Friday, September 15, 2006

How To Reach Post-Everythings


Couldn't Help Noticing, 1 September 2006 AD

Tim Keller asked the following question to his denomination:

How do we, as a denomination, do renewal and outreach in the emerging post-everything United States culture? ‘Post-everything’ people are those who are now in their teens and twenties—and they are our future.

In this brief article, Keller lays out six issues at stake in engaging this group and how Reformed theology offers the resources to address these issues:

  1. Issue: Post-everythings like narrative and story
    • Resource: Geerhardus Vos:
    • If you know how to do Christ-centered preaching, then you turn every single sermon into a kind of story. The plot of the human dilemma thickens, and the hero that comes to the rescue is Jesus. Christ-centered preaching converts doctrinal lectures or little how-to talks into true sermons. Post-everythings who are interested in narrative are reached by such preaching that is deeply Reformed.
  2. Issue: Post-everythings are experientially oriented
    • Resource: Jonathon Edwards:
    • Edwards taught that a sermon should not only make truth clear, but also should make truth real. In Edwards we find ways to preach that are Reformed, committed to objective truth and, at the same time, deeply experiential.
  3. Issue: Post-everythings are set against moralism and self-righteousness
    • Resource: Martin Luther:
    • Traditional gospel presentations assume that the people want to be ‘good.’ But our kids’ generation wants to be ‘free.’ Luther said, ‘Look, you want to be free? Good. It’s good to be free. But you’re not. You are living for something and, whatever that something is, it enslaves you.’ If a person lives for reputation, then he is a slave to what people think. If a person lives for achievement, then he will be a workaholic. As did Luther, we should tell such people, ‘You want to be free? Fine. But you’re not going to be free unless Jesus is your salvation.’ When post-everythings rejected Christianity they thought moralism and Christianity were the same thing. But we can show post-everythings that the two are not the same, and that freedom really is in Jesus.
  4. Issue: Post-everythings have a concern for social justice
    • Resource: Hermann Ridderbos:
    • [Go to] Ridderbos and other Reformed theologians who stress the coming of and the presence of the Kingdom. The Reformed understanding of salvation is not simply that God is rescuing individual souls out of the material world, but rather he is also redeeming all of creation. God is going to bring complete healing and shalom to the material world eventually.
  5. Issue: Post-everythings love art because they love the material world
    • Resource: Abraham Kuyper
    • Abraham Kuyper’s understanding of Reformed theology enables us to say to post-everythings, ‘Christianity is not just a way for you as an individual to get peace, love and groovy vibes in Heaven. Christianity is a comprehensive worldview. You can be a Christian artist, dancer, manager, or minister and these are all ways of living out the gospel.’ When post-everythings hear that, they get extremely excited. They have never considered that Christianity embraces the whole of life.”
  6. Issue: Post-everythings are not swayed by evidential apologetics
    • Resource: Cornelius Van Til:
    • If you start to present evidence for the deity of Christ or the proofs of God, post-everything eyes will glaze over. But the presuppositional apologetics of Cornelius Van Til can work with post-everythings. I think Reformed theology provides us with tools for our culture that Josh McDowell’s kind of evidential apologetics does not.

Noticed by Marty at 09:00 AM

Monday, September 11, 2006

Ozymandias


A poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Friday, September 08, 2006

Pencils Ranked #4


Forbes ranked the “20 Most Important Tools” recently, and the pencil scored #4!

“Writing may be one of the most important discoveries in human history. But it was easy-to-use writing implements–including the pencil, pen and brush–that made mass education and literacy possible. Cheap, reliable and convenient, the pencil represents these tools at their best. And because the sword came in at No. 8 on our list (more about the sword), we can now say for sure that the pen is mightier than the sword…
….In 1662, the first mass-produced pencils were made in Nuremberg, Germany, and in 1795, a French Chemist named Nicolas Conté invented a technique to make pencil leads out of powdered graphite and clay. In 1770, Edward Naime, an English engineer, created and began selling the first rubber erasers. The practice of painting pencils yellow began in the 1890s. Pencil manufacturers wanted to advertise that they were using high-quality Chinese graphite, so they painted them a color associated with Chinese royalty. Today, 75% of the pencils sold in the U.S. are still painted yellow. "

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Small is the new big


Check out item seven of this title essay of Seth Godin's new book.

Tell me what you think!

"Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.


Small means that you can answer email from your customers.


Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.


A small law firm or accounting firm or ad agency is succeeding because they’re good, not because they’re big. So smart small companies are happy to hire them.


A small restaurant has an owner who greets you by name.


A small venture fund doesn’t have to fund big bad ideas in order to get capital doing work. They can make small investments in tiny companies with good (big) ideas.


A small church has a minister with the time to visit you in the hospital when you’re sick.


Is it better to be the head of Craigslist or the head of UPS?

Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big.


Don’t wait. Get small. Think big."


Seth Godin
Author of Small is the New Big

You can visit Seth's blog here.

Small Update


1. Recieved a call to be the teaching elder of a small PCA church.
2. Just finished the written exams for ordination (Six tests took 22 1/2 hours to complete)

Saturday, September 02, 2006

What is Labor Day about?



Overhand the Hammers Swing: Poems of Work

by Philip Levine


What follows are images of work from contemporary American poets, that is poets contemporary to me. When I say work I mean the sort of brute physical work that most of us try to avoid, but that those without particular gifts or training were often forced to adopt to make a living in a society as tough and competitive as ours. This may in fact be a species of work that is disappearing from America as more and more automation replaces the need for human hands, that is manual labor. Perhaps the most beautiful evocation of this activity I find is in Whitman's great "Song of Myself":

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is great heat in the fire.
From the conder-strew'd threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

For Whitman this sort of work, which he liked to pretend he engaged in, is communal and harmonious; it is done with precision and craft, and the reader is left to assume that it brings to each man a sense of fulfillment as well as community. Over a century later another brilliant American poet finds two men engaged in similar labor--and though they should be even closer than Whitman's blacksmiths, being father and son--the blows they strike are in truth meant partly for each other:

We stood on a wooden platform
Facing each other with sledgehammers,
A copper-tipped sieve sunken into the ground
Like a spear, as we threaded on five foot
Of galvanized pipe for the pump.
As if tuned to some internal drum,
We hammered the block of oak
Placed on top for the pipe.
It began inching downward
As we traded blows--one for you,
One for me. After a half hour
We threaded on another five feet. The sweat
Gleamed on our shirtless bodies, father
& son tied to each other until we hit water.

(from "Song for My Father" by Yusef Komunyakaa)

Komunyakaa writes as a participant, one too busy or spent to notice the "sheer of their waists": perhaps if Whitman's blacksmiths had themselves written poems the overall pictures might not be so different, for they too may have felt driven by such labor deep into the self and marching "to some internal drum" or like the proud fathers of James Wright's poem, not marching at all but "ashamed to go home" where their "women cluck like starved pullets."

As we shall see in the poems that follow such work often leads to despair or worse, the human body torn to shreds like the bodies of Kenneth Patchen's orange bears, "Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs/ seared by hot slag, their soft trusting/ bellies kicked in. . . " Patchen's vision of the nature of labor leads him to question his master, Whitman: "What did he know about/ Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal. . . "

For Whitman such work may have led to a people and a continent fulfilled, but as we see in Snyder's marvelous "Hay for the Horses," it can lead to more work and not much else or in the words of his sixty-eight-year- old bucker of hay, "I sure would hate to do this all my life/ And damnit, that's just what/ I've gone and done."