I was one of the few people I know who were really discipled. Don Nonnenman took me under his wing and he taught me what he felt was important, then I spent two years in Bible College, and 8 years as a heavily active member of the church that sponsored the college. I still feel woefully uninformed when it comes to orthodox thoughts on Christianity. I learned a lot of about word of faith practices and how to “work the Word” for all that it is worth but very little about the core beliefs that make Christianity what it is.

Having not grown up in church I was never subject to Catechism or even much more than a very basic Sunday school experience. Heather and I have spent some time reviewing Catechisms for ourselves and our girls so that they will know what to believe and why as they grow up. Just from an anecdotal evidence I see very little proof that those young people who have grown up in church know much more about Christianity than those who have not been to church before.

Christian Smiths book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers interviews thousands of young people from many different church backgrounds and he discovered that many of our church kids follow what he describes as therapeutic moralistic deism and not orthodox Christianity. Could this be because we have gotten away from tougher deeper teaching to in order to be attractive to consumer driven seekers? I am not sure but I believe it must be considered.

In her new book “Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What to Do about It
” Julia Duin (pronounced dean) talks about the new reformed churches that are a growing number of churches that are gaining popularity. Churches like Mars Hill in Seattle is taking on tough questions and would never be accused of being seeker sensitive. Pastor Mark Driscoll pulls no punches with his devotion to the Gospel which he admits is an offense to most who hear it. He uses all the larger words of the Bible that many shy away from for the fear of sounding to religious.

The question becomes whether or not Christianity will be able to separate itself from any general spirituality that surrounds it. Although on paper we may be able to I don’t know of those who call themselves Christians can articulate the difference.

Last week at our house church I heard probably the greatest message on sex and marriage I have ever heard. The reason was because it went past pop psychology to the gospel and how our fallen nature affects our marriages. The Gospel should always be at the center of our lives, ministries, marriages and blogs.
The message was by Mark Driscoll and I will embed it here in the post if you would like to see it and I suggest you do…

The trouble with many marriages including my own is that we never plan for sin. We have a financial plan, a plan for raising our children, and plans for our vacation but not a plan for sin. I am a sinner, I am evil by nature and I married a sinner who is evil by nature, that doesn’t make for a sinless marriage. Pastor Mark Driscoll calls us to account for that in our marriages.

I am a shamefully proud person and it is very difficult for me to admit I am wrong. I will argue points I don’t even agree with just to ‘win’ the argument at times. This has hindered me in many relationships but consistently with my wife. After hearing from God on the details of this issue we are working on it together but we must consider the fact that we are fallen people and we will hurt one another.

One of the parts of the message that really touched me was when Mark’s wife joined him for the Q&A at the end and he asked the question if he deserved to be forgiven by her when he sins. The answer is no, forgiveness is mercy and grace which is by nature not deserved. The issues is not that we deserve to be forgiven by God or our spouses but that we forgive because God forgives.

I really hope and pray that Heather and I can live the gospel out more and more in our marriage so that our girls can truly understand the majesty of the glory of God.

The author employs some very interesting methods in his writing the first of which is his grammatical form.  There are very few paragraph breaks and little punctuation outside of commas and periods, which makes the conversations in the story very difficult to follow until you get used to it.

Additionally, none of the characters use proper names but are simply described by some feature of their personality, appearance or their relation ship to another character.  I felt very little attachment to the characters as a whole and there was very little development of them.

The book does have at least one scene of a graphic sexual nature that I was not comfortable with and wish I could have skipped because it added little to the story but nevertheless I feel compelled to warn anyone who may be tempted or offended by such a scene.  To be honest I wish I wouldn’t have read this scene for the images that came to my mind.

I am sure that the author was attempting to make some great moral or philosophical point when he wrote this book but he doesn’t make it very clear the story is barely coherent or interesting and doesn’t have a good ending.

I thought a Nobel Prize winning book would be better.  It seems when I step outside of my normal reading patters I discover why they are my normal reading patterns.

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

‘A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.’

‘A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.’

¡From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.’

‘The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years’

‘During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;

2. From spiritual faith to great courage;

3. From courage to liberty;

4. From liberty to abundance;

5. From abundance to complacency;

6. From complacency to apathy;

7. From apathy to dependence;

8. From dependence back into bondage’

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:

Number of States won by: Democrats: 19 Republicans: 29

Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000

Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 million Republicans: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13..2 Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: ‘In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare….’ Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the ‘complacency and apathy’ phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the ‘governmental dependency’ phase.

Again this year I am going to be reading the Bible, I haven’t decided on a schedule as of yet but I would like to know what would help you meet the goal of reading God’s word? I could do a newsletter/mailing list of encouragement, or set up a forum to discuss what we are reading, a podcast of the daily reading? I am willing to try anything if it will help people read God’s word.

I think it is important for everyone to read and understand the Bible, how else will we know what God said versus what we have always thought. It is the primary way God speaks to us, and most of us, including myself ignore it far too much.

Let me know if you are interested in partaking or helping this year.

Drop a comment and let me know what you think.

Please read John Piper’s Article here, it is short and wonderful.

One of the founding factors in this trouble has been increasing energy costs.  That means that everything is going to be more expensive and that includes the huge mega churches that we have been building.  I don’t think we are going to see an increase in their number because they are simply going to be priced out of existence.   But that isn’t necessarily bad news; it means we are going to have to adjust to new ways of doing things.

I believe one of the reasons the Bible doesn’t give any prescriptions on how the church should operate is because God knew it would have to thrive in many cultures throughout the ages.  I think we will have some great advantages if we take advantage of them.

1. We can eliminate some of the more useless programs that simply attract the “Serve us” instead of the Service Christian.

Let’s face it as an organization we have tried every marketing ploy and outrageous idea in order to attract people to the church.  Some have been affective but most have been laughable.  Now maybe we will be forced back to the basics.

2. Smaller organizations

I have spoken many times about the benefit of smaller organizations but it never hurts to do it again.  We may actually be able to build community in smaller churches with more ease.  Less wasted money because there will be less to waste.

Small organizations have a higher percentage of involvement.  When you can’t simply pay someone to do the work the leader’s job really becomes “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,”

3. No more prosperity

False prosperity gospels had an easy time flourishing in the soil of our rapidly rising economy but when things are turning around I think it will cause people to be a little more discerning.

4. Building Community

I have touched on it a little but I believe our economic times have helped us to ignore one another.  My child hood home didn’t have Air conditioning and my mom used to sit out front and so did the rest of the neighbor hood we would talk to each other.  If we actually turn the AC up and have to go out side it might be nice.

Or it may be difficult to go out on the town so we may have to have people over for an evening; there is something much different about inviting people into your home.  Let us not forget how the gospel was spread from house to house in the early church.

Heather and I have recently taken a friend into a spare room in our house, she needed a place to stay and we had a room.  It seemed only right that we offered her our spare room it wasn’t quite a necessity but who knows it may be depending on how bad things get.

We can’t always do what has always worked but we can always find new ways of doing things for the sake of the Gospel.

Dorie Morgan’s Rising Up » Wasteful Spending in Suburbia » Navigating Twenty-Something Suburban Life

That God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”

It also caused some people to ignore their current income and the obvious results of an ARM assuming that God would have doubled their income by now, but in most cases he hasn’t.

That branch of the church has been left with very little good financial sense, people are just as in debt as the rest of the world. I myself and struggling with the hangover of a little of this easy credit drug, I do not feel able to give what I would like to because of my current financial situation, and believe me, I am not as bad off as some people I know. Or lack of biblical sense and financial sense along with the financial situation of the time has left us washed up on the beach after being pounded against the sand.

It seems that we have gotten into a place as a people where we don’t want to know about God through old fashioned ideas like doctrine; we simply want to know God through what ever means that could be. We are super humans who can ignore common sense and the rules of the universe and human nature. You can not know someone if you know nothing about them; human or divine.

I am becoming more and more convinced that it will be this group of “Christians” that will be part of the great falling away because they have no root of doctrine to hold to but are like that double minded man James talked about; thrown about by every wave of doctrine. Orthodoxy (correct thinking) leads to orthopraxy (right living).