like the world. Before we publish yet another book/blog/article on why "kids leave the church", we need to examine why they would want to stay.
You can save money in a 529 plan, have just the perfect nursery and thought out birth plan, pre-registered your as yet unconceived child in the best preschool in town but you cannot turn back the clock or change the fundamentals of human biology. I understand that some women just don't want kids. That is their choice just as some people choose celibacy. What I find troubling is that so many women, and especially so many of my sisters in the church, have been deceived into denying what is a deep seated longing that God has placed in their hearts for the sake of capitulating to a sub-culture that hates children, delaying parenthood until it is too late and hugely expensive and ethically sketchy steps need to be taken to fulfill a yearning for children that was suppressed for most of a woman's natural child bearing age.
The fruits of radical feminism include empty wombs and empty hearts. No amount of financial security can offset that. The same movement that promotes artificial birth control as a great advancement now finds itself scrambling to find a way to undo the results of generations of women who bought into the lie that they can "have it all" and now are facing a childless future. In this quest to change the rules is anyone asking the question posed in Jurassic Park, in our quest to find out if we can has anyone stopped to ask if we should? I am sure there are plenty of women who are quite content to be childless and others who struggle with infertility who cannot have children naturally but there are also countless other women who waste their twenties and early thirties in cubicles and relationships that are going nowhere because they have been fed these lies for generations. The church has a responsibility to provide a counter-culture, a culture that cherishes children and gladly, even joyfully, accepts and embraces the glory of bearing each others burdens, including caring for children when they are young and in turn caring for our parents as they grow old.
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
I’m not committing treason, you are!
And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, and of course he also gave the church Fox News to keep Christians informed of how they are being persecuted in a land where the church gets all sorts of tax breaks and preferential treatment from Caesar. (Ephesians 4:11, American Judeo-Christian Traditional Values Version)
I confess. I tend to read Fox News when I am checking on the events of the day. I find CNN to be entirely too busy and clearly slanted (of course so if Fox but everyone knows it unlike CNN which pretends to be unbiased). MSNBC? Please. So along with the Wall Street Journal and our local paper, Fox is a frequently viewed page for me. But I find it troubling that many Christians seem to think that Fox is somehow more friendly to Christianity than other news outlets. Maybe it is just me but when your news site that posts articles all the time about "attacks" on Christianity also posts smutty articles about which star had a wardrobe malfunction or published a sex tape or photos of stars in various states of undress (see a screen shot from today, about noon)....
....it is hard to take it seriously as the media defender of the faith.
In the screen shot above we see an article right above the links about a Kardashian and Amy Bynes "racy tweet from self-appointed cultural warrior and selective religious freedom crusader Todd Starnes, Pentagon: Religious Proselytizing is Not Permitted with the obligatory flag waving picture:
Here is the portion of the article, way down the page, that addresses the source of the complaint by Mikey Weinstein of The Military Religious Freedom Foundation :
Pentagon officials met with Weinstein and his group were to discuss a policy called “Air Force Culture, Air Force Standards,” published on Aug. 7, 2012.
Section 2.11 requires “government neutrality regarding religion.”
“Leaders at all levels must balance constitutional protections for an individual’s free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and the constitutional prohibition against governmental establishment of religion,” the regulation states.
Military leaders were admonished not to use their position to “promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion.”
So as I read that the regulations discourage superiors from using their position to promote a particular religious outlook to those that report to them. I fail to see how this is a violation of religious freedom. I would certainly wonder how Mr. Starnes would respond to a Muslim major that was aggressively proselytizing enlisted members that reported up to them to try to get them to convert to Islam? I think the real underlying issue here is the notion that Christianity is the proper or preferred religious expression for the U.S. military. After all, the military recruits and compensates clergy as an integral part of the military structure.
It isn't like this is an unknown policy. The military has a policy in place that prevents proselytizing:
The Pentagon confirmed to Fox News that Christian evangelism is against regulations.
“Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense, LCDR Nate Christensen said in a written statement. He declined to say if any chaplains or service members had been prosecuted for such an offense.
“Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis and it would be inappropriate to speculate on the outcome in specific cases,” he said.
So in a rigid, hierarchical military there are rules against religious proselytizing. Again this makes sense given the diversity of the military and the inherent coercive nature of superior-subordinate relationships in the military. I would think it only sensible to keep political/religious coercion out of the ranks for the sake of cohesion in the ranks.
But what really takes the cake is this exchange between Mr. Weinstein and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins:
In an interview with the Washington Post, Weinstein called proselytizing a “national security threat.”
“And what the Pentagon needs to understand is that it is sedition and treason,” he told the newspaper. “It should be punished.”
Perkins said it was troubling the Obama Administration would place so much trust in someone like Weinstein.
“Unfortunately, it appears our military is on a forced march away from the very freedoms they are sworn to protect,” he said. “This language from Weinstein that Christians who share their faith or offer comfort to others from their faith in Jesus Christ is “sedition and treason” is a treasonous statement in and of itself.”
I am not sure which charge of treason is more silly. You're a traitor! No, you're a traitor. I know you are but what am I?!
Bottom line, the church really needs to find better spokespeople than Todd Starnes and Glenn Beck. When the world looks at us and these sorts of silly squabbles when people are homeless and orphans are languishing in orphanages, why would we expect them to be interested in hearing about Jesus?
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