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 …

With all this talk about Capitalists and outsourcing and whatnot, I wanted to use this blog post to talk about the craziest business person I know: my friend Andy. Andy is a contractor who specializes in high end and historic restorations. He looks like a blonde cleft-jawed super hero and at one point he was doing over a million dollars a year in renovations. Until he decided to engage in the craziest business model ever. Andy decided his business was a ministry. Originally he wanted the business to fund a ministry but God had other plans and slowly Andy’s business got devoured by Andy’s ministry. How crazy is this business model? Andy gets most of his workers from either a homeless shelter or the half-way house where he attends regular bible studies. Currently he has 5 workers who are recovering alcohol and drug addicts. He has them working on roofs, putting up quarter-of-a-million dollar homes, and they pray together every morning before he entrusts them with power tools in someone’s home.

Continue reading …

One of the underlying themes behind the healthcare debate is the question, “Should Adults be Trusted to Make Adult Decision?” Should an adult be allowed to decide they do not want to purchase health insurance? Perhaps they are part of health care sharing though an organization like Samaritan Ministries. Others may not want any provision for potential medical expenses for a variety of reasons. Liberals, in love with the nanny state concept do not really want to allow for adults to make decisions about their lives. After all, they may make the wrong decision and put themselves at risk.

Some of folks plagued with the problem of independent thinking rail against Federal control of their lives with policies like this. However, the liberal press and liberal/progressive politicians view the Federal Government as all knowing and all caring and have full time bureaucrats who know what is best for each individual. Avoid independent thinking for questioning their authority is rebellion and those who do so will likely be punished.

Many in the conservative camp are fighting against this kind of government intrusion into the lives of citizens but, as is so often the case, there is also a blind spot on the part of at least some conservatives in areas of their teachings.

Continue reading …

Wandering Stars, Contending For the Faith With the New Apostles and Prophets, by Keith Gibson, Solid Ground Christian Books, Birmingham, Alabama, paperback, 306 pages, 2011, $25 (Note: This book can be purchased from our friends at Personal Freedom Outreach by calling 314/921-9800)

Author Keith Gibson has produced a book on the history, heresies and aberrations of the New Apostolic and Prophetic Movement. In it he takes on every one of their claims. It is comprehensive and meticulously documented. Gibson has researched an incredible amount of material and information from first sources and from the writings and public statements of these heretical teachers themselves. It is interesting to see their own words condemn them. What Gibson exposes is a group of false teachers who are presenting an imaginary and fictitious portrait of God, Christ, the Gospel and the Christian life and who wind up in the end with a diminished God, and a diminished Bible. In doing so they work hard to exalt themselves and themselves alone.

Continue reading …

I know, some will gasp in abject horror and even cry out while tearing their clothes, “Why do you hate the poor?” This is an emotionally charged issue to be sure but MCOI has never really shied away from controversy. Although I am not suggesting we forsake the poor I am suggesting we follow the arguments used for abandoning the war on drugs to answer whether we should continue the War on Poverty. Consistency in political social policy is as important as consistency in an individual’s life. The parameters are fairly simple and I think Sting did as good of a job as any in his March 2010 piece, Let’s End the War on Drugs. He argues that is has been, “…the most unsuccessful, unjust yet untouchable issue in politics…” While it may not be the “most” unsuccessful” it has been pretty unsuccessful and it is for the most part “untouchable,” politically at least. What are the criteria Sting used to demonstrate his point?

Continue reading …

Over 20 years ago when Joy and I taught on homosexuality we suggested that in our opinion pedophiles would follow the road map which homosexual activists were developing as the path to “normalizing” and main streaming homosexual behavior. In the early 1990s at one of the MCOI conferences we did a panel Q&A. One of the questions raised was where did we see culture heading? Joy submitted that we but look back 20-25 years and note homosexuality wasn’t mentioned in polite society but was becoming normalized in the 1990s. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t homosexuals and there were even some very famous ones like entertainer, Liberace. Sexual activity of any kind simply hadn’t been the stuff of polite conversation in the past. She suggested

Continue reading …

In two previous blog posts I examined the Christian engagement with the post-Christian culture. Those posts implied that the dominant paradigm of Evangelicals preserving our culture by “Taking back America” is wrong-headed. It is wrong-headed because it denies the moral strangeness that exists between Christianity and Secularism. In the next post I opined that the Christian efforts to preserve traditional marriage will fail. I was pretty pessimistic.

My prediction is that gay marriage is an inevitability. Eventually there will be a federal law.  I predict that same-sex couples will not settle for tolerance and being left alone with their right to marry. Instead many will demand non-discrimination from religious organizations. They will insist that churches rent out their fellowship halls to same-sex weddings if they are going to do weddings for any hetero-sexual couples and will sue if they are denied. . . To be clear I don’t think there is any amount of voting or lobbying or grass roots efforts that will change this.

Christians need to shift from the dominant paradigm to something else. In this last post I want to propose what that “something else” might be. As always these ideas are mine alone and do not necessarily represent Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc.

Rodney Clapp the author and former editor of Christianity Today says that in the dominant paradigm of engagement with culture the Church sees itself as the  “Sponsoring Chaplain” of society.

Continue reading …