A Bad Name Setting A Bad Tone

A conference most Christians will not attend or watch is causing a lot of stir on the internet. The conference, titled Strange Fire, is starting today along with the release of a new book on the same topic. Here is one of the videos promoting the conference featuring John MacArthur:



Notice that amidst the oddly hokey figurines depicting Biblical events, Dr. MacArthur speaks of the "charismatic movement" offering strange fire in the worship, blasphemes the Holy Spirit and attributes to the Holy Spirit the work of Satan. The second charge bears a quick note and I am sure Dr. MacArthur did not use it carelessly because it jumped out at me. They blaspheme the Holy Spirit. He uses this phrase multiple times, a phrase we find in the third chapter of Mark:

"Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin"— (Mark 3:28-29)

The "charismatic movement" is guilty of what is often called the unforgivable sin? Well that is an interesting way to try to influence people you think are in error.

While I don't like the way this slanders literally millions of Christians, brothers and sisters I disagree with but still still as brothers and sisters, more to the point it is just awful application of a text and that is shocking coming from a widely recognized excellent exegete like MacArthur.

The event name is based on the Biblical account of the "strange fire" that the sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10. Here is the account if you are not familiar with it (in the KJV which uses the phrase "strange fire"), it is pretty powerful:

And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD. Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the LORD spake, saying, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace. (Lev 10:1-3, KJV)


God gave very specific instructions about how the Israelites were to worship God in very specific situations. John MacArthur is trying to tie that with the real and perceived excesses of charismatic worship.

So here is the problem. First the account of "strange fire" is a very unique situation in a unique setting under an obsolete covenant. John MacArthur is not Moses. The New Covenant church is not Old Covenant Israel. Second, God actually gave us very few specifics about how to come together to worship in the New Testament, an inconvenient fact that hasn't stopped generations of Christians and unbelievers alike from helping God by filling in the blanks and declaring manmade traditions to be "biblical".

This is one of those "all publicity is good publicity". Those who disagree with MacArthur and talk about it drive traffic to the conference webpage and it gives those who support MacArthur the opportunity for smugness and the obligatory posting of random Youtube videos of crackpots and heretics as "proof" of the general heresy of any form of charismaticism. Again, I disagree with a lot of charismatics and I absolutely recognize that there are excesses and outright heresies. It would have been a great conference to explore the topic of the spiritual gifts and help draw some distinctions between what is or is not Biblical. Instead we get an inflammatory lead up to a conference.

I am getting ready to watch the first general session with Dr. MacArthur right now, I hope I am wrong about this whole thing.

What Is Prayer?

Well that is easy! I close my eyes and bow my  head (perhaps hands or arms folded) and thank God and ask God for stuff I need!

Here is how most evangelical prayers go:

Our Father in heaven...

*list of things I/we am/are thankful for*

*list of things I/we would like*

in Jesus name, Amen

Now there is obviously nothing wrong with giving thanks and seeking blessings. Doing so is good and profitable and of course Biblical. Jesus modeled this style of prayer. I just think we lose the power of prayer by turning it into a formula and losing the intimacy of prayer. Prayer has by tradition been something very formal and divided into a specific sphere.

In reducing prayer to a rote, formulaic process we lose the essence of prayer which is communing with the Living God. When a born-again believer prays, he is gaining a personal audience with the Creator of the universe, ushered into His presence by His most precious and only begotten Son. Think of Isaiah when he beheld the glory of God in  Isaiah chapter 6. He was undone! But when we come before God we are announced by the Only Begotten and granted audience as sons and daughters of the Most High! No one who is not a son or daughter of God has that privilege! Yet prayer is more than just a litany of "thank you for" and "can I have" bookended by invoking the Father at the beginning and signing off with Jesus name at the end.

Like I said prayer is at its most basic level a communing with God or in a sense fellowship with God. It is an open line of communication with our loving Father and our Lord.

There are times when I am outside watching the fields being planted or growing or being harvested and I feel the presence of the  Lord of the Harvest. Or watching the sun set or holding a new baby or wherever I see the Creator's work unfolded. Often when I read and really ponder the Scriptures or read a great book about some matter of doctrine I can feel the Holy Spirit. In so many ways outside of "head bowed, eyes closed" prayer I am communing with God.

In our human  tendency to make checklists are we reducing our fellowship with God to: "Prayer time? Check. Personal devotional reading? Check." I often wonder if our overwhelming religious culture is not only not helping our walk with God but hurting it by making the life of a disciple into a series of checklists. Did I pray today? Did I read my Scriptures? Did I go to church on Sunday and put a check in the plate? If check all of my boxes off, I must be a good Christian! Have we so reduced the Christian life of prayer that it becomes something on a to-do list in the same way that we have devolved worship from a way of life and service to an event we attend on Sunday morning?

Again not to diminish those intentional, intensive times of speaking with God. They are critical and something I often neglect but this isn't replacing one with the other, it is simply (hopefully) recognizing more of our lives are opportunities for prayerful communion with God. The grave danger of trying to create two spheres in our life, one secular and one religious, is that it diminishes the 24-7 reality of the Christian life. A Christian doesn't have "church time". "work time", "prayer time", "leisure time". All of our day is an opportunity to serve God and prayerful communion with God is so much more than blocks of time we carve out to fit God into our schedules. Don't try to find more times to bow your head and close your eyes, just recognize the reality of our lives of constant communion with God all day, every day!

Stuff I Have Liked Lately

I am working on some actual posts but due to some circumstances I am having a hard time completing them but I did want to pass along some posts/articles from others than I have found interesting.

Our Shaken Faith in Football

There is not much that is more American than going to church on Sunday and then rushing home to watch the NFL all afternoon. I remain convinced that a large part of the reason church meets mostly before noon on Sunday is that no men would show up at all if it met in the afternoon. That is what makes Owen Strachan's essay so jarring. The idea that perhaps the values of football, my favorite sport bar none, is not a particularly healthy obsession for Christians borders on heresy. High school, college, pro, we love our football but Strachan asks some important questions about a game that revels in violence and leads to many injuries (how many of us talk about nagging injuries from high school football as a badge of honor?). Is it possible that our cherished national obsession is unhealthy for the church?

Food (Stamps) For Thought

Food assistance for the needy, commonly called "food stamps" even though they are not really stamps anymore, is a huge and growing program designed to meet the most basic need of the poor and/or needy among us on a temporary basis, namely feeding their family. It is also an easy target for conservatives because it is a growing program and feeds (pun intended) into the image of the "welfare queen" living off the government dime. National Review is an unlikely venue to read someone who thinks that conservatives should lay off food stamps but that is kind of what Henry Olsen is suggesting. His most salient point is that it is disingenuous to complain about food stamps in the "ag bill" and ignore farm subsidies. I am not a huge fan of food stamps as a program and it needs serious reform but there are much bigger fish to fry in the Federal budget (um, "defense" spending perhaps?!).

It's (Too) Easy for me to say I'm a pacifist

I don't like the term pacifist, preferring non-resistant because pacifism implies I am against war and that is it but this brief essay raises a troubling issue. It sure is easy to be non-resistant when I don't have much to resist in the first place. We are not persecuted in any sense of the word in America. I am not forced to fight in wars. I am in little personal danger. So it is mostly academic for me to say I am non-resistant. I trust that God would give me wisdom and strength should I ever find myself in a situation where being non-resistant had a real cost but until that happens I recognize that it is awfully easy for American Christians to claim to be pacifists.

Is Public School An Option?

I don't write much about homeschooling these days because it is hard for me to not be self-righteous about it. It is a hot button issue that causes battle lines to be drawn and it often divides the church. Nevertheless I think Al Mohler makes some important points in his essay and concludes, as I have, that public school is by and large not an option for Christian families. It is one of those issues that I think people need to address but I don't think I am the right person for the job, at least not these days!

Evangelical Adoption Movement Attacked..Again

We have seen a number of assaults on the burgeoning movement toward adoption in the church and the attacks are relentless. Jonathan Merritt points us to another public attack, this time on the elite pages of the New York Times. I will admit that there are issues in this movement, as there are any time fallen humans attempt something, but the attacks take the exception and the anecdote and apply it to all. Most Christians I know are very sincere in their desire to help those without families. It is unhelpful to orphans and those in the system to attack the people trying to help them out of some misplaced fear and outright bigotry. There seem to be some who prefer children be trapped in the government system rather than be exposed to those awful Christians in a loving home. I think I know what their motivation might really be...

And then there was this...

Evangelical Sex Abuse Record 'Worse' Than Catholic, Says Billy Graham's Grandson Boz Tchividijian

This one got play all over the media. I read it and alarm bells went off all over the place. I am in no way discounting the problems being alleged. What I an concerned about is four fold. First, Mr. Tchividijian is apparently (although not uniquely) playing on his famous grandfather's name to gain credibility (almost every article I saw on this referenced 'Billy Graham's grandson). Second, the articles are all pretty vague and mostly anecdotal. There are lots of problems but they are unreported. Well isn't that convenient! You can make a claim of a huge problem that is unreported so you are not burdened with providing statistics/facts and if questioned just blame a culture of silence. Notice that the title is inflammatory but then he is quoted saying "I think we are worse" (emphasis mine). Pretty major accusation to make based on something he thinks might be true. Third, Mr. Tchividijian is all over the secular media to drum up attention rather than dealing with this in the church. When you seek attention from unbelievers and those with an ax to grind (i.e. an interview with Rachel Held Evans who of course brings up Sovereign Grace Ministries who also happen to be complementarian) it makes you seem more interested in drumming up business than dealing with an issue. Fourth, follow the money. Mr. Tchividijian works for an organization that also employs another relative and seems a little shady to me. When it is in your financial interest to blow a problem out of proportion I am always suspicious. Notice the praise for Bob Jones University for hiring his organization.

Child abuse is real, it is a problem and when it happens in the church it is a major issue but I am not sure if this is a real attempt to solve a problem or a cash cow for people to provide "consulting" and "investigative" services. As always when money is involved your discernment radar should go up. No one is more critical of organized religion than I am but sometimes it seems as if the "solution" is less a solution for a problem and more a way to cash in on sin.

Anyway, that is a little of what I have been reading for the last week or so. Give them a look!

A Hopeful Conversation

One of the major repercussions of our religious system where local churches see other local churches as competitors for scarce resources is that we tend toward a severe form of tribalism. This tribalism leads to theological in-breeding, Christians only reading writers from their own theological circles. That makes Christians who are very well versed in their own theological brand but largely ignorant of or downright hostile toward other parts of the church. This is common in a lot of groups but it is epidemic in the Reformed/Neo-reformed movement.

This morning along comes an encouraging post on the blog of the Gospel Coalition, a blog where I rarely find much encouragement. The title grabbed my attention, Listening to our Anabaptist Brethren, and I was pleased to find some thoughtful writing. I expect the comments to be quite interesting as well!

There are two reasons I am glad to see a post like that on a widely read blog like the Gospel Coalition.

First because it raises some very important issues that are deeply embedded in the Reformed/Neo-Reformed camp. Issues like the cult of personality that infects Reformed Christianity that manifests itself in constant name dropping "I was reading *insert obscure Puritan author name here* the other night and....". Or issues like the narrow focus on the forensic nature of justification without ever fully reforming the implications of the Gospel and New Testament witness on how we relate as the church.

Second because it encourages those Christians who identify with the Reformed/Neo-Reformed movement to look seriously outside of their own circle of authors and speakers, something that is quite rare. Many Reformed types read only books and blogs written by the same small cabal of authors, a practice which serves primarily as an echo chamber. Not to mention that many leaders of the Reformed camp actively throw suspicion or cast aspersion on people outside of their own stream, especially the Anabaptist. Just referring to Anabaptists as brethren is a major accomplishment since many prominent Reformed teachers use Anabaptist like a swear word (White Horse Inn, I am talkin' 'bout you!).

I would encourage you to read and interact with this essay, even if you are not personally influenced by either Anabaptist or Reformed Christianity. These are the sorts of conversations we need to be having as we move away from a Christendom, prevailing religious cultural world and into one where Christianity is not only not assumed but actually actively opposed, a culture where the church will have no choice but to find ways to cooperate in the face of a increasingly hostile culture.

Are We Outward Focused or Inward Focused? Follow The Checkbook To Find Out.

$50 billion.

$50,000,000,000

That is a lot of money even in a day of trillion dollar Federal deficits. It is also the estimated amount given as "tithing" by some 10,000,000 American church goers based on a study I saw published by Christianity Today ( 10 Million Tithers Donate More Than $50 Billion ). Given that some ridiculously high percentage of Americans self-identify as "Christians" that is not a lot of givers but since I put zero stock in checking the  "Christian" box on a survey it doesn't make much difference. What is pretty incredible is the staggering amount of giving. The study also points to the most common form of religious giving, a form that is pounded into the head of every Christian, "97% make it a priority to give to their local church". If there is one thing that is uniformly taught across the religious spectrum, it is the prioritization of giving to your "local church".

I have said this before but the idea of prioritizing giving to the "local church" is at its most fundamental level a self-serving concept. I say that because most of the money that goes to local churches stays in the local church and is used to make "worship" and religious observation more pleasant, more entertaining and more convenient for the very same people who donate the money. That is not to suggest that all local church giving stays in house as most local churches pay a token percentage to mission work, mercy work or local ministries like food pantries. It is to say that most local church budgets focus on keeping the local church open on Sunday morning. As an added bonus those who are most vociferous in teaching the priority of giving first to your local church are those who likewise depend on perpetuating that myth, namely the paid clergy who depend on this system for a paycheck.The entire system borders on a scheme where our most trusted sources in the church are the ones peddling the most self-serving notion.

This gets back to the broader of issue of our love and indeed worship of money in the church, an idolatry that is a near perfect reflection of the broader American cultural obsession with money. I absolutely affirm that we have a serious problem with how money and the church relate but I don't think it is the same problem we hear about so often. We don't so much have a giving problem in the church, what we really have is a spending problem. Where is our spending as the church focused? Is it outward or inward and which is more Biblical?

The New Testament church was outward focusing in....

• Caring for the needy, such as widows among the church.
• Concerned for the welfare of Christians in other locations that were suffering.
• Supporting the evangelistic work of apostles/missionaries/evangelists who were traveling and preaching the Gospel.

The New Testament church was not concerned with...

• Mortgages, interest payments, building projects, utilities.
• Salaries for religious employees.
• Material and curriculum for Sunday school. 
• Supporting the hierarchy of religious organizations like denominations and seminaries.

...because those things didn't exist. Have we matured beyond the simplistic, primitive state of the early church? Or have we rejected what was important to the church under the leadership of the apostles and substituted what is important to those with a vested interest in perpetuating the current religious system that panders to the basest impulses of a people obsessed with convenience, entertainment and self-focused consumption?

It is not a coincidence that there is a backlash against the "radical" Christianity movement and the labeling of virtually any notion of a prioritization of mercy ministry as "social justice" with the connotation of liberalism that is attached to that term. These movements, which are by and large so mild that Christians of days past in the early centuries of the church, or those persecuted by Catholic and Protestant alike through the Reformation years or contemporary Christians who put their lives on the line for Christ everyday would find laughable to be label them "radical", are a major threat to church as we know it. The questions they raise are uncomfortable and lead to people thinking thoughts dangerous to the religious establishment. When you read between the lines you can see the worry as the religious world that we have known for so long evaporates.

We can have all the studies we want about giving with the implied disapproving finger wag toward those who don't "tithe" to their local church or who give less than 10% or who, gasp!, "tithe" based on net earnings rather than gross. That doesn't get to the heart of the problem, a problem which truly is a "heart"  issue. Where is the church focused? Is it on Sunday morning and our own convenience? Or is it on the messy and often invisible work that goes on "out there"? Until we get our spending figured out, our concerns over giving are a wasted effort.

Paul was a jerk so I can be one too!

I have noticed a distressing tendency among Christians, at least certain subsets, to see the strongly worded statements of Paul and Jesus Himself primarily as a license to be a jerk. The logic goes like this:

On several occasions Jesus and Paul were, in our eyes, pretty harsh with opponents of the Gospel using polemics, sarcasm and even pejoratives. Because Jesus and Paul did this, I can too.

While it is certainly true that at times Jesus and Paul as well as other figures in the New Testament used strongly worded, even harsh or sarcastic, statements it is also true that I am not Jesus. Nor am I Paul or an apostle like Paul. I have found instead that this notion provides many people, like the guys at Team Pyro and myself on many occasions, with sketchy theological cover for being a jerk and a bully. It also is often true that those who are the targets of this bullying are not opponents of the Gospel or heretics but simply other believers that I disagree with.

Of course it is just as dangerous to refuse to call anything an error, no matter how gross an error it might be, out of fear of not being nice. Some errors require, demand even, that we call them out. Some men and women really are heretics, or at least proclaim heretical teaching, and we don't do them or anyone else any favors by pretending that what they are teaching is anything but dangerous and damning.

How we disagree is as important as what we disagree on. My own tendency is to see disagreement as an opportunity to show off, to make someone look stupid, to "win" for my own satisfaction. That attitude has probably won me a lot of arguments and left unconvinced a lot of people. Hooray for me. Or not. So hey buddy before you take the mantle of modern day Paul for yourself remember that you ain't him.

Stand for the truth. Be unwavering. Be bold. Refuse to compromise. Just don't be a jerk about it.

The Family Economic Unit

I wrote a few weeks ago about the subject of debt and trying to avoid/get out of debt. In the meanwhile I have been thinking a lot about the economics of the home and family and how that relates to debt and financial stability. As I look at the world around me I see very little praiseworthy from an economic standpoint. The rich grow richer and more power too them I guess. The poor and the dependent class grow larger every year thanks to a mediocre economy and incentives that generationalize poverty and dependence. More and more families have two wage earners and yet those same families are barely making ends meet. I want something different than the rat race and debt/consumption model for my family. That requires a different look at how we approach economics at family level.

There are two main factors in the economy of a household, income and expenses. The expenses side is fairly self-explanatory, spend less and make do with less. Live more simply. That is easier said than done in our culture that worships the new, the better, the upgrade and the update while consumption is king and debt is always available. But we really can do with less, for example see John Mureiko's recent post More With Less: Clothing to look at just one area where we think we need more than we really do. We are a pretty frugal family in some ways, no smartphones, no cable/satellite TV, we don't go on expensive vacations (or vacations at all!) or buy lots of gadgets or clothes. We don't eat out a ton other than breakfast at the local greasy spoon for my wife and I and the occasional pizza. We don't throw a lot of food away because we feed it to our pig in return for bacon. We have a modest sized mortgage and one small car payment. So we are pretty bare-bones in a lot of ways compared to other families.

That doesn't mean we can't do more. We are looking at our livestock because that has gotten a bit out of control, we have too many horses that eat too much hay and do little in return. We are trying to be smarter about our meal planning, more basic food stuffs to make meals from rather than pre-packaged foods. We are being a bit more picky about driving our Amish neighbors around to make sure that we are get fairly compensated for time, gas and wear & tear.

The other side of the equation is income. We are an anomaly in modern America, a large family with a single bread winner. That is who we are and how we have rolled since 1995 when I graduated from college. I am not sure that is going to keep working. So we have to decide what to do in place of that model and in doing so take an inventory of our family. While we have is some extra space and we have lots of potential labor. With four able bodied adults in the home and plenty of other kids old enough to help we are looking at how we can leverage that to diversify our economic structure. That looks a little light this....

- Multiple income streams

As it stands right now, we are a single income family. We have been since the day I graduated from college and we like that. We are old fashioned perhaps but we think that the family is best served when one of the parents, usually mom, is home more or less full time to manage the household. For us that has always meant that I go to a job somewhere and my wife stays home. That has worked for almost twenty years although it has been very trying for us financially for much of that time. It was especially critical when we had a non-stop procession of babies and very small children in the home. Now our children are getting older, our youngest is almost six and soon we will have 5 of our 8 aged 13 or older. That doesn't mean they don't need attention, just not as much of stuff like feeding and diapering which in theory frees up a lot of time. So we are giving serious thought to how the income end of the equation can change without compromising our core belief structure about having mom at home.

What we would like to see are multiple income streams. We have a somewhat unusual opportunity in that we live among one of the largest populations of Amish in the country and we have very good relations with many of them. This means that we can leverage those contacts to drive them places they cannot readily reach with a buggy, get into business ventures including one we are looking at very seriously and also a bartering economy where we trade their expertise for our technology like cars.

- The home as the economic center for the family

Alongside the multiple income streams, we would like to see the home become the economic focal point of the family. Rather than our home being the place we all go forth from to jobs/schools and then come back to for the purpose of eating and sleeping, we would love to see the home be where we work and where we live. That is how humanity worked for a very long time and I don't think modern "progress" has a whole lot going for it, far more so than the model of families scattering to the winds to chase "education" and jobs leaving families splintered and professional caregivers to take care of young children and elderly parents. Our next door neighbor is a hog farmer, his dad lives on the corner of his property and helps him with the farming still, and does so alongside his grandsons.

- An eye toward the future

Far too often in America adulthood means the kids striking off on their own to make their way in the world and this also often means moving away leading to fragmented families. Little wonder that families don't care for parents when they grow older and so many families put their children in day care. Our future hopefully is one where our kids are participating in the economy of the home and stay near us so that we can help care for their children and in turn can rely on them for assistance as we get older.

Also, what will the economy look like in the future?

Like it or not the United States is headed for a single payer health insurance system. While I think that is a horrible idea it is happening whether we like it or not. Having a job that provides insurance might not be a major concern. Also with a family economy it should be less important to have a million dollars socked away in your 401k. I think these and other factors are going to make the traditional employment model obsolete

That is just a rough plan to start.

We would like to get more property as we are kind of tight on land right now. One project we are exploring pretty seriously would require a new building and that would eat up the last bit of land we have that is vacant on our current property. So if we can get established with a decent income supplemented by jobs by myself and my older kids our next task would be expanding with more property, something that is pretty expensive with high crop prices and a ton of land hungry Amish to compete with! Really our goal is becoming more clear in my eyes and that is important. I really want to get out of the office/cubicle world and spend more time working alongside my family for a whole bunch of reasons and I think we are taking a few of the right steps along that path. You are welcome to follow along as we seek a new path!

Knowing Nothing But War

As the Nobel Peace Prize winning President of the United States prepares to perhaps unilaterally attack Syria to show he was darn serious about that whole "red line" thing, Robert Martin remarked on Facebook that his children have known nothing but war for their entire young lives. I commented that at 41 years of age I have barely known "peace" at any time in my own life. As I thought back on this question it was a pretty sober realization of how true that was.

From birth to high school I lived through the waning days of Vietnam and the Cold War. I attended an elementary school with fallout shelter signs and assumed that the Russkies were going to attack us at any time. Of course there was also the invasion of Grenada to get the U.S. of A. a win to take some of the ashes of Vietnam out of our mouths. As the cold war ended and I graduated high school I headed off to college. I made it all of two months before the invasion of Kuwait and then Operation Desert Storm. That lasted a very short time of course but it was followed by the battle in Mogadishu in 1993 memorialized in Black Hawk down and the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, not to mention various other military actions around the world. Still,  the decade between Operation Desert storm in 1990 and the Cole bombing in 2000 were relatively peaceful. Until that fateful day of September 11th, 2001 when the world changed. For the next 12 years we have been at war nonstop. The bodies come home in flag draped coffins, soldiers come home with fewer limbs than they left America with, occasionally we see the all too common sight of dead women and children, "collateral damage" in our war on terror, a war that ironically seems to be defending American families from terror at the cost of inflicting terror on families overseas. In four decades as a citizen of America I have know peace perhaps 25% of the time.

As we seem bent on repeating the same mistake that we have made so many times before, I am praying that those calling for war will be thwarted and I also pray that those in leadership in our nation who profess the name of Christ will seek peace rather than war. Endless war is no way to run a country and has proven to be futile at leading to a lasting peace.

Antibiotic Use (Abuse?) Down On The Farm

I listened to this interesting story on NPR this morning, Antibiotic Use On The Farm: Are We Flying Blind?



It is undenaible that massive use of antibiotics occurs on the farms and that it is just a given in most agricultural schools of thought this is a necessary and good thing. It probably is necessary if for no other reason than the conditions industrialized agriculture houses animals in, an unnatural and unhealthy environment being fed unnatural feed. The reward at the end for this is "cheap" food for Americans, resulting in American families spending less of their income as a percentage on food than ever before in history.

Is this bad? It it nothing to worry about? I am not sure but even as someone who is not an eco-nut or alarmist I think there are legitimate and serious concerns about the massive and often preemptive use of antibiotics in our food system. The story is brief, give it a listen and see what you think. At the very least it should encourage you to think more about where your food comes from and how it got there.

Book Review: What To Expect When No One Is Expecting

Some time ago I read an interview with author Jonathan Last where he was talking about his latest book, a very troubling look at declining rates of child bearing, What To Expect When No One's Expecting. After reading the interview I was eager to check this book out and I was not disappointed.

Last's premise is a simple one but it runs contrary to virtually every doom and gloom Malthusian theory out there, theories telling us that the world is suffering from overpopulation. Last argues that just the opposite is true, that plummeting birth rates not just in the West but in the developing world as well spell serious trouble for our future as a species.

The math is pretty simple. People have a 100% mortality rate. Without exception. So when a couple dies and leaves behind less than two children (plus childless singles), the population shrinks. We see this right now in Europe and Last cites some startling statistics that show that some of the largest nations in Europe like Germany are headed for dramatically reduced populations in the next 50 years. This is especially problematic in cultures where the care of the elderly has been subcontracted to the state, a state that relies on a steady supply of young workers to support the older workers.

Another interesting observation Last makes is that at one time a large family was seen as a sign of success while now it is largely becoming the inverse where the more education and the higher your income, the correspondingly fewer children you tend to have. There are a lot of implications to that, some that can be dangerous if taken the wrong way (like the worldview of Planned "Parenthood" patron saint Margaret Sanger)

This book is not merely a veiled racial attack on minorities and immigrants because as Last point out they too are adopting at least this aspect of American life, having rapidly diminishing family sizes just like their Caucasian counterparts. Nor is it intended as a wagging finger in the face of families that struggle financially and see children as an expense. That mindset is deeply cultural and ingrained in our society. This book is simply looking at the numbers and seeing that our future is being lived out in Europe right before our eyes demographically, just as it is religiously and in many other ways.

On top of it all our economic system is broken and that has not helped. We are one of the few single income families I know and it is not an easy way to go. Our cultural norm has created an untenable situation where more and more families are two income and have fewer and fewer children which leads to an upside down demographic pyramid where more elderly people needing care are at the top being supported by fewer and fewer replacement workers.

While most of the information Last provided was quite useful and presented in an informative and often humorous fashion (given the gravity of the topic), his solutions presented at the seemed like more of an afterthought, mere tinkering, rather than substantive policies. Sure we need to have more flexible work arrangements and modify Social Security but what is really needed is a renewal of the social contract that has family at the center rather than government. Families need to be more than relative strangers who inhabit the same residence and become the generation spanning units that have held our social network together for centuries. The social breakdown of the family, the rise of single parent by choice households and the dual income couple, the seemingly endless increases in college costs and the simultaneous relatively diminished value of a four year degree, on and on, have led to a shattered social network and a soon to be bankrupted government. Last has done a service by pointing out the numbers and giving us some of the background that has led to this point but where we really need to focus is on the solutions and those will require more than mere tinkering around the margins. This is a book we need to be reading as a nation and taking a long, hard look at the reality being played out i Europe right now. We cannot serve as a nation and culture, and indeed we cannot survive as a species, if we stop having children but that is the very road we have gone pretty down already.

Where Have All Of The Children Gone?

I have been reading a very interesting book on demographics, What To Expect When No One Is Expecting by Jonathan Last. His point is pretty simple and backed up with a ton of stats, namely that we are facing a demographic disaster even as certain academics continue to warn of overpopulation. This is an argument I have been making for some time and it is just common sense. As people live longer thanks to improved medical care and nutrition while at the same time people have much smaller families to replace those workers that die or retire, we are inevitably heading for a major crisis. The best thing we can do to ensure the viability of Social security is not to keep paying our Social Security taxes, it is to have children who will be future tax payers.

Anyway I read something interesting that I wanted to share from the book:

This does not mean people have stopped having children- merely that in the Second Demographic Transition, procreation became an act of self-actualization. And because raising children is difficult, resource intensive, socially inhibiting, and (if can be candid) often unpleasant, it is not an exercise many people want to put themselves through multiple times.

What To Expect When No One's Expecting, pg 93

There is some definite truth to that. Having children is often seen as a milestone in our own personal quest toward an adult bucketlist but it also is something that seems more about the parents than the children.

The second sentence is also quite interesting. Raising kids has always been time and resource intensive but in spite of all of our cultural noise about how important kids are we are at the same time doing everything we can to make raising kids more and more difficult.

Anyway, just thought that was interesting. The full review is coming out soon as I finished the book a few days ago.

 

Indebtedness

The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.
 
- Proverbs 22:7

There is a reason it is called "servicing debt".

We are a nation with an insatiable appetite for borrowing and consumption fueled by that borrowing. Working hard, saving and waiting have been replaced by easy credit, massive debt and instant gratification. When you step back and look at the big economic picture you see a nation teetering on the edge of disaster thanks in large part to debt and the resulting wage and housing inflation it has caused. In terms of actual debt already incurred and liabilities promised with no feasible means of payment (public pensions, Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, etc.) America is already fiscally dead but the nation keeps shambling along like a zombie.

Here is a little exercise, please bear with me. Just around the corner from our home there is a decent sized plot of farmland coming up for sale, a little over 600 acres. That is a sufficient amount of acreage for a full-time farmer. Thanks to inflated crop prices, government subsidies, a culture of "get big or get out" in farming and readily available credit I am guessing that the whole deal will sell at some $6000 an acre. That actually might be kind of low. $6000 for an acre sounds pretty cheap if you are buying a lot to build a house on but multiply that by 600 and you get $3,600,000. Over 3 1/2 million dollars is nothing to sneeze at. Using some random numbers for a 20 year loan at 5% you get monthly payments of $23,000 and total interest paid of over $2 million. That is over a quarter million a year in just mortgage payments. If you plant corn that yields a very nice 185 bushels to the acre you get 111,000 bushels of corn. Now with great corn prices, say $7 per bushel, you get $777,000 from a corn crop. That is what prices were hovering at around the beginning of last week. As Reuters reports by the end of the week thanks to ample rain in the corn belt prices had plummeted to around $5.50 a bushel which equates to a potential drop of over $150,000 in income in just one week. That is farming, great weather and great crops equals low prices, bad weather and poor crops means great prices but little to sell. Anyway the difference between the mortgage and the crop revenue is a huge number, somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000. So why don't more people get into farming with that kind of revenue? Well you also have to feed and house your family, buy seed and fertilizer and pesticides to get those big yields, buy and maintain enormously expensive farm equipment. Other than a small few who have an enormous amount of land, probably passed on for generations by a business savvy farmer, most farmers live right on the edge and choose to farm for the pride and the lifestyle rather than the money. Someone who wants to get into farming? Good luck going to the bank and getting a multi-million dollar loan based on potential revenue from farming. Thanks to the debt system that has inflated land and machinery prices, few young people can get into farming leaving us with a bunch of old farmers and fewer and fewer giant farms. Many of the very policies allegedly designed to "help" farmers have actually worked to drive aspiring farmers out of the fields and into regular jobs.

Farming is hardly the only area that government tinkering in lending has hurt the very people it was supposed to help. Student loan debt that was supposed to make college affordable and accessible to everyone has instead achieved the opposite, driving tuition prices sky high and saddling new graduates with a crippling debt in return for the promise of a life of working in a cubicle. Meanwhile the value of a college degree has diminished but people are fed the lie that the only way to make a decent living is by getting a four year degree. Meanwhile skilled workers are desperately needed all over the country but we keep churning out grads with the magical Bachelors degree in sociology or art history. Then there is the mortgage business where political pressure to make "the American dream" accessible to everyone created a situation where lenders were given an incentive to make stupid loans and shockingly that whole thing blew up when borrowers who couldn't afford the loans they were given started losing houses that were overpriced thanks to those same loans. Meanwhile people who had saved and built decent credit get to pay the same inflated prices thanks to government housing policies. So creditworthy borrowers were hurt, people who were not creditworthy got loans they couldn't pay making them more un-creditworthy and the whole system has been in distress for years.

The church is not only not immune to this craving for debt but largely a willing and enthusiastic imitator of the culture. Both corporately and individually the church is virtually indistinguishable from the world on this question.

We send young men to seminary to learn how to "minister" and at the same time accumulate a bunch of debt that will hamper their ability to apply all of that leaning later on in life for years or likely decades. Rather than learn under the local elders of the church by observing and imitating they study expensive academic concepts from relative strangers and then are thrust into the world with a degree in hand and no useful job skills to show for it. No matter what he feels called to do, like move to an inner-city or a poor rural area, the new seminary grad really is limited by having to service that debt (as well as the costs of caring for a family which means a mortgage). So that means going to a small church until he builds up a resume to move to a larger, better paying job calling. or getting on staff at a large suburban church so he can pay his student loan (and probably credit card) debt. As a result many young seminary grads end up in the religious professional system and either climb the vocational ministry corporate ladder or burn out after 5 years with a bunch of debt and no job skills. In other words we not only don't equip men biblically for the work of ministry, we cripple their ability to follow callings because of their debt that the church demanded they take on as the part of the price of admission for "ministry".

Corporately our local churches borrow enormous sums of money for buildings and improvements and then spend years asking church attenders to put money in the plate to keep the doors open so they can come back next week to put money in the plate to keep the doors open and on and on. Show up, pay up, come back next week, repeat. Enormous sums of money are tied up in maintaining our religious institutions and by tying up our giving in budgeted expenses to maintain buildings, service debt and pay staff we are left with precious little left over to minister to the poor and needy, not to mention funds to support missionaries.

Debt is a sickness and it is slavery. We are two and a half year into a 15 year mortgage and I can't wait to pay this house off. Having a mortgage, even a very modest one like we do, impacts everything we do and we only have a dozen years left. For those with a 30 year mortgage, it is unlikely to ever get paid off. A 35 year old couple, assuming they don't keep refinancing and extending that 30 year mortgage, will pay their house off the same year they retire having paid an enormous amount of interest. The church needs to address this sickness and I mean more than just sponsoring Financial Peace University classes. The issue is not one of poor budgeting, it is an issue of worldliness, of covetousness, of fear of being different, of sin. We cannot be blind to this log in our collectives eyes while wagging our finger at the speck in the world's eye. When we turn a blind eye to our own sinful attitudes and behavior we lose much of our standing to be salt and light to the world. Our embrace of the American love affair with debt is just one more place where we have compromised and exhibited the exact sort of hypocrisy that we are warned about in Scripture.

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I would also recommend this great article by my friend Matt Jabs, Debt Slavery - What it is and ways out