From Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling:

All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously... The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C.

So first we heard that global warming had nothing to do with carbon emissions. Now this. Can someone please explain to me why it's wrong to be skeptical of "science" that's pushed onto the public by politicians?

And can someone explain to me how long the mainstream media can possibly avoid covering this accurately?



I just can't wait for Al Gore to do a sequel and include all of the updated figures into another movie. Then again, maybe I shouldn't hold my breath.

Labels: politics

From John Stossel in Guns Save Lives:

How many shootings at schools or malls will it take before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia is to be realized.

While they search for -- excuse me -- their magic bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless.

That's because laws that make it difficult or impossible to carry a concealed handgun do deter one group of people: law-abiding citizens who might have used a gun to stop crime. Gun laws are laws against self-defense.

Criminals have the initiative. They choose the time, place and manner of their crimes, and they tend to make choices that maximize their own, not their victims', success. So criminals don't attack people they know are armed, and anyone thinking of committing mass murder is likely to be attracted to a gun-free zone, such as schools and malls.

Why do liberals insist on creating gun-free zones? Do they not see that this creates an obvious place for criminals to go on mass murder sprees?

It's actually quite typical of the liberal mindset - focus on ideas that sound good. And implement them without any thought to the ramifications. "Ban all the guns! They're evil!" You know, if you could really ensure that all of the guns in the universe were destroyed, and that nobody could ever create another one, then sure, it'd be a good idea. But liberals neglect the fact that criminals will always have the ability to secure lethal weapons, including guns. And the most efficient way to stop a crazy gunman is with a law-abiding citizen carrying a gun.

Labels: politics

This series is reviewing Rethinking The Wineskin by Frank Viola. See my introduction to the series, if you haven't already, for the background discussion about the book.

In Christianity, we have nearly 2,000 years of tradition behind us. How much of this helps us? How much of this hinders us?

I'm actually not going to focus much, right now, on the traditions of the last 1,900 years. Primarily because that's a different book (one that I'll do a short review of soon), but also because over the past couple of years I've made it my goal to tease out the tradition of men from my thinking. It's an ongoing struggle, and will likely always be a struggle.

But the NT does talk about tradition - specifically, about apostolic tradition. The apostolic tradition is not a set liturgy or detailed description of worship gatherings. It is not a detailed description of how to organize churches geographically. It is not about obedience to some kind of new law of church practice. If it was, we would not need the guidance of the Spirit in our churches.

The apostolic tradition is all about the principles of following Christ in an organic way.

The apostolic tradition is the embodiment of those spiritual principles and organic practices that the apostles modeled in every church during the first century. It is the principles, methods, and lines of working that constitute the wineskin that God has formed to preserve His new wine.

In other words, Christ brought the new wine of the new covenant, and the apostles created the new wineskin of the church to contain the new covenant. Christ specifically said that the new wine could not be contained in the old wineskin. Therefore the apostolic tradition is essential if we with to truly reflect Christ in the church.

The NT presents the church in its purest form. It shows us what the church was like before it was tainted by the defiling hand of man... if we ignore Scripture on these points, we will make the perilous mistake of creating a church after our image.

I've been saying for awhile that I'm starting to take the NT more seriously. It is exactly because of this that the apostolic tradition becomes more important. For as much as the NT has to say about individual salvation and personal holiness, it has more to say about corporate holiness, our responsibilities to each other, and how we corporately interact with God. Viola quotes Stephen Kaung:

People believe that the Word of God shows them how to live individually before God, but they think that insofar as their corporate life is concerned, God says, 'It's up to you; do whatever you like.' And that's what we find today in Christianity; there is no guiding principle as to our corporate life - everyone does what is right in his own eyes. But dear brothers and sisters, we are saved individually, but we are called corporately... there is as much teaching and example in the Word of God that governs our corporate life as there is our personal life.

The apostolic tradition is the new wineskin. But we have held on to so much more that is either glaringly absent from the apostolic tradition, or even specifically forbidden. Professional clergy are never mentioned in the tradition. (Helping traveling ministers is mentioned, but Paul dislikes taking payment for ministry!) Single-leader and presentational systems are not mentioned, instead each member ministers to the entire body. In a time when religion was always combined with a "holy space," Christians specifically refrained from building temples are basilicas for worship, instead intentionally choosing the simple relational format of the home. Denominations and church splits are specifically warned against. Unity was of the utmost importance.

Observing apostolic traditions means following what was theologically and spiritually significant in the experience of the early church. The apostolic tradition represents the balance between reenacting the specific actions of the first-century church and ignoring them... Multitudes of church leaders today have opted to regard their own ideas of "doing church" as wiser, more expedient, and more successful than what is found in the NT. The tragedy of this mistaken conclusion is manifold. When Divine tendencies are replaced with man-officiated programs and schemes, God's ordained purpose for the ekklesia is crippled at best. It is crushed at worst.

I believe that the heart of the modern church's problem in this area is pragmatism. The idea is that we are after tangible results. God will not be pleased unless we reach as many people as we can. A church building is necessary to reach the unsaved in suburban cultures. That paid pastoral staff serve a need in the church community. Et cetera.

But I believe that the Bible shows, time and time again, that it is not results from pragmatic approaches that God desires from us. God's desire of us is simply to be obedient.

The tragic story of King David's presumptuous act of placing the ark of the Lord upon a wooden cart is the summary witness that God's work must be done His way (2 Sam. 6:1-7). The humanly-devised scheme of placing the holy ark upon a cart appeals to modern pragmatic ears. Yet the idea was borrowed from the heathen Philistines. And it violated the plain instruction of Jehovah.

There is simply nothing we can add to church practice that can be of any lasting value if we are not first and foremost obedient to the direct and obvious descriptions of church life, principle, and practice as described in the NT. This is the apostolic tradition. We would be very wise to compare our modern churches to it, and make any and all adjustments that we need to make in order to follow what has been handed down to us. Not what has been handed down to us through 1,900 years of human improvements. But what has been handed down to us directly from the apostles themselves, in the form of NT scripture. It is this, and only this measurement, with the guidance of the Spirit, that we have been given to adhere to. Pragmatism should be viewed as our enemy if it distracts us from obedience.

I'll finish with a quote from A. W. Tozer about pragmatism:

What shall we do to break its power over us? The answer is simple. Acknowledge the right of Jesus Christ to control the activities of His church. The NT contains full instructions, not only about what we are to believe but what we are to do and how we are to go about doing it. Any deviation from those instructions is a denial of the Lordship of Christ. I say the answer is simple, but it is not easy for it requires that we obey God rather than man, and that brings down the wrath of the religious majority. It is not a question of knowing what to do; we can easily learn that from the Scriptures. It is a question of whether or not we have the courage to do it.

Labels: books, church, house church, reviews

This series is reviewing Rethinking The Wineskin by Frank Viola. See my introduction to the series, if you haven't already, for the background discussion about the book.

Who is in your church?

Last time, we talked about Membership, and how it is clearly not acceptable to separate ourselves out due to any kind of division. We are all a part of Christ, and all members of His body.

But what about the local church? What does the New Testament have to say about the nature of local fellowships?

The New Testament clearly defines local churches in terms of geography. Distance is the only thing that separated one church from another.

Strikingly, everywhere the word "church" is used throughout the NT (excepting the passages which refer to the universal, heavenly church or a church in someone's house) it is identified by the city. By contrast, everywhere the word "churches" is used in the NT, it refers to the various churches that exist in a given province or region... according to the Bible, the boundary of the church is the city.

But this is not how it is today. You can drive down any local highway and easily pass by five churches within a mile of each other, that have no connections between them. Christ is not unified.

Given the size of our cities today, though, the "city" might not be the best analogy to use today. We could more appropriately talk about communities. In metropolitan areas, though, there is little differentiation between communities other than arbitrary political boundaries. Nevertheless, it is the spirit behind this issue that is important. Even if my house church meets just a few miles from my brother's house church, I don't think the issue with geography is that we have to combine our fellowships. But I do think that it is crucial that we view ourselves as part of Christ's church, and more importantly, that we intentionally meet together to express that in a practical way. I have recently realized what a gift this is from God, and how easy it is for us to personally model this, because we have three different house churches in the area, all connected through sibling relationships. I think this is truly opening my eyes, anyway, to how connected our churches should be in Christ.

With the five churches within a mile of each other on a local highway, though, how much inter-relation do these churches have? In nearly all cases, very, very little. A friend of mine who is a pastor in just that situation has lamented to me about how difficult it is to create any kind of fellowship among the pastors. If you ask me, we are divided because of the clergy class, because of the preferential treatment they receive from their followers.

The notable feature of these sects is that the people within the gather around their favorite leader (or doctrine) instead of around Christ.

You could just as easily add stylistic issues to that today. But it began with clergy.

One of the pitfalls of house churches is that we can consider ourselves too much as a single unit. We need connections with others, in other house churches and even, hopefully, those still in a modern church, so that we understand that our group is not singularly the body of Christ.

While the house is the Scriptural setting for the church meeting, the boundary of the church is never the house. It is always the locale. An ongoing challenge for modern house churches is the danger or raising up several independent and separate house churches in the same community.

How does this position house churches relative to the modern church? The problem is that the modern church is heavily based on its division.

What is the remedy for the endless divisions in the Body? It is certainly not found in the formation of an association of sects or ministers who hold hands over the fence... the Lord's reaction to the present disorder is to raise up a representative company of believers who will respond to the Spirit's cry for genuine unity. His is a charge to leave the manmade sects and to meet freshly upon the first-century basis of the church... They receive all whom God has received, whether they meet in sects or not. They include all believers living in their locales. They welcome unreserved fellowship with any and all who wish to gather with them. At the same time, they cannot endorse a system that smacks square in the face of NT revelation... they cannot support the denominational system. Nor can they join the sects.

This sums up so well what I have been feeling. Denominations are simply not approved by God. That is not to say that the people involved aren't of Christ, but their organization is a hindrance to fully knowing and belonging to Christ. But we do not seek to simply start a new sect. We seek to express fully the unity of Christ, apart of sectarianism, and the only way to do that in a lasting way is to avoid manmade structure and organization and remain a truly organic church. I came out of a denomination that originally started with such an ideal - yet within decades the structure and organization had turned the Church of God (Anderson, IN) into just another denomination.

Divisions of the church in any locale is due to sectarianism. We must reverse this trend. Viola quotes Stephen Kaung:

We come out of divisions to return to unity. That's what we are doing. Therefore, on the one hand, we hold fast the Head; on the other hand, we open our heart and arms to all our brothers and sisters all over the world... You may reject us, but we cannot reject you because we believe in the oneness of the Body of Christ... We come out of sects not to be sectarian, but to be delivered from the spirit of sectarianism.

Labels: books, church, house church, reviews

This is what is known in programming as a "deadlock":


(Hat tip to The Daily WTF.)

Labels: fun, tech

I do a lot of commenting around the web, but really mostly on Josh Brown's blog. Something about the discussions there just sucks me right in.

So I decided to start quoting myself every now and then. Kind of vain, I know. But every now and then I just say something that I think, "I should write a blog post about this." Due to my laziness, I'll just give you the back-of-the-book quotes.

If people were half as worried about babies getting their brains sucked out of their head while being halfway through the birth canal, I’d take liberals a little more seriously in their concerns about waterboarding. (from Huckabee Is An Idiot)

The whole process of picking a president was never supposed to be this way. Presidents, initially, were chosen by electors who were chosen by state legislatures. So none of this beauty contest type of thing. Presidents (and senators, for that matter) were chosen by the states. I would really love to see someone push for a more simple system like that again. It would give the national news media a LOT less to talk about. (from Oh Politic Where Art Thou?)

I think the ideas of transforming culture, and us redeeming the world, are very appealing. But therein lies their danger. They make us important. Following what Christ personally did, and what He commanded His followers to do, will not really help us transform the world. It’s too radical. Too crazy. Too dismissive of worldly systems. When we become followers in God’s kingdom, we’re aliens here. I don’t know, I just see so much in scripture that goes against the idea of us redeeming the world, whereas I think you have to try really hard to read those ideas into scripture.

Look, we have a hard enough time following Christ’s explicit commands. Trying to obediently serve my place in the kingdom of God is simple, yet really, really hard to do. I don’t think Christ burdened the entire church with the transformation of the world into God’s original vision of it - something that is described in scripture, but something that is described as God doing, not the church. (from Oh Politic Where Art Thou?)

Compassion means “to suffer with.” If our efforts are based on funneling money from the “evil rich” to the poor with no interaction between them except for a cold, soul-less government, it’s very little service to anyone. I think it’s perhaps the most heartless form of ministry imaginable. (from The Politics of Heaven)

When Jesus is telling us to sell our possessions and give to the poor, I don’t think he was suggesting that we encourage the government to do so by force. To me, that sounds like a joke - if I could only figure out how to turn it into a punchline. (from The Politics of Heaven)

Good comments from the other side on each of those posts as well, lots of stuff to think about.

Labels: church, politics

Toshiba announced yesterday that they are pulling out of the HD-DVD market. Toshiba really was the main force behind HD-DVD, with the exception of a couple of other makers of hybrid HD-DVD/Blu-ray products (such as LG), which were always way too expensive for mere mortals to purchase - even moreso than a single-format HD player.

The upside? The format war is over. Those of us who have upgraded their TV sets for HD now have a clear path for a better DVD format. Blu-ray prices will get cheaper this year, as more manufacturers will step in now that they won't be worried about losing their startup costs for entering into an uncertain market.

The downside? If you bought an HD-DVD player, you're up the creek without a paddle. That's been clear for about a month, though. This announcement wasn't a surprise yesterday.

Personally, I waited. But I expect that the player prices will get low enough this year that I'll jump. I wasn't an early adopter of DVD, either, but I didn't wait for the prices to go all the way down before going for it. I'm kind of a "middle" adopter in many ways.

What's interesting to me is how this compared with the VHS/Betamax war in the 80's. One of the things that the Blu-ray advocates touted all along was that Blu-ray was better. More storage. Probably others, but storage was the biggie. But Betamax was far superior to VHS. The quality of the video was undeniably better. The cassette size was smaller, and more reliable. My dad was an early adopter, and we grew up with a Betamax. But it turned out that price beat quality. VHS was cheaper than Betamax.

No so this time around. HD-DVD players were always cheaper than Blu-ray. The discs started out cheaper, but eventually that leveled out. If I had gambled on it, I would have gone with HD-DVD for two reasons - price, and the name. What kind of dumb name is Blu-ray, anyway?

But it turns out there was one factor I was neglecting - during the VHS/Betamax wars, there were no other alternatives. The only other thing you could do with your TV was watch TV over the airwaves or cable. So everybody wanted something, and as soon as they could get it. People were more motivated to move forward, even with the uncertainty of what would happen. They wanted to watch movies at home! They wanted to record TV!

With HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, this was not an issue at all. Most people were perfectly content with DVD, and actually will still be quite content with DVD for years to come. Many people had access to content on demand through their cable provider (many with HD options). Many people had DVR functionality through the cable provider, media center systems, etc. There are simply so many ways to get content now, other than live TV. So most people, even those who really would have liked to do something, waited. In the end the adoption was driven not by price, but by quality expected by early adopters who were willing to fork over the cash.

The PlayStation 3 had a huge impact as well. If the HD-DVD had been standard in the XBox 360, that might have changed things a bit. But Microsoft chose to make it cheaper. So Microsoft is winning the console war, but Toshiba lost the HD disc war.

The biggest downside? With HD-DVD, you could put the HD-DVD on one side and put a regular vanilla DVD on the other. Nice compatibility. But if I buy a Blu-ray of "Cars" for my kids, they can't watch that in our DVD player in the car. I guess eventually there will be some software on the web to break the Blu-ray encryption and make a DVD backup of a Blu-ray disc, but you'd still rather not have to resort to those methods just to keep your kids quiet in the car.

But I'll take the tradeoff. The ability to step into full HD content without being worried about picking the losing format will be worth it.

Labels: tech

This series is reviewing Rethinking The Wineskin by Frank Viola. See my introduction to the series, if you haven't already, for the background discussion about the book.

I fully believe that God hates denominations. They represent the fallacy of man's desire to be right, to be heard, and to be prominent. Much more so than even the local church pastor who commands the pulpit for a half-hour every week. As soon as we move beyond the basic theology of Christ's salvation and forgiveness of sins, and separate ourselves from each other based on these kinds of disagreements, we are no longer a church. We're an arbitrary man-made division of Christ's body.

If a person belongs to the Lord, then he is part of the church. And we must receive him into fellowship. If we demand anything beyond his acceptance of Christ before admitting him into fellowship, we are not a church. We are a sect.

Paul is very clear about this being a major problem. If we become so convinced that we're right that we're willing to end our fellowship with another person that God has received, we're rejecting Christ.

There is an equally dangerous problem of expanding the Biblical view of the body of Christ, and accepting those who do not claim Christ as part of the church. We are not to be all-inclusive.

To receive unbelievers as family members is to turn the church into something earthly and to corrupt the true people of God. This of course does not mean that we should forbid unbelievers from attending the gatherings of the church. But it does mean that we are not to receive them as our brethren.

The New Testament places a huge emphasis on unity within the body of Christ. But it is simply not enough to claim unity when we are horribly divided by organization, doctrine, or practice. Unity within division is simply not unity. It is a lie of the enemy to believe otherwise.

Fellowships that either undercut or exceed the scope of the Body are not Biblical churches. In God's thought, the church is one unified Body of His Son with local expressions throughout the world. Let us, therefore, cease from using the word "church" in a tribal sense where we equate it with Christian denominations, hierarchical structures of descending authority, program-driven institutions, and clergy-led enterprises.

The more our churches act and assemble organically, the closer we will be to how God views the church. And the closer we'll be to fulfilling what God calls the church to be. Manmade divisions of the body, through membership in earthly institutions, only act as an obstacle.

Labels: books, church, house church, reviews

This series is reviewing Rethinking The Wineskin by Frank Viola. See my introduction to the series, if you haven't already, for the background discussion about the book.

One of the biggest struggles I've had in the past couple of years is this - what is the purpose of the church? Trying to answer this question while ignoring the effects of your background is nearly impossible. Having grown up in a traditional church, with an emphasis on both evangelism and holiness, it's hard to think of anything other than "reaching the lost."

Properly conceived, the church exists to make the fullness of Christ known on the earth. It stands here to register Christ's final victory over Satan in every place (Eph. 3:9-10). As His Body, the church is here to express Jesus in all of His glory.

Notice that there's nothing in there about saving individual people. We are called to "build the church," but the pressing question is simply what is the purpose of what is being built?

Our American/evangelical variant of Christianity has turned this around. We are taught that the purpose of the church is to add people to the church. That doesn't really make any sense - by having kids, I create a family. But what is the purpose of my family? Is the purpose of my family to have kids? The logic becomes circular, and can easily become a justification for having lots of kids without being at all concerned with who those kids grow up to be. This is what has happened to the church - we've become so focused on adding people to the church that we lose sight of what the church is supposed to become and what it is supposed to represent.

So to make this perfectly clear, adding people to the church is not the purpose of the church.

I'm also not really going to address the "change the world" ideal that many view as the purpose of the church, because in reality you just can't find that in the Bible.

There are three primary metaphors for understanding the purpose of the church, and centered on the idea of a singular, connected, unified church body:

The Temple
Under the old covenant, the temple was the physical place where God would dwell on earth. It contained His presence, and as such, strict instructions were given as to how it would be created, assembled, and maintained. Each aspect of temple life was governed by law.

Under the new covenant, God dwells within His people, the church. We contain God's presence. And we have rather specific instructions as to how we are created (through salvation), how we are assembled (through love and mutual edification), and how we are to be maintained (through holiness).

One brick never made a temple yet, nor has a heap of bricks piled on top of the other. The church is a people built together into one new man. And it exists to be the corporate expression of Christ.

The Bride
Paul describes as a mystery newly revealed that God has been preparing a bride for Christ. Revelation gives a glorious picture of the beauty of Christ's bride (described as a shining city). As is the purpose of any bride, the purpose of the church is to prepare ourselves for Christ.

The two central themes of the church as the bride are purity and love. These are not individualistic, though, they are collective - it is not or individual purity that really matters in this regard, it is our collective purity as a church. Purity in holiness and obedience. But our purity must be motivated out of our love for Christ.

The Lampstand
In an often overlooked part of Revelation, the church is described as a lampstand of pure gold. (Revelation 1:20) The purpose of this lampstand is to shine out Christ, to "bear the testimony of Jesus." The only way this can be done is for the lampstand to be made into the image of Christ through discipleship.

There is also much to be said of the church as the kingdom of God - in essence, the church is the visible agent of the kingdom on earth, similar to the metaphor of the lampstand. But as the kingdom of God, we are also called to be the hands of Christ in the world - preaching the good news, bringing healing, deliverance, and freedom.

When we talk about the purpose of the church being to bring salvation to the lost, or to be an agent of change in the world, though, we are missing the critical, higher purpose. When the church is properly being the church, it will bring salvation to the lost, it will call out evil in the world and serve as a counter-example of love and purity. But these are not the church's purpose.

The church is the very fiancé of Jesus Christ. It is the new humanity. It is the lifestyle of the coming kingdom. It is the Christian's natural habitat. It is the spiritual environment where face-to-face encounters between the Bridegroom and His Bride take place. It is the living witness to the fullness of God's Son.

In short, whenever the church gathers together, its guiding and functioning principle is simply - to be Christ (1 Cor. 12:12).

Labels: books, church, house church, reviews