This summer I attended a lunch with Neil Cole and Don Graves in Philadelphia. Neil Cole is the author of the book Organic Church. Both of these men are involved in the Simple Church Movement. It was helpful to me, and while I don't agree with everything in the movement, there are significant truths to be learned for those who seek to find God's mission in this world and join Him in what He is doing.
Here's an article Don wrote, which summarizes an essay by a man named Wolfgang Simpson. Below, I'm pasting the fifteen theses of the simple church movement. Read the article, and you'll be challenged, I think.
- Church is a Way of Life, not a series of religious meetings
- Time to change the system
- The Third Reformation.
- From Church-Houses to house-churches
- The church has to become small in order to grow big
- No church is led by a Pastor alone
- The right pieces - fitted together in the wrong way
- God does not leave the Church in the hands of bureaucratic clergy
- Return from organized to organic forms of Christianity
- From worshipping our worship to worshipping God
- Stop bringing people to church, and start bringing the church to the people
- Rediscovering the “Lord’s Supper” to be a real supper with real food
- From Denominations to city-wide celebrations
- Developing a persecution-proof spirit
- The Church comes home
Everyone has a story. Some people in religious circles call the story of God's meeting and changing them a "testimony." While that has a bit of a cheezy ring to it, it more or less communicates the point.
I read a testimony from a friend of mine that was recently published in the paper. His testimony draws out significant aspects related to sexual abuse and pornography. You can find it here.
Speaking of stories of people who struggle, I love the website/web resource called Heart Support. This is how they describe their mission:
We believe that everyone has a life story and that his or her story is unique. We also believe in strength in numbers. To know that we are not alone in our struggles and to know that someone else has been through what we are dealing with can be the greatest gift and relief.
You can find a bunch of inspiring stories along these lines here--and even add some of your own!
Rebutting Denis Munby's 1960s book, The Idea of a Christian Society, Lesslie Newbigin observes that in a truly secular society, "language about justice becomes meaningless." Why? Because injustice is inevitably a claim to or an appeal to a court higher than the state--a sacred court.
With this an several other helpful criticisms, Newbigin concludes: "the idea of the secular society has been accepted by many Christians uncritically because it seemed to offer the Church the possibility of a peaceful coexistence with false gods, a comfortable concordat between Yahweh and the Baalim. But the promise is illusory." (Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, 220).
In the American Geek column of Newsweek (July 21, 2008), N'Gai Croal brings the "crackberry" commentary to a new, philosophical level when he ties our constant use of PDAs to Aristotle's famous maxim, "Nature abhors a vacuum."
So far from seeking new levels of productivity, Croal confesses, "even the work I did on my PDA was a way of filling the void with some form of electronic activity."
This isn't multitasking, Croal says. It is a new form of "mobile perpetual tasking" where "moments of spare time are steadily filled in by constant communication."
This was poignant after returning from a vacation in the New Hampshire wildlands, where neither I nor my wife had any cell-phone connectivity. Our closest "option" was a rotary-dial phone in our camphouse.
In fact, the closest "berry" I had was cracking open an ancient recipe for blueberry jam, which I made with baskets-full of fresh blueberries from the woods in which we stayed.
I went four straight days without any email, internet, or cell-phone access. On the fifth day (hear the reverberating tones of Genesis chapter one), I drove twenty minutes into town where I finally "plugged in" again.
As I sat drinking a hot cup of coffee, I couldn't tell which was more stimulating: the caffeine or the e-universe?
Making things more interesting, the "novels" I had chosen to read on vacation was the science fiction trilogy by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony).
In these well-written books (but not for kiddies), Scalzi paints a compelling, if brief, overview of the future multi-verse in which people's PDAs are basically hardwired, and then, genetically and organically "soft-wired" into the brain itself.
At one point in the series an alien race figures out how to "turn off" these brain-based PDAs and the human fighter species are rendered practically helpless.
Besides being great reading, and entertaining, Scalzi's future vision has one obvious present-day implication for all perpetual-taskers like Croal and myself: shut the thing off and find out if you still know how to sabbath. I did, I do, and I'll do it again, too!
Scientists reported on Thursday that taking two pills can boost endurance in mice, giving them the benefit of having trained without having trained.
Traditionally, aerobic exercise increases the ability of muscles to burn fat. An important protein in this process is PPARδ. When activated, PPARδ increases endurance.
Last year, Science Now reports that. "a research team led by Ronald Evans of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, genetically engineered mice with increased PPARδ activity; they discovered that these “marathon mice” had almost double the running endurance of regular mice."
Question: could normal mice achieve the same result by taking a PPARδ drug? The answer was yes when the drug was combined with a workout routine.
Next question: was the endurance benefit only available to mice who had PPARδ combined with an exercise routine? Or, could the body be tricked into thinking it was exercising?
The team gave mice a drug called AICAR, an enzyme that is activated during an exercise routine. The team discovered that these mice "got an instant boost of endurance of up to 44%--without any form of exercise training."
What's more, after 4 weeks on the drug, the mice behaved as if they had exercised every day.
Meanwhile, in related events in Washington DC, a Senate committee has determined that "Mighty Mouse" may have been
taking a mouse enhancing drug all these years. Lawmakers are calling for hearings and threatening to have his "M" removed from the
Mouse Hall of Fame. (Thanks to Bill B for this funny twist on the story.)
