Podcast Pastors

December 29, 2011 By scotmcknight 31 Comments

From Trevin Wax’s post as reported at CP:

There’s a dangerous trend among Christians today, according to one Christian: Podcast sermons are increasingly replacing real pastorship.

“What is dangerous is not listening to podcasts, but thinking that pastoring and shepherding is taking place through this means. There is more to pastoring than the delivery of sermons,” said Trevin Wax, blogger and managing editor of the Gospel Project at LifewayChristian Resources, to The Christian Post….

Earlier this year, Dr. Russell D. Moore, dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a discussion on “Faith in America” that when he asks young evangelicals in ministry who has been really influential upon them, they mention “a disembodied voice that they have heard on a podcast.”

“Ten years ago, most people would have given me the name of a local pastor who had mentored them and worked with them,” Moore noted, calling the new trend “a very dangerous thing.”…

Shane Hipps, author of Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith, elaborated on the idea of technology and the church in an interview with Christianity Today. He said Christians can’t escape or resist technology because it’s everywhere, but they should try to understand it before blindly trusting it.

“Christians are quick to critique it (technology) or adapt it or reject it without understanding it,” he said. “My interest is to have deep discernment, to understand the actual power of these things, and then decide whether or not a technology is useful.”

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized 31 Comments

Testing Scripture 1 (RJS)

December 29, 2011 By RJS 40 Comments

Scripture plays a foundational role in the Christian faith on both an individual level and a corporate level. In fact, the centrality of scripture to the Christian faith is hard to argue. It is the self-revelation of God, so Christians believe. Without the Old Testament we would know little or nothing of God’s relationship to or interaction with the world, from the calling of Abraham and Israel to the significance of the Davidic kingdom or  the exile. Without the New Testament we would know next to nothing about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament and the turning point in the work of God in creation.

The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne opens his short book  Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible with a reflection on the importance of scripture.

Scripture has been very important to me in my Christian life. For more than sixty years I have read the Bible every day, and when in middle life I was ordained as an Anglican priest, I undertook the welcome duty of saying the Daily Office. Every year this takes me through the whole of the New Testament and a good deal of the Old Testament.

… there is great spiritual truth and beauty to be found in Scripture. Anyone who has listened to a performance of Handel’s Messiah, where the text is drawn wholly from the Bible, will have caught a glimpse of the majestic power and hopeful promise that are to be found in the pages of scripture. (p. ix-x)

The nature of the bible raises major questions for many today, however. Many doubt that the bible can be read both critically and religiously. Either the critical reading must undermine the religious experience or the religious reading must ignore the critical analysis. Dr. Polkinghorne disagrees – it is possible, he asserts, to read the bible as a believer, in an intellectually rigorous way.

How can the modern educated person read the bible as a Holy Book?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Bible, Science and Faith Tagged With: 40 Comments

“Social” Justice (Tim King)

December 29, 2011 By scotmcknight 29 Comments

Tim King is a former student of mine, works with Jim Wallis, and is pointing out something I would affirm. The word “social” has been added to the word “justice” because “social” has been too often neglected. Having said that, though, I would plead with us to learn to use the word “justice” biblically — it refers to being right with God, with self, with others, with the world — so that we don’t have to add “social” (with others, with the world) and so we can cease with our gnostic-like spirituality where it is only “me and God.”

Justice, properly understood in a biblical sense, always has social implications.

Personal salvation is redundant in the same way. Salvation, properly understood in a biblical sense, while it may have broader implications, is always personal in nature.

Why the modifiers?

In a column last week for the American Spectator, Jonathan Witt calls the “social” in social justice a “weasel word”. He writes about social business, social justice and the social gospel:

In all three of these phrases, the common weasel word sucks some of the essential meaning out of what it modifies by implying that business, justice, and the Christian Gospel are a-social, or even anti-social, until conjoined with a mysterious something else.

I disagree. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Kingdom of God, Public Issues 29 Comments