A Withering, Insightful Assessment
By Ken | June 17, 2008
I ran across an entertaining, withering, insightful series of columns about the state of the church in our culture that I wanted to call to our readers’ (all five or six of them) attention. The author is Doug Giles, a columnist on the Townhall.com website, author, and pastor. He is also the creator of a radio program called Clash Radio. You can read his full Bio here.
The columns are a series titled “The Detergent Church,” a word play on “The Emergent Church,” and in stark contrast to it. Giles pulls no punches, using some pretty creative labels for both the good and the bad versions of the church. The structure of the series is his elaboration on his ten point “laundry list” he describes as the way “‘the called out ones’ can be the holy hellfire Detergent Church they’re ’spose to be.” He suggests putting on a cup. You guys will understand. Here’s the list.
- Get men who dig being rowdy back in the pulpit.
- Could we have some sound doctrine, por favor?
- Preach scary sermons (at least every fourth one).
- Get rid of 99.9% of “Christian TV and sappy Christian music.
- Quit trying to be relevant and instead become prophetic contrarians, I’m talking contra mundus, mama!
- Put a 10-year moratorium on “God wants you rich” sermons (yeah, that’s what we need to hear nowadays, you morons, more sermons about money, money money!).
- Embrace apologetics and shun shallow faith.
- Evangelize like it’s 1999.
- Push lazy Christians to get a life or join a Satanic Church.
- Demand that if a Christian gets involved in the arts that their “craft” must scream excellence and not excrement.
Yes it’s edgy, but I think right on target. Read all four installments at the links below. I suggest that you print or save the pieces when you get to them. The web site has been down a good bit and I couldn’t always get to these pieces. Enjoy!
Topics: Popular Culture, Serious Living, The Bible, The Church | No Comments »
Never More Necessary …
By Ben | April 21, 2008
Well, it’s been awhile since anyone has posted anything, so I thought I’d put up a thought-provoking passage I read recently. To be honest, I haven’t been reading all that much lately; this is actually something I read more than a month ago. We’re in the middle of trying to move in to a house that’s been all but completely renovated, but we’re currently staying with my parents-in-law and it’s left us feeling a little displaced (even though her parents are great). I realize I seem to have a penchant for longer quotes, but I promise if you read the whole passage it will make sense why I have to include it all. 
Anyway, the quote is from Aldous Huxley’s Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience. I picked it up off the bargain rack in a bookstore across from Yale University (I was only there on business) and although Mr. Huxley is anything but Christian, he is a deep thinker and careful observer. The following was written in 1941:
… it is upon fashions, cars, and gadgets, upon news and the advertising upon which news exists, that our present industrial and economic system depends for its proper functioning. For, as ex-President Hoover pointed out not long ago, this system cannot work unless the demand for non-necessaries is not merely kept up, but continually expanded; and of course it cannot be kept up and expanded except by incessant appeals to greed, competitiveness, and love of aimless stimulation. Men have always been a prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system. Recollectedness, or the overcoming of distractions, has never been more necessary than now; it has also, we may guess, never been so difficult.
Topics: Books, Life of the Mind, Popular Culture, Serious Living | 2 Comments »
Things really haven’t changed much, it seems …
By Ben | February 13, 2008
This is a quote from the The Jugurthine War, written by Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) about 41 B.C., nine years after he was expelled from the Senate for alleged immorality and approximately six years before he died at the age of fifty-one.
Men have no right to complain that they are naturally feeble and short-lived, or that it is chance and not merit that decides their destiny. On the contrary, reflection will show that nothing exceeds or surpasses the powers with which nature has endowed mankind, and that it is rather energy they lack than strength or length of days.
But if the soul is enslaved by base desires and sinks into the corruption of sloth and carnal pleasures, it enjoys a ruinous indulgence for a brief season; then, when idleness has wasted strength, youth, and intelligence, the blame is put on the weakness of our nature, and each man excuses himself for his own shortcomings by imputing his failure to adverse circumstances. If men pursued good things with the same ardor with which they seek what is unedifying and unprofitable — often, indeed, actually dangerous and pernicious — they would control events instead of being controlled by them, and would rise to such heights of greatness and glory that their mortality would put on immortality.
Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. (Ephesians 5:15-16)
Topics: Books, Life of the Mind, Serious Living | 1 Comment »
Some hardy morsels …
By Ben | January 28, 2008
I came across these quotes while reading a book by George MacDonald entitled Dish of Orts (Orts means a scrap or morsel–I had no idea either:). He actually used these passages in his own essay on forms of literature and I was so taken with them that I scoured the Internet until I found a scanned-in 1853 edition of Mr. Lynch’s book. I downloaded it and, using “economy” mode on the printer, printed all 166 pages.
The first quote brings to my mind the moments of warm recollection, often caused by a simple scent or the fading sun or a cup of coffee, of times spent with brother-books, the ones we remember as fondly as we do our faithful dogs; the second, that reading should exist reciprocally with all other parts of life; and the third, which doesn’t so much make me want to begin reading a biography (it kinda does) as it does review my own story in light of what Mr. Lynch says here. After all, the payment of self-sacrifice is non-refundable, is it not? Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Books, Life of the Mind, Reading, Serious Living | No Comments »
Oh, this hurts …
By Spencer | January 24, 2008
One more quote:
Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little. He left Cambridge University to join the army; but he left the army because, in spite of all his erudition, he could not rub down a horse; he returned to Oxford and left without a degree. He began a paper called The Watchman which lived for ten numbers and then died. It has been said of him: “He lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one—the gift of sustained and concentrated effort.” In his head and in his mind he had all kinds of books, as he said himself, “completed save for transcription.” “I am on the eve,” he says, “of sending to the press two octavo volumes.” But the books were never composed outside Coleridge’s mind, because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out. No one ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached it ever maintained it, without discipline.
—Donald Whitney quoting William Barclay in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (22)
Thanks, Glenn, (I think) for sending that our way!
Topics: Life of the Mind, Serious Living | 1 Comment »
Is “informed” the same as “wise”?
By Spencer | January 22, 2008
Rod Dreher writes:
I am becoming the ideal 21st-century American: a soft-bellied physical slacker who knows everything going on right this very second but understands less and less of it. Information is not the same thing as knowledge, and “data” is not a synonym for “wisdom.”
Well said. Read the whole piece HERE.
(Thanks, Matt, for pointing us to this article!)
Topics: Life of the Mind, Popular Culture | No Comments »
A New Link in Our Blogroll
By Ken | January 18, 2008
Thanks to Glenn Bosarge for the tip about the new link in our Blogroll…Unashamed Workman. This is a blog by a pastor in Scotland with lots of good resource links and suggestions for reading and listening. Make sure to visit.
Topics: Life of the Mind, Reading, The Bible | No Comments »
A Divine Cordial
By Ben | December 23, 2007
I recently finished reading All Things For Good (A Divine Cordial was the original title) by Thomas Watson, who was a 17th-century Puritan preacher. I realize that books written by Puritan authors probably don’t take up much shelf-space in the average modern library. This particular book had banded together with Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor and hunkered down on a corner shelf, bravely representing their brethren among the more glamorously-inked lumber that retains the majority in my own library.
However, Watson’s book providentially made it’s way into my hands not long ago and I was surprised at how forcefully relevant it was to me. Watson lays his expository case out in a logical, easy to follow way, just as you should expect from a preacher. But it’s his recognition and use of rhythm and balance that gives the reader so many truth-encapsulating sentences, sentences that stay with him long after the book is closed. I’m posting some of these very sentences here in hopes that you’ll see what I mean, and perhaps go lug a Puritan out from your own shelf.
Though a Christian has not a perfect knowledge of the mysteries of the Gospel, yet he has a certain knowledge. … Let us then not rest in skepticism or doubts, but labor to come to a certainty in the things of religion.
Mercy does more multiply in Him than sin in us.
If God does not give you that which you like, He will give you that which you need.
God will not be an inmate, to have only one room in the heart, and all the other rooms let out to sin.
He who is in love with God is not much in love with anything else.
What shall we think of such as have never enough of the world?
… may not Christ suspect us, when we pretend to love Him, and yet will endure nothing for Him?
Was His head crowned with thorns, and do we think to be crowned with roses?
Topics: Books, Life of the Mind, Reading, The Bible | 1 Comment »
Just in case …
By Spencer | December 15, 2007
If anyone’s been wondering about the movie The Golden Compass or about Philip Pullman’s whole trilogy of books under the title of His Dark Materials, I’ve written a few reflections in a document available on BibleDriven.com, at the post HERE.
Topics: Books, Life of the Mind, Movies | No Comments »
A Lament and a Poignant Longing
By Spencer | December 10, 2007
For many of the image bearers of God in our day being literate is neither a goal nor a possibility. They have been rendered functionally autistic through the diversions of digital media, hyper hedonism, and pseudo-education that is more concerned with indoctrination than with the invocation of the muse, whose presence can transport us to unexplored lands of truth, even to eternity.
The National Endowment for the Arts laments (again) that reading is in steep decline. How can I provoke in my students the love of learning, the thrill of discovery, the discipline of finding, testing, and applying ideas? How can I commend reading over watching or playing? I can attempt to be a model of a literate man–a very imperfect one, who got a late start, and who chronically feels his ignorance. I can pray for them to awaken, to begin to disdain the cave they call a home.
– Douglas Groothuis
Topics: Life of the Mind, Reading | 1 Comment »
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