Assorted recommended reading

I haven’t had a lot of original thoughts to share in long-form here on the blog lately, but I can pass along some links that are good recommended reading:

  • Scandal and Madam Secretary: A Tale of Two Political Dramas - In days when it’s hard to not be cynical about anything remotely political, I really appreciated Alissa Wilkinson’s attitude toward the new show Madam Secretary. It reminded me what it means to “hope all things”.
  • Disorderly (mis)Conduct: The Problem with ‘Contempt of Cop’ Arrests (PDF) by Christy E. Lopez. Ms. Lopez apparently now works for the DOJ and is part of the federal Ferguson investigation. A good piece documenting issues with the ‘contempt of cop’ arrests and making recommendations for making improvements.
  • Justice then Reconciliation - Austin Channing Brown bringing the truth. “Reconciliation is what we practice after we have chosen justice.” Powerful.
  • College Girls: Education, Imago Dei, and the Gospel - Hannah Anderson bringing truth on why we educate both boys and girls: “We educate girls and women for the same reason we educate boys and men. We educate our daughters because they are made in God’s image. Full. Stop.” Bravo.
  • How does the iOS 8 Time-lapse feature work? - Just so I’m not linking to all political and theological heaviness, here’s some nerdiness to go along with it. Apple came up with a fiendishly clever and simple way to do the time-lapse video thing. Really neat.

So yeah, there’s some recommended reading. Enough for now, I’m going to bed.

I'm still reading...

So, what have I been up to reading-wise? I don’t know that any of you were actually asking yourselves that, but I’m going to answer anyway.

  • I really enjoyed Richard Beck’s Unclean.
  • I read the first chapter of Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy and found it slow-going stylistically. I’ve heard so many folks say so much good about it I’ll keep at it and see if it gets better, though.
  • I started O’Donavan’s Resurrection and Moral Order and wow, it’s dense. That’s not necessarily bad, but wow. Of course, maybe I should’ve taken the hint when Alistair Roberts told me that you had best read it slowly.
  • I read a quick WEB Griffin novel and a short popular history.

Business trip again next week so maybe I’ll get some more substantive reading done.

As an aside: I mentioned a discussion this week with a couple of co-workers that I’ve logged and rated every book I’ve read over the past 8 years. They looked at me like I was nuts. I trust you, dear reader, won’t judge me near so harshly.

The book pile:

  • Surprised by Scripture, NT Wright
  • Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong
  • Meditative Prayer, Thomas Merton
  • Resurrection and Moral Order, Oliver O’Donavan
  • Paul and the Faithfulness of God, NT Wright
  • A Severe Mercy, Shelden Vanauken
  • From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, Darren Dochuk
  • Parables of Judgment, Robert Capon
  • Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris
  • Evangelical Theology, Karl Barth
  • Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton
  • The Wounded Healer, Henri J. M. Nouwen
  • The Monster in the Hollows, Andrew Peterson

Books I’ve started but not yet finished:

  • The Kingdom of Christ, Russell Moore
  • Jesus Manifesto, Frank Viola & Leonard Sweet
  • The Fiddler’s Green, A. S. Peterson

Books I wanna re-read:

  • The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark
  • When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson
  • Between Noon and Three, Robert Capon

Unread on my Kindle:

  • Barefoot Church: Serving the Least in a Consumer Culture, Brandon Hatmaker
  • Center Church, Tim Keller
  • The Pastor: A Memoir, Eugene Peterson
  • Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity, Frank Viola
  • Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, Robert Edsel
  • Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality, Richard Beck
  • Why Holiness Matters: We’ve Lost Our Way–But We Can Find it Again, Tyler Braun

Fun for Friday: Star Wars without the Music

How awkward would the final scene of Star Wars Episode IV be without John Williams’ awesome score?

Pretty awkward, as it turns out.

MPT: 20 Problems with Progressive Christianity

Matthew Paul Turner says he’s a “progressive Christian”, but that he’s never really owned the label because he’s not entirely sure how to define it. He writes an insightful piece, with a title (“20 Problems with Progressive Christianity”) that’s a bit of a head fake - rather than being a list of 20 items, it’s an essay with 20 “problems” identified throughout.

While I wouldn’t identify myself as being in the same theological place that he is, I do recognize myself in some of his self-descriptions. For instance:

A part of the bigger problem is that it’s easy for many of us onetime conservatives/now progressives to get caught up in our faith being defined by our past as opposed to it being inspired by what’s in front of us (<-Problem number 10). In other words, many of us know exactly what we believe to be true and untrue about the churches we grew up in, the theologies that we were taught, and the perceptions of God that we once worshiped. And there’s nothing wrong with knowing what we believe to be good and true about our pasts. But sometimes we fall onto the path of getting so lost in fighting the ills of our former spiritual lives that we go for long periods of time when that’s all our faith is, one big fight against what was.

I went through that period for quite a while a year or two back. It might’ve been helpful to me for a while, but it was something I had to get beyond if I was going to move forward.

Turner never really gets around to defining what he means by “progressive Christianity”, so I’m not sure whether I’d self-identify as a member or not. I often find myself somewhere in between, not willing to fully endorse the liberal leanings of folks like Rachel Held Evans, but also not fully embracing the conservatism of my more fundamentalist past or the neo-Calvinism to which many of my friends hold.

Down in the comments of Turner’s post, Colorado pastor Jeff Cook proposes a set of “centering affirmations” of progressive Christianity, and these I could probably get behind:

… We believe in a New Creation , not in an escapist soteriology. We do not embrace the Gospel as “the plan of salvation” (a gospel just about me). The Gospel is the royal announcement that Jesus Christ is Lord (a gospel about all of creation). … We have moved from speaking of ethics as simply rules to follow, to seeing the good life as a process of becoming a person fully alive in Christ and in community through the power of the Spirit. … We have moved from thinking history doesn’t matter or that modernity is history’s zenith to seeing the past as full of wisdom to draw on. …We are aware that the Bible must be interpreted by fallible readers. … We elevate Jesus’ life, teachings, resurrection and ascension, and reject an exclusive focus on just the virginal birth and cross. All 6 are necessary to see God and his unveiling story.

If you’ve made it this far through my post, I’ll recommend you go over and read MPT’s post in its’ entirety.

Argument is offered to justify the felt judgment...

I’ve finally been catching up with Richard Beck’s Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality and I’m finding it fascinating. Beck is a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University and his work usually sits at the intersection of faith topics and psychological study.

In Unclean he looks at the psychology of purity and disgust and how Christianity interacts with those built-in reactions (such as disgust) and how they shape our attitude toward sin and toward others. I’m only about 20% of the way in so far, but this paragraph caught my eye:

These dynamics [feelings leading to reasons, rather than vice versa] make conversations about God inherently difficult because our experience of the divine is being regulated by emotion rather than logic, affect rather than theology. I think people in churches have always known this, and felt that people in conflict within the church were generally talking past each other. One reason for this is now clear. Very often, arguments and the warrants found within them are secondary to the felt experience. Argument is offered to justify the felt judgment of the sacred or profane. And as self-justifications these arguments often fail as acts of persuasion or forms of consensus-building.

I’m looking forward to reading more.

Wherein I rag on Aaron Sorkin, do a little bit of my own research, and brag on my completely awesome friends.

Last night I briefly moaned on Facebook about a small inconsistency that bugged me whilst watching The West Wing Season 4 Episode 18 (“Angel Maintenance”). At the end of the episode, Air Force One’s pilot announces over the intercom that they are cleared to land on “runway three-niner”.

There’s just one problem with that announcement: there’s never any such thing as a runway 39. Runways are numbered based on the compass orientation of the runway’s direction, with the units digit lopped off. For example, a runway running directly East-West would be marked “09” on one end and “27” on the other end.

Having thus been minimally annoyed, I followed up by checking Google Earth to determine what runways Andrews Air Force Base (the intended landing site on the show) does have.

Well, it has two of them that run roughly parallel to each other:

And when you zoom in on one end of one of them you can see it’s marked “01 R”:

From this you can quite easily conclude that the other runway ends (with associated names) are “01 L”, “19 R”, and “19 L”.

But that’s not all

Aside: The plot of this episode is that AF1 is heading in from a long flight and they can’t get a green light on the nose gear. So, the president manages crises from the air for a few hours while they turn circles over West Virginia and try to solve the problem.

I continued on Facebook to comment that there were other nits I’d like to pick with the plot.

Another nit that I’m tempted to pick at is that the press attache makes up a story that the reason they’re not landing right away is that there’s a fuel spill on the runway that has to get cleaned up. And a reporter asks “don’t they have another runway?” and she replies that apparently it affected both of them. In point of fact, Andrews AFB has two runways that are parallel, so an incident shouldn’t affect both of them. But given that it was a made-up story, I guess we should expect factual inaccuracies.

I had a couple pilot friends “like” my comments and provide a few snarky remarks about “artistic license”… but then my friend Daniel chimed in.

Daniel is one of those people who’s uniquely qualified to comment on a plot involving a Boeing 747: he’s a 747 pilot. Here’s what he had to say:

Hmm, the runway 39 indicates that the writers and producers made not even a token attempt at any accuracy, as even a rookie pilot would have cringed in a quick scan over the script. Just to highlight how unlikely many aviation scripts are, the B747-200 (which AF1 is, although everyone in the military insists its not, its an E-4, which is also true) only has one green light for the gear. There are ten green lights back on the flight engineer’s panel, and the system is checked for continuity before each landing. In the event the primary (hydraulic) system does not work, any gear that cannot be lowered hydraulicly can be lowered by gravity (an extremely robust power source). This is accomplished by simply electrically removing the pin that holds the gear up, and, in the case of the nose gear, is actually faster than lowering it hydraulically (the hydraulics just slow down the nose gear when lowering). If that doesn’t work, and there is no record of the electrical back up failing, the engineer can go down into the forward cargo bay, and use a wrench (permanently attached) to physically remove the pin. If THAT doesn’t work, ten bolts can be removed covering the landing gear, and then the pin can be extracted. All of which, and the nose gear is not needed for a safe landing. The only use for the nose gear is to reduce the thrust needed to taxi, and facilitate steering. Ironically, there are a large number of real emergencies that can occur on large aircraft. Of course, it might take an hour or two of research to learn that….

Do I have awesome friends or what?

It’s fun when somebody has a topic like this right in their wheelhouse. It reminds me of when I was in high school and my friends’ dad was a submarine captain. Getting his opinions on The Hunt for Red October… hehehe.

Or when I watched an episode of Human Target a few years back and ripped the whole thing apart when their plot revolved around someone reprogramming avionics software while in the air on board an airplane THAT WAS FLYING UPSIDE DOWN THE WHOLE TIME.

OK, maybe I’m not over that one quite yet.

So, yeah, I have pretty awesome friends.

A couple more knocked off the list

I had a business trip last week which gave me extra reading time, so… two more knocked off the list.

First, Merton: A Biography by Monica Furlong. This one underwhelmed me. The first part of the story (up to the point where Merton joins the Trappists) is told in a much more interesting fashion by Merton himself in The Seven Storey Mountain (which I read a couple years back). The second half of the story mostly exists to make you repeatedly ask why anyone in their right mind would join the Trappists.

Second (and much more highly recommended): The Pastor: A Memoir by Eugene Peterson. Peterson is a hero among pastors to me - a man planted a church and stayed there for 30 years, who focused not on numeric growth but on spiritual growth, who made it his goal to simply consistently pastor (an active verb) the flock that God brought him… Peterson recounts his childhood, his call to ministry, and the lessons learned from decades of pastoring in his usual winsome way. Well worth the read.

I’m now cheating a bit - I found a novel that looked interesting at the library and I’m reading it this week. Then I’ll be back to something off my pile.

The book pile:

  • Surprised by Scripture, NT Wright
  • Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong
  • Meditative Prayer, Thomas Merton
  • Resurrection and Moral Order, Oliver O’Donavan
  • Paul and the Faithfulness of God, NT Wright
  • A Severe Mercy, Shelden Vanauken
  • From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, Darren Dochuk
  • Parables of Judgment, Robert Capon
  • Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris
  • Evangelical Theology, Karl Barth
  • Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton
  • The Wounded Healer, Henri J. M. Nouwen
  • The Monster in the Hollows, Andrew Peterson

Books I’ve started but not yet finished:

  • The Kingdom of Christ, Russell Moore
  • Jesus Manifesto, Frank Viola & Leonard Sweet
  • The Fiddler’s Green, A. S. Peterson

Books I wanna re-read:

  • The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark
  • When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson
  • Between Noon and Three, Robert Capon

Unread on my Kindle:

  • Barefoot Church: Serving the Least in a Consumer Culture, Brandon Hatmaker
  • Center Church, Tim Keller
  • The Pastor: A Memoir, Eugene Peterson
  • Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity, Frank Viola
  • Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, Robert Edsel
  • Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality, Richard Beck
  • Why Holiness Matters: We’ve Lost Our Way–But We Can Find it Again, Tyler Braun

Bullet Points for a Wednesday Afternoon: San Diego Edition

I’m on business travel this week to San Diego and with so many thoughts rattling around in my head, bullet points might be as good as it gets for now.

  • There’s been a long-time West Coast - East Coast argument among my friends related to burger joints: In-N-Out vs. Five Guys. I like Five Guys, and today made my first trip to In-N-Out. It was fine, but it’s no Five Guys.
  • I had more response on Twitter and Facebook to my burger joint comments than I’ve had on any post for months. Apparently I have a lot of friends who have very strong opinions about burger joints.
  • It’s been a burger-heavy trip; I ate at Hodad’s at a friend’s recommendation on Monday night. It was also pretty tasty.
  • I love the SoCal weather but can’t imagine living here. The traffic. :shudder:

Some thoughts unrelated to my location this week, in decreasing levels of significance:

  • Ferguson, Missouri. So sad. So much pent-up history rearing its head the past week or two.
  • Everywhere else in the world: apparently also falling apart. Come quickly Lord Jesus.
  • I have a long post about death rattling around in my head but no time or will to write it right now.
  • I’ve found precious little interesting new music this year, but the eponymous debut record by the band Colony House is a winner.
  • I won (well, shared) the “Special K” award in our church softball league this season: the award for the most strikeouts. I think I had two.

Paul Tripp on the inadequacy of external accountability

Pastor, author, and counselor Paul Tripp recently resigned from the Mars Hill Church (Seattle) Board of Advisors & Accountability. There was a lot of speculation at that time as to why Tripp was resigning, and in what capacity he might stick around as a consultant and counselor. Tripp cleared that up today with a statement on his website wherein he describes the inadequacy of that sort of external accountability.

It’s because of this love [for the church] that I accepted the position on Mars Hill Church’s BoAA. But it became clear to me that a distant, external accountability board can never work well because it isn’t a firsthand witness to the ongoing life and ministry of the church. Such a board at best can provide financial accountability, but it will find it very difficult to provide the kind of hands-on spiritual direction and protection that every Christian pastor needs. Unwittingly what happens is that the external accountability board becomes an inadequate replacement for a biblically functioning internal elder board that is the way God designed his church to be lead and pastors to be guided and protected. So, since I knew that I could not be the kind of help that I would like to be through the vehicle of the BoAA, I resigned from that position.

(Emphasis mine.)

I think Tripp’s point here is key - that healthy, functional leadership comes about by having a local group of elders who can support, protect, and guide the pastor(s). There is no substitute for “firsthand witness” to what’s going on at the church.

All of us involved in church leadership, whether pastors, elders, or other, should be reminded that mutual, humble accountability to people right there within the local church is the best way to stay on track.

Looking back at my thoughts on the Acts 29 Leadership Change

My post from March 2012 about Matt Chandler taking over the reins of Acts 29 has seen some renewed activity this past week with the news that Acts 29 booted Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church from membership in the church planting network.

Last week’s move is a significant one, seeing (as Wenatchee the Hatchet has documented) that for most of its existence, Acts 29 was, both by leadership and funding, nearly indistinguishable from Mars Hill.

In 2012 I had four key thoughts:

Chandler was a strong enough personality to bring about change.

This seems to have borne itself out; it can’t have been easy for Chandler and company to call on Driscoll to resign, but under Chandler’s leadership Acts 29 has done exactly that.

Chandler could help change A29 culture

Not sure that this has really happened, but I’m hopeful that it will start to as days go by. For too long the A29 church planter model appears to have encouraged not just the Mars Hill church style but the Mark Driscoll leadership style - brash, vulgar, MMA-loving, trash-talking, in-your-face “leadership”. One good that could come out of Driscoll’s current woes is for some of his acolytes to recognize the folly of emulating that persona.

Acts 29 could start to get some distance from Driscoll’s controversies

Well, that one clearly hasn’t happened yet.

Driscoll could have some room to rest and grow

I was hopeful that with A29 leadership off his plate, Driscoll might have time to relax, refresh, and recharge. Perhaps I was a little bit optimistic.

Regardless of where you stand on Acts 29 and Mark Driscoll, this is no time for gloating. I continue to pray that Driscoll will come to real repentance and seek reconciliation with those he has harmed, and that the Acts 29 network will be strengthened, not damaged, from Driscoll’s ouster.