Jim Wallis was on the Daily Show last year, promoting his book God's politics. Jim, and his organization Sojourners are really picking up momentum. Their website finally has the video clip, which is pretty amazing. "Jim joins Jon in the tradition of Hebrew prophets who use humor and truth-telling to make their point." You can also listen to and download 3 free samples from the audio book.
How should the Church respond the sexuality in our culture today? The Christian message contains the truest guide to sexuality in existance, but too many people refuse to listen b/c all they here the church saying in regards to sex is NO!
Perhaps we should change our approach, much like this recent article in Wired Magazine:
" I stayed up all night Monday reading Smut: A Sex Industry Insider (and Concerned Father) Says Enough Is Enough by Gil Reavill. He's no prude, and he's no extremist. But he is tired of the porn creep that has turned mainstream entertainment into a sex-saturated parody of itself. And as I finished each chapter, I found myself thinking "yeah!" and "what he said!" instead of what I'd expected to think (which was something along the lines of "whatever, get over it").
"(The) internet ... represents a shared commons or public square," he writes. "It presents an engrossing portrait of who we are as a society, as a culture and as human beings." And it also houses "the nastiest neighborhoods of any town on Earth."
C.S. Lewis said in Mere Chrisitanity that "You can get a large audience together for a striptease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a piece of meat or food, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?"
Continue Reading Put smut in its place
Wow! I was speechless after reading this:
"Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to
Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became
an institution; it moved to
and became an enterprise." Sam Pascoe, American scholar.
From http://www.religioustolerance.org/christ.htm,
via Anna at Deep Soil.
Earlier this week, I was sitting next to a friend of mine and noticed something that freaked me out: they were still using Internet Explorer! I couldn't believe it! How could anyone still use that? Tens of millions of people know and understand the greatness of Mozilla. And then, this week Firefox was hit with it's first security flaw.
So how does this relate to the gospel? Well, it should be obvious that the internet is bigger and greater than any one browser, no matter how good that certain browser might be. And isn't this also true of the christian faith? Isn't is bigger and larger than any one version? From time to time, doesn't our faith need to be updated, debugged, and reinstalled into our lives?
Did the early Church practice evangelism? Should we? And if so, what should be our approach? There is much conversation taking place about the Church being a community that lives out its faith and invites others into the community of faith. The New Testament refers to the Church as a body and a bride. Does modern evangelism fit into these metaphors?
I was recently talking to someone who was making some phone calls for us. They said they felt like they were trying to sell paradox, or sell Jesus. I knew exactly what they meant, I have felt the same way before! Should we rethink evangelism all together, or just "tweak" it?