My Interview With Jonathan Acuff For Stuff Christians Like

Some of you know I work for christianaudio, and, among other duties, I sometimes conduct downloadable audio interviews with authors for their newly released books. I recently spoke with blogger and newly published author Jonathan Acuff:

In this edition of Author Sketches we talk to author and blogger Jonathan Acuff, whose new book Stuff Christians Like and blog of the same name (stuffchristianslike.net) tackle thorny and sensitive faith issue with humor and humility. We talked with Jonathan about the book, how he started blogging, and how he navigates the difficult tension between satire and mockery with an attitude of self-deprecation and respect for the very faith he’s often critiquing.

You can download the interview by clicking here. It’s free, but you do have to register with christianaudio.com.

Technorati Tags: Author Interviews, christianaudio, Jonathan Acuff, Stuff Christians Like

What Book Should I Blog Through in April?

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Books, Christianity, Polls

My Interview With Frank Viola for From Eternity To Here

(This is a re-posting of an interview I did last year for audiobook publisher christianaudio. I’ve been working for christianaudio for the past year in a variety of roles, one of which is to conduct author interviews. The interviews are absolutely free to download – although free registration is required.)

Last week I was fortunate enough the chat with author and organic church leader Frank Viola. As you know he’s written some provocative titles recently, including Pagan Christianity and Reimagining Church. His most recent book is From Eternity to Here. Frank talked with me about his motive for writing the book and how he came to see God’s eternal purpose for the church differently. I think you’ll enjoy hearing from him.

Go to the interview download page by clicking here.

Technorati Tags: audiobooks, christianaudio, Christianity, Frank Viola, From Eternity To Here

One MIllion Arrows Encourages Christian Parents to Take Discipleship Seriously

Recently I was fortunate to receive a copy of the book One Million Arrows, by Julie Ferwerda, for review. It is well-written and surprisingly packed for 156 pages. She does an excellent job of combining illustrative narrative with relevant information, and manages to tell her stories with uncanny authenticity and passion. Her illustrations aren’t just overworked sentimental nods to the narrative-oriented reader; they’re personal experiences that comes across as compelling without being sappy. No small feat in the “Christian Living” category of publishing.

What I liked best was how Ferwerda cuts to the heart of the issue: are we as parents just walking our kids through life as usual, or are we raising them up to impact the world for the Kingdom? There’s an important quote on page 43 that punctuates the urgency of that question:

One concerned educator and youth ministry expert, Alvin Reid [...] shares his observation: “For the past three decades youth ministry…has exploded across America accompanied by a rise in the number of degrees in youth ministry granted by colleges and seminaries, and abundance of books and other resources, and a network of cottage industries devoted solely to youth ministry. Yet those same three decades have failed to produce a generation of young people who graduate from high school or leave youth groups ready to change the world for Christ.” Add to that Reid notes, that our churches are starting to show a startling decline of youth ministry effectiveness.”

Julie points out that when she was growing up it was the youth pastors job to educate Christian kids and lead them to have an impact on the world for the gospel. But now she realizes that this job is far bigger than local churches and fundamentally belongs to Christian parents.

I couldn’t agree more.

Christian parents must see themselves as their child’s spiritual teacher first and foremost, with the rest of the community of faith playing a supporting role (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Perhaps the best part of the book is that Ferwerda doesn’t allow it to descend into a simplistic formula for raising Christian kids. It’s full of excellent tips and contextual examples, but mostly drives home the message that parenting is a task of discipleship, and leaves the reader to freely work out how that might look in their own home.

I only have one minor concern: the tone is highly triumphalistic. Throughout, Ferwerda’s emphasis is on immersing your children in scripture, prayer, and what I would call a vision for missions, all as a means of ensuring your child’s commitment to the Kingdom. It might seem strange that as a pastor I would find this concerning, so let me explain.

As a minister for more than 15 years (10 as a youth pastor) I’ve observed that those households who were the most spiritually fervent tended to produce two kinds of kids: equally spiritually fervent or religiously rebellious – and more often the latter. In my opinion the reason for this was that many Christian parents take the scriptural admonition to “raise up a child in the way they should go” as a mandate to indoctrinate their children rather than disciple them, and in my experience most youth will, sooner or later, resist the process of indoctrination.

Nowhere in this book does Ferwerda recommend the simple-minded indoctrination of kids. However, neither is there any dialogue with how the typically-simplistic approach to bible-teaching common in Sunday school often leads those kids to an adolescent rejection of those very answers on the grounds that they simply don’t match up neatly with the actual experiences of life. Most youth go through a fatalistic “Ecclesiastes” phase, and it’s tempting to combat that with biblical certainty. Yet, what is needed most is to heed Solomon’s own advice – to not be too religious (Ecc 7:16) – and instead offer youth the freedom to question, explore, and even to be skeptical and fatalistic at times. Teenagers especially must be brought into an open and safe dialogue with the mystery and skeptical self-critique found in scripture, particularly through the alternative wisdom writings, the prophets, and, of course, Christ himself. When we gloss over the biting critique of these writings in an effort to counter the moody skepticism of adolescence, we rob youth of the raw honesty adolescence craves and invalidate their natural and necessary doubts.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems with the Evangelical Youth Ministry approach, and I worry that if parents read One Million Arrows that way, they’ll simply duplicate a kind of dishonest certainty in their home, and thereby suffer the same rate of failure as Modern Youth Ministry.

But to be fair, Ferwerda never denies any of this scriptural complexity, and addressing it isn’t her project. Her goal is to affirm the centrality of the home as the place of discipleship, and she does an excellent job with that task. She tends to express the faithful optimism characteristic of Evangelical faith, and those who aren’t Evangelical might find this a bit off-putting – which would be a shame because One Million Arrows brings an important perspective to a critical issue facing the American church at this very moment. I recommend it for any Christian parent looking to engage their kids intentionally with the gospel.

Technorati Tags: Books, Christianity, One Million Arrows, Parenting

Reading Blog: Knowing Christ Today, Chapter 8

(This is the 9th and final installment in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7)

Pastors as Teachers of the Nations

Of all the chapters in Willard’s latest book, this final one surprised me the most, starting with the seemingly outrageous title, “Pastors as Teachers of the Nations.” Isn’t that arrogant? Imperialistic, even, in a post-Colonial sort of way? Still, it is the logical conclusion of Willard’s line of thought regarding the central importance of spiritual knowledge in general and knowledge of Christ in particular:

“Who is to bring the knowledge that will answer the great life questions that perplex humanity? [...] The primary responsibility to teach falls upon those who self-identify as spokespeople for Christ and who perhaps have some leadership position or role in Christian organizations.”

He makes it clear that he is not speaking exclusively to those who hold official leadership positions, but he is speaking especially to them and in so doing he addresses Jesus great comission to”make disciples of all nations,” and says something perhaps challenging to us pastors:

Above all, perhaps, we must not think of the task as making adherents to a particular brand of Christianity now current. If we do, we will then lose the cosmic viewpoint and see the task only in terms of religious organizations and political realities. Jesus, however, did not send people out to make Christians or start churches as we understand them today. He set them to make disciples (students, apprentices) to him and, supported by his presence, to teach them all that he had taught by word and deed. That is a very different enterprise!

Here Willard stresses, again, the central importance of genuine knowledge for teachers of any kind, but particularly Christian teachers. It is not enough to know about Christ, or scripture, or theology proper. Our task is to know Christ and make him available by that knowledge to others. This, of course, means that we must actually be people who possess such knowledge of Christ and be able to demonstrate it; and this leads to another challenging point – Willard says we should ask for and expect no priviledge accoriding to title, but rather be ready to demonstrate the truth of the knowledge we profess:

True spokespeople for Christ need no special advantage and seek none. It is one again – but now on the worldwide stage that comes with “globalization” – a question of the God who answers “by fire” (1 Kings 18:24).

Are pastors really ready and willing to be tested in that way? Being willing to have one’s knowledge tested and demonstrated as true in real life speaks to a level of confidence we don’t often see in Christian leadership. Instead, what we tend to see is endless defensive bickering and accusations aimed at belittling the competing dogmatic thoughts of others (usually other Christians). Entire ministries and churches are now built on that foundation. Willard has something to say about that as well:

It is not knowledge, but nervous uncertainty, that makes people dogmatic, close-minded, and hostile – which spokespeople for Christ must never be. Paul wisely said to his young pastor friend, Timothy” “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth” (2 Tim 2:24-25).

Of course, because we live in a time when all religious thought – and the status of Christian leaders along with it – has been relegated to the scrap heap of mere opinion, pastors will have to repeatedly, and under tremendous external opposition, present the basic tenets of Christianity as knowledge and be ready to defend and demonstrate it. This is largely not the case today, where pastors as seen as teachers of what Christians are supposed to believe, not of what is known and can be known as true by anyone through fair inquiry.

Finally, all this discipleship is an activity that happens not in the church, but in the world – for that is where people live their lives and that is where God is at work. Raising people up to serve in the church is ultimately a dead-end. “Discipleship is for the sake of the world, not for the sake of the church.” Willard ends the Chapter and the book with this exhortation and encouragement:

The most important thing that is happening in your community is what is happening there under the administration of true pastors for Christ. If you, as a pastor, do not believe that, then you do not understand the dignity of what you are supposed to be doing. Whatever your situation, there is nothing more important on earth than to dwell in the knowledge of Christ and to bring that knowledge to others.

Questions:

1. What’s your reaction to Willard’s claim that pastors are to be the “teachers of the nations?”
2. How do you feel about the idea that our claims of knowledge about Christ must be testable and provable as true?
3. What other thought or questions are you left with as we finish this book series?

Technorati Tags: Books, Christianity, Dallas Willard, Jesus Christ, Knowing Christ Today, Pastors

Interview With Joe Boyd, Author of Between Two Kingdoms

Last week I reviewed Joe Boyd’s new book, Between Two Kingdoms, was released today. It’s an allegorical work of fantasy aimed conveying the message of the Kingdom of God for kids and adults. I definitely recommend it. Here’s a quick interview with Joe, talking a little about his story and the premise of the book.

Technorati Tags: Between Two Kingdoms, Books, Christianity, Joe Boyd

Reading Blog: Knowing Christ Today, Chapter 7

(This is part 8 in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6)

Knowledge of Christ and Christian Pluralism

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

How can a Christian claim knowledge of Christ in a pluralistic society, where there is an increasingly hostile posture toward any religious claims to exclusive truth?

First, it simply cannot be avoided that knowledge inherently excludes by nature because, again, knowledge cannot avoid being about what is true – a state which, by necessity excludes all contradictions. If the car is out of gasoline, then declaring it so is true, a fact that logically excludes other statements such as “The car has gasoline” and “the car is not out of gasoline.” Such knowledge cannot be avoided in real life (in fact, we couldn’t survive without it), and any discipline that seeks to avoid the trueness of genuine knowledge relegates itself to the realm of the absurd, irrelevant, and possibly even the dangerous (untruth in medicine and rock climbing, for example, can get you killed). There is no plausibility for a pluralism that either denies truth or claims truth for every proposition.

However, Willard states there is an important sense in which a certain kind of pluralism is vitally important and it begins with the humble acknowledgment that even if we are convinced we are right we know we are not infallible. This is nothing less than the Christian ideal of loving one’s neighbor:

“This distinctively Christian imperative is precisely based on the knowledge of God, Christ, and right and wrong that we claim as Christ followers. It concerns respect for the sincere efforts of human beings to do what they believe to be good and right.”

Willard spends some time exploring the difference between what he calls “weak pluralism,” the position that all religions may hold some reflection of the truth about God, and “strong pluralism,” which insists that that there are no real differences at all between religions. He says there is no reason for a Christian to reject the former, but that no serious thinking person could hold to the latter. A cursory examination of the major religions reveals there are too many contradictions between the faiths. More often than not, strong pluralism is simply a veneer for polite agnosticism.

Is Christ Exclusive?
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father but by me” (John 14:6). What does this mean? Willard points out the obvious dilemma: If no person can be accepted by God without personal knowledge of the historical Jesus then billions of people are denied access to God by simply being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

However, Willard maintains that Christ’s words about himself as the exclusive way were not a reference to himself in the historical sense, but in the cosmic sense, that is, himself as the Logos, the eternal Word of God. This, he says, is demonstrated by the fact that in that very moment, even though the disciples knew the historical Jesus of Nazareth personally, they still did not know him as Christ (John 14:7-9). In other words, it’s not the historical Jesus of Nazareth that is “the way,” rather, it is the eternal person of Christ (which, of course, certainly includes the incarnate Jesus). This Christ, says Willard, is always “the way” to the Father, even if it is without knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth:

“Where there really is a way to God, where there really is truth about God, where there is genuine life of God, Christ is there.”

What Willard is saying here, very simply, is that anyone, anywhere, at any time can have a limited measure of true knowledge about God, and even respond in faith to the saving grace of God, without ever hearing about the historical Jesus, and that whenever this happens it is always via “the way” of grace made exclusively by Christ.

Perhaps more shocking to some, Willard is careful to say this is not the gospel (no surprise to those who have read Willard’s previous works). A minimum cosmic acceptance by God (the “ticket to heaven” form of salvation) is not the good news. Indeed, Willard says it is not very good news anyway, since we’re still left here on earth to deal with the horrors and injustices of life. Rather, the gospel is that the Kingdom of God is readily available now to those who will become disciples of Christ, and that gospel does require knowledge of the historical Jesus and his teachings for it is only by following his teachings that we can be apprenticed into an eternal kind of life that partners with the Kingdom rhythms of God by the Holy Spirit and overcome to the evils of this world.

Questions:

1. What has been your position on the exclusive nature of Christ? Has it changed over time?
2. What are your thoughts on Dallas Willard’s separation of the gospel of the Kingdom from the possibility of God’s acceptance of us? Is this the first time you’ve heard of an “inclusive” view? If not, where else have you heard it?

Technorati Tags: Books, Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today

Fiction Friday: Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

“Hardly a pure science is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal differences between the hubandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.”

Long before Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code there was Tom Robbins and a mummified Jesus on display in Another Roadside Attraction. Robbins writes in a rambling and wildly fragmented fashion, telling his fantastically conceived stories in an almost mythical style reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges. Though Robbins lacks the imagination of Borges, he does share the Argentinian’s gift for erecting curious outposts of cultural self-awareness. Throughout Another Roadside Attraction the reader feels less like a companion of the characters (like most fiction) and more like an anthropologist, peeking into the field notes of a colleague who has discovered a bizarre and deliciously intriguing foreign culture.

That culture turns out to be our own.

Our main characters are an unlikely collection of pluralistic creatures: a magician/artist/musician, a an earthy pagan princess, the specter of Modernity bearing the name “Marx,” and a martial arts expert disguised as an assassin-monk who wandered the catacombs of the Vatican only to discover the mummified secret at the heart of the world’s most powerful religion. Though Robbins skewers Christianity in this story, it would be a mistake to read this novel as merely an attack on that faith. Robbins project is more ambitious – Jesus just proves to be the fattest sacred cow in what he considers to be history’s husbanded barn of “bullshit.” Ultimately, all of it must get shoveled out. Robbins reflects, in his disjointed prose, a postmodern prejudice toward the wild complexity of life and the futility of linear narratives. The pervasive – yet somehow funny and lighthearted – skepticism toward authoritative meta-narratives lie at the heart of Robbin’s novel; he simply doesn’t believe the power-claims of history anymore. Jesus may be the most conspicuous casualty, but he’s not the only one.

Robbins wants us to question history as well. Are magical thunderstorms, assassin-monks, and a mummified Jesus in the catacombs of the Vatican any more implausible than Manifest Destiny, Western Cultural hegemony, and the story of Jesus’ resurrection? Robbin’s would have us see that compared to Western history, Another Roadside Attraction is possibly the saner narrative, or, at least, no more the husbanded product of cross-pollinated scat than history itself. Because he writes with more art and honesty than Dan Brown, his critique – though ultimately adolescent – comes across as more damaging.

Yet Robbins has tossed out too much. He shovels out possibility of a truth with any purchase on people, and thereby tosses out the very concept of history itself. Without history there is no heritage, no sense of self via the communal connections of a shared identity. Without history there is no ethnicity, either inborn or adopted; there is no culture or conversion, only the wildly individualized consumption of personally invented identity. There are no convincing alternatives teased out in the relationships and philosophies that are always clever but never authentic, always wry and witty, but never satisfying. He seeks to “enrich” the future through the selective breeding of fictionalized historical alternatives, but ends up bankrupting our future by looting our past.

Technorati Tags: Another Roadside Attraction, Books, Fiction, Tom Robbins

Reading Blog: Knowing Christ Today, Chapter 6

(This is part 7 in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5)

Knowledge of Christ in the Spiritual Life

Those who really do know Christ in the Modern world do so by seeking and entering the Kingdom of God. Everything else we have discussed here is meant to lead up to that.

Hence, in Chapter 6 it is Dallas Willard’s desire, above all else, to convince us that Christ is a living person, contemporary with each of us, and available to each of us in an interactive relationship amid the daily activities of one’s life. This is what it means to know Christ: to potentially have a real and dynamic sense of personal connection and communication with Him at any and every moment.

The reason so many people don’t have this knowledge – this actual connection – with Christ is because, fundamentally, they don’t believe it is possible. The cultural climate of Modernity and it’s Enlightenment prejudices have convinced many people that true, reliable knowledge of God (much less Christ) is not really possible.

But much of Christ’s work on earth was to inaugurate the present availability of this real spiritual interaction with God and His Kingdom. This is critically important because knowledge about a thing/person is not knowledge of a thing/person. One of the very important thing Jesus does in the gospels is demonstrate that fact, and immerse (or baptize) his disciples into that God-bathed reality. This kind of first-hand interaction with Gos is our source of knowledge of God by Christ and through the Holy Spirit.

In this Chapter Willard spends some time interacting with ways in which Christ can be said to have been demonstrably “present” in Modern society. There is a nice discussion of how Christ breaks through all barriers, including those of science, religion, and culture, and some interesting engagement with modern writers who have come to independent conclusions regarding the uniqueness of Christ.

There is also some brief interaction with Willard’s understanding of the role of the classic spiritual discipline for learning to come into regular contact with Christ. If you’re familiar with Willard’s writing at all, there’s nothing new here. If you’re not, you would be well served to read The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines.

Willard also spends some time addressing what some have called the “new atheism.” This is a helpful portion of the book, mostly because Willard affirms that Christians have much to learn from the arguments of atheists. The fact that Christ breaks through as a person in the persons and structures of our society doesn’t mean that those who proclaim him are correct in their beliefs, ideas, and assumptions. Willard does not see them as a threat, mostly because these people “do not long for there to be a biblical type of God or to be a part of His life.” Hence, they are predisposed to miss God (there will be no “seeking and entering”) and there is no sincere engagement with those who practice genuine spiritual lives.

(Two asides: 1. I don’t agree with Willard on this last point. Some of the atheists I’ve encountered are atheists, in my estimation, precisely because they do long for what God supposedly stands for – such as righteousness, peace, and justice – but they cannot reliably find that God in the world around them, and 2) It occurred to me that there are many self-proclaimed Christians who, apparently, “do not long for there to be a biblical type of God” either. Indeed, a few go to great lengths to explain away that God and replace him with a God more suitable to their liking. Some, in their own way, have even embraced the term “atheist” or stated flatly that they’d prefer atheism to the God of the Bible.)

Unlike most contemporary Christian authors (conservative or liberal) Willard makes a rather interesting and unique claim: Christians must demonstrate a verifiable form of spiritual knowledge. I think this assertion is one of the boldest claims of the book, and in this chapter he states that those who genuinely come to know Christ will:

• Discover remarkable changes in their beliefs, fundamental attitudes, and emotional conditions. For most, if not all, this will come as a surprise, one which they will most likely readily “confess” or “own up to” (One gets the sense Willard has been reading Roland Allen).
• Receive communications from God. Willard is careful to state that most will come from the Bible, and that all such communications from God will be in harmony with scripture, but he is clear that God will speak in a multitude of ways, persons, and circumstances that will – and this is key – “be testable against the realities of life and the insights of others.” Willard is trying to subvert an understanding of faith that necessarily pits it against other forms of knowledge, including science, traditions, classical wisdom, and common sense. He really does think that many people’s faith has been debilitated because their understanding of faith contradicts everything they know to be true about life.
• Discover the reality of the “light burden” and the “easy yoke.” This is closely related to the second point above. What Willard is getting at here is that Christians who know Christ will discover that their burdens are being significantly lightened by some other agent, assisting them and carrying them along. Christ is “acting with them.”

Questions

1. What do you think of Willard’s characterization of knowledge of Christ as being personal and intimate?
2. What do you think of his assertion that our knowledge of Christ must be “verifiable?”
3. What are your thoughts on the idea of “communication” from God outside scripture as a normative form of life?

Technorati Tags: Books, Christianity, Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today

Joe Boyd Explores Childlike Faith in Between Two Kingdoms

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
—G. K. Chesterton

And so, Joe Boyd’s fairytale, Between Two Kingdoms, begins with the words of Chesterton, promising, by proxy, an adventure of truth, danger, and perhaps even a dragon waiting to be vanquished. What follows is a delightful tale of childhood faith, broken people restored, and, yes, a dragon of sorts, set within an imaginary realm that somehow contains two very different kingdoms.

Joe Boyd has been on quite the adventure himself over the past thirteen years. During that time he helped to plant a large “church-within-a-church” in Las Vegas in 1997, then transition that into APEX, a decentralized house church network in 2000 (Joe’s story was recounted in the 2005 book Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger). Boyd is now the Teaching Pastor at the Cincinnati Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and working to integrate his passions for the Kingdom in a new city.

One of those passions is creative expression (Boyd is also a professional actor), and Between Two Kingdoms is his take on a Kingdom of God fantasy, complete with a King, good and evil Princes, a magical doorway between two realms, and an atmosphere of both innocence and tragedy. Throughout the tale, we follow our reluctant hero, Tommy, as he endeavors to follow his hero the Prince of the Upper Kingdom. Together they seek to rescue wayward subjects in the Lower Kingdom. Along the way we discover a little something about what it means to to have faith, be a friend, recognize true danger, and, perhaps most importantly remember what needs remembering and forget what we need never hold on to.

There is much more in this densely packed fable. There are swords, rescue missions, perilous confrontations and mysterious creatures. And, as you might suspect, Between Two Kingdoms is, more than anything, a re-telling of the redemption story. However, Boyd manages to work in some surprises through his deceptively simple characters; surprises that may reveal more about ourselves and what we truly believe than we realize going into it. And that, of course, is what good fiction is really all about – telling the truth. Overall, Between Two Kingdoms is a delightful read, perfect for sharing with children who love fantasy, or adults who haven’t forgotten what it means to be children.

Technorati Tags: Between Two Kingdoms, Books, Christianity, Fiction, Joe Boyd