Archive for the 'Rant' Category

Drive In Church

Published
by
LayGuy
on August 24, 2008
in Rant
. 2 Comments

I’m all for missional churches where the timeless message of Jesus is shared in a way relevant to modern culture.  But, and it’s a huge BUT, a line needs to be drawn when church is done in a missional way to cater for the downright fallen nature of mankind.

A good example of this is found in the following video where a church is held in, of all places, an abandoned drive in theater.  Check out the video below: (just get passed the 30 second ad at the beginning)

“Since I’ve been retired, I’ve decided to take the easy way and sit in the car.”

This was one of the comments of an attendee at this so called church.  Really?  The easy way?  What ever happened to counting the cost and “taking up your cross” and all that?  As Jesus sweated drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, did He do this so people can “take the easy way?”

I know the “emergent type” people would embrace this kind of church as it embraces modern culture. But even the reporter asked the question:

“What about community and fellowship?”

To which a glib reply was that people get together before and after church for coffee and catch up session. Nope sorry.  this type of “church” sucks in a major way.  This church is catering for a mindset of:

“Let’s go to church this week to make us feel good.  We get our message and feel all holy and sanctified - and we can do it in our cars while we pat our dog.  We then can go home and feel justified that we got our fill of the word and we can do it all the easy way.”

Check out the article here to see some of the comments.  An unbelieving world hates this kind of crap and the witness they leave behind is almost as putrid as as their so called church.  I guess it’s all summarised with the comments from the “pastor” when the reporter asked:

“Isn’t there a risk, when all is said and done, that it’s so convenient - God won’t count it?”

Where the pastor replies:

“I know she does”

Give me something to punch right now!  Why is the “Church” in such a spastic condition?  I guess my King knew of this when His Spirit uttered to Paul to write down the following words:

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.” 1 Tim 4:3

These old farts put their own comfort above the Body of Christ.  In doing so they make the Head look like an idiot.

Being Salty & Not Wealthy

Published
by
LayGuy
on July 5, 2008
in Church and Rant
. 2 Comments

Starting to really resonate with Piper more and more these days. Just watched another one of his video’s on the “prosperity gospel” and how it contradicts the call for us to be “salty” instead.

Have a watch and let me know what you think…

Church Multimedia Resources

Published
by
LayGuy
on April 26, 2008
in Christianity, Church, Internet and Rant
. 1 Comment

If you don”t visit churchrelevance.com, you should. Kent Shaffer runs a great blog on “training people to reach other more effectively.” I link my posts to his site more than any other blog and today he has provided another great post.

Many medium to large churches can afford or have the talent pool to create custom made graphics and video resources. For the rest of us, we need to rely on the God given talent of others and the generosity placed in their hearts to share what they have.

Church Relevance has a great post here, outlining free Christian and non-christian sites as well as linking to some Christian sites where you need to pay for resources.

Here’s my rant though, why would these large churches charge for their content when they are raking in the money? Call me cynical but when I see much smaller churches and ministries given stuff out for free, it makes these large & charging churches look like parasites. Anyway, I have told myself not to be so critical so I’ll go and scream in a room with egg carton insulation.

My favorites listed at churchrelevance.com include:

creativemyk.com is a new and growing site offering a image related resources. Be sure to check it out and visit often as new stuff is being added all the time.

LifeChurch.tv This is a Church I really like in regards to it’s philosophy of sharing materials. They have a tonne of material ready to go for you to use in your church or small group setting.

But my new discovery via churchrelevance.com is a ministry called Muddy River Media. This website rocks and, after registering, provides a bunch of material available for free download. They host their previews on YouTube and here is a taste of what’s available:

Medical Science: I couldn’t resist this one as I make a living flogging products for bleeding disorders:

Vine & Branches: One of my favourite topics in the Bible.

Worship Background: Those of us in the media ministry know how hard it is to spice things up. Well have a look at what this site does to spice up things for free!

I really enjoy the growing move within Christianity to share resources. After all, we are one body. When’s the last time your heart said to your leg, “Hi dude. I’m gonna charge you $2.00/liter of blood I supply to you!”

C’mon Christians! Spread the love and talent around!

The Shack - A Trinity Shocker!

Published
by
LayGuy
on April 15, 2008
in Books, Christianity, Digging Deeper and Rant
. 14 Comments

shack Ranking very high on Amazon’s best seller list is a book by William P. Young, The Shack. Released in May last year, many of you would probably already know about it.  As of today, it has upward of 350 reviews on Amazon.com.

Additionally Christian personalities such as Michael W Smith and Eugene Peterson (Author of The Message) have endorsed it in a positive way. Here’s what Peterson had to say:

When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of The Shack. This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!

This has found many people rushing to buy the book and calling their experience in reading it, “a mind blowing experience, a spiritual stick of dynamite and a life changing book.”

So what’s the book about?  Basically it’s this:

The Shack revolves around Mack (Mackenzie) Philips. Four years before this story begins, Mack’s young daughter, Missy, was abducted during a family vacation. Though her body was never found, the police did find evidence in an abandoned shack to prove that she had been brutally murdered by a notorious serial killer who preyed on young girls. As the story begins, Mack, who has been living in the shadow of his Great Sadness, receives a strange note that is apparently from God. God invites Mack to return to this shack for a get together. Though uncertain, Mack visits the scene of the crime and there has a weekend-long encounter with God, or, more properly, with the godhead.

In a nut shell, God asks Mack to meet in the shack for a deep and meaningful about His nature.  The author was interviewed on the 700 Club on CBN and here is what he had to say:

It all sounds nice and fine and dandy until you get to meet the “god” Young introduces to Mack.  You see God the Father is an African American woman called Papa. God the Son (Jesus) is a guy from the Middle East with plain looks apart from his big nose.  And God the Spirit is Sarayu - a small and delicate little Asian girl.

Talking about messing with people’s heads!  And the fact that Christians are out there endorsing this crap and readers are saying that their consciousness is altered as a result of reading this book, blows me away.

It really makes wonder about the state of Oprah Winfrey type, new age mentality spreading across Christianity these days and how Christians are sucking this up into their minds and souls and don’t have any idea of the vomit they are consuming.

To be honest, I haven’t read the book.  But I don’t need to.  There are many people holding onto biblical truth who have exposed this book for what it’s worth. Tim Challies, author of The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment and keeper of the popular blog challies.com has an awesome review about the book here.

In his conclusions, Challies says:

Because of the sheer volume of error and because of the importance of the doctrines reinvented by the author, I would encourage Christians, and especially young Christians, to decline this invitation to meet with God in The Shack. It is not worth reading for the story and certainly not worth reading for the theology.

Despite the great amount of poor theology, my greatest concern is probably this one: the book has a quietly subversive quality to it. Young seems set on undermining orthodoxy Christianity.

One of the theological areas The Shack centres on is the nature of the trinity. And Young’s characters of a black female Papa, a plain and big nosed Son and a delicate little female Asian Sarayu spirit, struck a negative vibe in me as soon as I read it.  Undoubtedly, Young’s work is in the genre of Mclaren’s work and you all you where I stand with Mclaren.

And in typical Mark Driscoll style, he nails this issue of the trinity in The Shack in his sermon series on doctrine.  Below is a snippet:

As you can see.  The Shack is a shocker when it comes to many aspects of Christianity.  Many good things are mixed with many bad things resulting in a delightful read where you may be unaware of the realigning of your understanding of crucial doctrines. And isn’t this just what the devil wants?

If the nature of the trinity does confuse you and you want to know more about this important aspect in our understanding of God, I invite you to check out Driscoll’s sermon below.

"Modernised Easter Messages"

Published
by
LayGuy
on March 31, 2008
in Christianity, Church, Digging Deeper and Rant
. 0 Comments

With all the debate going on these days about "emerging church" and traditional churches etc, sometimes those outside our circles can be left a little confused with us Christ followers. Well being an Aussie, I’m somewhat taken back by the "official" Easter message focus delivered by some in the so called "organised religious institutions" of my country..

Splattered all over my TV over Easter were news articles on "modern Easter messages" delivered by the "nations religious leaders."  Instead of using the one time most people go to church and nailing (excuse the pun) the message of the cross to a largely unbelieving crowd, these guys completely miss the boat and talked about interest rates, the drought and Aboriginal reconciliation.

To those outside the best nation in the world, our newly elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, officially apoligised to the "stolen generations" of aboriginal children taken by force by well meaning white people from pathetic life styles in Aboriginal communities.  But they did this in questionable ways - hence the need for an apology.

We are also experiencing a massive rise of interest rates due to an over heated economy as we pump our commodities into China.  This is putting massive inflationary pressure on our economy and, when combined with increased petrol prices and the effects of the drought, the Reserve Bank needs to increase rates to help stop spending.

Sure these issues are important and people are hurting in our country.  But to focus on these messages instead of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus over the Easter period make Brian Mclaren’s attempt of being relevant to society a piss poor effort.

I don’t for a minute put down the need for our culture to address these issues.  But this is Easter for crying out loud.  Put aside the pagan nature of the way Easter is celebrated, and you have a platform where people would go to church more then any other time.  To waste this opportunity on other issues is disappointing.

Instead of connecting to people in their hurt and presenting the hope of Jesus, these leaders decide to dwell in the hurt and offer no hope. To this lay guy, that’s just dumb.

To take dumbness further, consider the views of The Reverend John Evans, the Uniting Church Minister at the Church of All Nations in my home town of Melbourne.  This guy wants to substitute the Good Friday Holiday with a national "reconciliation" holiday to celebrate our recent advances in reversing our travesty with the Aboriginal people.

"We have done a great thing with the national apology but when you look at our public holidays there are no public holidays that recognise the role and place of Aborigines as the first people of this land."

In the newspaper that this quote was taken from, the following response was left by a reader:

Well John Evans is leading with his big mouth in showing why people are turning away from the church in droves. It is increasingly irrelevant in society at all, and when a cleric can call for one of the most holy days on the Christian calendar to be replaced by something that still divides Australian society today, it simply proves just how out of touch the church has become. Perhaps its time the government took a different view of the workings of our churches, such as removing their tax-free status etc. The church has become a blight on modern day Australia, and we could do much better without them.

Sobering thoughts of what our culture thinks of us when we replace what we are called to do with trying to appease man.

Example Of Dumb Christianity

Published
by
LayGuy
on March 9, 2008
in Christianity and Rant
. 4 Comments

I got this video from “Kingdom People” and it’s a beauty in that it shows just how pathetic the Body Of Christ looks when people elevate man made things above the things of God.  It’s about a KJV only fundamental preacher who comes across the term “he that pisseth against the wall” 6 times in the KJV. 

Instead of getting into the scripture like a good preacher should, he launches into verbal diarrhoea…

 

 

To all you who don’t know Jesus, please don’t base your opinion on people like this.