Waiting For Sunday

This blog has moved to waitingforsunday.com.  See you there.

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Weights and measures - Dennis Mullen - 1.28.7
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Why numbers matter & what we’ll look for

Series: Vision: Where MHCC is heading in 2007 (part 4 of 4)

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1. The New Intolerance - Christianity Today article on fear-mongering atheism.
2. 65 Percent of Americans Spend More Time with Their Computer than Their Spouse.  But if they’d read our blogs…
3. Hacking the Human Life Span - from Wired. Science and wishful thinking about living longer.
4. Email, Holograms of the Dead to Haunt Your Inbox - From Crunchgear. Microsoft’s “Immortal Computing” Initiative and other plans to help you speak from beyond. A more business-like report on the same topic is here (via Gizmodo)
5. The Invisible Enemy in Iraq - Wired. Super-bacteria developing in battlefield hospitals.
6. Infuze - A site that’s new to me, about art, entertainment and faith. I immediately see several interviews I want to read.
7. A new MHCC blogger I stumbled on this week.

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Here’s an article of diet tips from Kyle Pott (his real name?) who lost 50 pounds in three months and has kept it off for more than a year.  Like a lot of good advice, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but the thing that makes it attractive to me is the realistic approach.  Potts dieted only five days a week and gave himself a break on the weekends.  Or, if he had a social event during the week that called for a little indulgence, he made it up Saturday.

His ten tips may not allow you to drop 50 pounds by May 1 - he’s got to have some good metabolism - but his approach seems solid and workable, including his ideas for keeping it off.

Found this through Lifehacker.com

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Maybe you’ll never watch a ten minute video you find here, but I’m telling you, this one is interesting, worth at least skipping around to see the highlights.

In the video, Jeff Han demonstrates what may be the computer interface of the future. It’s a huge leap past typing on a keyboard or using a mouse. The idea is a touch screen in which you can use all of your fingers to expand, contract, and arrange photos and maps (reminiscent of Minority Report), and create art as if you were molding clay. Once you see it, you’ll know how to use it, which is why he calls it “the interface-free interface”. And if you need to type, you can even pop up a virtual keyboard.

This won’t replace Office or Wordpress anytime soon. But it is a bigger step forward then the one from DOS text to the Mac graphical user interface.

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Move over, Philip Yancey and Donald Miller. I’ve found a new book to mention ad nauseam, and it’s The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. As I mentioned a few days ago, Claiborne is a 31-year-old Christian who founded The Simple Way, a faith community in Philadelphia that practices a truly different (and intriguing) way for people to live together.

The Irresistible Revolution is 358 pages of easy reading covering Claiborne’s ideas on community, poverty, war, social justice, wealth, the consumer culture, nationalism and the Christian faith. What’s new here? Nothing. And everything.

Nothing, in the sense that Claiborne’s thoughts and habits come from a long stream flowing back through Rich Mullins, Tony Campolo, Martin Luther King, the Catholic Worker Movement, Anabaptist traditions, monasticism, all the way back to Jesus of Nazareth. Everything, in that Claiborne lives in today’s world and confronts the problems we should be facing (though in general, we’re not) - including the Iraq war. Claiborne went to Baghdad early in 2003 to minister to and with the local Christians, and was there during “shock and awe”.

In a book loaded with great content, two things about Claiborne make him impressive to me:

First, he doesn’t just protest, he gives positive alternatives (and lives them). He writes: “Whether in church or in circles of social dissent, there are plenty of people who define themselves by what they are not, whose identity revolves around what they are against rather than what they are for…Most people are aware that something is wrong. The real question is, What are the alternatives?” (p. 309) The Irresistible Revolution is filled with alternatives - some are nutty, many are quite compelling.

Second, although Claiborne offers a strong critique of the megachurch movement, he also shows deep and love and respect for the ultimate megachurch, Willow Creek Community Church, and its pastor Bill Hybels. When Willow kicked off a multi-million dollar building campaign several years ago, Claiborne expressed grief that so much money would be spent on buildings when millions live in terrible poverty. Claiborne and Hybels wrote back and forth over this, but (according to Claiborne) without defensiveness and with “deep respect and gentleness”. Willow went ahead with the project, for which Claiborne expresses sadness “that we had settled for another building when God might have had so much else in mind”. But then he adds a paragraph praising Willow for its “remarkable strides toward justice and reconciliation”, its substantial financial gifts toward relief for people around the world, and its continuing emphasis that “90 percent discipleship is 10 percent short”. Claiborne completely won me over with that single paragraph. (All quotes from p. 328)

The biggest takeaway from The Irresistible Revolution and from Claiborne’s life is that it is the layers of separation - between rich and poor, white and black, Christians and non-Christians, and Americans and the rest of the world - that perpetuate injustice and poverty. Claiborne shows with his life that he has the guts to tear down those walls. As did Jesus.

As shall we.

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This is a dated topic, but I write it now because yesterday someone gave me the poster you see here from the Rocky Balboa media push for churches.  I’m grateful to the person who put it on my desk, and I plan to put it up.  But the campaign itself, to promote Rocky Balboa to churches, seems odd.

I saw the movie, and commented on it here.  It was good.  Of course, I felt like I had seen it before, since it was the same movie as as the previous ones.  But there wasn’t anything especially Christian about it, and the “good fight” Paul speaks of (quoted on the poster) certainly wasn’t a sixty-year-old man vs. the heavyweight champ.

Sylvester Stallone learned from Mel Gibson the value of connecting with pastors, although Stallone’s marketing push wasn’t nearly as far-reaching as Gibson’s, nor was it as successful.  (BTW, when is some Hollywood director going to invite ME to a pre-screening?)

NPR covered the church marketing strategy here, and Christianity Today Movies abetted the project to some degree too.

I have no problem with Bible-based discussions on movies.  I just see this as another warning to be careful.  It IS flattering to be noticed by Hollywood.  But it would be easy to be used.

P. S. - Just today, Christianity Today posted an article about movies and church marketing citing the dangers.

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Priorities - the heart of this church - Dennis Mullen - 1.21.7
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Series: Vision: Where MHCC is heading in 2007 (part 3 of 4)

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I heard Tony Campolo, the well-known speaker, author, and radical Christian, speak at a conference a few years ago.  His topic was gay marriage, and he ended his talk with an appeal to support children through Compassion International.  As you can hear in this two-minute audio clip (which I’ve used at MHCC before), I felt he was speaking directly to me.

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I just finished reading Illusions of innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 by Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen (1988, University of Chicago Press). This is an excellent book that most of you won’t want to read (unless you’re really into history) because it is so technical. But it is valuable especially to those of us in the independent Christian churches who approach our faith with a “restorationist” mindset - meaning that our goal is to restore the pure faith and practices of New Testament times.

Here are some of the major points of the book:

1. Our vision of restoring primitive and purer times is by no means unique. On the contrary, few things were more common in the years following the American Revolution. The desire to reconnect with primordial purity drove the New England Puritans, primitive Baptists, and Mormons as well as Alexander Campbell and our Christian churches (which Hughes and Allen insist on calling “Christians”, using the quotation marks not to question our sincerity but to distinguish us from other Christian movements). In fact, this mindset drove Thomas Jefferson and the founders of our republic, so the intellectual soil of the early 1800s was fertile for producing primitive religious movements.
2. Restorationist movements tend to follow a predictable path from liberty to exclusivism to coercion. Most movements begin with an emphasis on free thought because they are formed in reaction to older movements which restrict freedom. Campbell, for example, began his movement in opposition to the “human creeds” of the established Presbyterian church of his youth, creeds which he found restrictive. It doesn’t take long, however, for such movements to arrive at the conclusion that they have reestablished the true way and that all others are in error - hence exclusivism. Then, when the movement gains strength in numbers, it usually resorts to coercion to enforce the “right thinking” it has rediscovered. Our Christian churches in many regions are certainly known for this attitude of “we’re the only true Christians”, though Campbell himself didn’t take this journey with his movement. In a real sense, our branch of the Christian churches was stolen out from under Campbell by others. Hughes and Allen show that this trajectory of thought can be seen in our nation’s foreign policy. Our birthright of freedom of conscience has often been translated into a doctrine of enforcing “freedom” on other nations by military power. More often than not, America’s stated desire to spread freedom serves as a cloak for other national interests.
3. The key to breaking free from our failures (if there is such a key) lies in being aware of our “illusions of innocence”. The last paragraph of the book begins with these words: “Awareness of our own failures and appreciation of the traditions of others will not likely occur, however, so long as the luxuriant growth of pretentions to innocence remains unpruned.”

I’m enough of a product of America and our Restoration Movement to find a lot of value in the truths which both rediscovered. But I have long been troubled about the exclusivism and coercion I have seen in both. Illusions of Innocence is valuable in that it gives a name to and a comprehensive description of these failings.

PS - I got my copy of Illusions used and at a good price from Amazon, but now I see that it lists for almost $45! I wish I hadn’t marked mine up!

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Shane Claiborne has an interesting article (part 1 of 3) today at Out of Ur, the blog for Christianity Today’s Leadership magazine. I’m currently reading Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. I like the book because, aside from a few sophomoric references, Claiborne defines “radical” in the correct sense of “getting back to the roots”. Hence the subtitle reference to being “an ordinary radical”; radical Christians aren’t defined by tattoos or body-piercing, but by living like Jesus, returning to the roots of Christian practice. Every Christian should be a radical in this sense, though most of us are not. Claiborne lives what he speaks. For years, he has lived in a different sort of Christian community in inner-city Philadelphia.

As for the article, the only weakness (I think) is that it seems to minimize hell as an eternal reality (though Claiborne doesn’t dismiss hell altogether), which is unnecessary to make his larger and vastly more important point: That millions of people are living in a hell on earth right now. Jesus did speak of an eternal hell, but there is no doubt that his life and ministry give us a powerful example of living among those in hell-on-earth and releasing God’s Spirit among them to set them free.

Claiborne (who is originally from Maryville, TN) is doing a great service for the church, and his book has really got me thinking about alternative ways of living in community WITH our community.

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Friends are still sending me emails that say that the death-rate of US soldiers in Iraq isn’t all that different from the murder rate in big cities like Detroit. The implication, I guess, is that people die everywhere, so why get upset over some deaths in Iraq? Or maybe the idea is that our troops are as safe in Baghdad as Detroit.

Come on! If you need to defend our Iraq activities, put some thought into it and stop sending me this nonsensical data.

First off, if ever there was an apples -to- oranges comparison, it has to be US soldiers to Detroit civilians. Put these well-trained, well-armed and (hopefully by now) well-armored men and women in Detroit and their death rate drops to zero.

CNN says that 113 American troops died in Iraq in December 2006, 102 from hostile action. For 2006, the number of American deaths was 814. If I read this chart right, the Detroit metro area suffered about 440 murders in 2005 (the most recent year of complete data), so our men and women in Iraq are dying at twice the rate of murders in Detroit (I can’t believe I’m stooping to make this point, but that was the comparison in the email).

But the real story is the CIVILIAN causalities in Iraq. Today CBS News quotes a UN report that says that nearly 35,000 Iraqi civilians were killed last year. (I presume CBS means these people were killed in war-related violence, but shoddy reporting makes it hard to say for certain). Compare that to 16,692 murders in the US in 2005 and you have a better comparison (and remember that Iraq has less than 10% of our population).

Now I’m not saying that US troops are killing all these civilians (I don’t believe that for a minute, and I am VERY pro-troops), and I’m not saying that an immediate US withdrawal would end the violence (though I think us getting out would help - four years on, I’m pretty anti-war too).

I am saying: Quit sending me emails that downplay the deaths of our soldiers and ignore the civilian causalities. When Christians forward this nonsense, we reveal how knee jerk our political views are and how little thinking we do about Jesus, violence and our faith.

In fact, don’t send me any emails that you don’t write yourself.

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I still maintain my innocence regarding interest in O. J. Simpson’s salacious book deal, but if I were to write about it, I would want my post to resemble this Newsweek article based on an exclusive look at the chapter from Simpson’s book about the night of the murders.  You shouldn’t read the Newsweek article, but if you’ll do you’ll find it fascinating, and you’ll come away with pretty much the same opinions you had before.

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Attitude adjustment - Thinking that holds us back - Dennis Mullen - 1.14.7
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Series: Vision: Where MHCC is heading in 2007 (part 2 of 4)

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When I was a kid, I was a committed Christian and I was really into science fiction. It didn’t take me long to see the tension between the two. My favorite science fiction writers (especially Isaac Asimov) were atheists. Their vision of inter-galactic travel and settlement of the universe had no place for God.

So I dreamed up in my own mind a vision combining the two. What if a group of Christians could settle another planet somewhere and establish it as an outpost of the kingdom of God? In my mind, I pictured a screening process which would make sure that all the settlers were true Christians. Thus, we’d start our settlement with only the good people. Then, if anyone later decided to reject Christ or if they persisted in sin, or if they committed serious sin, they’d either be sent back to earth, or else face the death penalty (I mean let’s get serious, right?). In other words, specifically the words of Jesus in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, we would first uproot the wheat and transplant it elsewhere; and then we’d uproot the weeds as they sprouted up.

There were several problems with this vision, however. First, it didn’t take seriously the sin in my own heart - the benevolent founder and dictator of this colony - let alone the commoners I’d take with me. Even good Christians carry enough sin with them to infest another planet quickly. Second, my vision assumed that it is possible to set up a screening process to tell real Christians from fakes and outright sinners. It isn’t. One day the Lord will make the judgments - and his judgments will be right. But until then, we cannot do so.

The third problem with my dream of a Christian planet was that I didn’t realize that such things have been tried many times and have almost always failed. I’m currently reading a book called Illusions of Innocence about early-American religious movements (mine included) that tried to restore the primitive faith and sometimes (as with the Puritans) attempted to set up “Christian” colonies. The lessons? People who try to establish a utopian community by separating the good people into a village away from the sin without quickly see their utopia destroyed by the sin within.  The pride, the lust, the petty jealousy and legalism reveals that the wheat and the weeds aren’t really all that different in this age. In the OT, God separated his people into an isolated nation, and made it very clear by outward practice who was part of it and who wasn’t. And yet that chosen and separate nation didn’t often behave in a holy fashion. Sin infested Israel much as it did the surrounding nations.

All of this is to say that it shouldn’t surprise or discourage us to find sin in church. Of course we have to confront it (see Matthew 18:15-17). But we can rest in the knowledge that we don’t have to make church into a sin-free zone. God will handle that at the end of the age.

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Two MHCCers who have been blogging on MySpace have recently ventured out into the wider blogging community. One is Summer Hensley, whose blog “The Shelf” is on life in general and parenting in particluar, with a special focus on raising her autistic son. Summer registered more than 10,000 page views on her MySpace blog in 2006, and now she is putting her new content on the new blog. I highly recommend her work.

The other is Hannah, who is 15 so I’ll simply use her first name here. “Peace, Love and Hannah’s Blog” is well-written and thought-provoking.

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I recently discovered Carmine Gallo, a Business Week writer who focuses on the craft of public speaking and giving presentations. I’ve been slowly working through his articles, trying to learn as much as I can to apply to my own preaching and teaching. Gallo is practical and entertaining. Check him out before you face your next crowd.

Here’s a link to the RSS feed for his articles. You can search the Business Week site for older postings.

PS - I found Gallo’s feed on another blog. As soon as I remember where, I’ll give credit.

Update: Ah, here is is - a post from Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion about the Business Week feed builder which mentions Gallo as an example.

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Your integrity - How much would you sell it for? - Dennis Mullen - 1.7.7
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Series: Vision: Where MHCC is heading in 2007 (part 1 of 4)

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I could mess around for hours with the Museum of Modern Betas, and sometimes I do. MoMB is a very simple list of the most recently-released web applications. No reviews or recommendations, just a thumbnail screen-shot with the default brief description from the app itself. It’s amazing to see the creative business ideas people are trying (a social network for geeks?). And for anyone who does web design, browsing through these new releases shows you how Web 2.0 is supposed to look (according to these folks who are betting money on design).

Check out the top betas for 2006 and you’ll notice how quickly some services go from beta-testing to web heavyweight.

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Many misguided ideas about happiness keep us from having real joy.
But we can set our minds on the truth.
Dennis - 12.31.06 Read it- Listen - MP3

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Last night, Saddam Hussein was executed in Iraq. No matter how you feel about capital punishment or the war in Iraq, it’s pretty obvious that he deserved it, and not just in a “wages of sin is death” kind of way. MSNBC has posted a video which shows Saddam, on the very first day of his reign in 1979, sitting in a crowded room reading off the names of his enemies who are then snatched out of the room and taken away. Many of these “traitors” to the Baath party were shot without trial. These were but the first of his crimes as president. Even the ones for which he was convicted and hanged (the 1982 slaughter of 148 Shi’ite villagers) were but a tiny part of his infernal legacy.

Should Saddam have died? I have problems with capital punishment as it is carried out in the U. S., but those problems stem not primarily from Scripture (I understand Romans 13:1-7 to allow for capital punishment, along with Genesis 9:4-6), but from our system’s inability to reliably find the guilty person. That wasn’t an issue with Saddam to say the least.

What if Saddam had been sentenced to life in prison instead? Could this have been a tiny step toward ending the eye-for-an-eye cycle of retribution in that region? I’d like to think so. It’s just as likely, however, that his continued presence would have have been seen as 1) a horrible injustice to the tens of thousands he tortured and killed, and 2) a rallying symbol for those on all sides who desire to stoke violence.

The major news sites have all posted footage of Saddam with the noose around his neck, along with stills of his corpse. I suppose it’s just a matter of time before the moment of his death is widely available too. A friend said to me yesterday that when we finally have that video, we’ll see a lost man stepping through the gates of hell. That’s that saddest thing that can be said of anyone.

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Up until a year ago, whenever we rented a DVD, I’d always grab the full screen version. I figured the wide screen image would be too small on our TV. Then one night, on the DVD extras for the movie The Interpreter, I saw a feature by director Sidney Pollack on why wide screen is better. He convinced me for life in about five minutes. I won’t even consider renting the full screen film anymore.

OK, so this isn’t the most important post I’ve ever written. Nevertheless, I consider myself a minor wide screen evangelist. Most movies are filmed and shown in theaters at a 16:9 width-to-height ratio. To fit on a standard 4:3 TV screen, the movie is edited by a process called pan and scan in which somebody chooses a 4:3 rectangle from each shot and crops the rest out. Since the director is responsible for laying out each shot, Pollack said that pan and scan is in effect redirecting the movie. He showed 4:3 cropped scenes from The Interpreter and said: “I didn’t direct that.”

Turner Classic Movies occasionally runs a short feature on wide screen vs. full screen. Check it out the next time you run across it, or just watch this short demo to see what I’m talking about.

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Cindy and I finally saw The Nativity Story last night. What a perfect way to close out Christmas Eve. I was impressed.

The Nativity Story captures several themes that Christians have heard developed repeatedly in generations of sermons - the fact that Joseph and Mary belonged to the “working poor”, that the pregnancy probably caused something of a scandal, and that the Romans were oppressive rulers. And the film does a great job expanding on Matthew’s statement that Joseph was a righteous man. As the story progresses, Joseph shows himself to be a humble, strong, servant-like husband, willing to do everything he can to care for his wife and her child. Mary moves from an attitude of resignation over their arranged marriage to a state of genuine love for Joseph.

The Nativity Story plays essentially by The Book, a fact that some critics have found disappointing but which many Christians will appreciate. All the elements from the Gospel accounts are there, and the supernatural element is in no way downplayed or called into question. (The Magi arrive at the same time as the shepherds, which almost certainly did not happen, but have you ever seen a Nativity pageant played any other way?) Sam Van Hallgren at Filmspotting criticized the film for being no more than a professional version of the same kind of Nativity play one can see at any church this time of year. Actually, he’s right. But the difference the pros make is refreshing. Even Van Hallgren says that if you’re looking for a straight telling of the story from the Bible, this is it. I say “Amen” to that, and I mean it as a recommendation.

Someone with young children asked me if The Nativity Story (rated PG) was kid-friendly. It isn’t, not for young kids anyway. The brutality of Roman rule, Herod’s massacre of the innocents, and the realistic portrayals of the labor pains of Elizabeth and Mary may disturb those under 10. But for older folks, The Nativity Story is a realistic, well-crafted portrayal of the events leading to the Incarnation.

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The King makes His move - Dennis Mullen - 12.24.06
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Series: The World Through Christmas-Colored Glasses (part 3 of 3)

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This headline caught my eye: “Rabbi claims holocaust dead ‘deserved it’”. Read the article and you’ll see that the headline is only slightly sensationalized. The rabbi is Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox Jew from England who recently spoke at the controversial holocaust conference in Iran. Cohen isn’t a holocaust denier, but he holds a point of view that is at least as old as Job’s comforters - that those who suffer deserve it, and those who inflict suffering could not otherwise succeed. Cohen’s beliefs about suffering shape his view on Israel (and this is what makes him so controversial): He believes that the modern nation of Israel was formed as an act of rebellion against God, who wills that Jews live peacefully in exile.

Laying aside Cohen’s anti-Zionist doctrine, it strikes me that Christians inhabit an entirely different universe of ideas about suffering. On one hand, we all deserve it “in one way or another” as Cohen so loosely puts it. “The wages of sin is death” says Paul in Romans 6:23. Jesus talked about people who died in a much smaller incident of anti-Semitism in Luke 13, and then he said: “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:2-3, NIV)

On the other hand, at the center of our faith is the one true innocent man suffering without deserving it. The “punishment that brought us peace was upon him,” Isaiah says.

Grace is a wild, unlikely thing, isn’t it?

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