Waiting For Sunday

I try to rarely promote commercial products on this blog, but when a good FREE tool presents itself, I like to talk about it.

When I got my new computer awhile back, I really wanted to buy MS Office to go with it (so I could work at home easily) but I just couldn’t afford it. For just a few bucks, I got a basic office suite from Wordperfect included with my computer. Then I discovered Open Office, an open-source office suite that is available for free (legally, I might add). Open Office is backed by Sun Microsystems and is built by programmers all over the world who donate their time. It contains an excellent word processor along with a spreadsheet, database, etc. I basically just use the word processor, and it communicates SO much better with Word than Wordperfect does.
One qualifier: I word process all the time, but I don’t use many advanced features, and I’ve heard that people who do run into more problems with compatibility. But as a basic user, I can email my sermon or lesson to myself when I leave the office and pick it up at home and continue to work on it seamlessly, for the most part.

As for Powerpoint and Publisher, which I also use a frequently but for short periods, Bart Mayo (our church tech guru) showed me a program called LogMeIn which provides me simple remote desktop access for free, so I can sit at home and control my office computer as if I were sitting at my desk at church - and you don’t need Windows XP Professional to do it. It IS a bit slow to run a remote session, but it is definitely workable.

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We have the hope of the world - 1 Peter 1:1-12 - Dennis Mullen - 7.30.06
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SERIES: Aliens, Strangers and Misfits
A series from 1 Peter on living as missionaries in this foreign culture. Part 2 of 8

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I just finished reading Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller, who also wrote Blue Like Jazz. One of Miller’s main points is that we, being separated from the security of God’s love, look to everybody else to tell us that we’re OK. He included this magnificently honest quote from Tom Arnold, the former Mr. Rosanne Barr and former host of The Best *** Sports Show, Period. It comes from Arnold’s book How I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years (sounds like my diet plan):

“The interviewer asked him why he had written the book, and I was somewhat amazed at the honesty of Arnold’s answer. The comedian stated that most entertainers are in show business because they are broken people, looking for affirmation. ‘The reason I wrote this book…is because I wanted something out there so people would tell me they liked me. It’s the reason behind almost everything I do.’”

It’s the reason behind more of my actions, sermons, and blog posts than I care to admit. Oh to reconnect with the Father in such a way that we can live with and love others and not worry about their opinions!

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Most of you know that my wife Cindy and I have no children of our own. I have no regrets about that because I think it’s important to live the life God gives you and to live it faithfully, and we have many wonderful blessings for which to be grateful – my greatest blessing being her. But occasionally I get to look through the window at what might have been…

This past Saturday, for reasons you can read about in an earlier post, I found it necessary to go to a mall in Chattanooga with Mallory and Jessica, the college students who have been working at MHCC this summer. Both of them are twenty-year-old college juniors, Jessica at Wheaton College near Chicago, and Mallory at Vanguard University in Southern California. Now most of my friends my age (42) have children who are in early high school and younger. But it wouldn’t be unusual at my age to have a twenty-year-old child. My parents did when they were 42.

This little road trip opened me to a new world, one which is commonplace for many of you. I pray that you don’t take it for granted. First, the drive itself – I listened to their music (Coldplay, Pedro the Lion, Ben Folds) and I made them listen to some of mine (I had to pronounce the name “John Mellencamp” a couple of times before they said it sounded familiar). Then when we walked into the mall, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t been in a mall for maybe three years. Not exactly my kind of place, you know. But more than that, watching these two young women shop and make wise and mature buying choices was fascinating to me and made me proud on behalf of their parents.

What an awesome responsibility and privilege to raise daughters these days! The best parents teach their girls to be strong, independent, and smart, to respect themselves because they are beloved daughters of God and to expect nothing less than respect from others. Most of you have seen these two young women at church and you know that they are both beautiful. But what I have seen over these last seven weeks (and what I pray their parents see) is that each is, in her own way, wise, confident, steel-strong, excellent in leadership, compassionate and gracious.

Here’s my advice to those of you who are working hard to teach your daughters the same qualities, and feeling the pressure, the strain, and maybe even the heartache of raising your girls: Don’t miss it for anything.

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Ya ain’t from around here, are ya? - Dennis Mullen - 1 Peter 1-2 - 7.23.06
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SERIES: Aliens, Strangers and Misfits
A series from 1 Peter on living as missionaries in this foreign culture. Part 1 of 8

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When I suggested to Mallory and Jessica (from Group Workcamps) that we should go fishing this coming week, I knew I should do some boat maintenance and fish-scouting in order to have a successful trip. Through various circumstances, Jessica (a Junior at Wheaton College) and Cindy (my wife, natch) came along on what was supposed to be the scouting and boat-shakedown trip.

It would be an understatement to say that things didn’t go exactly as planned. I made my first mistake when, after the boat motor didn’t start right away, I hooked up the electric trolling motor and pointed us away from shore. I figured that I’d get it started soon, and I didn’t want us drifting back onto land in the meantime.

My second mistake happened when, as I saw a really ominous black cloud heading in, I didn’t turn us back immediately. After all, it hadn’t rained around here for weeks!

So what happened? I never got the motor started, and we were overtaken by an ugly storm (with lightning) that blew us to a point midway between the launching ramp at the city park and the one at the Highway 58 landing. Along about the time that Jessica and I were swimming and pushing/pulling the boat along the shore, she laughingly reminded me that her mother had sent me an email thanking me for taking good care of her. Ouch!

There is a Latin phrase, in absentia parentis, that used to describe the responsibility of colleges and universities (no longer, unfortunately), and should still fit the church. In absentia parentis means that we look out for the children of other people even as we look out for our own. Even though I had offered to Jessica the chance to let Cindy take her back to the church and leave me to fix my mess, I really felt rotten later for letting her family down and getting her into this “adventure” just because I didn’t want to give up.

Well we did get the boat back home, Cindy and I had a brief fight about my poor judgement (it’s all better now), I ended up replacing Jessica’s rain-damaged cell phone (glad to do it, Jess), and the inside of my truck smells like a kennel (from water, not from any specific passenger).

Despite all of this, I had a really great time. Jess is such a great girl that she had me laughing most of the time instead of insanely clubbing my boat motor with the paddle, Chevy Chase-like. Still…

The bad decisions we make don’t usually affect us alone. My desire is to live and lead responsibly out of respect for those who work (and “fish”) with me and those who care about them.

P. S. - Tonight, after a little tinkering, the motor started on the second pull!

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Last month I heard an interview with Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. This book immediately went on my must-read list (haven’t read it yet) because Gilbert gave some intriguing ideas about how most of the things from which we expect happiness fail to provide it, and how we blindly sacrifice real happiness now for imaginary happiness later.

One of Gilbert’s points was about money. Going from $4,000 to $40,000 in annual income certainly increases happiness for most people because basic needs are met. But going on up to $400,000 or $4 million doesn’t make a predictable difference. I.e., money can buy happiness, but only to a point.

A new study called “The Happy Planet Index” confirms it, by comparing happiness v. Gross Domestic Product in 233 nations. Economic and consumerist giants like the U. S., Japan and Germany are unhappy places (the U. S. ranked #150) while the happiest place in the world is Vanuatu, a tiny South Pacific island nation (well, sure!).

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John Pryor first told me about MySpace in November of last year. He got me to join in January, just a couple of days after I first blogged about it. Now MySpace has almost 94 million members, and according to TechCrunch, signs up nearly a quarter of a million new users per DAY, has 15 million unique log-ins per day, and 30 billion page views per month. MySpace accounts for 4.5% of all U. S. Internet visits.

But here’s how big it really is: Tonight at church, worship got underway while three of us in our 40s and 50s stood out in the Atrium discussing the coolest tricks for customizing our MySpace profiles.

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I found this article called “Go from Couch to 5K in Six Weeks” at one of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker. I haven’t run a 5K since 1991 (in Denver - the altitude was a killer for me, but I made it), and I don’t plan to run one just now, but I think I might try this simple training plan as I try to lose the twenty pounds I’ve gained since last summer. When I trained in 1991, I designed a plan similar to this one, except that I broke my goals down into quarter-miles (which are marked on the Kingston walking trail) rather than minutes. Most folks in reasonable health can train themselves to run a 5K (3.1 miles) in a little over 30 minutes. (When I ran in Denver, I finished behind a 77-year-old man - but he was in GREAT shape!)

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I wondered when this would finally happen. When Titanic hit video stores in the late 90s, a company called CleanFlicks began selling edited copies with nudity and foul language removed. Since then, CleanFlicks and a couple of competitors have built a nice business around cleaning up other feature films.

I sympathize with this idea, but the practice never seemed quite legal to me. Last week, an appeals court in Denver agreed, saying that cleaning up films without permission is an illegitimate business.

OK, but I have to scoff at this bit of sanctimonious pap at the bottom of the article: “Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor,” said the President of the Director’s Guild of America.

Hey, I’m in favor of artistic freedom, but follow the money on this one. Every movie you watch on TV is cleaned up, edited for time, chopped up for commercials, and (worst of all) “panned and scanned” to make a wide-screen feature fit your TV, in effect redirecting the movie by reframing every shot, often without the director’s approval.

OK, so this post is nothing but a rant. And the point is…CleanFlicks can keep doing this by making it profitable enough to fit the “vision” of the filmmakers…or at least the studios.

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Dave Terpstra has an interesting post at Out of Ur about the contradictory way Christian react to movies. When the first Harry Potter movie came out, there was considerable debate about whether Christians should see a film featuring a wizard-boy hero. One local church here in Kingston put an anti-witchcraft Scripture on its sign that week. I have never heard of anyone protesting either Pirates of the Carribean movie on faith-based grounds. Yet Terpstra notes some commonalities:

The similarity in material between the two movies that should concern parents is amazing. First, both films focus on activities contrary to the teachings Scripture, piracy and witchcraft. Second, the hero of Pirates, like the hero of Potter, is practicing what is considered evil—not just battling against those who practice it. Third, there are dark forces involved in both. Harry Potter films are amuck with sorcery and the like. Pirates of the Caribbean films are full of curses and the undead. The list could go on.

More than this, the real star of the Pirates movies is Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, a conflicted hero if ever there was one. An important theme in both The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man’s Chest is that a person can be a pirate AND a good man. Few parents want their little ones following THAT example.

The answer isn’t protests, which Terpstra shows to be mostly knee-jerk, but discernment. I haven’t seen the Potter movies (will there be one called Welcome Back, Potter?) but I love Narnia and The Lord of the Rings (the books are better) which could be criticized in the same way that the Potter films are. And I really liked the first Pirates movie (the second suffers from bloating caused by sequel-itis) but if I had kids, I’d want to talk to them about the moral ambiguities of Jack Sparrow. CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow, that is.

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My previous post defined the “missional” church as one that understands it exists in a culture alien to the Kingdom of God. That’s easy to get a handle on when the church is new, but what about when it grows to include several thousand disciples who are growing in the knowledge of God’s Word? Our traditional answer is to keep feeding them and maybe get them involved in maintaining the institution of the church.

That leads to the second defining characteristic of the missional church: Every member is a missionary where they are, every single day. This isn’t a new idea in the evangelical church, but though we talk about it a lot, it’s rare to find a church that really puts it into practice.

One church that does is Watermark Community Church in Dallas. I’ve said before that Todd Wagner is the one preacher (besides me) that you ought to be listening to. You can catch all of his stuff online, but if you really want to hear about a church that puts the emphasis on the mission of every member, listen to this message called “A Steward’s Report”. (You can download it for free and put it on your music player or a CD.)

Watermark gave everybody who attended a service in December an envelope containing some cash. It sounds like most people received $5-10 but a few got larger amounts, up to $1,000. Each person also received the instruction that they were to use this money to make the name of Jesus “more famous” in whatever way God led them. “A Steward’s Report” is the follow-up message reporting on what people did with the money. The remarkable lesson of the message is that this is essentially what Christians face each day. God has distributed his gifts among us, and we are to use them to lift up Christ so He can draw all people to Himself.

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Someone recently asked me what I thought about “the missional church” (thanks to Jessica Friesen). “Missional” is a buzzword I have heard kicked around a little, but I had to do a little research to find out what it means. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. Like most buzzwords, many use it and few define it. But what I found out is valuable.

As I understand it, MHCC would become missional if we understood that we are now working in a culture that is foreign to Biblical Christianity, and we let that fact begin to shape everything we do. When the Pryors went to Papua New Guinea some thirty years ago, they understood that everything about the Gospel was foreign to the people around them. They even had to create a written form of the local language in order to give these people the Scriptures. The Pryors couldn’t assume (as we do) that the people had any previous knowledge of the Bible or its teachings on things like sin, salvation, atonement, sanctification, etc. Our situation isn’t as extreme, but increasingly this is the culture in which we live.

In contrast to the missional church is the evangelistic church, where teaching unbelievers about Christ is ONE of many church programs. An evangelistic church fits well in a community where many people are Christians, and where even the unbelievers have a basic understanding of the Gospel which they have (so far) rejected. When I was a kid, churches used to have evangelistic services where a preacher would come in from out-of-town and preach fire-and-brimstone messages. During the day, the visitor and the local preacher would visit the notorious sinners in town - often the hard-living husbands of church women, guys who had heard it all before - and try to convince them to come to the services and (hopefully) repent. Sometimes it worked.

But if the people we want to reach have almost no knowledge of God or His Word - if indeed they have accepted a very different world view - we have to approach the mission much differently. That’s when the church must become missional, considering itself an outpost of the Kingdom of God in a very foreign land.

More later…

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My previous post (and church newsletter article) was about my boyhood admiration for Superman. Well what’s a young kid who loves superheroes to do when he’s too old to believe in the Man of Steel? In the 70s there was a real-life substitute who flew through the air, put his own safety aside for the sake of his cause - heck, he even dressed in red, white and blue and wore a cape. His fame swept across America and through my Elementary School too. I’m speaking of Robert Craig Knievel, Jr.

Evel Knievel was nearly thirty years old when he made what became his most famous jump - and crash - at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. I became aware of him when ABC’s Wide World of Sports featured him regularly from 1973-76. During that time, he appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, had a popular line of toys, and inspired a two-part Happy Days cliffhanger in which Fonzie tried to jump his bike over a line of barrels. (It wasn’t till later that Fonzie - and Happy Days - jumped the shark).

Even today I can’t help watching this guy. Last night I saw him featured on The History Channel, and today I have spent more time than I should have reading about him on the web. But these days, the fascination is more about a guy whose LIFE is a motorcycle crash. Superman was invincible. Evel Knievel has broken up to fifty bones, spent a month in a coma after Caesar’s Palace, and says he has been in the hospital for a total of three years. He had a liver transplant in 1999 after contracting hepatitis C, apparently in one of his many surgeries.

Superman fought for truth, justice, and the (politically incorrect) American way. Knievel beat Sheldon Saltman (who Knievel said wrote lies about him) with a baseball bat while another man held Saltman (Knievel served six months in jail for that). Superman was a force for good. Knievel has been in trouble for tax evasion, soliciting a prostitute, and carrying illegal weapons.

When I was a kid, I looked at Evel Knievel and saw Superman. Today when I watch those old interviews, I see a guy who is just LOST, an Elvis impersonator who has been kicked in the head a few times too many.

And Superman never sold a scooter.

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