I have to admit, this started out to be a very different blog than it ended up. Like many, I was discouraged at the results of the election. Yes, I know that God is in control and uses even government for His purposes but sometimes those purposes are to punish His people or the nations in which His people dwell and they suffer as well. To be perfectly honest I am not a big fan of suffering.

I know that politics is messy business and corruption abounds in the hallowed halls of Congress and the White House. Special interest groups are working hard to persuade the Federal Government to use the club of legislation to beat down the opposition. But that is how government works in a Democratic Republic. We vote for candidates that most closely align with our worldview and values and trust they will at the very least protect us from those who have a different view. Continue reading …

Most often when we think of the consequences of false teaching, we think in terms of eternity. Where will those we care about be after they pass from this world to the next? That is a very big consideration but there are consequences to false teaching and false beliefs in this life which go on largely unnoticed by most in the church or even in culture. Big groups like Jim Jones’ “Peoples Temple” or the deaths of the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX or Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate make a big splash in the news but most are not personally affected and assume something was wrong with those followers. It is easy to take a passing interest and keep moving without much of a thought.

Often harm comes more one at a time with little fanfare. Jehovah’s Witnesses are proud of how many of their children have died due to a lack of a needed blood transfusion which they teach God opposes. These children died one at a time, here and there, with little or no public notice. Any family members who tried to oppose this to save the child are cut off.

Another group, Christian Science Continue reading …

The news has been filled to brimming with fodder for blogs the last couple of weeks. Conservatives went into a feeding frenzy with the declaration by Barack Obama: If You’ve Got A Business, You Didn’t Build That . His claim isn’t surprising in light of his overall worldview but to have it so clearly expressed in the political season was a bit jarring so some. The left is rushing to defend the idea that that we are products of our culture, surroundings and upbringing and therefore are only successful because of everyone else and all that went before us.

In the early morning hours of the 20th, as I was driving though California, the breaking news took over XM airwaves Continue reading …

Last week Jonathan in “Whitney Houston’s Missing Will” looked at biolologist Jerry A Coyne’s view that we do not have a will. Coyne is a physicalist (we are simply a physical being) and contends that what anything we view as decisions or actions we may take are essentially preprogrammed into our genes. We don’t have a “will” and any “choices” we make are predetermined, which essentially makes us victims. We may have thought we wanted to do something different but have to ability to act differently than we do. Physicalism is not the only view that holds we are little more than victims in a culture of victims who cannot act differently than we do because we are controlled by something other than our will. Two other areas with a similar view, although the basis is different, are psychology and some segments of the church. I have no doubt that some will react strongly to what I have to say but that doesn’t mean that the following is any less true. Even as I typed this I was reminded of an incident some years ago when I was a pastor of a small church. Joy and I wrote a weekly article for the area newspaper and one of those articles was about what we called the “cry-baby boomer” generation. After if was printed a message was left on the church phone from a disgruntled reader. (By the way, has anyone met a “gruntled” reader?). She began by saying she didn’t know how old we were but why do we always pick on her generation? Joy and I chuckled that the caller was proving our point by seeing herself as the victim of the article. When I called and we talked about it she too saw the irony and was able to laugh at herself as well. But I digress. Continue reading …

Steven Tyler weighing in on the Whitney Houston tragedy said, “I hate this disease.” It seems just about every celebrity is commenting on the causes of Whitney’s downward spiral even though we won’t know the toxicology results for some time. This tells me that Whitney’s drug abuse and alcoholism have been on the mind of the A list for along time. Of course, the entertainment media have been warning of this for a while with blurry pictures of Whitney disheveled and drunk plastered up for all of us to compassionately leer at and feel better about ourselves. What I find curiously missing is any sense of responsibility. Tyler talks of her demons, conjuring up the image of some malevolent force that is responsible for her addiction. Pundits speak of the burdens and pressures of fame.  Actress and yogurt spokesperson, Jamie Lee Curtis says fame has nothing to do with it. Its a disease:

Don’t let another famous person die, participate in the media spectacle, the tearful, heartfelt farewells and the blame it on the fame game and not take it into your home and circle of life that surrounds you in your own life. It is not fame’s fault. It is no one’s fault. Do you blame cancer on fame? Do you blame diabetes on fame? It is a disease and like cancer, diabetes and depression, it is everywhere. Alcoholism and addiction is ever present and it wants you dead.

Alcoholism wants you dead. Whitney had her demons and they wanted her dead. What’s missing from these heartfelt sentiments and pleas for awareness? Whitney’s will is missing. Everything is articulated in terms of what the disease will do to you. I’m not sure that is what Tyler, Curtis, and others intend. But it is coming across that way and frankly it doesn’t surprise me. Just this January, USA Today ran a column by biologist Jerry A Coyne entitled “Why You Don’t Have a Free Will” Continue reading …

The story is told of football couch, Vince Lombardi’s exasperation with the team he had taken over, the Green Bay Packers and their seeming inability to turn around their 10 year losing streak. It is said that he called the team together and began with the following words, or something very similar:

This is a football. These are the yard markers. I’m the coach. You are the players

This all seems too basic that even reading it makes it sound silly and yet, sometimes the simple is deeply profound. When we lose sight of the basics, the core things, we are apt to wander off in ways that cause us great trouble. This happens to us as individuals, as teams, as corporations, as churches and even as nations. What are the basics define and direct who we are and what we are doing? As a nation the United States has as its founding document, something we might look at as the national birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence which begins with these words: Continue reading …

In 1975 a second movement was born with the founding of Willow Creek Community Church in the suburbs of Chicago. The founding pastor, Bill Hybels, had been strongly influenced in his thinking, which gave birth to WCCC by two individuals. The first, Gilbert Bilezikian, a professor at Trinity College in Deerfield, IL, where he taught for two years, (1972-74) before moving to Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL. Bilezikian was dissatisfied with the current protectionist state of the church.

Bilezikian recalls two aspects of his teaching about the church that were particularly influential on Hybels:

He resonated with the concept of the church as community – rather than as an institution or organization – as body, as community, as organism.

And then the second thing was the mission of the church, not to be just self-sustaining, or self-perpetuating, but to reach weekly into society and claim it for Christ.(1)

Bilezikian and his young protégé, Bill Hybels, recognized that the church had largely walled itself off from the culture around it. As a result it had marginalized itself and in so doing was perceived as having nothing to offer and therefore was simply boring and irrelevant to life.

The second major influence was a very well known and highly successful pastor in California by the name of Robert Schuller. Continue reading …