Call to Action

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."

- Martin Luther King Jr., in his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence"

This is a great quote, but hard to act on. We are such selfish people. Lately, however, I've begun to realize that I'm not the most important person in the world - it doesn't always have to be "me first". And although I realize that, I know I have a long way to go to break this life-long mindset. Hopefully this shift of values will be quick to take hold.

Here's a good quote

I ran accross this quote from Pascal while perusing some other blogs. I just love to rip off material from other blogs. This is also quite convenient as I seldom have original thoughts.

"there are two kinds of people:
sinners who think they are saints
and saints who know they are sinners" ~Pascal, pensees

More On Culture

This is an interesting and relevant quote I came across in an article that Dani sent me. I think this quote sums up a lot of our thoughts about and disappointments with the modern Church's inability to understand the importance of the culture around it. The article comes from www.emergingchurch.info.

I long for a culturally relevant church. I don't understand why cross-cultural missionaries attempt to understand culture to present the gospel within it, while churches in the developed world tend to simply withdraw from their own culture, often condemning its evils. Unfortunately for them, our culture is filled with people who need to see real Christianity in action: they have seen enough caricatures of Christianity already. Being culturally relevant in the early 21st century means understanding -gasp!- postmodernism.

Multisensory Prayer

This is a link to a very interesting article from the Emerging Church UK website. I think it presents some ideas that are definitely worth considering if you struggle or are unsatisfied with your prayer life.

Below is a snippet from the article. . .

Sometimes I feel a terrible fraud for writing a prayerbook. Isnt it people that are good at prayer that write prayerbooks? In my imagination I always used to picture people who write prayerbooks as being super-pray-ers who have sussed the art of living life totally-connected to God. Yet my prayerbook came out of our struggles within the Visions group and our realisation that we were actually pretty bad at prayer really.

So we went on a sort of pilgrimage and scavenger hunt. We looked at all the different Christian traditions and how they prayed, collecting things that worked for us.

A Lesson on Postmodernism. . .

Postmodernism, I have found, seems to be almost a bad word among a lot of Christians. Below is an article from the Youthworker Journal by Matt Kelley that dispells some of the assumptions regarding this new culture. . .

Postmodernism isn't an outright rejection of modernism in the way that modernism rejected what had come before it. People who are postmodern seek to preserve modern attitudes and philosophies that they find helpful, as well as rediscovering older traditions and ways of thinking. In his book, Postmodern Youth Ministry, Tony Jones identifies several attitudes present within our postmodern culture.

Subjectivity
Postmoderns recognize that it's almost impossible to be objective about anything. Our socio-economic backgrounds, our upbringings, our friends, our educational levels, and everything else about us influence the way we perceive every situation. Even when we simply observe a situation, we interact with it and change it to some degree. Human beings simply cannot be totally objective--and that's okay.

Postmoderns seek to understand more fully what it is that affects the way we see things. Only by recognizing this inherent and inescapable subjectivity can we see more clearly. The result: postmodernism is all about self-awareness.

Truth
Postmoderns also have a nuanced view of truth. Some go as far as to say "there is no Truth with a capital 'T'." As with subjectivity, postmodernism recognizes that what we hold to be true is anchored in fundamental assumptions that vary from person to person. This scares many Christians, because it sounds suspiciously like moral relativism: the idea that there's no absolute truth. While many secular postmoderns certainly fall into the camp of moral relativism, that's not the case with all postmoderns. Postmodern Christians don't necessarily believe that there's no absolute truth, but many believe that it's very hard to understand and even harder to articulate.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber believed that truth is the very essence of God, and that God cannot be contained by human language. To be able to understand and articulate something is to exercise a degree of control over it, and we certainly cannot control God. Postmodern Christians believe that truth, like God, is transcendent and can only be encountered through being, not through intellectual understanding.

Questioning
As a result of these attitudes about subjectivity and truth, postmoderns believe that everything must be questioned. This can be another scary thing for Christians, because questioning basic assumptions and things we've taken for granted all our lives can seem to border on heresy. However, postmoderns believe that people can't truly believe something unless they've honestly considered that the alternative might be true. This is very different from the type of apologetics found in Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, or Josh McDowell's More Evidence that Demands a Verdict, which are based on the modern idea of reason and rationale...convincing ourselves beyond any doubt.

Paul Tillich, one of the most important theologians of the 20th century, maintained that doubt is an essential element of true faith. Superficial faith is that which holds on to supposed truths for the sake of security. Tillich said that "this element of uncertainty in faith cannot be removed, it must be accepted." Tillich articulated a postmodern attitude by recognizing that an element of doubt or uncertainty is an integral part of faith precisely because of the radical transcendence of God and God's truth. Because the mortal mind can never "possess" God, the life of faith always involves anxiety.