the merge thoughts on leadership, church planting, theology, writing, and design

I have been working my way through C.S. Lewis's book Letters to Malcolm, and found this great quote on worship:

Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best-if you like, it 'works' best-when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost of; our attention would have been on God.

But novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping...A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question, 'What on earth is he up to now?' will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, 'I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks'
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I like this quote from John Adams:

Upon common theaters, indeed the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actors than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss! On the contrary, if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.

Death is painful. It creates an unwanted separation and leaves us with tons of questions. What is life after death like? What happens when we die? Is this the end? How do those left behind continue with this loss?

I think we all struggle with these questions...they are "ultimate" questions. Poets, writers, philosophers, and scholars of all religions discuss these questions. But none offer hope like the Apostle Paul.

Recently I was teaching a class on Paul's Epistles and was struck by this passage from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, "Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him."

Because of the promise of the resurrection we are not "to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope." We know that we will be resurrected so death is not the end. What an amazing promise! We grieve and mourn the absence of those who go before us...but we have hope in being with them when Christ returns and we are resurrected in His Kingdom.

Now that is hopeful!

Just saw these stats about Facebook...makes you realize what a big opportunity it is for the Christian message.

Global Audience: 316,402,840

America is ranked #1 in Facebook users
US Audience: 94,748,820
Percent of Global Audience: 29.95%

Gender Breakdown:
Male: 40,750,980
Female: 53,255,660

By Age:
>13: 740,980
14-17: 8,921,600
18-24: 23,612,940
25-34: 23,316,940
35-44: 16,613,480
45-54: 11,271,320
55-64: 6,266,980
65+: 2,795,980

 I find it interesting that almost 3,000,000 people over the age of 65 are using Facebook!

What do these kind of stats say about possible ministry uses?

Here is a great quote from Tullian Tchividjian

For (some) Christians, contextualization means the same thing as compromise. They believe it means giving people what they want and telling people what they want to hear. What they misunderstand, however, is that contextualization means giving people God’s answers (which they may not want) to the questions they’re really asking and in ways they can understand.

This misunderstanding of contextualization has led these people to argue that cultural reflection and contextualization are at best distractions, at worst sinful. They admonish us to abandon these things and focus simply on the Bible. While this sounds virtuous, it ends up being foolish for two reasons. First, as we’ve already seen, the Bible itself exhorts us to understand our times so that we can reach our changing world with God’s eternal truth. To not contextualize, therefore, is a sin. And second, we all live inescapably within a particular cultural framework that shapes the way we think about everything. So if we don’t work hard to understand our context, we’ll not only fail in our task to effectively communicate the gospel but we’ll also find it impossible to avoid being negatively shaped by a world we don’t understand.

In a recent interview, pastor Tim Keller put it this way: “to over-contextualize to a new generation means you can make an idol out of their culture, but to under-contextualize to a new generation means you can make an idol out of the culture you come from. So there’s no avoiding it.”

What do you think?