Rick Warren – Renovate

“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.

“God’s Purpose in Your Pain: What good could suffering possibly serve? A pastor reflects on what he has learned from losing a son to suicide.” – Rick Warren in Plough: “Because we live in a world broken by sin, life is painful. Almost everyone is living with some kind of pain. The type varies – it may be physical, relational, mental, emotional, financial, social, or spiritual – but it all hurts. Pain is inevitable; none of us is able to opt out of it. As a minister for fifty years, I’ve spent my life helping people in pain, and I’ve never had to look far to find it. To cope with this reality, we desensitize ourselves and detach ourselves from others who are suffering. One of the great challenges in my ministry has been to stay sensitive while witnessing so much distress. One way God has kept me empathetic toward others’ pain has been by giving me what the apostle Paul calls “a thorn in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7). I’ve lived with chronic pain for most of my adult life. As I was writing this article, I had to pause for my fifth hospitalization in a year. So what I’m sharing with you is not just theory, but truths learned through pain that have enabled me to carry on in spite of it. I’ve learned that pain should not be wasted, but used for God’s purposes. Scripture is clear that following Christ doesn’t exempt us from suffering. Instead we’re told to expect it (1 Pet. 4:12, John 16:33) and to consider suffering for Christ a privilege (Phil. 1:29). Peter says, ‘Those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good’ (1 Pet. 4:19). Submitting to God’s will does not protect you from suffering. In fact, sometimes doing the right thing creates pain.”

“Nick Cave: my son’s death brought me back to church” – Rowan Williams interviews Nick Cave in The Sunday Times: :”Meeting Nick Cave in the vestry of a church in central London — hard wooden chairs, miscellaneous cupboards and buckets, stacks of pale green teacups — is slightly surreal. Cave’s long and turbulent career as one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the past half century, a career marked by struggles with trauma, addiction and a reputation for inhabiting some extreme edges in human creativity, might not seem to lead very obviously to a place like this. But when he arrives — the familiar figure, tall, gaunt, pale, a dark suit and white shirt under a black overcoat — he shows no signs of disorientation. The Nick Cave who grew up in the Australian town of Wangaratta and sang as a choirboy in its Holy Trinity Cathedral, who has throughout his career startled his audiences with lyrics saturated with God and echoes of the Bible, is not exactly a stranger here. In his recent book of conversations with the music journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, he speaks with raw clarity about how his creative energy has been fed by the experience of agonising grief and loss. At the heart of this is the death of Arthur, his 15-year-old son, in 2015, after falling from a cliff edge near Brighton — one of many bereavements in his life. Heartbreakingly Cave has since lost another son, 31-year-old Jethro. All this has come to be bound up for him with the awareness of the holy. He has been drawn back to some sense of belonging within the battered, inarticulate and compromised community that is the Church. Asked by the publisher to share my thoughts on Faith, Hope and Carnage, I could say only that I could think of few books that had brought home more completely the way in which grief and creativity work together. The book also reveals the way in which faith, without ever giving a plain, comforting answer, offers resources to look at what is terrible without despair or evasion. Cave’s faith is not that of a man looking for shortcuts or consolations. At one point he speaks about the ‘spiritual audacity’ that he felt coming to birth in the wake of Arthur’s death — “a kind of reckless refusal to submit to the condition of the world”. That recklessness is what I want to hear more about as we meet.”

“Only eight churches remain open in Algeria” – Katey Hearth in Mission Network News: “A state-led campaign against Protestant churches continues in Algeria. Last month, believers told MNN that only ten churches remained open in the entire country. Today, ‘there are eight (churches) left open, but you never know for how long,’ says Youssef*, a Protestant leader partnering with Operation Mobilization USA. ‘[The remaining churches] have been visited by the authorities, and you never know what will happen tomorrow.’ A 2006 law set the tone for legal persecution. Then, ‘the plan started in 2018 to close down all the churches,’ Youssef says. The systematic church closures are part of a broader lockdown on individual freedoms. Last month, Algeria’s government shut down several civic groups. It also forced Algeria’s oldest independent human rights organization to close its doors. ‘This is the situation we’re in. It’s quite sensitive, delicate, and challenging,’ Youssef says. The small but growing indigenous Christian population – mainly converts from Islam and their children – stands firm. ‘The Church in Algeria will never disappear because the vast majority of the Christians are Berber [and] Kabyle,’ Youssef says.”

“Protestant bodies, Protestant bedrooms, & our furious need for a theology thereof” – Beth Felker Jones at Church Blogmatics: “Gentle reader, If you’ve read the article at The Gospel Coalition’s (TGC) website, you know the one I’m talking about. If you haven’t, no need to go looking for it; I’ll fill you in. The article is bad, and I’m going to say so. When something is false and damaging, calling it so isn’t meanness; it’s truth telling. Those teaching this theology are accountable for it. The editors at TGC, an organization that claims to champion the very gospel of Jesus Christ, are accountable. When someone tells lies about the good news of Jesus, it’s theology’s job to call out those lies. The truly bad article has not come to us out of nowhere; too many Christians are getting similar stuff from church leaders they trust. The article is a loud canary in the mine shaft, but there are a lot of quieter canaries down there too, and while we may be tempted to write this thing off as an over the top aberration, it isn’t. It fits all too well with teaching I hear from complementarian niches of the church, all the time. One friend tells me the rhetoric of the article is downright tame, compared to what she constantly heard growing up. This kind of theology is causing devastating damage for the people of God. Maybe the very bad article can be a wake-up call.“

“Is America suffering a ‘social recession’?” – Anton Cebalo in The Guardian: “Ever since a notorious chart showing that fewer people are having sex than ever before first made the rounds, there’s been increased interest in the state of America’s social health. Polling has demonstrated a marked decline in all spheres of social life, including close friendships, intimate relationships, trust, labor participation and community involvement. The continuing shift has been called the ‘friendship recession’ or the ‘social recession’ – and, although it will take years before this is clearly established, it was almost certainly worsened by the pandemic. The decline comes alongside a documented rise in mental illness, diseases of despair and poor health more generally. In August 2022, the CDC announced that US life expectancy had fallen to where it was in 1996. Contrast this to western Europe, where life expectancy has largely rebounded to pre-pandemic numbers. Even before the pandemic, the years 2015-2017 saw the longest sustained decline in US life expectancy since 1915-18, when the US was grappling with the 1918 flu and the first world war. The topic has directly or indirectly produced a whole genre of commentary from many different perspectives. Many of them touch on the fact that the internet is not being built with pro-social ends in mind. Increasingly monopolized across a few key entities, online life and its data have become the most sought-after commodity. The everyday person’s attention has thus become the scarcest resource to be extracted. Other perspectives, often on the left, stress economic precarity and the decline of public spaces as causes of our rising anomie.”

“Farminaries: From souls to stomachs, seminaries are looking to expand their reach”– Kendall Vanderslice in Christianity Today: “In the spring of 2014, Nate Stucky was nearly finished with his doctorate in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary when he was invited to the president’s office. He walked into the office to discover a property survey unrolled across the desk. ‘It turns out,’ President M. Craig Barnes said, ‘we own a farm.’ Throughout his time in seminary, Stucky had dreamed of teaching theology on a farm—or a ‘farminary,’ his colleagues joked. Intrigued by this vision, Barnes began to explore rumors that the seminary owned a nearby piece of empty property. The seminary purchased the plot in 2010 from a friend of the school, hoping that one day the property could somehow contribute to the mission. For four years, it remained nothing more than an asset on a spreadsheet. As Barnes later discovered, the 21-acre field was already zoned for agriculture, and Princeton’s Farminary Program was born. The Farminary is one of several seminary-based projects across the United States that are exploring the role of food in the formation of ministers, questioning how churches might better fulfill the call of Genesis 2 and John 21—to keep and till the earth and to feed Christ’s sheep.”

Music: Fernando Ortega, “Trisagion,” from Come Down, O Love Divine

Lutherpreaching-1536x649 “The International League of the Guilty” – Jason Micheli in Mockingbird: “There’s no ‘Peanuts Ash Wednesday Special.’ Nobody grew up watching a stop-motion Burl Ives saying, ‘Hey kid, you’re a sinner and you’re going to die.’ Ash Wednesday doesn’t get anyone like Kris Kringle or Krampus. Starbucks doesn’t unveil any sin-themed soy lattes for Ash Wednesday. Christmas has been commercialized and loaded down with sweet-sounding Law. Easter has been sentimentalized by bunnies and butterflies and metaphors of springtime renewal. The soot smeared on Ash Wednesday remains an unsullied message. There aren’t any Ash Wednesday office parties. There’s no marketing, no media, no movie tie-ins or product placements for Ash Wednesday. Nobody but Christians want anything do with talk about sin and death, which is a shame because, as allergic as our culture is to the ashes, what Christians do with them has more to do with love than any Nora Ephron movie. When you do away with the concept of sin, the category of shame is your only alternative. Without sin, what’s wrong with me is simply and only what’s wrong with me. Leaving sin behind is lonely-making. Without a concept of sin, there is no correlative category of grace and you’re left only with what St. Paul would call the crushing accusations of the law.”

230130_r41784 “What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention: Lessons from a centuries-long war against distraction” – Casey Cep in The New Yorker: “Who was the monkiest monk of them all? One candidate is Simeon Stylites, who lived alone atop a pillar near Aleppo for at least thirty-five years. Another is Macarius of Alexandria, who pursued his spiritual disciplines for twenty days straight without sleeping. He was perhaps outdone by Caluppa, who never stopped praying, even when snakes filled his cave, slithering under his feet and falling from the ceiling. And then there’s Pachomius, who not only managed to maintain his focus on God while living with other monks but also ignored the demons that paraded about his room like soldiers, rattled his walls like an earthquake, and then, in a last-ditch effort to distract him, turned into scantily clad women. Not that women were only distractions. They, too, could have formidable attention spans—like the virgin Sarah, who lived next to a river for sixty years without ever looking at it. These all-stars of attention are just a few of the monks who populate Jamie Kreiner’s new book, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Liveright). More specifically, they are the exceptions: most of their brethren, like most of us, were terrible at paying attention. All kinds of statistics depict our powers of concentration as depressingly withered, but, as Kreiner shows, medieval monasteries were filled with people who wanted to focus on God but couldn’t. Long before televisions or TikTok, smartphones or streaming services, paying attention was already devilishly difficult—literally so, in the case of these monks, since they associated distraction with the Devil.”

Asbury University revival “Opinion: What is Revival—and is it Happening at Asbury?” – Craig Keener at The Roys Report: “‘I thought you were praying for revival. What are you doing downstairs?’ With those words, my wife summoned me from my basement last Wednesday evening, where I was working on a very long book and neglecting what was happening on the campus of Asbury University. I teach at neighboring Asbury Seminary. And if you’ve following the news, you know that people have been streaming to the university—and now the seminary—to witness and experience what some are calling revival. After my wife’s prompting, she and I quickly headed to the back of Asbury’s Hughes Auditorium to pray. We found the worship service that started that morning had neither stopped nor declined. On Saturday, we found seats in the balcony. The university’s 1,489-seat auditorium was packed. On Sunday, the spirit of worship felt deeper, and I felt more aware of God’s awesome holiness. By Tuesday, Feb. 14, long lines waited outside the auditorium, where amplifiers allowed the music to be heard. When I finished my evening class at the seminary, the overflow crowds had filled the seminary’s Estes Chapel, which seats 660, its McKenna Chapel, which seats 375, and spilled over into the building shared by the local United Methodist and Vineyard churches. (I was informed that had already begun the preceding night.)” You may also enjoy watching Dr. Keener speak about this on YouTube here.

hymns “Write a New Hymn unto the Lord” – Benjamin Vincent in Christianity Today: “Anyone who has grown up in or around the church is likely familiar with ‘hymn stories’—the stories that surround the composition of some of our favorite songs of worship. How many times have you heard the life of Horatio Spafford recounted before singing ‘It Is Well with My Soul’? How often has the slave-trading past of John Newton been told to give rich reality to the sweet strains of ‘Amazing Grace’ (which is just over 250 years old!)? The same can be said for number of other famous hymn writers throughout Christian history. We love to tell hymn stories because they remind us that every hymn is a prayer and that every prayer begins from the real faith of a real man or woman seeking God. For the same reason, there has been a resurgence of interest in seeking God through various spiritual practices, especially in recent decades. Popular books like Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love have challenged believers to consider the role of disciplined, habit-forming practices in spiritual growth and development. As a young Christian myself, I have watched my peers pick up practices like journaling, lectio divina, and prayers of examen as they seek to consistently practice the presence of God. In the same way, I believe writing hymns should play a role in spiritual formation. And as I reflect on the role that hymn writing has played in my own life, I find that it has become a kind of spiritual practice—not merely an artistic enterprise but a simple and consistent way of responding to God.”

073a3a98-0731-4454-94fe-399a4b508f2b_1850x2389 “How I Quit Consumerism (and Rediscovered God)” – Strahan Coleman at Ecstatic: “I’ve been chronically sick for years, a decade actually, and something I’ve learned about the body is the way it remembers things long after we forget them consciously. Healing then, is about going back into our past to uncoil the damage done by different immune responses—or lack thereof—from the many little wars our bodies fight in a lifetime. This truth has a spiritual dimension, too. Once in a while, we arrive at a moment when the malfunctioning of our prayer lives and church communities finally become painfully apparent, and yet the damage doesn’t seem to be healed with the usual dose of herbal remedy or bandage. It’s a deeper kind of pain, and it can feel unnameable and untouchable. Sometimes, it can seem like a whole generation gets hit with the same symptoms at once, as the communal body breaks down under the weight of the undiagnosable pathogen within it. I know I’m not alone in wondering if we’re in a moment like that right now. But what’s the underlying disease? Or at least the source of infection? For me, I had the stark experience of a God-interruption some years ago now that helped me to name the disease for myself.”

1000 “Southern Baptists oust Saddleback Church over woman pastor” – Peter Smith at APNews: “The Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday ousted its second-largest congregation — Saddleback Church, the renowned California megachurch founded by pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren — for having a woman pastor. The vote by the convention’s Executive Committee culminates growing tension between the nation’s largest Protestant denomination — which officially opposes women as pastors — and a congregation whose story has been one of the biggest church-growth successes of modern times. The committee cited Saddleback’s having ‘a female teaching pastor functioning in the office of pastor,’ an allusion to Stacie Wood, wife of the current lead pastor of Saddleback, Andy Wood. But the controversy began in 2021, when Warren ordained three women as pastors, prompting discussions within the denomination about possibly expelling the megachurch. Warren retired last year after more than 42 years at Saddleback. He made an emotional speech in June 2022 at the Southern Baptists’ annual convention in Anaheim, standing by his ordination of women. He told delegates who debated the issue, ‘We have to decide if we will treat each other as allies or adversaries.'”