This is a perfectly pointless game.  Go ahead. Try to beat me.

Post your scores in the comments (if you’re not too ashamed to be beaten by a girl.)*

*Disclaimer: This comment has absolutely no bearing on my stance on gender roles in the church.

Something about the meeting last night brought to mind a Ken Myers talk I listened to recently. Yes, I’m linking Ken Myers and “emergent” but I think it’s because they have some of the same concerns. Namely, seeing God’s plan as more than just individualistic salvation and then working out the ramifications of how we live embodied in this creation. I’d love to see the Emergent guys move towards Myers’ more robust and historically connected views on these subjects.

This is from about the 36:30 mark in his talk :

Culture is the cultivation of the order of creation.

Now for many American Christians, culture is not the pursuit of ramifications of the order of creation in ways that honor our nature and the nature of the world. Cultural experiences are just pleasant diversions or opportunities for evangelism. Because we tend to separate creation from redemption and because we’ve tended to think of redemption as an escape from creation to a purely spiritual existence, culture tends to be trivialized.

I spoke with someone recently about some church leaders who had made, in my judgment, some rather bad choices in the culture of their church. The person I was speaking to [said] “…they mean well, they’re trying to get as many people to Heaven as possible”. I said that’s exactly the problem. They see the church’s ministry as an escape plan rather than a recovery project.

Some Christians believe that creation is a lost cause because of Adam’s sin and thus our salvation involves a deliverance from creation. Our spiritual lives don’t have much to do with our embodied life and so cultural choices can be made according to the very pragmatic standard of what enables evangelism. Evangelism understood very minimally is encouraging someone to respond to a few propositions about sin and grace. That view depicts an inadequate view of the relationship between the order of creation and the effects of God’s redemptive work in Christ and thus I think misunderstands the church’s cultural obligations.

I think in the Biblical picture, the church is not simply a fellowship of spiritually and internally and invisibly renewed people. We are a people who recognize the cosmic lordship of Christ [and] who strive to configure our lives as best we can in ways that conform to the kinds of creatures we were made to be. And in whom by God’s grace our full humanity will eventually be realized.

While I’m not exactly an emerging/emergent fanboy, I do think there are some useful things which have come out of the movement. So when the opportunity comes around to go see a couple of the “big guys”, I see no reason to turn it down.

I had not even heard of this Church Basement Roadshow that Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt are on but it sounds like an interesting(and possibly entertaining) concept.

So, I’ll be at St. Bartholomew’s in Nashville tomorrow night. If, on the off chance you happen to be going too, drop me a line. I’d love to take the chance to say hi.

Well, I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and it went a lot smoother than I expected. I’ve done the upgrades manually in the past and wasn’t really looking forward to doing this one but then I found this plugin which does it for you. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty but anything that saves me time is much appreciated.

The reason we were forced to upgrade is that some people(Clark, Milly, etc.) starting seeing our posts in reverse chronological order. This was due to a mySQL bug that our old version of WP was tripping over. This should take care of the problem. And really, I should have upgraded before now and this provided the right impetus.

Everything looks pretty decent although I notice some of links on the sidebar are a bit scrambled and I’m seeing a few more smilies than I would have expected. Hopefully those are minor things that I can get squared away fairly quickly.

I must learn to never promise a post is coming soon. I tend to think it will motivate me to finish it sooner but it hardly ever works that way. So, I still have a couple of posts on God’s will waiting in the wings. They’ll be done when they get done. How’s that?

I also mentioned in my last post that we’d be traveling North to visit Jenn’s extended family. That did happen and we got back this past Wednesday evening - just in time to empty the car before it started raining. It was a lot of driving but I think everyone enjoyed themselves. We saw family we haven’t seen in years and the kids got to play with their second cousins. We also visited a few places - like the Bavarian Inn in Frankenmuth where we learned how to make pretzels(see pic to the left). What else… ate some fresh(but greasy) perch and walleye and managed to fit in some putt-putt and seeing Wall-E.

There’s still laundry to do but I think we’re settling back in. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll be sooner than a week before another post shows up.