Catholics, etc can go have a coffee. This is for evangelicals and others to whom it applies.

Here’s my question:

“Who wants 30-40+ minutes of music in worship? Who? Why? I mean…explain this to me. I seriously do not get it.”

Sunday’s lectionary lesson for the Gospel is a little “blah” as a preaching text. I’ve heard healing and miracle stories allegorized, turned into prosperity Gospel texts and used for every kind of questionable lesson on faith. I think we can do better.

I have some individual ideas, but none of them are really revving my preaching motor this week. So you take a swing of the bat.

What can we do with Mark 10:46-52 as a text for preaching the Gospel? Ideas. Illustrations. Applications. Themes. I’m open for suggestions.

At least once a year or so, I’ll have someone want to tell our ministry of mostly non-Christian kids a “miracle” testimony of being healed, delivered from drugs, saved from prison, etc.

I obviously don’t say “no,” but I really struggle with this kind of thing on Biblical grounds. Jesus didn’t primarily use miracles to evangelize, but to show the presence of the Kingdom. It was present miracles, not stories. I know it’s common in mission settings. I know Pentecostals love it. But I have to be honest: I’m pretty uneasy- on Biblical grounds- about how we tell those stories and recall those events. The message- overt and overheard- is often sub-Gospel. Our sinful, prideful, self-seeking need for attention gets in there as well. You know what happens. I’ve heard some testimonies that would send a lie detector up in smoke.

I’ll hear it over and over: “He’s the same God now as he was then, and he can do the same miracle for you he did for me. Just have faith.” Lots of scriptures to quote about believing, bold prayer, etc. I’m not much to take those verses and run. I’ve been jaded, but then the Bible gives me reason to be cautious. Miracles have their place, but we shouldn’t have them on the loudspeaker all the time.

One of the guys who gave his healing testimony was dead in a few months. I don’t want to even check on the testimonies of those saying they were delivered from drugs and crime. I know the score. Averages in that game aren’t encouraging.

I had a good friend fault me because I do not tell my students to pray specifically for miracles. And I don’t. I believe Jesus taught us how to pray. Your will be done. Your Kingdom come. Deliver us from evil. It’s not hard.

I don’t deny anything about the possibility of miracles, but I am very reluctant when we start to advertise them.

What do you think of “miracle testimonies” and their place in evangelism and Christian communication?

A couple asks to join your church. Well…..a non-married, living together 5 years, parenting 2 of her kids couple asks to join your church. They aren’t married because, basically, of not wanting to lose substantial child support. When that runs out next year, they tell you they will get married and they appear very serious about that.

What do you do?

a) Receive them as married. (Leaning to a common law definition of marriage.)
b) Refuse to receive either as members until they repent of their sin and are married. (Rem: They have lived together as husband and wife exclusively for 5 years.)
c) Receive them as engaged.
d) Receive them as separate families.
e) Your better idea.

Special note: How do you believe Jesus would treat this couple? As married, since they are living as a married couple in every intention except government sanction or as unmarried?

Catholics: We know your answer, so you don’t need to explain it. But how would you deal with this couple in parish life?

Preaching is ________________. And/Or Preaching is not ________________.

Don’t write a novel or even a short story. Keep it compact and to the point.

I especially hope that this open mic question will involve as many non-preachers as possible. Preachers might not know everything there is to know about preaching. Ya think?

The mic is yours. Feel free to offer answers and to discuss answers in the threaded comments.

UPDATE: Why the LCMS choose the ESV. I doubt that it was the Piper endorsement.

I have this nagging feeling that the English Standard Version isn’t as good a translation as I’ve previously thought.

My experience with the NLT has me in major regrets that I’ve got my students using the ESV, that there isn’t a cheap textbook version of the NLT, etc.

I’m using the NLT in preaching most of the time, but when I read the ESV for personal study, sermon preps, classes, etc…..something just isn’t right. I’m wondering if I’ve been “marketed.” That is, I’ve bought the impressive ESV marketing version of itself, but the translation isn’t living up to its own press.

Is it really clunky….and awkward? Do people really have problems reading it? Is it stylistically difficult? Does it do all of the things it accuses other translations of NOT doing? Is it just not up to its own press clippings?

Scott Mcknight recently came right out and said it: We do translations by tribes:

“NRSV for liberals and Shane Claiborne lovers;
ESV for Reformed complementarian Baptists;
HCSB for LifeWay store buying Southern Baptists;
NIV for complementarian evangelicals;
TNIV for egalitarians;
NASB for those who want straight Bible, forget the English;
NLT for generic brand evangelicals;
Amplified for folks who have no idea what translation is but know that if you try enough words one of them will hit pay dirt;
NKJV and KJV for Byzantine manuscript-tree huggers;
The Message for evangelicals looking for a breath of fresh air and seeker sensitive, never-read-a-commentary evangelists who find Peterson’s prose so catchy.”

By that list, I’m an NLT guy. (I’ll complain about the NLT some other day. Basically- we need MORE EDITIONS GUYS. Way too few choices.) I don’t want to just play this game. I am honestly wondering if the ESV is more C+/B- than I’ve suspected.

So, this ISN’T a ” tell your favorite translation” discussion. Please, please don’t give your “translation testimony.” This is a “What’s your experience using the ESV?” discussion, with a special invite to the long unheard from critics- who have used it.

What’s your experience with the ESV?

Then, savor the irony: If you read Manson’s biography, he’s the product of Christian parenting and fundamentalist education.

Marilyn Manson was born as Brian Hugh Warner in Canton, Ohio, the son of Barb Wyer and Hugh Jack Warner. His father was a Roman Catholic and his mother was an Episcopalian. According to his autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, …He was raised in his mother’s religion. Warner attended Heritage Christian School from first grade to tenth grade.

Instead of owning up to one of the unfortunate possible results of fundamentalism, Christians are protesting and denouncing Manson.

So, imagine through the magic of the Internet Monk Research Department, you are able to place an ad on a website that will be read by everyone who attended the Manson concert and saw the protestors.

What would your ad say? (Limit: 350 words)

An event has an application, and God has a Word, but making the various aspects of weather in a particular place a clear word from God is raising a human pastoral application up to the level where all the problems we’ve discussed become real problems for many people. Such connections will cause many to stumble in their faith as they wonder “what was God’s Word to me in taking my child? Why did he have to speak that way instead of another way?” Piper clearly, WILL answer that question for suffering people out of his high views of God ordering all that comes to pass. Many other Christians will not. It’s the difference between a pastor saying, “in the tornado, I see a lesson” and saying “in the tornado, God is saying to you.” There’s a significance difference between these two expressions. I, and many others, frequently call to mind the lessons of providence, but they are the connections we see, not the connections God has made absolute. “The tornado caused me to think about God” and “God sent the tornado to Minneapolis so I would think about God” are simply two pastorally different statements. I’d suggest that what I can say about my house fire (or Piper can say about his cancer) and what I can say about Minneapolis’s tornado are two very different things on the level of using my interpretation of events as God’s Word.

In my conception of pastoral care, there are things you can think and believe, and then there are things you say at particular times. In the neo-natal ICU, when a child is about to die, people are making these connections: God is punishing them, God isn’t there, God is wanting something from them, etc. I believe pastoral care doesn’t tell people why that tornado is in the ICU. It humbly clarifies what we know about God from Jesus and the Gospel. I’m not going to say “this happened for the glory of God” THEN. I’m going to lament THEN. I’m going to take the time to see death for the enemy that it is, not say this is God. I’m going to Romans 8:28, etc LATER. If your first word to those parents is God’s sovereign ordering of all things so they will repent, I don’t think you’ve spoken a false word, but in the context, you’ve spoken a word that makes it more difficult to trust God. Jesus wept even when he’d said Lazurus’s death was for the glory of God. Some believe the highest expression of God’s sovereignty in the midst of tornadoes is the best pastoral and evangelistic word at that moment. It’s a legitimate disagreement, and no one should be embarrassed for having it.

1. Christians all generally believe that God is sovereign. I realize there’s a rather large bar fight about the footnotes, but it’s a reasonable attribute of anyone who calls himself the sort of things God does in scripture.

The game, however, becomes something like this: “My sovereignty can beat up your sovereignty.” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah. Watch this. I say that tornado was a warning from God to the liberals in the ECLA.” “Well….well…..OK…OK….I say that Kyle Lake’s electrocution during a baptism was because God wanted to warn the emerging church.” “Oh yeah….well….”

If you want to play this game, you can generally find people willing to play, but I have one thing to say before you do: If you tell me that I don’t believe in the sovereignty of God because I won’t play your “one up” game, I’m going to punch you in the nose (if you are a man over 18 and not blind) and then you can figure out what that means. (That’s a joke.)

2. Evangelical Christians are amazing for wanting it both ways. They want to be able to say when a tornado is warning liberal Lutherans, but they don’t want to say the light fixture that fell and killed a baby in some church is a sign of anything. They will probably sue the electrician. They want to say that God sends signs of repentance in the tornado that just skirted their town, and then want to say God is teaching us to depend on him when the tornado destroys the building the church meets in. They want to say that God is always communicating through his “megaphone of pain,” (not Lewis’s finest moment) but they don’t want God communicating by putting the face of Jesus on toast. They want to call John Piper a prophet and Kim Clement a kook.

3. It’s an evangelical specialty to jump in and out of the scientific world view as needed. It really irks me. One moment we sound like people who have no idea what storms and earthquakes are all about meteorologically and geologically then the next minute we’re off to the doctor to get more of the benefits of medical science with no reference to God’s decision about whether we should get well or not. I know these understandings of reality aren’t exclusive, but who is your audience when you talk about a storm in language not too far off from animism and then next minute you’re looking down your nose at someone who says that grandma’s blindness is caused by demonic attack, not macular degeneration?

We’re just fine telling kids that God sends X and causes Y, but if our children are scared of that God and don’t want to cross the bridge or go to sleep during a storm we tell them that everything is OK. How does that work? If you say that storms are the result of the way the atmosphere operates as a system and that bridges hold up if the engineers build and maintain them right are we confusing the kid, contradicting ourselves or just operating in two entirely different universes.

If we are going to start saying that comets and eclipses and asteroid strikes are messages from God, then I think we owe it to someone to explain how that interacts with the fact that we also understand these things scientifically.

4. The Bible says that God sent plagues upon Egypt and that God told Moses- told him- what was happening. Was there a difference in that and Moses next inclination to believe that an unusually strong wind was warning the rebellious Israelites to obey? It seems to me there’s a huge difference here, and it’s a difference that has everything to do with our view of scripture as authoritative and everything to do with why we don’t believe that every pastor who tells his church the reason God caused an infant to die is a prophet.

I fully believe that general revelation preaches to those who are listening, but when I start cherry-picking what events and occurrences I want to use to make my point, I’m being inconsistent. I never read that general revelation requires commentary from selected preachers.

5. If you haven’t read it, read this mess from Paul Proctor and tell me that it’s not a monstrous and vile abuse of the theology of God’s sovereignty for Proctor’s own purposes. This is an extreme and vicious example, but it obviously raises the question: how does this guy know that?

This sort of thing has been going on for centuries. We should be taking notes and learning a few things along the way.

UPDATE: From long, but right on point: The Islamization of Christianty by Udo Middleman.

UPDATE: Some of my own thoughts on the ‘04 Tsunami. Also, Halden Doerge: Why John Piper is Dangerous. I first caught the attention of the Reformation Police when I blogged about Paul Proctor’s announcement that God killed emerging pastor Kyle Lake. This was repeated by some bloggers that would surprise you.

UPDATE: Baptist Press takes a break from vilifying Piper’s association with Mark Driscoll to reprint his tornado theology.

Jerry Falwell said that 9-11 was God’s judgment on gays, feminists, abortionists and other sinners. (He later apologized.)

Pat Robertson has repeatedly told us that hurricanes are God’s judgments on the east coast.

More than a few preachers have said that Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgment on New Orleans. Which is apparently why it almost destroyed New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and left the French Quarter in place.

John Piper has chimed in before on what was going on when the Interstate bridge in Minneapolis collapsed.

Now Piper has written that a tornado in Minneapolis was a warning to liberal Lutherans about to vote on issues related to gay clergy. Here’s Pastor Piper’s original post.

When I was 13, I fell off my bicycle and busted a tooth. I won’t tell you what I was doing back in those days, but I got the message.

After you read 1 Kings 19:9-13 and David Sessions at Patrol Magazine, you can comment.

The open mic question of the day: How would you characterize this kind of comment? A bit excessive, but harmless? Arrogantly outside the lines of what any Christian ought to say in the aftermath of a serious or tragic event? Confused, but sincere? Proof that Job’s friends (”I know why it happened! I know!! Call on me!! I know!!) and not Job’s repentance (Job 42:1-6 “I’m shutting up”) are really the model for theology in the reformed camp?

God forbid that we act like people actually matter. Lord, save us from having to listen to someone’s pain. Just SHUT UP and SHOW ME YOUR CONFESSION. Right?

I’m looking for stories; stories of how relationships were changed for the worse because of theology.
I want commenters to tell- briefly- their stories of how theology caused stress, conflict, change, separation and distance in relationships with spouses, family members, parents, friends, co-workers and/or fellow Christians.

I’m not interested in changes from Christian to atheist, etc. Or in announcing you were gay. I want to know how someone becoming Calvinist changed your relationship. How did someone’s charismatic practices cause rejection? How did your family change their treatment of you when you left the Baptist denomination and became Orthodox? How does a creationist treat a Christian co-worker who is an evolutionist? How did your move to or from Catholicism affect your marriage? Are there people who stopped speaking to you or started evangelizing you when you changed your theology or practice?

That’s the sort of stories I’m looking for. With 40% of Americans changing religions and many moving to and from various theological positions, there’s bound to be a lot of these. Share them. Briefly. In the comments.