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Hemant Mehta, author of I Sold My Soul on eBay, was interviewed in the last issue of Wineskins.  He’s an athiest who set up an eBay auction promising “that for each $10 of the final bid, he would attend an hour of church services. The 23-year-old … says he suspected he had been missing out on something. The winning bidder actually asked him to visit 10-15 church services, then write about them. I was surpised to find that in this interview he said a few things I agree with.

“…the pastors were speaking to a group of believers; however, I still didn’t get the feeling that the various congregations were going to question anything the pastors said.”

“I was shocked because I rarely saw critical thinking going on. I thought the churches would emphasize the reasons for believing a lot more than they actually did.”

“I took the phrase “Bible Study” much more literally than I should have. There was very little questioning of whether we should believe everything we read, and much more of “The Bible says it so it must be true.” I’m sure Christians would become stronger in their faith with more of the former…”

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Tim Keller Reasons with America, Christianity Today

C. S. Lewis says somewhere not to believe in Christianity because it’s relevant or exciting or personally satisfying. Believe it because it’s true. And if it’s true, it eventually will be relevant, exciting, and personally satisfying. But there will be many times when it’s not relevant, exciting, and personally satisfying. To be a Christian is going to be very, very hard. So unless you come to it simply because it’s really the truth, you really won’t live the Christian life, and you won’t get to the excitement and to the relevance and all that other stuff.

I missed Wade’s sermon today, but we had a pretty lively discussion about it this evening. There was so much for us to talk about, but we had to get out of there early to put the little one to bed. The sermon was on the church’s approach to and treatment of homosexuality. Tonight we talked about homosexuality, sin, accountability, and a little church polity.

I’ve been thinking about the conversation all evening and have decided to dig up everything I’ve written on the subjects, each with a link and an excerpt. So here it is!

You Call That Protection? August ‘06

The institution of marriage has been around a looooong time. It’s survived centuries of men treating women as property. It survived the dark ages, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. It survived the War of 1812, the Civil War, the two Great Wars, and Vietnam. And it has stood strong through our society’s turn towards cohabitation and parents who avoid marriage. But it’s suffering some staggering blows. The traditional family in the US has been on the decline for 40 years. It’s almost rare for a child to be raised by both biological parents. People are choosing to stay single (but not celibate), and those who do get married do it much later and with much less commitment than in past generations. Even when they’re married they have a bag packed in case they aren’t “satisfied”. The marriage bond is weakening and prenups and no-fault divorce are just making it worse. Thank God someone figured out how to protect this sacred institution from further damage; by focusing our energy on making sure gay people don’t get married.

On the Narrow, October ‘06

In Matthew 16, after Peter’s confession, Jesus rebukes him fiercely, calling him Satan. “You do not have in mind the things of God,” he says, “but the things of men.” Peter was working from the human assumption that God wouldn’t allow his Son, the Messiah, to be killed. We, much the same way, work from the human assumption that God wouldn’t allow someone to be born in a way that forces them to resist their natural desires.

Across the Board, November ‘06

I think that the church should take a more Biblical stance on sin. We tend to single out sexual sin as the only one that is bad enough to keep people out of the church: homosexuality, promiscuity, adultery. And adultery has to be really egregious to get real attention.

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I’d like to start a new feature here: my Rules for Life. I’ll post two or three a week starting today.

• Rule #1: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength.
• Rule #2: Love your neighbor as yourself.

These two don’t need a whole lot of explanation. The main thing I want to point out is the order and the separation. Many people in the church today forget that loving God is the greatest commandment, “and the second is like it.” That means we must love our neighbors without compromising our fidelity to God.

The problem with the first two rules is that they’re just nebulous ideas that sit in the back of my mind. They’re always with me, but they don’t provide a lot of specifics. But that’s part of the beauty of them as well. They’re always there, and they have no limits.

We often talk about ways to glorify God and worship Him outside of church services. TheResurgence.com recently posted audio in their “Continuous Worship” series with the topic “Is ‘worship’ the only word for worship?” It’s something that I’ve struggled with. We’ve put our worship of God into the church box, and have excluded it from the rest of our lives for so long, that when we realize we need to set it free, we don’t know how. (continue reading…)

If you’re a reader at GetReligion you’re aware of the tendency for journalists to see churches only in political terms. Last Monday’s opinion piece on the emerging church is no different. Tom Krattenmaker writes about the “growing movement of believers [for whom] an activist faith means more than proselytizing about Jesus and stoking the fires of our culture wars.”

There is almost no theological content in this article. He quotes Rick McKinley, leader of Portland’s Imago Dei Community, as saying, “We’d say ‘yes’ [to being 'evangelical'] in terms of what we think about the authority of Scripture and those things…What you have is evangelicalism defined doctrinally, which we’d agree with, and defined culturally, where we would disagree. Culturally, it has been hijacked by a right-wing political movement.”

Other than that it is an article on the politics of the “liberal” emerging church movement. It showcases the morally superior attitudes of the emerging leaders that were quoted, which - let’s be real - mirrors the morally superior attitudes of most on the other side of the aisle. So that’s a wash. (continue reading…)

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