This photo album contains slides that are being used to report on two options for reconfiguring and expanding St. Paul Lutheran's current facilities. The architectural drawings in this report have been produced by Peter Norgren, ELCA architect, who has spent his career designing church buildings. These proposals attempt to meet needs that have been identified regarding our congregational facilities.
Included in this report is a review of the principles of design that Norgren has recommended that congregations to consider when they look at changing their current structure or building a new building. There is a section devoted to the needs that have been identified in our church. Finally two proposals are described, one that reconfigures and expands the building on the present site and another that envisions a new building on a new site.
When I was reading Garr Reynold's blog the other day, he mentioned a video that was a great example of using text as a series of visual images as a means to communicate a message very effectively.
When I took a look at the video, which focuses on something called the Advent Conspiracy, I found it not only a great example of effective presentation, but it also had a great message.
I liked it so much that I used it a part of the sermon today. It generated a lot of positive comments because it made people think. Here it is. Let me know what you think of it.
During the last years, I thought a lot about the
relationship of faith and doubt. I was reading the latest issue of Christian
Century (August 12, 2008), and I came
across an interview with Ron Hansen, a Roman Catholic novelist and writer. In
the article, Hansen is asked his view of doubt. He writes:
I have a priest friend who points out that the opposite of
faith is not doubt, but certainty. I think God intended that—it is a way of
making us creative instead of smug in our belief. God plants in us the seed to
love and worship God, and the seed is enough to make us want to seek God out,
but not enough to fully get there. That reaching, that striving, is what God is
really interested in—that creative activity that all of us should pursue.
What do you think is the relationship between faith and
doubt? Do you think that faith must do away with doubt? Or is it more likely
that the two exist in most of together?
Recently I have been running across a spate of articles dealing with hell and the wrath of God. Not the most cheery subject, yet Christians do need to somehow come to terms with that fact that Jesus did talk about what we’ve called hell, as do the rest of the Scriptures as well.
I think Christians have tended to veer into one of two ditches regarding hell and the wrath of God. Many contemporary folk would just as soon avoid the subject. There are many who would think that hell is an antiquated idea that we have outgrown.
The opposite ditch is the get caught up in intense speculation about who belongs in hell and what exactly it will be like. There are those who have used the notion of hell to try to scare people into faith.
Scott McKnight has been using his blog to examine the Biblical passages that deal with the wrath of God. You can find a good example here. McKnights writes, “We are testing a hypothesis, namely, this one: Does “wrath” refer only to “historical” events in history, the negative implications of doing things contrary to God’s will, or does it also refer to “evangelistic” wrath (threatening with wrath when evangelizing) or “eternal” wrath (an endless state of the damned)? As I read him, Scott seems to find the first and third meanings of hell, but seems to question whether wrath is used evangelistically.
Have you heard of this congregation, yet—Relevant Church? They are a congregation in Tampa, Florida that targets young adults and they made news not long ago with their 30 Day Sex Challenge. What got reported in the news was that they were challenging married couples to have sex each day for 30 days while at the same time challenging unmarried people not to have sex for 30 days. Even unmarried couples who are living together were challenged to abstain from sex.
As usual, there’s a lot more to it that what wound up in the news reports. Actually, what the church was striving for is really quite Biblical. Most people can see how the challenge for unmarried people would be consistent with Biblical values. One of the pastors at Relevant Church, Paul Wirth, explains that they were challenging unmarried couples and singles to take a break from sex to see if sex has been the main theme of their relationships. Such couples and individuals may discover that they are missing something else that is just as important, maybe even more important. Here’s the link that explains the challenge for singles.
As for married couples, the challenge responds to a theme church leaders had heard over and over from young marrieds: we don’t have time for sex in our marriage. The challenge for married couples isn’t simply to have more sex. The materials the church created focus on each partner striving to meet the emotional and relational needs of the other, which goes beyond sex itself. The emphasis is on deepening all aspects of the marriage relationship, including the spiritual.
Here’s a video tells a bit more about the origin of the challenge and how it works for married couples.
Comments on the video indicate that not everyone appreciated Relevant Church’s treatment of the topic of sex. Some thought that it was just a gimmick that didn’t have anything to do with the gospel.
I’m inclined to see the challenge in a more positive light. I think the church has been trying to be both relevant to the lives of people in their community, addressing issues that are important to those people, and also trying to be the church. They were trying to bring the Scriptures to bear upon this key aspect of human life in a constructive way.
If the church doesn’t do that with sex or any of the other major issues in life, the only thing people are left with is what they hear in contemporary American culture. That’s a culture that is dishonest about and disregards how sex outside marriage can produce a great deal of unhappiness and can degrade the individual’s experience of sex, itself. At the same time, our culture tells us that our job and lots of other things are more important than taking time to cultivate a healthy marriage relation that can actually contribute to a very satisfying sex life. That’s the kind of sexual relationship that is most pleasing to the God of the Bible After all, God created sexuality in the first place, intending it to be a significant way of blessing the children of God.
Mary Karr is a poet I recently discovered. She also writes prose and has described her life growing up in a dysfunctional family in two memoirs (The Liar's Club and Cherry). Karr is working on a third memoir that will tell how she came to faith as a Christian.
She says she first started going to church because her young son 'wanted to see if God was there.' After trying several church and even a Jewish synagogue, she and her son wound up at a Catholic mass. After mass she told the priest, "I'm taking my son to this church the way I take him to soccer, a game I don't particularly like."
The priest replied, "God's after you."
She says she liked the priest's playfulness and the way the people in the congregation engaged in each other's lives. Eventually she found the experience of Eucharist to be healing, especially for the anger she felt toward her mother.
I think any pastor, or any lay leader for that matter, would like unchurched individuals to have that kind of experience when they come into contact with their congregation. I hope we can continue to learn and grow to be that kind of church for people who come to us from the outside. (from Christian Century, April 22, 2008)
I have been following with interest a series of posts that Scott McKnight has been doing on Roger Olson’s book Reformed and Always Reforming. (Here's the beginning of the series) Olson gives his description post-conservative Christians in a postmodern world. One notion that McKnight finds in Olson that I can identify with is “knowledge may be relative even if truth is not.”
I think this is an accurate statement regarding human knowledge. Truth is objective, but our understanding and apprehension of the truth is always limited.
I wish there were a way to inject that king of humility in to the political, moral and religious debates that go on all around us. What I’d like to see is the admission by all sides that they don’t know everything and that they just might have something to learn from those who are politically, socially, culturally or religiously different from them.
Truth, itself, is not relative, but our ability to know the truth is.
During the next few days, this blog is going to be a bit video rich. I am getting ready to attend the SPY dodgeball tournament. I hope to take lots of video and hope I can post some of that as soon as I can edit it after the tournament. I also have a couple of other clips that I am about ready to put up that are just for fun.
But I am going to start off with a video I just watched that is a truly amazing presentation. It is a TED talk (technology, entertainment, design). TED talks are an attempt to give the world’s leading thinkers and doers a chance to talk about what they are doing.
The video below will take about 18 minutes or so to watch. This talk was given by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a researcher, studying how the brain works. In 1996 she had a massive stroke and she felt her brain functions disappearing one by one. It gave her a unique awareness regarding the human brain. When she finished, the audience gave her a standing ovation.
I am still thinking through what her experience all means. I think it is evidence that we are what Glenn Tinker calls “exalted individuals,” yet at the same time we are connected to each other, to all of creation and to God.
Take a look at the video. (Thanks to Garr Reynolds who featured this on his blog.)
George Barna and the Barna Group recently released results of a new study that contends that the way we measure the number of ‘unchurched people’ needs to be updated. Here’s why:
The fact that millions of people are now involved in multiple faith communities - for instance, attending a conventional church one week, a house church the next, and interacting with an online faith community in-between - has rendered the standard measures of "churched" and "unchurched" much less precise.
Barna and his associates argue for dividing the population into five different subcategories.
1. Unattached - people who had attended neither a conventional church nor an organic faith community (e.g., house church, simple church, intentional community) during the past year
2. Intermittents - these adults are essentially "under-churched" - i.e., people who have participated in either a conventional church or an organic faith community within the past year, but not during the past month.
3. Homebodies - people who had not attended a conventional church during the past month, but had attended a meeting of a house church.
4. Blenders - adults who had attended both a conventional church and a house church during the past month.
5. Conventionals - adults who had attended a conventional church (i.e., a congregational-style, local church) during the past month but had not attended a house church.
What I found most interesting were their findings about the first group, the unattached. These are the people that I think churches really ought to try to reach. Fifty-nine per cent of the unattached consider themselves to be Christians. Furthermore a significant number participate in traditional faith activities. One fifth (19%) read the Bible and three out of five (62%) pray to God during a given week.
The Barna organization notes:
Attempting to get them (the unattached) involved in the life of a church is a real challenge. The best chance of getting them to a church is when someone they know and trust invites them, offers to accompany them, and there is reason to believe that the church event will address one of the issues or needs they are struggling with at that moment."
“Sin is a disease. The best we can do is manage the symptoms,” said Rolf Jacobson at the 2008 Mid-winter Convocation. “The law tells us how to do that. And the gospel reminds us that through Christ, God makes us whole.”
I ran across Jacobson’s observation in the most recent issue of The Story, a publication I receive from my alma mater, Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN. I like the metaphor that Jacobson uses for sin. It is a disease, chronic ailment that we never get over as long as we are alive. The best we can do is to learn to live with it, to manage it if you will.
We may prevail against certain sins. If we’ve been guilty of shoplifting, for instance, it is possible for us to give it up. But sin as a power, an influence, will always manifest itself one way or another. Even the best of us still must struggle with sin. That doesn’t end until we die.
Yet the Gospel proclaims that God heals us. We begin to see the effects of that healing now. As God acts on our lives, sins power is reduced. And we look forward to a complete healing from this disease when God raises us up again from the dead. Now won’t that be something!
Time magazine recently reported on Amity Printing, a company that operates in mainland China, that saw the only book they publish sore to bestseller status. Last year they produced over 3 million copies of the Bible in a country that restricts religious freedom. Amity is a joint venture between the Amity Foundation, a Chinese Christian charity, and the UK based United Bible Societies. Its publishing is entirely within Chinese law. There has been a rapid growth in the number of Christians.
Recent Comments