Our religion ought to inform our politics as it ought to inform our whole life. There are some political issues we should not be silent on (abortion comes to mind). However, the “culture wars” in America have duped Christians into enlisting in causes that have nothing to do with their religion. Worse still, it makes our religion into simply one aspect of a larger subsuming culture complete with its own schools, dress, music, television shows and diets. It doesn’t take a large jump before those things all become of similar importance, and Christ takes his place in the pantheon between Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (or Obama and Al Franken, as the case may be). It’s the devil’s old bait-and-switch. Christ didn’t have a problem with the Pharisee’s actual righteousness, he had a problem with assuming that adherence to arbitrary cultural conventions was righteousness. Christianity is not a culture, it is trans-cultural. When we engage in evangelism, it should not be to make people more like us, but rather more like Christ.

- Justin Longacre, “Five Things“

To mistake an ideology or a social model for the transcendent and always surprising (and irritating!) Kingdom of God is, technically speaking, the sin of idolatry.  It is to worship the work of our own hands.  What makes it worse is that to some degree in the mainline churches we have replaced faith in the scripturally based and historically rooted doctrines and values of the Christian heritage with faith in progressive social thought.

Instead of proclaiming a gospel of salvation that still brings lost sinners streaming through the doors (ask the Pentecostals and evangelicals who have continued to grow even as we shrink) we issue statements urging the federal government to fulfill its contributions to the Millennium Development Goals and to raise the minimum wage.  They preach and plant churches; we have professional development workshops for diocesan employees.

- Walter Russell Mead, from “Petty Prophets of the Blue Beast“

The are a lot of different kinds of Good News, but there is little good news in “My argument scored more points than you argument.” But the news that “Christ is risen!” really is Good News for one kind of person: The person who is dying.

If Christianity is not a dying word to dying men, it is not the message of the Bible that gives hope now.

- Michael Spencer , On Real Apologetics

If you can, pray for Michael. He’s having a rough go at it with some pretty nasty cancer.

Also, as he’s now without a job and could use the financial help, you can donate to him at the link below:

“Church should not be a place for people who can’t make an honest living to pretend they’re bigwig business executives.”

- “Fearsome Tycoon”, From The Boar’s Head Tavern

The human experience commonly shared is suffering … If he [Matt Chandler] suffers well, that might be the most important sermon he’s ever preached.

– Mark Driscoll, on Matt Chandler’s Brain Cancer

The lesson of theological liberalism is clear—embarrassment is the gateway drug for theological accommodation and denial.

Be sure of this: it will not stop with the air conditioning of hell.

- Al Mohler, “Air Conditioning Hell: How Liberalism Happens“,

We urge decisions (especially during invitations), but base them on emotional pressure rather than the unpacking of the Person and Work of Christ, starting our sermons in the Ephesians 4-6 portions of Scripture without rooting them in the Ephesians 1-3 portions of Scripture. By doing so, we’re setting people up for failure and despair by preaching law without preaching Christ.

Frankly, this is what concerns me most. Sure, I grieve when we don’t preach the text with sobriety—but even when we do, we often highlight what we must do for Christ more than what He has done for us [emphasis added]. Sure we must remember the former, but we need to base it on the latter—without fail. The truth is, we don’t exult in Christ. Seriously, listen to what gets the most “Amens” in your next fundamentalist conference. A message that focuses on compromising evangelicals or rebellious teens or worldly music is apt to be met with a chorus of people saying “Amen!” and “That’s right!” Meanwhile, a message focused on Christ’s atoning work and it’s affect on every day living can be met with silence or a “tell me something new” inattentiveness. It grieves me. I urge those choosing special speakers to choose those who make much of Christ. What else do we have to offer sinners, after all? …

Preacher, get serious about preaching. Get a conscience about it. And for mercy’s sake, if you’re going to criticize John Piper or Sovereign Grace, you’d better bring it. You’d better drive your message deep into the text. You’d better have the approach of a prosecuting attorney who knows that every single thing he says has to be verifiable by hard facts, not clever jokes or circumstantial evidence. Because if you criticize men who are passionate about preaching the text even as you give it a back seat to your own wisdom, you’ll be deservedly ignored. And it’s happening a lot. A lot.”

- Chris Anderson (from his post  “It’s Past Time to Put a ‘Zero Tolerance’ Policy on Preaching“)

I changed my sermon late Thursday night. I lived in New Orleans for Katrina and heard the comments from Christians about God Judging the city and all and it pissed me off. When I heard Pat’s comments last week and then heard a local pastor repeat them at an association meeting I took a break from the book of James to preach on Luke 13. What did Jesus say when we are confronted by a tragedy. He said repent or you will likewise perish. It baffles me that Christian leaders so miss God’s grace and stand in judgment when they should be on their knees thanking God that they were spared and have the chance to repent [emphasis added].

- Aaron Arledge, from The Boar’s Head Tavern

The first step to knowing God is to know His Word.  He has revealed Himself to us in the written Word.  Without the Bible, we would have very limited knowledge of Him … Some people will go around the world to find God’s will for their lives, but will not go to the next room to read their Bible.

- M. David Sills, “The Missionary Call: Find Your Place in God’s Plan for the World“

“Cancer quickly reveals who and what we ultimately trust. It can bring life into eternal perspective, so long as we don’t despair in our illness. If we feast on Christ, we will find our sins don’t taste so rich any longer. Even well-known pastors must fight this battle. They might appear to have it all, but they actually have more cause for despair that we usually imagine. Thousands turn out to hear them speak in conferences. Thousands more buy their books. Megachurches sprout where they serve. But cancer threatens to end that influence. Of all people, they are tempted to think they are too important for God to take.”

- Collin Hansen (“When the Pastor Suffers“)

“The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.”

- Ross Douthat, Reviewing Avatar

“Young pastors should not turn up their noses at such places, where they may learn the full spectrum of ministry tasks and skills as they will not in a large church. Nor should they go to small communities looking at them merely as stepping stones in a career. Why not? Your early ministry experience will only prepare you for ‘bigger things,’ if you don’t aspire for anything bigger than investment in the lives of the people around you. Wherever you serve, put your roots down, become a member of the community and do your ministry with all your heart and might. If God opens the door to go somewhere else, fine and good. But don’t go to such places looking at them only as training grounds for ‘real ministry.’”

- Tim Keller, on “The Country Parson”

“If you insist on bragging about your church, don’t tell us about the numbers. Tell us about how the Kingdom has come to your community. Tell us of the lame who walk, the blind who see, the debts that have been forgiven, the reconciliation that has taken place at personal, generational & racial levels, how the poor and the outcast are loved and taken care of, how widows and orphans are grafted into the church family, how your community is experiencing the Year of Jubilee – because of what the Spirit is doing in and through your church.

But if all you can talk about are your numbers, then, please…

…just shut up. It’s long past old.”

- Bill Kinnon (from his post, “What We Win Them With is What We Win Them To“)

Whitlock can oftentimes be fairly offensive, but his columns on his fellow media-men/women are always interesting and entertaining (and pretty much spot-on to boot)

“Tiger’s critics — read them here, here, here, here, here, here and here — want the man publicly flogged and embarrassed, and they want him to beg the media to fix his public-relations problem. More than anything, the media, especially the print media, want to be needed. We’re an insecure lot, dealing with festering childhood insecurities about popularity and sexuality.

If you’re offended by that statement, you’re exactly who I’m talking about.

…

I’m sharing this because it’s important for the public to know that the media act dishonestly all the time. We’re far more phony than Tiger Woods ever could be.”

- Jason Whitlock on Tiger and the Media

Online church seems to be the logical extension of models we have already adopted.

But more importantly, I think the whole conversation has reinforced for me that evangelicals are people who love fads.  Church growth, seeker sensitive, emerging…and now we’re on to ‘online church.’  We love getting all worked up, talking a lot about it, and then we all eventually move on and keep doing our own thing.

Of course, that doesn’t mean such fads don’t have any impact.  The center gets pulled in various directions as the people on the fringe’s make their case.  Case in point:  video sermons are now the center, while 5 years ago they were the fringe. But we are suckers for the next cool way of ‘doing church,’ a treadmill that is difficult to keep pace with.

- Matthew Lee Anderson (On Online Church and Evangelicals being “People of the Fad”)