Quotes from Culture Making: Chapter 4

"Because culture is cumulative - because every cultural good builds on and incorporates elements of culture that have come before - cultural creativity never starts from scratch.  Culture is what we make of the world - we start not with a blank slate but with all the richly encultured world that previous generations have handed to us." - 73

Not Much Blogging but Here's A Few Links

Patrol is a new favorite site.  Check it out.

Here is Driscoll from the A29 Boot Camp in Dallas.

Tim Keller interview (Part 1 and Part 2).

I am listening to these guys right now. Mellow.

-  Bon Iver

-  She & Him

-  Sufjan Stevens

- Andrew Peterson

ESV Study Bible is now available as an app for the  often-imitated but not yet duplicated iPhone.

I have a couple sermons posted I preached the last of couple of weeks on Luke 5:27-32.

The Sad News Comes to The Emergent Village Hitler

What I'm Reading

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Hey Ho Let's Go: The Story of the Ramones by Everett True

Culture Making by Andy Crouch

Leading With a Limp by Dan Allender

Get Better at Contextualization

Jonathan Dodson gets all historical on us over at the resurgence.

The Faith of Obama

Here is a very telling interview on Obama's faith.

Hat Tip: Tim Challies

Suburbanism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice in a Liberal City?

I would not agree.  Southerners are the only people you can always berate and ridicule and never worry about the repercussions but this is a good argument.

hat tip: Subtext

Simply Missional

One of the best articles I have read in a long, long time.

ESV Study Bible Going Mobile

This is awesome news for those of us with an iPhone.

Culture Making: Quote from Chapter 3

"The only meaningful use of the phrase "the culture" is embedded in a longer phrase: the culture of a particular sphere, at a particular scale, for a particular people or public (ethnicity), at a particular time.  And even this much more careful way of speaking needs to always be accompanied by the awareness that the culture we are describing is changing, perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly." - 60

(Check out the Culture Making website.)

Making Religious People Angry

Scott Thomas over at the acts 29 blog discusses one of the more provocative paragraphs in Timothy Keller's phenomenal new book The Prodigal God

Making Culture: Quote from Chapter 3

from page 58

"...like earthquakes, revolutions are much better at destroying than building.  There is an important asymmetry here, whose roots go all the way down to the laws of physics: It is possible to change things quickly for the worse.  It only took two hours after the collision between a 767 and the South Tower of the World Trade Center to destroy it.  But no one can build the World trade Center in two hours.  the only thing you can do with Rome in a day is burn it.

The revolutionaries - and terrorists - of the world put their hope in cataclysmic evens.  But they are likely to be disappointed by the long-term effects of their actions.  After the 2005 bombings in the London Underground, the Economist observed, No city ... can stop terrorists altogether.  What can be said, though, is that terrorists are unable to stop cities, either."  the attacks of September 11, 2001, undoubtedly set in motion huge, and very likely tragic, changes.  But they did not change as much as all of us who witnessed them thought they would.  At the largest scale of culture, even horrific revolutionary events cannot easily destroy.  All the more so, the most beneficial events possibly have little positive effect in the short run." (emphasis mine)

Quitting Church: A Short Review

So it only took a few sittings to finish Julia Duin's Quitting Church.  While not all was wrong I struggled to not...well struggle through her observations.  Full interesting and lots and lots of polls and stats, there was a lot to digest.  But the gist of the book is that people are quitting church.  OK.  So I am not sure that would be a surprise for anyone besides those who have just emerged form the cave.  Duin couches what I can only assume are suggestions for improvement in chapters, each with an observation.  I think it would be easy to say that Duin longs for a church with the community of the Jesus Movement (which she was a part of) that is Charismatic (she is) where women (like her) can be ordained.  She would like for churches to be more mindful of singles over 35 (like herself) and I think she would prefer good teaching but I was not sure.  The catch 22 of her criticism is that she rails against seeker-sensitive churches while being more specific than any other person I have ever heard about what she wants.  The book only "works" if you really listen to the reasons people are leaving.  Therein lies a huge assumption.  If you dare to criticize the thinking behind anyone who leaves, you then become further proof of the reasons they left in the first place.  The unsatisfied customer reigns supreme.  

All that brings us to what is not even on the radar of Julia Duin and her friends and family. First, all the complaints she puts forth are born of living in a place where there is choice in where you worship.  There may be this problem in China but their lack of choice makes such worries and complaints ring a tad bit hollow.  Second, there was no discussion but the glory of God for which we were made and saved (Eph. 3:21).  This book was in no way a metaphysical discussion. Third, the cross was absent except for her (veiled) complaint that, physically speaking there was no cross displayed in many churches today.  It really made it hard for me to listen to her complaints when the very thing that beget the church was for the most part a tertiary given(1 Cor. 1:2; 8:11; Eph. 5:25).  Fourth and lastly, I appreciated her looking at Mars Hill in Seattle but she gives no indication she talked with any of the staff.  And she never mentioned the Acts 29 network and os of course dialogued with no one involved in it.

Because of the above reasons I just can't commend this book as being helpful.  A more helpful book would be this one.

Demon Hunter

Tim Smith interviews Demon Hunter over at theresurgence.com. 

In God We Do Not Trust

Mark Driscoll waxes upon the election.