Stones Cry Out

What can we do as Christians and what can our churches do to help address the damage from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Here’s a thorough guide from Flourish, with clear information, how to pray, ideas for fundraising, and tips for action.

One tip:

Although it is not appropriate to fly down to the Gulf Coast, pick up an oil-slicked bird, and start scrubbing on your own, there are lots of opportunities to assist established organizations with oil spill clean up efforts at ground zero.

[I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]

#19 Bill Hybels. Church changer b.1951

Walk into most evangelicals churches in America today, large and small, and you are likely to see the influences in worship style and service components of Bill Hybels and the Willow Creek church and association. It is particularly true in the megachurches, regardless of their evangelical flavor–from reformed to Wesleyan, charismatic or Baptist. Early, he was criticized for using marketing language to sell church and accused of smoothing the sharp corners off the Gospel to make it more “seeker-sensitive.” In recent years the Willowcreek team has been its own strongest critic, faulting its failure to adequately develop spiritual maturity while creating an enormous, active congregation.

Hybels’ South Barrington, Illinois, church is the third most attended in the country, with an average weekly attendance exceeding 23,000, and the nation’s most influential church for the last several years in a national poll of pastors. He is also the founder of the Willow Creek Association and creator of the Global Leadership Summit.

In 1971, as youth pastor at Park Ridge’s South Park Church, Hybels started a youth group with friend Dave Holmbo. With modern music, dramatic skits and multimedia combined with Bible studies in relevant language, the group grow from 25 to 1,200 in just three years.

After 300 youth waited in line to be led to Christ in a service in May 1974, Hybels and other leaders began dreaming of forming a new church. They surveyed the community to find out why people weren’t coming to church. Common answers included: “church is boring”, “they’re always asking for money”, or “I don’t like being preached down to.” These answers shaped the group’s approach to creating a new church, Willow Creek.

In October 1975 the group held their first service at Palatine’s Willow Creek Theater. 125 people attended the service. The rent and other costs were paid for with 1,200 baskets of tomatoes, sold door-to-door by 100 teenagers. Within two years the church had grown to 2,000 and in 1981 it moved to its current suburban location.
Willow Creek is the prototypical megachurch, with modern worship, drama and messages focused on the unchurched. Through its association, Willow has promoted a vision of church that is big, programmatic, and comprehensive.

Not long ago Willow released its findings from a multiple year qualitative study of its ministry. Willow Creek leadership wanted to know what programs and activities of the church were actually helping people mature spiritually and which were not.
The research revealed that “increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does not predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does not predict whether they love God more or they love people more.”

Speaking at his Leadership Summit, Hybels summarized the findings:

“Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back, it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their Bible between services, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

Now, our dream is to fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture. Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how he’s asking us to transform this planet.”.

More than any other person of his generation, Bill Hybels developed a church ministry plan, found the blend of stability and innovation, and built a team that figured out how to involve modern, message-saturated Americans in church programs and services—in very large numbers for many years. But perhaps even more important, Hybels found an effective way to share that information with other church leaders, and then after painstaking measurement publicly admit mistakes—not in church building or evangelism, but in not more successfully leading believers to deeper levels of Christian maturity—and commit to correcting them.

CBO says ObamaCare will cost $115 billion more than thought.  That is to say, if you already had a healthy skepticism of government estimates.  And those same people won’t be surprised if when this figure climbs higher.

Pity the poor folks who have been snookered by the Democrats.

Cities across the United States are officially boycotting the state of Arizona. Presumably because of its recently enacted state law, which enforces Federal law regarding alien status in our country. In Berkeley, a group of UC Berkeley students engaged in a hunger strike, ostensibly to force university administration to sanction illegal activity with the confines of the campus. It is, indeed, interesting to note this excerpt from the post,

Their initial protest target was Arizona’s new immigration law, which requires police to stop and question anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.

No, the AZ law does not require police to stop anyone they suspect is here illegally. Consider this audio clip of an Arizona sheriff, regarding high speed pursuits during the past month.

The new AZ law is widely supported throughout the country, so one has to wonder why so many city governments are shoving their liberal views down the throats of their constituents?

Rest assured, politics is at play here. Is it no wonder, then, that we have Nancy Pelosi instructing clergy what to tell their congregants?

Good morning.

1. Of public transportation and markets.
2. Again on Ms Kagan … and blind justice.
3. On the Soviet gulag system.
4. Global warming strikes again.
5. On the Middle East.
6. Mr Cuomo.
7. Banking and profit.
8. Diversity studies.
9. For President?
10. For discussion.
11. The intentionally (?) dense Mr Holder.
12. Firearms and airports.
13. Supporting genocide?
14. Schools.

So. Ms Kagan. Anybody find any links to online articles authored by her? It is said by her defenders that she’s a brilliant academic, whatever that means. Publish or perish means there should be scads of articles and books by her if she was as claimed a brilliant academic. No book at Amazon, except a $45 tribute essay contribution in honor of some Harvard dude. And I’m guessing this book isn’t hers. Finally there is this at Amazon as well … out of print and no reviews. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t publish in journals not available on-line. So … anything?

Do legal professors not publish? What is the point of being in the Academy if you don’t publish? I don’t get it.

Look to be a brilliant academic you have to make a mark. To make a mark you have to publish important works which make a visible impact on our profession. I see no evidence that is the case for Ms Kagan. Perchance this is more of this retconning thing in which brilliant academic is recast to mean something entirely different. Perhaps it now is to mean an academic liked by Mr Obama who just happens to be another ‘brilliant academic’ who lacks any actual substantive academic record.

There is no shortage of articles and broadcast reports on the Gulf oil spill–who is to blame, what’s being done to stem the flow of oil, what the impact will be on the Gulf coast and its people, flora and fauna.

The Flourish Blog has an important view of things, The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Creation Care, from Southern Baptist Seminary’s Russell Moore.

Moore writes:

Some conservatives, and some conservative evangelicals, act as though “environmentalism” is by definition “liberal” or even just downright silly. Witness a lot of the evangelical rhetoric across social media on Earth Day a while back: mostly Al Gore jokes and wisecracks about cutting down trees or eating endangered species as a means of celebration.

Do some environmentalists reject the dignity of humanity? Yes. Do some replace the reverence for creation with that due the Creator? Of course. This happens in the same way some do the same thing with reverence for economic profit or any other finite thing.

There’s nothing conservative though, and nothing “evangelical,” about dismissing the conservation of the natural environment. And the accelerating Gulf crisis reminds us something of what’s at stake.

This is an important read for those of us who are conservative evangelicals from one of our community’s articulate leaders.

From Chuck Asay (click for a larger version):

Just a bit of perspective before tossing around the "racist" or "Nazi" labels.

Good morning.

1. Logic and the greening of cars.
2. Medieval icons uncovered.
3. One of the unspoken unexamined axioms of the left.
4. Spending binge … do you think it will stop?
5. Climate not weather … heh.
6. Mr Wilson.
7. A quote regarding the UK PM exchange.
8. A discussion of church and same sex relations.
9. Paradigm shifts in thinking about the universe.
10. Chutzpah and an interesting recasting of what swiftboating means that perhaps aligns better with history (although perhaps “politically motivated” should be added as an adjective to the term opponents).
11. Examining Mr Gates.

Good morning.

1. One of the Gentlemen on Kagan.
2. More here from a Volokh conspirator.
3. Lithium dead? That has to be a translation glitch. Oh, wait … reading more carefully it is presented as such.
4. Jews as WASPS?
5. EU crises examined.
6. I failed to mention this yesterday. Actually the WSJ Monday had a hole section on energy which is worth a look.
7. Apropos of my “failure to communicate” essay last night … here’s another example.
8. A solution from the Soviet era?
9. Well, I don’t always take all my vacation days … but I wouldn’t ascribe the reason as guilt.
10. I suspect that “increase” is the first of many admissions of cost increases.
11. A novel.

From a comment:

In Mark’s post-modern relativistic world it appears almost impossible for anyone on the right to say anything untrue. Likewise there’s almost nothing Obama can say that can’t be ret-conned into a lie.

In the above, the accusation leveled at myself is likely a charge made reflexively whenever Mr Boonton (or likely any number of interlocutors from the left) sees someone on the right suggesting that a phrase or word can be taken in more than one way. This is noted in the wake of the particular history of post-modernism/quasi-Derridan theories of language and as a result of the rejection of the same by conservatives. The ironic thing here is that the accusation of this sort attempts to at the same time defend relativism, i.e., multiple meanings while at the same time force a particular meaning to be established.

Foucault and Derrida, as is my understanding, suggest that fixing and setting the meaning of words and phrases, fixing the primary hermenuetic if you will, is an act of power and that furthermore there is no intrinsic meanings for things beyond being an expression of power. While this is undoubtedly a simplification at the same time has the problem of getting the matter exactly wrong.

Meanings are fixed … but their particular assignment to particular words is not. When one says something the intention, the meaning is the one thing which is fixed and not a thing captured or expressed fundamentally in and via particular words. The act of speaking and then of hearing is a distortion on the original meaning (or web of meanings) which is being expressed. Conversation is one aid to the exercise of transmitting this which allows one to correct and refine the transmission. This is of course an exercise made more complicated by the fact that the idea reflected back is itself distorted by the act of expression by the receiver. If speaking is a lossy transmission of one’s thought to another. When you converse and try to get your meaning across, discussion is the act of trying to correct the image of your idea into another’s mind through the quadruple layers of distortion (thought -> spoken words then perceived words -> thoughts with a reflection).

What perchance does this have to do with the title selected for this particular essay? Well, in our political discourse peculiar (particular?) assumptions are made about what phrases mean which are normally misinterpreted by the other side and which make our discourse more contentious than it would normally be. One of the common irritants between parties then aligns along the continual frustration which this engenders. One says a thing to express one idea and by the other’s reaction and comments it is clearly misunderstood. Furthermore as one clarifies and attempts to more clearly state and restate the original point one either gets nowhere or the act of restatement is interpreted as an attempt at “changing” what one originally said.

From a news article on the measures Greece is taking to deal with their financial crisis.

Among the most significant features of the plan, a Greek government official said, would be a measure making it easier for the government to lay off some of the many thousands of public sector workers, whose low levels of productivity and high wages are a big contributor to Greece’s debt problem. Until now, the government has not been able to lay off civil servants, whose employment rights are in effect constitutionally guaranteed.

Another reform high on the list is removing the state from the marketplace in crucial sectors like health care, transportation and energy and allowing private investment. Economists say that the liberalization of trucking routes — where a trucking license can cost up to $90,000 — and the health care industry would help bring down prices in these areas, which are among the highest in Europe.

What right-wing rag would point out how reducing government payrolls, and more privatization, including in the health care industry, would be useful parts of a plan to save money?

Answer below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry

There is an encouraging move afoot by conservative evangelicals to deal constructively with the immigration issue and to find a solidly biblical approach not necessarily in line with majority Republican or Democratic positions.

The effort is headed by Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Matt Staver, dean of the Liberty University Law School, and Samuel Rodriquez, head of the largest evangelical hispanic group in the nation.

Today’s news:

A growing chorus of conservative evangelical leaders has broken with their traditional political allies on the right. They’re calling the Arizona law misguided and are attempting to use its passage to push for federal immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

The group, which includes influential political activists such as Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy wing, and Mathew Staver, dean of the Liberty University School of Law, will soon begin lobbying Republican leaders in Washington to support comprehensive immigration reform under President Obama.

But a big part of their job is to first persuade rank-and-file evangelicals to get on board.

“There’s a misconception among people at the grass roots that the pathway to citizenship is amnesty, and it’s not, but we have to overcome that,” said Staver, who heads the law school at the university founded by Jerry Falwell. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

Staver and Land have partnered with the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, an influential Hispanic evangelical figure, and Rick Tyler — former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s longtime spokesman and head of Gingrich’s new values-based organization — to try to draft a consensus evangelical position on immigration reform.

Good morning (and a belated happy mothers day). Links?

1. VE day in Moscow through Ukrainian eyes.
2. Thoughts on banking.
3. Aging populations.
4. On a remark by a Mr Klein.
5. Candy in school.
6. Marriage … some thoughts.
7. Ya think?
8. Mannequin as cultural marker.
9. An excellent way to recast the “Obama: Socialist or not?” question.
10. Exactly.
11. Miranda.
12. Kagan and Meiers.
13. The next American rifle?