Blog, page 13

John Piper offers a clear, concise response about the biblical precedent for three church practices:

Let’s leave aside any specific person or website. I like Francis Chan a lot. I count him as a good friend. We have overlapped in lots of places and I like him, and I don’t want to pick on him at all. So I am just going to pose the very specific questions: 1) Should there be a salary for pastors? 2) Should preached sermons be a part of regular church services? 3) Should you do that weekly? Are those biblical concepts?

Often, when there is a divergence like this about what “church” really is (or is not), I think of Abraham Kuyper’s distinction between the “organic” qualities of church and the “institutional” qualities of church.¹ Both are biblical. It is biblical to share meals in homes, to bring gospel witness to the marketplace, to seek the welfare of the larger community, to practically concern oneself with mercy and justice, etc. And it is biblical to appoint leaders, to baptize, to preach, to manage strategy and budget, to educate and ordain, to share in the Lord’s Supper, etc. The church’s full expression is found neither entirely within institutional Christian practice, nor entirely in organic Christian practice.

Tim Keller and John Inazu in Christianity Today:

We can also learn from the biblical witness how to engage in the world around us. The book of Jeremiah tells the story of God using the prophet to instruct the Jews in Babylon not to hate or ignore the pagan city, but to become long-term residents, to exercise good will toward it through prayer, and to seek its peace and prosperity. They were to build up the social fabric for their common well-being (“if [Babylon] prospers, you too will prosper” Jer. 29:7). They were to be known as a people who served their neighbors and their city.

Excellent article.

(I wonder, however, if the “protestant” piece is slightly overstated. Isn’t the more fundamental issue provoking the “anxious age” the transition from a monolithic culture to pluralistic one, not from a protestant culture to a non-protestant one?)

Interview with Georgetown prof. Cal Newport:

There are two types of work: deep and shallow. Deep work is when you focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task and push yourself to create something new and valuable. Shallow work is everything else. Some amount of shallow work is unavoidable, but try to maximize the amount of time you spend doing the deep alternative. The market does not reward you for being busy. It rewards you for producing things that are rare and valuable. This requires depth.

Speaking of “shallow work,” I’m on a plane right now next to a guy with an iPad streaming HBO, while playing poker on an iPod, while scanning email on an iPhone.

Thabiti Anyabwile in The Atlantic:

I find [Ta-Nehisi Coates’] searing analysis compelling. I appreciate his attempt to put a face—a worn, mistreated, yet noble African American face—on the issues. His stripping away of euphemisms and niceties and political correctness lays bare the ugly truth about the U.S.—about Americans. The cuts could be healing.

But in one significant respect, I think Coates fails his readership and fails to represent something vital about African Americans—his writing lacks hope.

Like Anyabwile, I too have been moved by Coates’ writing. Yet, also like Anyabwile, I’ve found Coates’ essentially fatalistic. Here Anyabwile offers hope in addition to Coates’ excellent criticism.

Wikipedia:

The horseshoe theory in political science asserts that rather than the far left and the far right being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, they in fact closely resemble one another, much like the ends of a horseshoe. The theory is attributed to French writer Jean-Pierre Faye.

h/t Andrew Wilson

Hint: It’s not what you think it is.

Joseph Lake for the Economist Intelligence Unit:

This is the most unpopular pair of candidates in history… The winner will be whoever is the least unpopular.¹

Via WorldPopulationHistory.org

Watch on YouTube

God has a kingdom. It’s made up of citizens. Some black, some white, some red, yellow, Spanish backgrounds. His intention was never that the individual uniqueness would cause them to lose sight of the flag flying over them. The flag of the cross …  America in particular is reaching an all-time low in this issue of race and culture and class. Just under the surface there is this ever-bubbling problem that has gone unresolved…

Benjamin Grant in SPUR:

At their best, cities bring us together across economic, social and racial divisions. If the anonymity of the Internet seems to breed trolls, the anonymity of the city mostly yields a decent civility. The public realm is where we safely mix across boundaries. Where we sometimes celebrate as one. Where, at the margins, norms of behavior are contested and enforced. Where protest calls us to account. Where the organs of the state translate white anxiety into violent control. Where symbolic acts of mass murder are performed. And where paroxysms of collective rage at times erupt. This is how much public space matters. It is where everything finds expression. It is where we face ourselves.

h/t Nick Parsons

Musk’s Central Park-sized factory is taking dogfooding to new a level:

Tesla cut and capped the natural gas line leading to the Gigafactory, so there’s no going back to on-site fossil fuels. There’s also no diesel generator for backup power. That means Tesla must rely on electricity for manufacturing processes that require heat, an unusual step for a major plant of any type.

Paul Barnwell in The Atlantic:

A few months ago, I presented the following scenario to my junior English students: Your boyfriend or girlfriend has committed a felony, during which other people were badly harmed. Should you or should you not turn him or her into the police?

The class immediately erupted with commentary. It was obvious, they said, that loyalty was paramount—not a single student said they’d “snitch.” They were unequivocally unconcerned about who was harmed in this hypothetical scenario. This troubled me.

Yet another shooting.

Two pieces come to mind:

1. A prayer from Psalm 10 that Jackie Hill Perry tweeted a week or so ago,
2. and songs of lament for churches in times of tragedy, shared with me from Mission Church Creative Arts Director T.D. Oakes.

The Psalm is a unabashed plea for God to justly intercede. The songs are both modern choruses and old hymns, and they remind the Christian that the fundamental peace, identity, and security have been already purchased for him.

Psalm 10:7-8, 12-18

7 His mouth is filled with cursing and deceit and oppression; under his tongue are mischief and iniquity. 8 He sits in ambush in the villages; in hiding places he murders the innocent. His eyes stealthily watch for the helpless…

12    Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up your hand; forget not the afflicted. 13 Why does the wicked renounce God and say in his heart, “You will not call to account”? 14 But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands; to you the helpless commits himself; you have been the helper of the fatherless. 15 Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer; call his wickedness to account till you find none.

16    The LORD is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land. 17 O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear 18 to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.

Songs for lament

• No Longer Slaves (Bethel)
• 10,000 Reasons (Matt Redman)
• Always (Passion/Kristian Stanfill)
• Blessed Be Your Name (Matt Redman)
• Healing Is In Your Hands (Christy Nockels)
• Take Heart (Hillsong United)
• I’ve Had Questions (Tim Hughes)
• I Need Words (David Crowder)
• It is Well with My Soul (Horatio Spafford)
• Great is Thy Faithfulness (Thomas Chisholm)

Great interview from Ken Wytsma in his book Create vs. Copy with relief and development veteran Keith Wright. Some highlights:

Everything is changing in Africa. One out of four people in the world will be African by 2050. Africa will be the world’s top producer of food in twenty or thirty years. Many African countries have completely leapfrogged over landline telephone networks and gone straight to cell towers… Africa is light years ahead of the US in technology facilitating sales through cell phones.

…the most effective way to impact a country is to create infrastructure… Fair trade coffee is a good thing, but it doesn’t have the economic thrust or long-term potential of an electrical grid.

[When I asked Keith,] “What’s the biggest change you think is heading toward Africa?” He quickly replied, “Urbanization.”

These kind of stats and projections demonstrate the strategic importance of church planting in Africa’s rising cities. Orchard Group, the organization I work for, is currently beginning projects with local leaders in the cities of Lagos, Nigeria and Cape Town, South Africa.