My friend Bram gave me an epiphany today. I asked him what I should do to a trance track I made last night since he’s from Europe and they actually listen to trance over there. He said why don’t you overlay it with vocals from a Pentecostal preacher’s sermon. And that was how the new genre of danceable homiletics was born. We’ll see if it goes anywhere. Let me know if you have any favorite sermons you’d like me to... Read more
We had the first session of our new member class today. During the first class, we do introductions and give a primer on Methodist theology. We had the fortunate problem of having too many people in the class so our introductions took up all but 15 minutes. I didn’t want us to leave having only done introductions, so I tried to explain in 15 minutes and 4 stick figure drawings the three kinds of grace we talk about in Methodism:... Read more
We had the first session of our new member class today. During the first class, we do introductions and give a primer on Methodist theology. We had the fortunate problem of having too many people in the class so our introductions took up all but 15 minutes. I didn’t want us to leave having only done introductions, so I tried to explain in 15 minutes and 4 stick figure drawings the three kinds of grace we talk about in Methodism:... Read more
I found a direct application that fleshes out a little better what I stumbled through writing last night about critique and dismissal. The latest hot blogosphere topic was triggered by an interview on the Patheos Religion Now blog with Christian ethics professor Yvonne Zimmerman in which she claims that there are colonial dimensions to the anti-trafficking movement. Unsurprisingly, this presented the blogosphere with some low-hanging feminist/academic fruit to be swatted first by Timothy Dalrymple and John Mark Reynolds on Philosophical... Read more
After witnessing several exchanges here and here and here regarding blogosphere dramas around Phyllis Tickle and Mark Driscoll and trying to process a convicting conversation with an honest friend, I thought I would wrestle through what I’m going to call the distinction between critique and dismissal. Because of the gotcha atmosphere that predominates our information age, we often critique in order to dismiss and feel dismissed whenever we are critiqued by others. What would it look like to critique and... Read more
Kayal ta-arog al afike mayim is how you write “As the deer panteth for the water” phonetically in Hebrew. That familiar heartwarming hymn has its place to be sure, but if you read the remainder of Psalm 42 from which it draws the first line, then you see that its tone is off. The psalmist says tears have been his food and his enemies’ taunts are crushing his bones. Those sorts of images call for a hip-hop song rather than... Read more
The Daily Office epistle for today was Galatians 2:11-21. In it, Paul talks about his confrontation of Peter, whom he calls by his Hebrew name Cephas: “But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in... Read more
There’s something attractive about Mark Driscoll to Methodists in a Clint Eastwood (pre-chair-incident) kind of way. We often see our denomination’s attendance decline as punishment for our unwillingness to “stand up for the truth,” “call sin a sin,” use words like hell and Satan and wrath in our sermons, etc. We’re surrounded by independent evangelical megachurches whose preachers have booming baritone voices that tell it like it is, which is why they’re growing faster than any tower Babel ever built.... Read more
Well it’s not a line item on our church budget called “Pastor family planning fund” or anything like that. So you can breathe now. But my health insurance through the United Methodist Church is what pays for my wife and me to have our IUD that keeps us from having more babies. And I think it’s time someone named the fact that family planning is a legitimate part of the equation of Christian sexual ethics rather than always being a... Read more
With it being Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, we preached on justice as our sermon series topic this weekend. For my text, I used Isaiah 58, where Isaiah confronts the people of Israel for fasting without justice. God’s people have often pursued devotional practices that “honor” God not only to the exclusion of treating other people justly but as a means of legitimating their lack of justice. I often call this pitting love of God against love of neighbor. As... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In