What is the Missional Church?

Great video. Short, simple, and immensely helpful to understand this overused term.

(HT: Gospel-Driven Church)

Joshua’s Surgery This Morning

We’ve been chemo-free since late December. This morning is sort of the final stage in Joshua’s completion of his treatment as he’s having a surgical procedure to remove the port from his chest.

When Joshua was first diagnosed with leukemia, one of the first things that happened was the insertion of the port. At least 3 times a month for the last 36 months, blood has been drawn and medicine given through it. It’s attached to a ventricle in Joshua’s heart and makes the taking of blood and receiving of medicine much, much easier.

Today it’s getting taken out. And Joshua, for his part, is more nervous about this than any of the poison that’s been put into his system over the last 3 years:

“They’re going to do what to my chest?”

“With a knife?!?!?!”

Funny. But God willing, he doesn’t need it any more.

UPDATE: Joshua’s surgery took about an hour. Port is gone, and we were eating M&M pancakes by 10:30. He’s pretty jacked about his “scar.”

Fridays Are For One Question

There’s been alot of controversy this week surrounding the Tim Tebo Superbowl ad. That discussion just takes the whole talk about Superbowl commercials to another level. In fact, I heard this week a commercial on the radio promoting a commercial on the Superbowl.

Seriously.

So let’s venture into the world of Superbowl ads for this week’s question:

“What’s the best Superbowl commercial you can remember?”

**The goal of “One Question Friday” is simple: To show that everyone has something funny, engaging, creative, and worthwhile to say. So comment away! Be real. Be creative. Think hard. And check back to see how others answered the question.

An Unlikely Perspective on the Tebow Ad

Surely by now you’ve heard about the pro-life ad Tim Tebow is starring in from Focus on the Family during the Superbowl. Sally Jenkins writes for The Washington Post about it.  Her conclusion is really interesting, especially given that she has vastly different beliefs than Tebow or Dobson:

Let me be clear again: I couldn’t disagree with Tebow more. It’s my own belief that the state has no business putting its hand under skirts. But I don’t care that we differ. Some people will care that the ad is paid for by Focus on the Family, a group whose former spokesman, James Dobson, says loathsome things about gays. Some will care that Tebow is a creationist. Some will care that CBS has rejected a gay dating service ad. None of this is the point. CBS owns its broadcast and can run whatever advertising it wants, and Tebow has a right to express his beliefs publicly. Just as I have the right to reject or accept them after listening — or think a little more deeply about the issues. If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem.

Tebow’s ad, by the way, never mentions abortion; like the player himself, it’s apparently soft-spoken. It simply has the theme “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.” This is what NOW has labeled “extraordinarily offensive and demeaning.” But if there is any demeaning here, it’s coming from NOW, via the suggestion that these aren’t real questions, and that we as a Super Bowl audience are too stupid or too disinterested to handle them on game day.

Read the whole thing.

(HT:  Z)

The Ipad is Amazing, Extraordinary, and Amazing

Or so says Steve Jobs…

(HT: Challies)

Consuming Ourselves to Death

According to a recent study done by the World Health Organization, more people now die worldwide from being overweight and obese than from being underweight. This is tough to believe especially in light of the devastating images we continue to see from Haiti, and yet it’s true – in parts of the world people continue to starve to death, and yet meanwhile we have the opposite issue.

Many of us are literally consuming ourselves to death. Consumption, maybe more than anything else, is the predominant mark of our culture. We consume everything – food, entertainment, even relationships. Rarely to we give, and even more rarely do we sacrifice.

Moderation is a thing of the past; perhaps we are entering into a day when the great sin facing the Christian is gluttony. We gorge ourselves on Twitter, pornography, and burritos. We consume indiscriminately; everything put in front of us is there for the taking.

It’s time to push away from the table.

Nothing Like a Drunk Squirrel

(HT: Z)

Fridays Are For One Question

This week, President Obama delivered his State of the Union address. The speech is both a report of the previous year and an outlining of goals and priorities for the future. So let’s think about that same topic today, but in the arena of the church. Let’s say you were delivering a “State of the Church” address to the evangelical world. Today’s question:

“What would be the opening line to your ‘State of the Church’ address?”

**The goal of “One Question Friday” is simple: To show that everyone has something funny, engaging, creative, and worthwhile to say. So comment away! Be real. Be creative. Think hard. And check back to see how others answered the question.

Looking Deeper at Sin

Any discussion of sin has the potential to end up as little more than behaviorism. That is to say, that typically when we hear sermons, think about, and honestly think about sin in our lives, the end result is us saying something like, “That’s it. I’m not going to ________ any more.” We resolve to change our behavior, and that’s not a bad thing.

But it is an ineffective thing. At least it has been for me. I’ve got a list as long as my arm of all things I’ve decided not to do any more and yet persisted in doing. So what gives?

Perhaps we’re not looking deeply enough at the sin in question. Sin isn’t just something we are; it’s a reflection of what we believe. At the root of any sinful action in our lives, if we trace it back, is a misshapen belief about God or ourselves. So in the case of gluttony which is a behavior, there may well be a root belief spawning the action that God isn’t sufficient. So we try and meet our emotional needs in food. Or lying. Trace that behavior back and we find that we might well believe that we will be abandoned if people (or God, for that matter) knew the truth about us.

That means that if we only look at the action without the motivation or belief behind it, all we’re doing is looking at the symptom and not the disease. We’ve got to look deeper, and if we do, we’ll trace our sin to see what we really believe to be true about God. And we might really be shocked.

But if we look deeper at sin, we also move out of the realm of effort and into the territory of faith, because we’re not fixated on doing something differently at the expense of believing something differently. And that’s where the gospel enters in. Because the gospel is alot bigger than our behavior. Jesus isn’t content to change our behavior; He wants the heart as well.

When we trace it deeper, Jesus will meet us there. At the level of the heart. And change the way we believe.

Devestation in Haiti

This video was shot by Churches Helping Churches, an organization spear-headed by Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald. Keep in mind as you watch that over half of this nation’s population is under the age of 18.