February 9, 2010

Books on Tap: Morley, Wax, Carson, Cole, Beale, and The Essential Edwards Collection

I’ve received some books recently, and have a minute at present to quickly pass on word about them.  I’m no expert on any of the books or subjects covered below, but I do love books, and it’s fun to try to let others know of possibly edifying works.

First, Patrick Morley’s Pastoring Men came out not too long ago (Moody, 2008).  It looks like a helpful book for practically solving a quandary many church leaders face: how do I engage men and involve them in the life of the church?  It is endorsed by a number of leaders I respect, and it looks worth checking out.  Here’s what Bryan Chappell of Covenant Seminary said about the text:

Patrick Morley’s long-standing concern to see the light of Christ in the life of men has always been inspiring. Now this exceedingly practical book helping pastors implement discipleship programs specifically directed toward men will do much to shape the future of home, church, and the next generation. Morley writes in terms that reach men—and change them.

Second, Trevin Wax of First Baptist Church of Shelbyville, Kentucky just authored Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals (Crossway, 2010, with a foreword by Ed Stetzer and endorsements by Mohler, Moore, and Olasky).  I’ve read through the book and found it a helpful meditation on an enlivening metaphor, that of subverting Satan through the gospel.  Trevin writes with clarity, passion, and a love for God’s church.  This would be a helpful book to go through with small groups, students, and many others.

Third, D. A. Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and The Gospel Coalition just wrote Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus (Crossway, 2010).  The book is a collection of five lectures on the title topic.  Dr. Carson gave these talks some months ago at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, and they were explosive.  The Henry Center is grateful to have been a sponsor of those talks.  Pick up the book, and embrace anew the scandal of the cross.

Fourth, Graham Cole of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School recently published God the Peacemaker: How Atonement Brings Shalom (InterVarsity, 2009).  Some TEDS students worked through portions of this text in a memorable doctoral seminar on the atonement with Dr. Cole.  Based on that experience and brief study of the book, it looks like this would be a very rich book for scholars, pastors and thinking Christians who want to better understand the multidimensional glory of the atonement.

Fifth, G. K. Beale of Wheaton College Graduate School has penned The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism (Crossway, 2009), a collection of essays on inerrancy.  This one looks to be particularly worth chewing on for Christian Old Testament scholars, as a number of Beale’s essays wrestle with OT textual issues.

Sixth, Doug Sweeney and I have just released the five-volume series entitled The Essential Edwards Collection (Moody, 2010).  (You will hear very little from me about this project.) This series distills the essential thought of America’s greatest pastor-theologian.  It is written to be of help to all kinds of people–those who know little about Edwards and haven’t had time to read him, those familiar with Edwards who could benefit from short resource guides offering important quotations and critical but deeply appreciative analysis, and those who love Edwards and want to work through the searching material he authored.  The books are short (160 pages), readable, and include application sections.

We wrote this series not simply, though, to be a collection about Edwards, but to enlarge the modern church’s understanding of God and the life of joy and excitement He offers us through His Son.  This isn’t, in the end, a series about the colonial pastor, but a series about the majestic Lord the pastor loved.

If you have a blog and would like to do a blog review of any books from Moody (including the EEC), I might be able to rustle you up a copy.  Write to hctu [at] tiu.edu with your address.

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So there you go–some books to potentially buy.  Here’s hoping that they build the faith of God’s people and give Him glory.

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February 5, 2010

HBU’s The City, David Brooks, and the Urban Woodsman

The City has just published its latest issue in ZMags.  If you have never used this web program, check out the site.  It’ll take you a minute, but it’s pretty cool.

Also, if you are a thinking Christian, sign up to receive The City for free from Houston Baptist University.  I read every page in the latest issue, and found a ton of food for thought.

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David Brooks just published a piece worth reading on the value of sports in society.  Brooks is pretty positive, on the whole.  I would have quibbles with some of his points.  I want to read the essay he riffs off of, a piece by Duke University professor Michael Gillespie called “Debating Moral Education” from an upcoming title of the same name.

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Are you an urban woodsman?  New York magazine documents a new trend.  (Be careful on that site.  There’s some hinky stuff.)

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Recently, doctors in Belgium found a trace of life in a vegetative patient who had lain comatose for five years.  Some serious implications for those who advocate the rush to extinguish life in such situations, eh?

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Carl Trueman, resident critic of evangelicalism, weighs in on the evangelical embrace of tenets and aspects of Catholicism.

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February 3, 2010

Church Fight Clubs: Good or Bad Idea?

The New York Times just published an article entitled “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries” that bears looking into.  It profiles evangelical “fight clubs” and quotes a number of pastors and young men who participate in them.

Here are some key quotations:

Mr. Renken’s ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts — a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles — to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low. Mixed martial arts events have drawn millions of television viewers, and one was the top pay-per-view event in 2009.

Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

The whole article is interesting.

If you have ever read this little blog, you will know that I am passionate about countering the anti-masculine spirit so common in our culture. However, speaking personally, I don’t see these fight clubs as a positive development for evangelicals.  I’m not against testosterone, sports, and manliness by any stretch.  We need far more practitioners of biblical manhood, which includes agency, dominion, and godly ambition.

But this sort of thing is not, in my humble opinion, what the Bible calls for from men.  Yes, Jesus cleansed the temple, and yes, I think that’s pretty cool (see Mark 11:15-19).  But that is a far cry from senseless, needless violence that has an excellent chance of causing permanent physical damage.

I’m not advocating for weak-kneed Christianity where every man wears plaid Dockers,  refuses to kill flies due to insect rights, and stays indoors when it gets hot.  Good grief.  But I do think that those of us who have a desire to reach men (and women) with the gospel and see them live to the glory of God in their role need to be very careful that we don’t adopt a trend just because it promotes some form of masculinity.

In my opinion, evangelicals are too quick to embrace violence, and too slow to think about it on a deep level.  In addition, many of us “cultural engagers” fall into the trap of redeeming every cultural trend in the name of Christ.  Many things, I think, are worth redeeming.  But many are not.

(Image: Fred Conrad/NYT)

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February 2, 2010

How to Tell Who the Best Employees Will Be–From Soccer

This is a fun tidbit about how one CEO figures out who could and could not be a good worker and leader in his company.  He plays soccer.

Here are the qualities he looks for when he plays (and hires):

One is reliability, the sense that they’re not going to let the team down, that they’re going to hold up their end of the bargain. And in soccer, especially if you play seven on seven, it’s more about whether you have seven guys or women who can pull their own weight rather than whether you have any stars.

So I’d rather be on a team that has no bad people than a team with stars. There are certain people who you just know are not going to make a mistake, even if the other guy’s faster than them, or whatever. They’re just reliable.

And are you a playmaker? There are people who don’t want to screw up, and so they just pass the ball right away. Then there are the ones who have this kind of intelligence, and they can make these great plays. These people seem to have high emotional intelligence. It’s not that they’re a star player, but they have decent skills, and they will get you the ball and then be where you’d expect to put it back to them. It’s like their head is really in the game.

See–you might think you’re playing soccer, and you’re actually being evaluated for your next job.  I’ve actually heard of a Louisville church that does this.  Makes sense.

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January 29, 2010

Least Adopted Children, Rebuilding Men, and the Hilarious Jean-Ralphio

According to the NYT, black boys are the least likely children to be adopted.  This is helpful for Christians who have a heart for orphan care to keep in mind.

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This is an interesting website from an African-American pastor who is calling for the renewal of men in his community.  Looks like great stuff.

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Have you met Jean-Ralphio?  Many of us have, though we may not have encountered this utterly hilarious Parks & Recreation character.  Note to men: avoid being like this guy by any means possible…

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Garry Kasparov in The New York Review of Books on chess, artificial intelligence, and his career.  Quite interesting.

Did you know this:

Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe.

Wow.

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Have a great weekend, all.

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January 27, 2010

Boys and Their Games: How Far Some Men Go to Play Pickup Soccer

For those of you who have the unfortunate fate in life to be linked to a man who loves playing pickup sports (I’m thinking wives here, primarily), this selection might provide some solace.  There is strength in numbers, after all.

It comes at the beginning of a NYT Magazine piece entitled “Vigor Quest” by Tom Dunkel on the lengths to which some older folks are going to keep their bodies young in order to play sports.  That’s a matter deserving consideration.  But you’ll get no such rumination from this little blog.  Instead, I merely wanted to quote this to show that, as many know, men will go to utterly insane lengths to, well, play sports.  If that seems crazy, it’s because it is.  It’s also how things are.  Sorry.

Enough blathering.  Here’s the quotation from the article:

NEARLY EVERY SUNDAY morning — Easter and Mother’s Day included — John Bellizzi says goodbye to his wife, Francesca, grabs an equipment bag and slides into the front seat of his black BMW. He drives to a high-school soccer field about 10 miles from his home in the New York City suburb of Rye.

Bellizzi, who is 51, is a member of the Old Timers Soccer Club, a band of stubborn, aging athletes who refuse to fall under the spell of golf. Technically, these are just pickup games, but they have been happening weekly since the early 1980s. The players go to the trouble of hiring a referee and battle full tilt (think slide tackles and heels-over-head bicycle kicks) for an hour and a half. Many of them were high-school and collegiate stars, decades ago. “One guy had a hip replacement,” Bellizzi, a former soccer captain at Queens College, says. “He was out for a year, then he came back.”

Advil, hot tubs and surgery keep most of the Old Timers going, but Bellizzi has ventured further. Two summers ago he became a patient of Dr. Florence Comite, a Manhattan endocrinologist affiliated with Cenegenics Medical Institute. Cenegenics, a privately held company based in Las Vegas, claims to have 10,000 patients and annual revenue of $50 million, making it the country’s foremost purveyor of so-called age-management medicine.

I certainly don’t endorse what the article’s subject is doing to keep his body young (it seems quite dangerous and untested), but I did find it amusing that he loves soccer so much that he will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to improve his performance in pickup games.  Those of us who creak and groan our way through our weekly pickup games (at TEDS it’s Friday morning at 8am every week, rain or sun) can only dream of such enhancement.  Our wives can celebrate that no such improvement will happen.

Here’s another article about Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and how he plays pickup ball (and here’s one I’ve linked to before).  I have some significant ideological differences with Duncan and other current members of the Administration, but I have to say, the amount of pickup basketball Obama, Duncan and others play is positively inspiring (to men–not necessarily to long-suffering wives!).

(Image: Henry Leutwyler for The New York Times)

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January 26, 2010

Keller’s Relaunched Redeemer Church Planting Center

Just heard word of this.  Sounds cool.

Redeemer Church Planting Center is now Redeemer City to City. Please visit our new website. We hope you will download resources, write a blog, or support our ministry online.

Looks like this new site will be of much help to church planters and others who are interested in church planting.

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January 22, 2010

The Horror of Abortion from an Abortionist’s Perspective

This chilling testimony about the emotional effect of abortion comes an article in The Weekly Standard by David Daleiden and John Shields entitled “Mugged by Ultrasound”.  It is a visceral quotation, I am warning you.

In general, abortion providers have censored their own emotional trauma out of concern to protect abortion rights. In 2008, however, abortionist Lisa Harris endeavored to begin “breaking the silence” in the pages of the journal Reproductive Health Matters. When she herself was 18 weeks pregnant, Dr. Harris performed a D&E abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. Harris felt her own child kick precisely at the moment that she ripped a fetal leg off with her forceps:

Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.

Read the whole article.

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Reading this article coincided with some recent reflection on my part on abortion.  If we conservative evangelicals think that we can avoid preaching on abortion, we’re kidding ourselves.  The Bible is far from silent on this matter.  When you’re covering Pharoah’s sacrifice of children in Exodus, or the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11, or the effort of Herod to kill the Christ-child in Matthew 2, you are in direct contact with texts that speak to abortion and the killing of children. (Russ Moore has an article on this that I commend to you.)

When you consider that you are not preaching these texts in a culture that celebrates the life of the fetus, but seeks to extinguish it to the tune of millions of unborn children each year, then you have a real quandary on your hands.  Even those who do only the most elementary application of the text to our age can’t help but see that there is a massive and bloody connection between the efforts to kill children in the Bible and those that continue in our own day.

We have been led by so many different commentators to think hard and well about ways to apply the Bible’s teaching to our own day.  But we have to be very careful here.  We shouldn’t pick and choose what cultural sins we call out and what sins we leave alone.  Nobody protests when we preach against our lust for success; many will protest when, in the course of our preaching through the whole canon of Scripture, we preach on the necessity to defend the lives of unborn children.

If and when they do so, we should realize that this is not an aberration; this is the way of the cross.  Yes, we should be wise as serpents, but we are also called to be salt and light.  The examples of the apostles call us to preach boldly and courageously before the Lord with no regard for our lives.  Perhaps many of us who desire to “engage the culture” should read old texts like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and soak up a little bit of the courage contained in it.

Of course, I am not advocating that we preach in favor of certain pro-life resolutions.  I’m also not advocating that we preach single-issue messages on abortion.  I’m also not suggesting that, if we’re preaching on Matthew 2 or some other text, that we devote the majority of our sermon to the issue of abortion.  I’m merely saying that we are not being fanciful or political when we preach on abortion from texts that cry out for application of this subject to our present-day.

Sometimes we reformed practitioners of expository preaching tie ourselves up in knots on the question of preaching and politics.  Of course we should not generally preach on certain laws and resolutions; of course we should not have a political pulpit.  But just because an issue is debated in the political realm does not mean that when we are in a given text by the natural rhythm of our preaching calendar we avoid preaching on it.  Though that action may proceed from a good motive (the desire to not politicize the pulpit), it may actually end up silencing the Scripture and its relevance for our contemporary age.

We will have to preach carefully and responsibly on abortion and other scriptural subjects, but this must not, it seems to me, muzzle our clear and courageous denunciation of a practice so wicked as abortion.

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January 21, 2010

Act Like a Man, Dude (Conference Edition)

Check out the upcoming Act Like Men conference in Columbus, Ohio on February 6, 2010.  It’s hosted by Veritas Church of Columbus and looks great.  Here’s the description:

Act Like Men is a one-day conference in Columbus, Ohio that exists to rally and challenge men to live into Paul’s call for Gospel transformation in every aspect of their lives. This event features local and national speakers addressing what it means to Act Like Men. Key topics will include: personal responsibility and leadership in their homes, families, churches and culture; Godly use of time, finances and resources.

Check out the whole thing.  Speakers include Daniel Montgomery of Sojourn Community Church of Louisville, Kentucky and Nick Nye of Veritas Columbus.  Acts29, a sweet church planting group, is a sponsor.

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The NYT will start charging for a certain amount of content in 2011.  Readers of this blog will recognize that I am distraught by this news.

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Andrew Breitbart, conservative publisher and general mover-and-shaker in the political world, has launched a new website called Big Journalism.  Also note Big Government and Big Hollywood.

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January 20, 2010

Live-Stream of Rich Mouw on “Evangelical Pietism”

The Henry Center of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is pleased to make today’s 1PM CST lecture by Dr. Richard Mouw on evangelical pietism available for free by live stream.  To view the lecture, please visit http://tiuproductions.com/livestream.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 | Richard Mouw | Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA “Confessions of an Evangelical Pietist”  (1pm in ATO Chapel at TEDS)

    The Christian community needs to work at integrating our doctrine, action and piety (”head, hands and heart”). But which takes priority? And a closely related issue: what, in the most basic sense, is the Bible trying to “do” to us? Shape the way we think? Guide us in the activist programs we align ourselves with in the word? Transform our inner life? Obviously, all three are crucial. But Richard Mouw will explain why he keeps coming back to the fundamental need to be guided in everything else by the kind of piety that characterized the “sawdust trail” of our revivalist past.

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