Knocking Over the Hurdles

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how important it is not to put barriers to Christian faith in the way of the unsaved. I certainly don’t want to do that, and I’m very sure you don’t either.

Archaic language and holy jargon can be hurdles. Arguing about the age of the earth can be off-putting, as can paternalism, denominational conflicts, smugness, and a host of other far-too-common attitudes and practices that needn’t and shouldn’t get in the way of the knowledge of Christ.

These things are unnecessary, and it’s shameful to see someone shake his head and retreat into the darkness of ignorance and eternal loss over the bad manners and misplaced priorities of the messenger, over mere tradition, or over form.

Too Hot to Handle: Does Your Building Matter?

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: I’m prowling the Internet, as is my wont, and encountering discussion on the subject of whether a church building can impede one’s efforts to grow a local church. Take for example this meditation, from Abby Stocker at Christianity Today:

“Our worship spaces matter. The music, preaching, and community obviously influence our church experience, but building styles also communicate something to the congregation about what is proper in worship. A central stage outfitted with a drumset probably means the music will be emotional and modern. Feel free to wave your hands, dance, however the Spirit leads you. Kneelers will probably be dedicated to congregational, possibly liturgical, prayer. Space for a mosh pit signifies ... you’re probably not at, say, a small intimate gathering based primarily on discussion of a text.”

So here we are, left to consider how the apostle Paul might have felt about a mosh pit. Immanuel Can, please help me out here.

(Re)Making Music

I’ve heard it said that the quickest way to split a congregation is to change the hymnbook or repaint the walls.

Well, I have no feel for interior decorating, so that second one’s not going to be a problem for me. But like most people, I have more definite tastes when it comes to music. Some of the songs that my local church sings, I love; others, I confess, make me cringe.

Too Hot to Handle: Virtual Fellowship

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

A few days ago, I watched a popular YouTube video one of our readers passed on. It was intended as a spoof of lazy, millennial, hipster Christians who have figured out how to avoid the inevitable complications and commitments of church life by going to “virtual church”. By themselves. From bed. Provided they can work up the energy.

Tom: It’s actually quite entertaining, and if you can watch it without cracking up, you have more self-control than I do. In fact, to really get the picture, you should probably watch it first, if you’re that sort of reader.

Don’t Forget What You Never Knew

“Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day — just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”

Ummm …

What do you mean, “remind”?

Too Hot to Handle: Beatles Buddhism

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Over the last 20 years we’ve seen all kinds of pontificating about the threat of global warming, or climate change, or whatever it’s being repackaged as this week. One thing we can be sure of is that climate change is not the first thing on the minds of most Americans. The percentage of U.S. citizens who consider the environment a source of great worry dropped to a new low of 29% in 2025, dwarfed by issues like government corruption, cost of living, and cultural and social divisions.

Given that the dire warnings of the Warmists are going largely unheeded at present, there has been an increasingly intense effort to reframe the climate change issue as a moral one rather than merely a political or practical one.

True Revolutionaries

Welcome back to our two-part treatment of the (post-)modern attitude to truth.

Last week, we were observing that the concept of an actual objective truth has gone out of fashion these days. More and more, the average person of today tends to disbelieve that anything can be, in any final and universally binding sense, “true”. Truth has been banished because there are so many voices shouting so many messages that most of us don’t know where to find it if it did exist. We’re overwhelmed by multiculturalism, media overload, the speed of modern life and the decline of the formerly-solid touchpoints of religion and tradition, even if we know nothing about the theory behind it, or about the new skeptical “hermeneutics” being taught in the contemporary academy. We’re all just pretty confused about truth.

Too Hot to Handle: The Christian Nation

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

In America is not a Christian nation: The dark capitalist roots of our country’s most destructive myth, Andrew Aghapour quizzes Princeton professor Kevin Kruse about the “Christian nation myth”.

As with most things in the media these days, the title is a bit sensationalist and the substance of the article a little less dramatic. Basically, it’s what it purports to be: the assertion that America is not and never has been a Christian nation, with a bit of window dressing that suggests a mini-conspiracy by businessmen and evangelicals to spread that myth.

Tom: Immanuel Can, I think we can agree that America is demonstrably not a Christian nation today. Has it ever been?

The Trouble with the Truth

Some years ago I picked up a volume compiled by Walter Truett Anderson entitled The Truth About the Truth. It was a collection of essays, actually, each one detailing some way in which the modern conception of “truth” has been warped. It had chapters on reification (the modern tendency to mistake mere traditions for inevitabilities), the love of the ironic tone, the tendency to accept things at face value, the obsession with commercialism, gender fluidity, cultural pluralism and the loss of the integrated self, and so on … all very interesting, and some of it insightful. But so far as the concept of a stable, universal, actually-existing kind of truth, very cynical.

The David Connection

It occurred to me while reading through the Gospel of Mark that the significance of many little things perfectly obvious to Bible students or people with a Christian upbringing is probably quite lost on first time readers, especially those whose background is not Jewish.

Little things like the words of the blind beggar Bartimaeus, who cried out to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” That “Son of David” thing must have been important: after all, the blind guy kept repeating it despite everybody around him trying to hush him up.

He wasn’t the only one. That title was something Jesus heard regularly.

Too Hot to Handle: Your Bible Is An Anachronism

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Juan Cole at Alternet.org has bucketloads of fun in an article entitled “If the Christian Right Wants to Get Worked Up About Sexual Controversy, They Should Read These 5 Bible Passages”. He goes to town on Solomon’s 300 concubines, Abraham and Hagar, etc.

In a forlorn attempt at evenhandedness, Mr. Cole tosses in this disclaimer: “Ancient scripture can be a source of higher values and spiritual strength, but any time you in a literal-minded way impose specific legal behavior because of it, you’re committing anachronism.”

Tom: Immanuel Can, one of things I love most about Mr. Cole is the unquestioned assumption that each scripture he cites is a “gotcha” moment to the religious right. Like none of us have seen these passages until his article came along …

Two Can Play That Game

Pearls of wisdom from Mary Kassian:

“A husband does not have the right to demand or extract submission from his wife. Submission is HER choice — her responsibility … it is NOT his right!! Not ever. She is to ‘submit herself’ — deciding when and how to submit is her call. In a Christian marriage, the focus is never on rights, but on personal responsibility. It’s his responsibility to be affectionate. It’s her responsibility to be agreeable. The husband’s responsibility is to sacrificially love as Christ loved the Church — not to make his wife submit.”

So it is “HER choice — her responsibility … deciding when and how to submit is her call”. So declares Mary Kassian.

Too Hot to Handle: Waiting to Date

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: A few weeks back, I was sent a list of questions asked anonymously by a group of teenagers attending a Christian summer camp. This one sounds like it’s worth thinking about:

“Do you think that we should wait to date until we are more prepared to be married, i.e., financially responsible, able to cook and clean … OR date younger?”

There’s a hot potato, IC. I’m actually impressed that a younger person is open to considering the options, given that our society operates in a very predictable fashion today where young people are concerned. What do you think of the question?

Brains With Feet

I was reading a book on apologetics, a collection of essays. It had one by Sean McDowell. Yes, that Sean McDowell, son of the more famous Josh McDowell. (How tired he must be of hearing that!)

Anyway, I’ve read a few McDowell books, and from the first moment I opened one, I remember feeling a vague sense of … what was it? ... a sort of vague ‘missing’.

Too Hot to Handle: The Social Gospel and Social Justice

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: Immanuel Can, I’m going to quote from my favorite source of lowest common denominator info, Wikipedia, to get us started.

Wikipedia calls the Social Gospel a “protestant Christian intellectual movement” that “applied Christian ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, inadequate labor unions, poor schools, and the danger of war. Theologically, the Social Gospelers sought to operationalize the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:10): ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ ”

You know how I love words like “operationalize”. But would you say that’s a reasonably accurate description?

What It’s All About

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate some surprising things. In my twenties, I finally “got” Shakespeare. How many people, like me, loathed him at first meeting, usually in high school? I guess there are some things you just have to be old enough to understand. And some people never do.

By my thirties, I suddenly found I had a feel for non-fiction reading. In my forties, I developed a taste for comparative religions and philosophy, then for apologetics. Now, in my fifties, I suddenly discover that some of the music styles of songsters more celebrated by my parents’ generation have started to speak to me with very strange poignancy. Again, I guess sometimes you just have to reach an age.

Lately, I’ve found myself strangely compelled by the work of Burt Bacharach.

Christmas Dreams, White or Otherwise

I had a dream.

No, not like MLK. That’s more of what we call a vision than a dream. Mine was nothing inspiring or quotable. Just a regular dream, the ordinary kind where your mind drifts randomly.

The Grand Entrance

In my dream I went to Hallowby Hall. I had heard that it had the most amazing Christmas decorations on the planet. Everyone said so. And I couldn’t wait to see them.

So I went there. And even as I approached I must say I was impressed. Rich, red carpets led the way up the front stairs. Gold gleamed from towering archways. Tall trees of blue and green framed either side, and from beneath each bough multi-coloured lights winked mischievously. Banners of satin crowned the entranceway, and from underneath gleamed the golden light of a dozen shining chandeliers. Such a glorious sight I had never seen.

Too Hot to Handle: The Gospel Meeting

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

On the subject of the gospel meeting, Mike Willis has dug in. Gospel meetings, Willis says, used to accomplish a lot of good when America was a rural nation and non-Christians would visit the meetings.

Now, he concedes, not so much.

Yet despite a significant decline in their effectiveness (according to Willis, “Fewer non-Christian visitors are attending gospel meetings than at times in the past” and “We are not baptizing people any more”), he’s determined to revitalize the form. Willis says, “Reminding ourselves of the legitimate goals of gospel meetings and refocusing our aims on those goals should help us to have more effective gospel meetings.”

The Mythical Native

So you’re speaking to someone about the gospel. And suddenly he gets that ironic glint in his eye. He folds his arms, steps back and says, “Well, what about the people who have never heard? What about people not born in Christian cultures, or even in cultures with some other religion? Hey, what about the native on some remote South Sea island, who has never even seen a white person and knows nothing about Western culture? If you have to believe the gospel to be saved, then isn’t that poor guy going to hell? And how is that fair? After all, he never even had a chance.”

He smiles smugly at you, confident you won’t be able to field that one. And you stumble.

Sound Advice from a Secular Source

Consider the source, but not too much.

The word of God is full of good advice. So full, in fact, that many of us regularly take biblical advice that was given to other people entirely; advice that has no obvious direct connection to us.

Sometimes that works out all right anyway, provided the instructions are general enough to apply more broadly. For example, God told Cain, “If you do well, will you not be accepted?” That piece of wisdom came in a specific context to a specific person and had a specific historical meaning, but that doesn’t mean we’re crazy to say to ourselves, “You know, things will probably go better for me if I approach God the same way as others with whom he says he is pleased.”

Just like Cain ought to have done … and didn’t.