Here on Internet Monk, Michael has made no secret of the fact that he is a huge fan of pastor, author, and professor Eugene Peterson. And I am right there with him in my admiration of Peterson’s writings.

If you would like to go back and read some of what Michael has said about the man and his writings, here are some posts from the iMonk archives about Peterson:

March 4, 2005
August 22, 2007
January 31, 2008
Sabbatical Journal I
Sabbatical Journal continued
Sabbatical Journal conclusion

Though best known in popular circles as the author of The Message paraphrase of the Bible, it is Peterson’s earlier works on what it means to be a pastor and his devotional books and Bible studies that I have long loved and treasured as encouragements for my spiritual life and ministry.

The other day I received my copy of Eugene Peterson’s new book, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ. In this work, Peterson has his readers contemplate the message of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians to help us learn what it means to, “grow up to the full stature of Christ.”

This is the final book in Peterson’s “Conversations on Spiritual Theology” series. Each book is deeply insightful and well worth reading. The other four are:

1. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology
2. Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
3. The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways that Jesus Is the Way
4. Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers

I plan to put up several posts on what Eugene Peterson has to say in Practice Resurrection. I hope you will join the conversation.

In my view, Eugene Peterson has been one of the most thoughtful and eloquent critics of American Christianity. In the introduction to Practice Resurrection, he takes on the subject of how we have handled spiritual growth.

We cannot overemphasize bringing men and women to new birth in Christ. Evangelism is essential, critically essential. But is it not obvious that growth in Christ is equally essential? Yet the American church has not treated it with an equivalent urgency. The American church runs on the euphoria and adrenaline of new birth—getting people into the church, into the kingdom, into causes, into crusades, into programs. We turn matters of growing up over to Sunday school teachers, specialists in Christian education, committees to revise curricula, retreat centers, and deeper life conferences, farming it out to parachurch groups for remedial assistance. I don’t find pastors and professors, for the most part, very interested in matters of formation in holiness. They have higher profile things to tend to.

Americans in general have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions in which growth takes place: quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. The American church is uneasy in these conditions. Typically, in the name of “relevance,” it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture: talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious.

…Not long ago a pastor who has made an art form of pole vaulting from church to church told me that I was wasting my time on this, there was no challenge to it, it was about as exciting as standing around watching paint dry.

I suggested to him that most of our ancestors in both Israel and church have spent most of their time watching the paint dry, that the persevering, patient, unhurried work of growing up in Christ has occupied the center of the church’s life for centuries, and that this American marginalization is, well, American. He dismissed me. He needed, he said, a challenge. I took it from his tone and manner that a challenge was by definition something that could be met and accomplished in forty days. That’s all the time, after all, that it took Jesus.

For far too long now, with full backing from our culture, we have let the vagaries of our emotional needs call the shots. For too long we have let ecclesiastical market analysis set the church’s agenda. For too long we have stood by unprotesting as self-appointed experts on the Christian life have replace the “full stature of Christ” with desiccated stick figures.

That’s a powerful critique.

Peterson’s counter-cultural answer is for the church to “practice resurrection,” to learn to walk with Jesus in a reality that is not of our own making or controlling.

I can’t wait to see what he has to say. Hope you’ll join the journey and the conversation.

Today’s post is by guest blogger, Chaplain Mike

Those of you with sensitive ears, cover them for a moment. I’m about to utter a dirty word.

OBLIGATION.

Let me give you another one.

DUTY.

I confess to being partially accountable for the fact that these are dirty words to many today, for I grew up in the American Baby Boomer generation. We came of age in a society of rules and manners, of authority and expected norms of behavior. And we rebelled, hard.

My generation wrote “Question authority” on blackboards across the country. We grew our hair long. We wore jeans with holes and patches and girls cast away their bras. We publicly protested the war. We dug rock ‘n roll and advocated the recreational use of drugs. We promoted free love. “If it feels good, do it,” was another of our slogans.

We didn’t believe in respecting our elders simply because they were elders. After all, most of them were hypocrites, living by somebody’s made-up code on the outside, screwed up on the inside and behind closed doors. And don’t even talk about how messed up their politics were. For us, conformity was the worst crime (at least conformity to the norms of “good” society).

I saw this change happen and I remember when things were different. When I went to junior high, we had a dress code. For boys, no hair below the tops of the ears. Shirts tucked in. Belt required. No blue jeans, no sneakers. You said, “Yes, sir,” and “Yes, ma’am” when addressed by an adult. You asked permission to speak, and when you did you called grown-ups by their last names and appropriate titles.

You also went to church. That’s what good people did. It was your duty. It wasn’t your job to question such things, especially if you were a child or teenager.

But we didn’t like or accept this society of rules and duties. We felt obliged to nothing. Our duty was to be true to ourselves. We didn’t care about appearances; we wanted things to be “real”. We craved “authenticity.” We sought “experience” and when we copped a good high on something, we called it “truth.”

I had a spiritual awakening in 1974, became a pastor in 1978, and for more than three decades now have seen how this thinking has affected the church, particularly in the area of worship.

In most of evangelicalism, the old rules have been simply thrown out. The church has rejected principles of objectivity, tradition, form, repetition, and authority, and has replaced them with notions of subjectivity, spontaneity, freedom, and personal preference. It is no longer “the Divine Service,” it is “my worship.”

With an ever-growing bag of technological tools at our disposal to make it happen, Christians have more and more become a people for whom worship simply is not worship unless it gives me a tangible “high.” As a worshiper, I must have an “awesome experience” of God’s presence and power to feel like I’ve worshiped. God’s “truth” is defined as that which comes home to my heart with powerful emotions and a sense of being somehow “transformed.” The worship music of the past 40 years has by and large unashamedly focused on cultivating an ecstatic intimacy with God. Anything rote or not immediately appealing to the “heart” is cold, formal, and dead.

Pastors have joined the “get real” movement. They no longer wear the robe or hide behind a pulpit, but wander around a stage dressed casually, talking “authentically” about their own lives, dealing with topics that are “relevant” to their target audience.

In every area of the church’s worship—architecture, seating, music and the arts, order of service, sacraments, etc.—we seem intent on reworking and manipulating our practices so that they produce the most bang for the buck. For example, Willow Creek used to say the goal in their services was to create “moments” for people, moments of spiritual breakthrough, “aha!” moments, “wow” moments.

There is a whole lot of theology we could chew on with regard to this subject, but I simply want to introduce one contrarian notion to all this rubbish that says, “What I don’t feel can’t be real.”

Obligation.

Why do I worship God? Why do I attend a worship service and participate in it? The bottom-line answer is simply this: “Because I am obliged to do so.”

I owe it to God. I come to the worship service to give him his due. It is my obligation and duty as one created by God, redeemed in Christ, and baptized in the Holy Spirit to present offerings of worship and thanksgiving to him for who he is and what he has done for me.

Each week in the liturgy, we say:

Leader: Lift up your hearts.
People: We lift them to the Lord.
Leader: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People: It is right to give him thanks and praise.
Leader: It is indeed right, our duty and delight…

Note the emphasis here. It is “right” to lift up our hearts in worship to the Lord. It is “indeed right.” It is our “duty” to do so. Only when we’ve established that fact do any words of emotion or feeling enter in—“It is our duty and delight…” In fact, it may be that the “delight” only comes as part of fulfilling the “duty”!

We resist this because we do not understand the concept of “obligation” or “duty.” Many of us, when we hear those words, think of something that is required of us that we really don’t want to do. An obligation means a burden of responsibility that is unpleasant and unfulfilling. To fulfill a duty means to perform a tasteless task while gritting my teeth and wishing I were somewhere else. And all because of somebody’s “rules.”

These words need to be redeemed.

I worship God because it is my obligation to do so. But this is not because some cruel taskmaster has laid an unwelcome duty on me. No! It is my obligation because of the very nature of things. It is “right” because it is is congruent with reality.

• Because of who God is and because of who I am.
• Because he is the Creator, and everything in this universe, including me, was made by him.
• Because he sustains me every day of my life, granting me each breath and heartbeat.
• Because he is my Redeemer and Savior.
• Because he took note of my sinfulness and brokenness, took pity on me and gave his Son to die and rise again on my behalf, conquering sin and death for me.
• Because he is my Comforter and Guide.
• Because the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in my life, assuring me of the divine promises and writing God’s laws on my heart so that I may obey them.

Since everything I am and have has come from his hand, I am obliged to say “thank you.” It is my duty to bring my offering of praise. I owe it to him. I am fully aware that I can never repay him, and that is the last thing on my mind. I am simply recognizing my eternal debt to the One who made me and saved me.

Grasping this takes worship completely out of the realm of coming to a service to seek out an “experience” with God. Whether or not I have a “moment” is simply not the point.

The traditional liturgy of the church is designed first of all to enable worshipers to fulfill the obligation of giving thanks to our Creator and Savior for who he is and what he has done.

Whether I feel like it or not, I owe it to God.

Now I know some of you are going to point to the prophets and to Jesus and start throwing verses at me about the danger of going through the motions without putting your heart in it. And you are right. But you are talking about the diminished definition of “obligation” that we all grew up fearing.

The fact that something is a duty or obligation does not require anyone to do it as a mere formality. In fact, to truly recognize our obligation is the most foundational motivation of heartfelt obedience.

COMMENTS NOW CLOSED.

If anyone asks me why I go to church, I am not afraid to tell them: it is my obligation and duty. It’s simply the right thing to do.

Today’s guest post is by Chaplain Mike.

UPDATE: Scot McKnight is discussing this over at Jesus Creed today as well. I encourage you to check out his perspective and those of his readers.

MY SPORTING LIFE
I grew up fully immersed in sports. Sports were a part of almost everything I did, every friendship, most activities. I became a jock. I got pretty good at basketball, and played competitively through my junior year in high school, capping off my career with a team that won the first regional championship in school history.

But I was especially focused on baseball. At the time of my conversion, as a senior in high school near Baltimore, I played for a school with a storied tradition. That year we again had a talented team that won our conference, beating out our rival, the school that would produce Cal Ripken, Jr. a few years later. I was honored as County Player of the Year, and there was little I loved more than baseball.

That was also the spring I met Jesus.

For some reason, at that time in my life, I thought this spiritual awakening meant that my life was supposed to change completely. Not just internally. Not just “spiritually.” Not just morally. Totally. Like the first disciples, I was being called to drop the nets, climb out of the fishing boat,  leave the family business behind, abandon it all and follow Jesus.

To me, that meant I was through with sports. I don’t think anyone told me that specifically, but nobody said differently either. When I graduated and started thinking about studying for the ministry, no one suggested I find a school with a baseball team. It was all about the Bible. It was all about following the Lord. It was all about spreading the message. And so I went to Bible college. Our school had a soccer team and a basketball team, but I never seriously considered playing. In fact, I rarely even attended games. Sports were now outside my radically narrowed focus. I was headed in a different direction.

Our first church was in a tiny mountain village in Vermont. My wife and I didn’t have a TV in our home by choice, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because reception was non-existent. Occasionally I listened to the Orioles or the Cubs on the radio when a distant AM station would come in, and once or twice we went to Fenway to see a game, but sports was no longer a regular or central part of my life, my thinking, or my interest.

We continued in this vein when we moved back to Chicago for seminary. Life for us was all about school, work, church, having babies, and learning about family life. While there, we got caught up a little bit in the fun of watching the Chicago Bears win the Super Bowl, and we occasionally watched games at friends’ homes, but sports remained on the periphery.

Then our children started growing up. Girl’s basketball games began appearing on our schedule. Then, even more significantly for our future lifestyle, we started Little League baseball with my oldest son. After more than 15 years of living, for all practical purposes, without sports, we entered a season of life in which, for the next 20 years, sports once again became a prominent focus. In fact, it would not be overstating it to say that, except for the church, nothing filled our lives so much as interest and involvement in sports. Whether spending time at facilities cheering on our children, coaching, watching sports on TV as a part of our family experience, or attending professional sporting events as special occasions, we had become a “sports” family.

That culminated this last fall when my son played his final college football game. Our role as “sports parents” is suddenly over. It remains to be seen what will happen with the next generation, our grandchildren. But the lifestyle is still a big part of who we are. We continue to watch sports on TV and follow various teams. Having grown up in Chicago, I remain a lifelong Cubs and Bears fan. Living near Indianapolis, we root for the Colts and enjoy attending games at our Triple-A baseball park. I check scores daily. The remote is used regularly to flip through channels in hopes of finding a good competition to watch. We host or attend parties for big games. As a chaplain, I have found that sports can be a bridge for building friendships and creating opportunities for ministry.

So, sports remains a central part of our lives and daily conversations these days.

Sometimes, though, I feel twinges of spiritual concern.

SPORTS AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
Like yesterday, when I read the thoughtful article by Shirl James Hoffman in Christianity Today entitled, “Sports Fanatics: How Christians have succumbed to the sports culture—and what might be done about it.” I encourage you to read it too, and see if doesn’t raise issues for you about our American preoccupation with all things sports.

Hoffman writes:

Americans are consuming sports on an unprecedented scale. The ancient Romans, long considered the gold standard for how sports-crazed a culture could be, were dilettantes compared to the sports fans of this century. The Romans could squeeze 50,000 spectators into the Coliseum for gladiatorial contests—a quaint assemblage next to the 107,000 seats regularly sold for University of Michigan or Penn State home football games. In 2006, Americans spent over $17 billion on tickets to sports contests and $90 billion on sporting goods, over double what they spent on books ($42 billion). Sports magazines take up prime space on bookstore shelves; the granddaddy of them all, Sports Illustrated, sells as many copies in a month (13.2 million) as To Kill a Mockingbird has sold since its publication in 1960. A tenth of The World Almanac is devoted to sports, more than is allocated for business, science, and politics combined.

None of this has been lost on evangelicals, who have been quick to harness sports to personal and institutional agendas. Less than a century ago, major segments of the evangelical community considered sports a cancer on the spiritual life; today their denominational progeny lead the parade to stadiums. The cozy coupling of sports and evangelicalism shows itself not only in the outsized athletic complexes that are common features of church architecture, but also in the ease with which sport and its symbols show up in the sanctuary. Pastors incorporate pithy sports metaphors into their sermons. Famous athletes are invited to pulpits to tell how their faith helps them compete. Some churches celebrate Super Bowl Sunday by canceling the evening service and assembling in the sanctuary to watch the game on large-screen TVs. “Faith nights” sponsored by local baseball teams draw entire congregations to the ballpark. Evangelistic organizations that center on the public’s fascination with sports flourish.

However, Hoffman later opines:

Variously described by those inside and outside as narcissistic, materialistic, violent, sensationalist, coarse, racist, sexist, brazen, raunchy, hedonistic, body-destroying, and militaristic, big-time sports culture lifts up values in sharp contrast with what Christians for centuries have understood as the embodiment of the gospel. There are simply no easy, straight-faced, intellectually respectable answers for how evangelicals can model the Christian narrative—with its emphases on servanthood, generosity, and self-subordination—while immersed in a culture that thrives on cut-throat competition, partisanship, and Darwinian struggle. If evangelical ethicist R. E. O. White is right to assert that self-absorption is behind all wrong social relationships and, for this reason, self-denial is the first ethical condition of discipleship, then elite athletes immersed in the self-consumed atmosphere of sports, where self-denial is a recipe for competitive disaster, face a fundamental problem.

…If indeed sport is marching toward Gomorrah, it seems to have escaped the attention of large portions of the evangelical community, which continue to bask in the reflected glory of Christian athletes. Much evangelical commentary glorifies athletes and sports, but becomes timid in situations that warrant indictment. Rarely does the evangelical press ask touchy questions about tensions between the moral culture of Christianity and that of big-time sports. The silence is deafening.

In its vision of sports, bolstered by the large number of Christian athletes who have joined professional and collegiate teams, the evangelical community has yet to ask how the influx of believers has affected the morality of sports. There may be no more vivid illustration of historian Mark Noll’s “scandal of the evangelical mind” than the way the community has neglected to think Christianly about sport, or has excused itself from crafting a sensible philosophy that will help them mine the spiritual riches that sport has to offer. [emphasis mine]

MERE “SPORTIANITY”
Back in 1976, Frank DeFord wrote a series of Sports Illustrated articles called “Religion in Sports,” in which he asserted, “Sunday has become a day of games rather than worship, but churchmen are adapting.”

In those articles, he coined a phrase, “Sportianity,” to describe a “new denomination” of Christianity that has embraced sports, has intentionally infiltrated its arenas for the purpose of evangelism, but which may have become, in fact, sports’ handmaiden.

Unlike DeFord, I am not qualified to speak on the complex relationship between sports and religion in America. My concerns are much more personal and pastoral. It seems to me that sports represents one of those areas of American pop culture that has simply inundated Christianity and left us helplessly going with the flow.

• Now churches schedule services and programs around sporting events and calendars, not vice versa.
• Now it is common for individuals and families to miss services and church activities to be involved in sports, whether simply watching or participating.
• In many minds, any specialness which Sunday maintains is usually more related to sporting events that are taking place that day than to Lord’s Day worship.
• People who would complain loudly of “legalism” or authoritarianism if the pastor suggested we dress up a little bit to honor God when we come to worship have no problem with wearing jerseys and other sports gear to church to show allegiance to their teams (picture the 80-year old woman wearing her Colts jersey, face paint and team-colored ribbons last week in our service).

But wait, isn’t most of this just harmless fun? Am I being too hard on God’s family here?

I am aware of the good aspects of sports, and I fully affirm them. After all, sporting fields and stands have been the context where I have sought to live out my faith over the past 20 years. But somehow, I wonder…

• Have we lost some perspective here?
• Was I completely wrong to have relativized sports, to have set it aside as a less worthy pursuit, when I was in the state of first love with Jesus?
• Has the Sportian lifestyle swallowed up a distinctive, counter-cultural Christianity?
• Do we live in a day in which it is simply impossible for pastors to admonish their congregations about a devotion to sports that has crossed the line, tying up their time, emotional energies, and finances in something which is not, in the final analysis, all that important?

Sportianity’s Holiest Celebration
And now we have come to Holy Week, which culminates on the holiest day of Sportianity’s year: Super Bowl Sunday. Here in Indianapolis, where we have a rooting interest in the game’s outcome, it’s just about all anyone is talking about.

• We’ll have our daily devotions listening to messages from sports pundits and talk-show hosts.
• We’ll have a special season of fellowship with our friends and coworkers, praising our team and encouraging one another with new insights into the game.
• We’ll share the good news with neighbors and coworkers that our team is best and will certainly win.
• We’ll utilize apologetics in commending our team against unbelievers, giving a reasonable defense as to why they will triumph.
• On game day, we’ll gather before the sacred flat screen altar, share the holy appetizers, and participate in the liturgy of watching the big game (and especially the commercials) with exclamations of praise and/or lament.
• We’ll go forth into the world on Monday to talk about our experiences and rejoice that we were together.

Then, on to spring training, the Final Four, the NFL draft, the start of baseball season, the NBA playoffs…

…with ESPN at our side, for he hath said, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.”

(Cartoon Copyright Gospel Communications International, Inc – www.reverendfun.com)

COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED.

-What do you think of the President?
-What is your position on abortion?
-What do you believe about the legalization of gay marriage?
-Are you in favor of any version of Federally controlled health care?
-What is your church’s definition of the inspiration and authority of scripture?
-What is a brief definition of the Trinity?
-How does your church’s beliefs differ from Roman Catholicism?

Unless your church is very unusual, the first three questions will draw unanimous and vocal responses from everyone. The last three questions will draw considerable silence and much less coherent and confident answers.

Is it an anomaly that the culture-wide impression of Christians increasingly relates to their positions on social and cultural and not to their beliefs about the Gospel?

I’ve explained this many times: the Biblical culture “war” is not a war. It’s the proclamation of a victorious Christ and his ultimate claims over the world, the nations and every person. Jesus created, empowered and invested himself in a movement centered around the Gospel. That movement is a sign of the Kingdom of God and that Kingdom is the triumph of the only “culture” with significant impact on the Christian.

Of course, Christians will have a view of social and political issues that is influenced by the righteousness, justice and compassion of God. Christian vocations in the world should reflect that compassion and justice.

The church is the ultimate counter-culture. It’s been demonstrated more than adequately hundreds of times in history that if the church becomes more concerned with the manifestation of the Kingdom in society than within its own community, worship, discipleship and spiritual formation, it will become a tool of forces in practical opposition to Christ.

The following is an excerpt from my August 2006 post The Tactics of Failure: Why The Culture War Makes Sense To Spiritually Empty Evangelicals.

I am suggesting, therefore, that the increasing interest in the culture war among evangelicals is not an example of a reinvigorated evangelicalism remaking its culture. Instead, I believe the intense focus by evangelicals on political and cultural issues is evidence of a spiritually empty and unformed evangelicalism being led by short-sighted leaders toward a mistaken version of the Kingdom of God on earth.

The Culture War makes sense to Christians who have little or no idea how to be Christians in this culture except to oppose liberals and fight for a conservative political and social agenda- an agenda often less than completely examined in the light of scripture, reason, tradition and experience. Those evangelicals- like Greg Boyd- who have challenged or broken the identification with the political right can testify to how they are immediately viewed. Dissenting evangelicals are labeled as pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and pro- Democrat instantly. The rhetoric of the culture warriors is relentless in associating dissenting evangelicals of every kind with the issues of abortion and homosexuality. No one could be blamed for believing that evangelicalism was a modestly spiritual movement with the goal of banning abortion and gay marriage.

In this scenario, there are a number of bizarre takes. The SBC’s most well known theologian doesn’t write books of theology. He hosts a daily talk radio program on cultural war issues. Rod Parsley may preach about miracles, but he uses his influence to elect candidates and promote political causes. Politicians elected by evangelicals get re-elected by appealing to the hot button culture war issues, but their positions on issues like gambling or Aid to Africa are unpredictable and often unknown. The Left Behind movies become video games where the godless are shot by Christians defending themselves. And of course, Ann Coulter appears on TBN, promoting her take on why evangelicals ought to care about the influence of real “godless” liberals.

Where is the Gospel? Where is the missional calling of the Christian? Where is the church’s ministry of spiritual formation? Where are ministries of Word and Sacrament? All of these are increasingly buried under doublespeak and culture war rhetoric. Evangelicalism is being betrayed by many of its leaders who are building their “ministries” by the appeal to anything but the Gospel and compassion of Jesus.

The culture war agenda increasingly makes sense to evangelicals who are spiritually unformed, distracted and misled. I cannot approve of Greg Boyd’s theology of God’s knowledge, but I can say that his stand against the encroachments of the culture warriors- encroachments that come from outside the church and seek to dictate the work of the ministry itself- is commendable.

Why is Ann Coulter on TBN? Because we understand her and her war against liberals.

We are to be the best possible Christian citizens while we are here. And while we are here, our passionate pursuit is God’s counter-cultural movement. We are to be formed by Christ, not by the culture war. And these days, it’s not hard to see the difference.

This is extracted from the famous 60 minutes interview with Joel Osteen, where the reporter asked the questions most evangelicals ignore. Here’s the entire interview, parts 1 and 2.

I’m suggesting that spiritually empty, poorly led and poorly taught evangelicals are mistaking the Kingdom of God on earth for the victory of their political and cultural preferences. The Culture War is a poor replacement for the mission of the church as a Jesus shaped community, pointing to the eschatological Kingdom of God.

Read: The Tactics of Failure: Why the Culture War Makes Sense to Spiritually Empty Evangelicals.

UPDATE II: Why angry Bob is angry?

Today being election day, and many of my evangelical friends being in somewhat of a foul mood, for reasons that, as of 12:28 p.m., are suspected and not yet clear, I found myself thinking about a fellow I’ll call Bob.

I met Bob while I was on sabbatical. He was a very dedicated conservative evangelical, and a pleasant enough fellow….when he wasn’t angry. And Bob was angry. Angry, afraid, frustrated and ready for a fight.

Bob was your stereotypical culture war evangelical. He was a Jesus follower, but his passion was what was going on in America, particularly the issues we broadly call the culture war: atheistic advances in the public schools, restrictions on Christian practice in the public square, the aggressive agenda of homosexual rights advocates.

Bob was obviously devoted to Christian and conservative media, particularly radio. He believed what he heard. Dobson. Point of View. 700 Club. There was some Michael Savage in there. Some short wave programs from the Art Bell side of the dial. And all the usual culture war channels on Christian radio and television.

In general, Bob was stuffed full of information that was only available through his devotion to a kind of Christian underground pirate radio, web sites and a regular diet of Christian authorities convinced the culture war was all-important.

Bob was mad and he was mad that more people weren’t mad. Of course, most people didn’t know what Bob knew. They had the general outlines of the problems, and sided with Bob on the issues, but few people had Bob’s zealous focus on the culture war. On more than one occasion, Bob’s assessment of the situation of Christians vs militant atheists, homosexual activists and the rising time of Islamists was quite similar to the attitude of the Confederacy. Secede and arm yourselves. This is a real war.

Now…Bob was part of a local church, but as you can imagine, he wasn’t very happy with his church either because…..that’s right, they didn’t see the situation to be quite as dire as Bob did. I had the feeling that more than a few people in Bob’s church might not be looking to share a cup of coffee with him after the service. Intense fellow, that Bob.

I was only around Bob for a few days, but in those few days I saw a kind of Christian for whom the term “culture warrior” and not the term “disciple:” was much more applicable. Emphasis on the “Warrior.” This was Jesus vs Allah; Jesus vs Dawkins; Jesus vs Hollywood…and it’s time for the followers of Jesus to see the most recent Rambo movie or WWE event for some inspiration.

Of course, politics was Bob’s game. Christians had to rise up and vote in order to take back the culture. We are losing because we won’t fight in the arena of political power.

I imagine Bob’s not very happy on this election day. I’m guessing he’s voting for Chuck Baldwin and is upset that more Christians aren’t doing the same. I’m sure he has a small library of information on Obama that none of us have heard, even on Fox. I’m sure he’s alarmed and is frustrated that many of us aren’t taking the threat seriously.

Bob wants good things for his country, family and fellow believers. He sincerely believes those good things are closely related to freedom, conservatism, traditionalism and Christianity. He senses the death of a kind of Christian dominated culture, and he wants to fight with all he’s worth- even with weapons if necessary- to keep his rights and his Christian heritage.

Over at his blog today, Frank Turk basically said this:

Pray. Vote. Then Pray again. Then go live like a disciple of Jesus.

Bob, are you listening?

Michael- and the many readers of this blog- are you listening?

Go live like a disciple.

It’s hard to say this, but Bob isn’t seeing the big picture. Our American culture war is not worth the demise of authentic discipleship. Trading following Christ in love, even in post-Christian times, for fighting and defensiveness, is a bad trade. Bob is frightened. Our faith says “Fear not.” Bob says prepare to fight. Our faith says prepare to love.

I am particularly impressed that these days should call us together in real community, not separate us according to Christian media audience niche. There are some helpful voices out there in the culture war, but I’d like to suggest that it’s time to listen to your pastor- assuming he’s showing you how to follow Jesus- more than James Dobson or some angrier, more paranoid manipulator of fear.

I really is time to go Biblically deep into Jesus shaped spirituality, and not into the spirituality of fear and misbegotten patriotic fervor.

Unfortunately, Bob is not a rarity. He’s not a majority report among evangelicals by any means, but he represents a significant number of Christians who are pursuing a very different kind of Kingdom than what we see in the book of Acts, the epistles and Revelation.

Jesus’ told his disciples that to follow him a lot has to die. We find a new life in Jesus, but it comes at the expense of the old life. I can’t help but believe that Bob, for all his zeal, his holding on to some of the old creation. There are some good things in this American Christian heritage of ours, and no one wants to see it taken away.

But it may happen, and if it does, Frank is right: Pray, then go live like a disciple.

Don’t feed the voices of anger, fear and the justification of violence. These were the same choices that the Zealot movement presented to Jesus; the same Zealots to whom Jesus said “Love your enemy. Don’t resist the evil-doer. Pray for those who persecute you.”

I’m sure it sounded ridiculous at the time, but in the end it was another invitation to discipleship, to Jesus shaped spirituality, to taking up the cross and finding a new life beyond it.

Those choices come to us every day. They sometimes come to us when we are tightly holding on to things we believe enough to be angry.

Put them all down. Pray. Go be a disciple of Jesus.

A good word for a chastened evangelicalism.

Resource: IM lurker Pastor Scott sends along Greg Boyd’s sermon/prayer guide for a current emphasis in his church called “The Great Reversal: The Upside Down Kingdom of God.” Woodland Hills Church media for the series will be here starting Oct. 5.

UPDATE: Read IMB Missionary in the comment threads.

I can’t blog what I want to blog on this post. Wouldn’t be prudent, as George H. W. Bush often said.

I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes looking through this Prayer Guide promoting the current big emphasis in the Southern Baptist Convention, The “40/40″ Prayer emphasis.

The 40/40 Emphasis is for “Personal Revival and National Renewal.” It’s as big a focus on the culture war as I’ve seen in the SBC, straight up.

Reading this promotional piece, I learned a lot about where the Southern Baptist Convention is right now, and where its leadership wants to go in the future. I learned a lot about my denomination, and what it wants to emphasize and teach as election time approaches.

And there’s a lot I want to say. But I can’t. A lot. It’s very hard not to write the post I want to write, but I have to be realistic.

But you can. If you are a Southern Baptist, layperson or minister, download this pdf. Look through it in detail. Get the feel for what it’s telling us about the church, the Gospel, the relation of church and state, the SBC and the culture war…..there’s a lot to keep you busy.

If you have some thoughts, use the comments here and share them. If you have a blog, take it there and I’ll link it here, up top, and drive you some traffic. If you are an SBC employee, use an alias and share your feelings.

I can’t blog about this one, but you can.

UPDATE II: So many good Osteen pieces on there. Denny Burke zeroes in on Osteen’s glad admission that he does not preach the Bible’s main message.

UPDATE III: Slate Magazine on Osteen’s God.

The mentality that thinks in terms of marketing Jesus inevitably moves toward progressive distortion of him; the pursuit of the next emotional round of experience easily degenerates into an intoxicating substitute for the spirituality of the Word. There is non-negotiable, biblical, intellectual content to be proclaimed. By all means insist that this content be heralded with conviction and compassion; by all means seek the unction of the Spirit; by all means try to think through how to cast this content in ways that engage the modern secularist. But when all the footnotes are in place, my point remains the same: the historic gospel is unavoidably cast as intellectual content that must be taught and proclaimed. -D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God

A few thoughts on tonight’s 60 Minutes’ piece on Joel Osteen.

1. Byron Pitts, the reporter doing the piece, was simply superb. To the point. Unmoved by show. Understood the problem. In fact, probably understood far more than Osteen himself does about Christianity.

2. As much as I would like to join those who say that Osteen is a simpleton who doesn’t know what he’s doing, a close examination will show that at every point where there is a choice between being part of the church or departing into heresy, Osteen sticks with the church where there is money to be had and departs from the church where there is a faith to be confessed. He’s could be called a heretic by some, even if he is a believer, and he communicates a purposefully false trivialization of the person and work of Jesus Christ in favor of a man-centered motivational message of self-improvement.

Again, as I’ve said before, every evangelical leader needs to personally and by name repudiate and separate from Osteen, and call upon him and his followers to come back into the faith that is articulated in the Apostle’s Creed.

3. Osteen’s 73 million dollar cash cow is making a lot of people wealthy. This is about money, and Osteen is smart enough to know there is more money to be had by avoiding begging on TV. This doesn’t change a thing, however. He’s taking enough money to fund a huge part of the modern missions movement and using it to put on a show and promote materialism.

4. The line about getting people into “church” who have been out of “church” is simply crap, to be polite. No one in this movement is in church. They’re in the worst form of the prosperity Gospel, they are abandoning the God of the Bible, and they are glorifying a man who is assisting in the humiliation of the Gospel of Jesus. Osteen is a motivational speaker, and he uses only enough Christianity as necessary to get in the pockets of the gullible. Osteen is a Gospel preacher like Col. Sanders is an army officer.

5. Osteen’s tears of gratitude over being part of “changed lives” shouldn’t erase the fact that he is responsible for the spiritual delusion of millions, and his dressed up denial of the Biblical Gospel will be judged for the lie that it is on the day of judgement. I’ve got hundreds of letters from people telling me that IM essays “changed” or “helped” them. Send me 73 million bucks and I’ll be grateful, too.

6. The piece got what it needed out of Dr. Horton, but you should read Made In America to get the whole picture of what Horton would say if he had more time.

7. Evangelicals: Want to know why thousands of us are looking toward Rome? How bad can Marian dogmas and purgatory be in comparison to a movement that has tens of millions of people hailing Osteen as the great Christian proclaimer of our age? From Graham to Osteen. God help us. You cannot help but feel dirty.

8. Osteen probably doesn’t have the knowledge to be able to judge his own errors in the light of Biblical truth. Sad, but true. He simply has no idea that he has no idea. He thinks Jesus, the Holy Trinity and the Holy Scriptures are all means to the end of having a better paycheck. According to Osteen tonight, you can get the same truths from any psychologist or motivational speaker.

9. The story no one seems to want to tell: Osteen never used the principles that are in his books in order to succeed. He dropped out of college after one year at ORU. (Too academic?) He was a media guy at his dad’s church. He was brought into the pulpit by his dad’s sudden death, and he was clueless. Parroted his dad’s methods for a couple of years, then found Norman Vincent Peale’s positive thinking and abandoned the Gospel for “life coaching.” In other words, he stumbled into daddy’s pulpit and found what drew the crowds. A guy with a message of personal improvement like Tony Robbins? Hardly.

Note: My previous essays on Osteen are available if you search “Osteen” on the search engine. For more substance, go over to Westy Seminary and read some of Horton’s Osteen writing, especially the “Glory Story” piece.