As with many holidays (originally Holy Days but in modern day usage has been contracted to holidays) Thanksgiving has become a largely commercial and secular time. As we consider The First Thanksgiving we see that:

The English colonists we call Pilgrims celebrated days of thanksgiving as part of their religion. But these were days of prayer, not days of feasting

Initially this was a time to spend before God, in communication with Him as a community and as individuals. The First Thanksgiving rightly points out:

Our national holiday really stems from the feast held in the autumn of 1621 by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag to celebrate the colony’s first successful harvest.

In their search for religious freedom and escape from religious persecution by Continue reading …

As Don mentioned last week, we are starting an extended project that I have labeled in my mind “The Culture-Driven Church.” The idea is to trace how culture (e.g. scientific, economic, spiritual, and psychological) have influenced the contemporary church and its mission. That’s the big goal. I suggested to Don that we use our meager megaphone (this blog) and our endearing and astute audience (that’s you dear reader) to help us sort out the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Culture Driven Church. Last blog Don painted a picture. This blog I’m going to ask some questions and introduce the project as a whole.

Now some of you might accuse us of pummeling a certain kind of deceased equine–namely “Modern church bad–Emergent Church bad” In fact we might be accused of the opposite of the philosophers in Acts 17 who were enamored with all things new. We might be accused of being curmudgeons Continue reading …

As I mentioned last week, Jonathan Miles and I will be developing a series in this blog on how the church and culture have gotten to be where they are today. Nothing happens in a vacuum and as the old cliché goes, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

I ran into one of our supporters this week and we got to talking about this project. They wanted to know if this would only be a historical treatise or is there another reason that we are working on this? Is this mostly to point out the problems in the church and culture or to also offer solutions? Those are valid questions and concerns. I thought it would be good to try to paint a general picture and set up a framework of understanding and direction. Continue reading …

Joy and I were somewhere between Amarillo, TX and Fontana, CA when I opened checked my email and a friend had sent a link to a 9 ½ minutes political cartoon from 1948 titled. Make Mine Freedom. It was fortuitous because even as I opened the cartoon link Joy and I were listening to George Orwell’s novel 1984 and the description of Engsoc (English Socialism), New Speak and Double Think. Orwell was not opposed to Socialism per se; in fact he was a member of the Labor Party which was Socialist. However, he was concerned about what he saw in the future if left unchecked which would be totalitarianism. The political cartoon has a snake oil salesman selling “Ism,” which is guaranteed to give you what you want. One individual warns the others to beware and taste it before they buy it and what they discovered in their taste test was that “Ism” leads to totalitarianism. The political cartoon and Orwell’s book were both done in 1948. Both shared the same “Future Sight” of what happens with extreme government intrusion. Both were challenging their audiences to beware of the consequences of their decisions.

Most of us get involved with a variety of things without considering the end result, or what Scripture Continue reading …