Tag: SBC

The Weekend Wanderer: 25 February 2023

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“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.

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.'”

Music: Zach Miller, “Chain Breaker“

The Weekend Wanderer: 28 May 2022

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of 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.

SBC“This Is the Southern Baptist Apocalypse” – Russell Moore in Christianity Today: “They were right. I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) a crisis. Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse. Someone asked me a few weeks ago what I expected from the third-party investigation into the handling of sexual abuse by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee. I said I didn’t expect to be surprised at all. How could I be? I lived through years with that entity. I was the one who called for such an investigation in the first place. And yet, as I read the report, I found that I could not swipe the screen to the next page because my hands were shaking with rage. That’s because, as dark a view as I had of the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.”

_124912301_optimised_guns_per_country-nc“America’s gun culture – in seven charts” – From The BBC: “A school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, involving young children has reignited the national US debate about access to firearms. What does the data tell us about gun culture and its impact? Firearms deaths are a fixture in American life. There were 1.5 million of them between 1968 and 2017 – that’s higher than the number of soldiers killed in every US conflict since the American War for Independence in 1775. In 2020 alone, more than 45,000 Americans died at the end of a barrel of a gun, whether by homicide or suicide, more than any other year on record. The figure represents a 25% increase from five years prior, and a 43% increase from 2010. But the issue is a highly political one, pitting gun control advocates against sectors of the population fiercely protective of their constitutionally-enshrined right to bear arms.” 

tree roots“Expect the End of the World” – Joy Clarkson interviews Paul Kingsnorth in Plough: “I didn’t expect to become a Christian. I didn’t want to become a Christian. I wrote an essay about that earlier in the year. It sort of crept up on me. I was doing sort of paganish things. I’ve always wanted to connect with the divine, whatever that quite meant. And I’ve always been looking for ways to do that through Buddhism or paganism. And if you’re a modern Western person, you look everywhere except Christianity because you just assume that that’s got nothing to do with you. I do think a lot of modern Western rebellion is a rebellion against Christianity disguised as something else. We’re in rebellion against our ancestral faith. But the story of Christianity is the story of rebellion against God. So the more we rebel against it, the more we’re replaying the story by accident. I ended up becoming an Eastern Orthodox Christian. There’s a great mysticism at the heart of that version of Christianity. There’s an emphasis on God, on the divine being immanent as well as transcendent.”

Ascension“Why Christ’s Ascension is Essential” – Matthew Burden in Christianity Today: “For a long time, I never really understood the Ascension. To me, the disciples’ question in Acts 1:6 seemed eminently reasonable. Why did Jesus have to go? Why not just usher in the fullness of the kingdom then and there, and start wrapping the whole thing up? Wouldn’t it be a great asset to our labors in missions and apologetics to have Jesus still around? As it stands, the Ascension plays right into the skeptic’s darkest doubts about the gospel narrative. How convenient that the supposedly risen Messiah should vanish without showing himself to anyone other than his friends and family! The Bible, however, stubbornly refuses to agree with my sensibilities. Far from treating the Ascension as a weird stage exit whose main function is to explain why Jesus isn’t around anymore, Scripture speaks of it as a necessary part of God’s plan. Not only is it necessary, but the disciples even refer to it as a primary proof of Jesus’ messianic identity. Rather than trying to explain away his absence, they tout it with vigor. The Ascension stands on equal footing with the Crucifixion and Resurrection in the earliest declarations of the gospel (Acts 2:33–36; 3:18–21; 5:30–31).”

5baa8e34-1b9c-4f51-b054-7e5c054b8e3e-Afghan_10468“They fought for education in Afghanistan. Now in Milwaukee, these 9 young women hope to achieve the dreams they nearly lost” – So glad our church can be part of this effort in Milwaukee. Sophie Carson writes about it in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “The streets of Kabul were like a scene from a zombie movie. One young Afghan woman had never seen her city like this: deserted and eerily silent, not a soul daring to venture outside. Last August, the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan’s capital city, and this woman — who asked that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel refer to her only by her last name, Panahi — was carrying out a dangerous errand. School representatives for a women’s university in Bangladesh had asked Panahi, a recent graduate, to retrieve nearly 150 students’ passports from a government office where they’d been sent for visa processing. Documents were being systematically destroyed around the city, and school leaders knew the students likely would be trapped in Afghanistan without their passports. The trip to the visa office was extraordinarily risky. Panahi believes if the Taliban caught her with stacks of passports belonging to young, educated women planning to flee, she could have been killed. But she also felt a huge sense of responsibility to the students, and their futures. ‘If I don’t take this chance, if I don’t do this right now, what if we (are) all stuck here?’ she thought. ‘That’s even more dangerous, to stay here.’ The trip was successful. She hid the passports in her basement when she got home and later returned them to each student. Panahi’s efforts allowed 148 women to begin what would become a days-long, harrowing escape from Afghanistan. They’d go from the gates of the Kabul airport to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, leaving their families behind. The women since have been placed at universities around the U.S. Most have full-ride scholarships.”

ATR-Fireflies-1536x1024“Billions of Fireflies Light Up an Indian Wildlife Reserve in Rare Footage Captured by Sriram Murali” – Kate Mothes in Colossal: “In many parts of the world, a warm summer evening sets the stage for a familiar sight: the lightning bug. Through a phenomenon called bioluminescence, these winged beetles generate chemical reactions in a part of their abdomen known as the lantern to produce flickers of light. Of more than 2,000 species found throughout the world, only a handful coordinate their flashes into patterns and are known as synchronous fireflies. Filmmaker Sriram Murali captured a rare gathering of billions of these insects at the Anamalai Tiger Reserve in western Tamil Nadu, India. Through a combination of moving image and time-lapse photography, Murali recorded countless specimens amidst the trees as they produce glowing pulses, which relay across the forest in expansive, wave-like signals. The color, brightness, and length of the light emitted is specific to each species, and as a part of the insects’ mating display, it helps males and females to recognize one another. Darkness is a necessary ingredient in the success of this ritual. For the past ten years, Murali has been working to raise awareness of light pollution through a series of documentaries. Focusing on the reserve and its nighttime fauna, he hopes to highlight the significant role that darkness plays in the natural world. He has been collaborating with scientists and forest officials at the wildlife reserve as part of a project spearheaded by Deputy Director M.G. Ganesan to study the ecology of the park and identify the different species of firefly present there.”

Music: U2, “40” (Live From Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Colorado, USA / 1983 / Remastered 2021)

The Weekend Wanderer: 22 February 2020

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of 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.

92299“Polyamory: Pastors’ Next Sexual Frontier” – Here’s a topic you may not have thought we would have been talking about in the church, but Preston Sprinkle and Branson Parler help us consider an issue pastors may encounter more in days to come. “For many Christians, polyamory seems so extreme and rare that there’s no need to talk about it. But it is much more common than some people think, and it’s growing in popularity. According to one estimate, ‘as many as 5 percent of Americans are currently in relationships involving consensual nonmonogamy,’ which is about the same percentage as those who identify as LGBTQ. A recent study, published in a peer-reviewed journal, found that 20 percent of Americans have been in a consensual non-monogamous relationship at least once in their life. Another survey showed that nearly 70 percent of non-religious Americans between the ages of 24 and 35 believe that polyamory is okay, even if it’s not their cup of tea. And perhaps most shocking of all, according to sociologist Mark Regnerus in Cheap Sex, roughly 24 percent of church-going people believe that consensual polyamorous relationships are morally permissible.”

Burkina Faso attack“Gunmen massacre 14 Christians during Protestant service in Burkina Faso” – If you haven’t paid attention to the religious tensions in the West African nation of Burkina Faso in recent years, this is a good time to pay attention. There have been increasing attacks against Christians by Islamic militants, including this past week. “Gunmen launched yet another attack on a church service in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, killing 14 people and wounding several others in the small eastern town of Hantoukoura. Sunday’s massacre follows attacks by radical Islamist insurgents on military posts, a mining convoy and places of worship in the restive countryside that the army has struggled to contain. The assailants fled on motorbikes after spraying bullets into the Protestant congregation, authorities said.”

Fasting“The Most Neglected Spiritual Discipline” – I have a love-hate relationship with fasting. I love it because when I fast I encounter my self-will and find ways to meet God in that place in a very tangible way. I hate it because…I encounter my self-will and, let me be honest, I just get downright hangry. With some slight exceptions, I have found that difficulties with a spiritual practice often mean that we really need it. However, as we draw near to the beginning of Lent, Thomas Christianson’s exploration of the significance of this spiritual practice is right on time.

115488“We Need to Read the Bible Jesus Read” – As I continue preaching through a series on the minor prophets at Eastbrook Church, I am reminded of just how significant the larger biblical context is for our understanding of the nature of Jesus as Messiah, the kingdom of God, the gospel, and so much more. In this article Brent A. Strawn, Professor of Old Testment at Duke Divinity School, explains why the Hebrew Bible is so important for us to understand as Christians.

Russell Moore“Trump critic Russell Moore, ERLC to face scrutiny by Southern Baptists” – “The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee will launch a task force to examine the activities of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the convention’s public policy organization headed by the theologian and author Russell Moore. Southern Baptist leaders fear controversy over Moore could lead to a drop in donations. Moore, 48, who has been president of the ERLC since 2013, has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump since the president began campaigning for the White House. In 2016, Moore called Trump ‘an arrogant huckster’ and wrote an essay for the National Review citing ‘Trump’s vitriolic — and often racist and sexist — language about immigrants, women, the disabled and others.’ In response, Trump attacked Moore on Twitter, calling him ‘a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for.’ The same tweet called Moore a ‘nasty guy with no heart!'”

1776“Sorry, New York Times, But America Began in 1776” – One of the most notable journalistic achievements of 2019 was that of the New York Times‘ “1619 project.” It would be mild to say that project generated a lot of conversation about both the content of the project and the nature of the journalistic approach. Now, this past week saw the launch of a non-partisan black-led response to the “1619 Project” called “1776.” Wilfrid Reilly, a participant in “1776,” outlines the three core goals of this response project: “(1) rebutting some outright historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project; (2) discussing tragedies like slavery and segregation honestly while clarifying that these were not the most important historical foundations of the United States; and (3) presenting an alternative inspirational view of the lessons of our nation’s history to Americans of all races.”

Flannery O'Connor“Flannery O’Connor’s Good Things” – When I was in college, my wife, Kelly, took a class on the writings of two southern novelists I knew very little about at that time: Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. I am forever grateful that she took that class and patiently introduced me to these two authors, who have become a couple of treasured voices in my life. James Matthew Wilson introduces us to a recently edited collection of O’Connor’s previously unpublished letters, including some with Walker Percy, that is aptly titled Good Things Out of Nazareth.

Music: Herbie Hancock, “Watermelon Man” (1962), from Takin’ Off

[I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within the articles linked from this page, but I have read them myself in order to make me think more deeply.]