The Salary Gap – This is so wonderfully Shane Claiborne. He suggests that we probe our churches and Christian institutions to find out how much they're paying custodial staff. Then ask how much the presidents and CEOs are getting. "A good question of any college president is if he or she would be comfortable exchanging salaries for a year with the janitor. After all, both are just as valuable in the eyes of God."
Giving Hell a Better Context – Barnabas Piper: "The biggest issue with using hell as a threat is that it doesn’t lead people to a new life. Salvation is a moment when the soul is instantaneously changed in the eyes of God through the work of Jesus Christ…It is walking with Jesus, following Jesus. That doesn’t come from fear. It comes through hope, through promise, through what we know we are following Jesus toward." A better way: Preaching Hell in contrast to Heaven.
Lost Worship Service Elements Responsible for Doctrinal Variances – Professor John Stackhouse makes the case that the cause of theological differences among Evangelicals may be rooted in what we're not doing each weekend: "[W]hat there generally isn’t is anything else liturgical: no call to worship, no confession and absolution of sin, no series of Scripture readings (OT, Gospel, Epistles), no congregational prayers, no “Our Father,” no Creeds … When Robert Webber and others chided and educated evangelicals about liturgy in the 1970s and 1980s, some responded by adding (back) elements to their services, but nowadays the trend-setting churches seem to have fallen back into two halves—singing and preaching—which, among other bad consequences, has put a very heavy burden on worship leaders and preachers to perform at a high standard, since that’s pretty much all there is to the service."
Perhaps Evangelicals Feel They Need Not Apply – I wish this had been a longer article, but apparently while there are some improvements taking place, Christians are few in number among the academics in university social sciences departments. "A fundamentalist-leaning Evangelical Protestant is not going to take a sociology class and say, 'this is what I want to do,' … It's just not going to resonate with their sort of vision of things. So they will select themselves out."
Goin' To The Chapel and We're Gonna Get Honest – "Planning to sabotage a wedding ceremony and defy centuries of tradition is not the sort of thing one shares with a spouse on the morning of the wedding. Why would the minister need to be told? No bride needs the added stress. Let it be a secret to the groom and watch him squirm as his soon-to-be father-in-law goes off-script." And go off-script he did.
Music that Drives People Away – The turning point, his personal ground zero which led to him walking away from his faith, was a poorly crafted worship song. "When I got done looking at the crowd I thought of myself, and I saw myself as one of those people and it frightened me. I had sung a million songs like this without thinking. Maybe not as horrendously nonsensical as this one, but close enough. And if I had sung songs like this without thinking, what else had I done without thinking?" (And all this took place in "the songwriting capital of the world.")
The Eye of the Beholder – Imagine being a book reviewer and covering the same book on a regular basis and thereby limiting your comments to seemingly superficials such as the typesetting, printing and binding. That's what J. Mark Bertrand—yes, the same guy who writes the Christian mystery books—does at Bible Design Blog, and it's a very precise science discerning the differences between various esoteric editions, such as this review of a Goatskin KJV.
Moving from the Sublime – Positively guaranteed to be the most unusual blog you'll read this week, The Story Behind the Story has spent much effort and energy these past few weeks documenting the reasons — and they are legion — why when it comes to music, absolutely every Western-influenced instrumentalist on the planet is doing it entirely wrong by tuning their instruments to the standard A = 440hz. Earlier in October was a defining article explaining why A440 is especially not optimal for church musicians and worship leaders.
Bonus Item – If some people didn't like God portrayed as a woman in The Shack, they may not be thrilled with the voice of God speaking to Moses voiced by an 11-year old in an upcoming movie.
Paul Wilkinson posts daily at Thinking Out Loud.
