Check out this interesting opinion piece from The Toronto Star today regarding the continuing “de-Christ”ing of Christmas and how Christians are responding to it and other challenges to our faith. The article presents an interesting perspective which I think is a far more constructive way to look at the growing secularization of society as opposed to the “yearning for the good-old-days” hand-wringing which often goes on instead.
For everybody who has ever spent time talking to somebody and walked away thinking “there’s no way anybody can EVER convince this person to believe in God!” read this. It’s amazing what God can do with even the hardest of hearts — something I think is particularly appropriate to keep in mind during this Christmas season.
You might also be interested in checking out a series of articles from The Star from last week giving a very secular/pluralistic but yet still interesting account of the growing influence of religion in the lives of the 18-30 year old population.
I suppose if I am encouraging everybody to post their opinion on this forum I had better too (hoping to slide in under the radar, but to no avail…
It’s always hard to find a topic that makes everybody happy since we all approach studying the Bible in such different ways - whether it be from a thoroughly intellectual perspective or, at the other extreme, a very application-driven perspective. To me, one of the best ways of bridging this gap is to pick a book of the Bible (Romans would probably be my choice this time around, although I have heard James mentioned as a good book to do in this way and maybe (I’ll plead ignorance here since I know nothing about Zechariah whatsoever) even Zechariah would work), choose some overriding themes of a particular book of the Bible which relate to practical, everyday Christian life, and exploring them using the chosen book as the main text as well as references from throughout the Bible. We worked through Acts using a similar strategy last winter (check out the types of things we talked about at http://www.getchurch.org/oxygen/resources-acts.shtml) and I thought it was really a useful way to not only delve into a particular text on an intellectual level (looking at the context of verses which speak to the topic and understanding the historical setting in which Acts played out) but also learn something about what God has to say on some really important issues we face daily. Comment yea or nay if you please!
Following up on the suggestion made last week for a study on an obscure prophetic book, I’ll put forward the book of Zechariah. I taught and preached out of it over the summer, and I’m working with it for my thesis currently. I have lots of notes and ideas on it, so preparing classes would not be that difficult.
For those of you who have never heard of/read the book of Zechariah, it’s the 2nd last book of the Old Testament. It’s full of strange visions which are fun to try and decipher, and great prophetic messages that spoke to the community of God then, and that I think echo down through the centuries and speak vividly to us today. I would welcome the opportunity to introduce you all to this wonderful book that most Christians never get the chance to study.
As this semester winds down, we need to make some decisions regarding what topic(s) we want to tackle this coming winter in our Sunday large group. What do you want to do — a book study (if so, what book), a Bible study (if so, what book(s) or theme(s) would you like to explore), a sermon-based series expanding on what Lane talks about in the service, or something else entirely? Post your thoughts (completely anonymously if you wish, you don’t have to include your name in the post) by clicking on this link:
Just give your post a title, type your idea in the text box and hit “save” when you’re done. You can also e-mail Luke to let him know directly what you’d like to see happen. Please take a couple of minutes and give us some feedback!
For those of you who are at McMaster, I’m sure you will have seen the counter-campaign (posters and sidewalk chalk) against the “I Agree with Dave” blitz that Campus Crusade is doing this week. If you go to their discussion forum at http://www.iagreewithdave.com/phpbb/, you’ll really get a sense of the raw nerves this campaign is generating on campus. Similar things have happened at other campuses doing these types of campaigns (the Guelph response was even stronger), which in a sense means that CCC is doing something right since the Gospel message should be “offensive” to those who are yet to believe. Taking aside all the usual arguments about the tactics and what the response might be if a non-Christian organization was doing the same types of things (ie. probably nothing at all), the reason I bring this up though is that, between this campaign and reading about evangelism this week in the Purpose-Driven Life, I have been reminded about how often we just settle into our neat little social groups in which everybody agrees with us and/or is at least tolerant to the Gospel message instead of sticking our necks out like Dave and Campus Crusade are doing this week. How often do we take a risk and identify ourselves as believers to people who may not like us too much for saying so? I think this is particularly interesting consider with a group as close as ours is, where it would be very easy to socialize within the ‘oXyGEN cocoon’. While there are certainly many different ways to go about evangelism, and not all of us are perhaps gifted to evangelize in the way CCC is doing this week, it’s a question I do think we should at least think about as we evaluate how well we are fulfilling purpose #5 for our lives this week.
We are starting a contemporary choir for the first service. I would like to invite anyone and everyone who likes to sing, to join this choir.
To join, you don’t even need to be that good of a singer— I just want you to love to worship God.
We’ve set up a Yahoo! Group called PhilpottChoir. You must be signed up to the group to get information on rehearsals, songs, etc.
The first rehearsal will start at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 30th in the Philpott Auditorium.
After that initial rehearsal, we will rehearse once a month on Saturdays, starting at 6:30 p.m., also in the Philpott Auditorium. These rehearsals will be 1.5 hours long.
I hope you join us! Wouldn’t it be great to have a 50 voice choir!!??!!
As some of you are aware, there is a new grad student in my lab who is extremely interested in the Bible — to an extent about salvation, but right now particularly how it can help him be a “better person”. He now has a Chinese-English bible (he just arrived from China last month) and is asking me questions about things he doesn’t understand as he works his way through. Fortunately I convinced him to start at Matthew instead of Genesis, so I’m off the hook on Leviticus for a while However, he asked me four questions today which I thought I’d share, because (a) I was fairly unprepared to answer 3 of the 4; (b) they may be questions you hear witnessing to completely unchurched people who are just searching out the idea of God existing, let alone whether or not Christianity is the answer; and (c) perhaps you could give me some ideas on how to answer a couple in particular better than I did. Some of them might seem really obvious or even silly to us, but I found that answering them for somebody who is just thinking about the concept of whether or not there is a “supreme being” for the first time is actually kind of difficult:
1) If Jesus is God’s Son, who is God’s wife? — obviously the virgin birth is the answer here, with Mary essentially being God’s conduit to bring Jesus into the world. Interestingly, in these days of in vitro fertilization etc. the idea of a virgin birth doesn’t sound as crazy as it used to. I think he was satisfied by my answer on this one.
2) If God created everything, where did God come from? — an interesting question to which I don’t think anybody can come up with a completely satisfactory response — I told him I’d think about a better response, and this site (coupled with the link provided) is pretty good: http://www.christiananswers.net/evangelism/responses/home.html#existence
3) What was God doing before he got around to creating the universe? — I have no clue! Ideas on what to say?
4) (particularly in the context of the pre-human creation time) doesn’t God have any friends? — this question I think is derived from a basic misunderstanding of a supernatural being; on the other hand, in last week’s PDL reading, Warren emphasizes how God has emotions etc. and so values relationships (with us now, but what about before we were on the scene?) Again, outside of talking about how Christians have relationships with God which God values, I didn’t have a great answer here.
Please feel free to post any answers you might have to these questions or other questions you have been asked (or thought of) so we can all be better prepared when these opportunities come up to fulfil purpose #5.
I was browsing the site I linked to in the previous blog and found this — it’s amazing what some people actually ask (these are apparently all real questions people have submitted to the site)! Anyway, the football question is yet another good reason it’s a good job it’ll be a while until my friend gets to Leviticus Rarely have monkeys on typewriters and football been placed in the same article, let alone one on apologetics, but there’s a first time for everything:
Our church signed up for a free web account for www.fortydays.info and the service was TERRIBLE. Let me just warn everyone now: stay away from www.mysitespace.com. They have TERRIBLE support, and are “DELETE-SITE happy.”
Because the oXyGEN group signed up for an account with them, they decided we were cheating and trying to have two sites! They deleted both accounts.
This is ridiculous! Are they trying to discourage sharing links with friends?
We tried to work it out with them, to negotiate, to come to some sort of mutually satisfying terms. First we were told not to email them— we could only post to the message board! All of the links on their site to the message board were BROKEN. They finally sent me the right link, and we posted our question. Not only did they NOT answer, they deleted our two messages from their message board and suspended the board membership! Rather than provide support, they stuck their head in the sand and pretended there were no complaints!
Please post this on your blog, and/or link to this complaint. If people are looking for free web hosting, they need to know how BAD this host is. We would never pay them a cent for fear their support would be just as horrible. If this is how they treat people who are signing up for free acounts, they shouldn’t offer free accounts.
Let’s show ‘em how we bloggers can spread news.
We wonder if it had more to do with our site being a Christian organization? If so, shame on them.
I’m sure there are some fools out there who would rather go for the free web space than do what’s right. Trust me, STEER CLEAR. MySiteSpace.com is Bad News. Tell the world.
…in the philosophy of science - specifically Darwinism. Daniel Dennett, primary proponent of the Naturalist viewpoint (that is, the belief that Evolution is fundamentally without purpose), has conceded that life is showing signs of having purpose “in the course of a dialogue with [Robert Wright, visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values]—and extracting the concession was a little like pulling teeth.”
A fascinating admission, and given the manner in which it was achieved, bound to have serious ramifications elsewhere.
I must first issue a disclaimer that it’s entirely possible that only I would be intrigued by this article since I do my thesis research in nanotechnology, but I found this really interesting.
Two big trends in science now are biotechnology (finding ways to use biological processes in traditional industries or simulating biological processes with synthetic materials) and nanotechnology (which allows us to essentially manipulate materials on an atom-by-atom basis). In a sense, both these thrusts are trying to copy God — do the same things natural biology and chemistry can while having full ability to CONTROL what happens. While we’re still a long way from the cyborgs of Star Trek, scientists are already having conversations about the ethics of all of this and, most surprising to me, how they feel these technologies might help to answer the question we are currently in the midst of attempting to answer from the Bible: what is the purpose of life? If we are essentially trying to “make life” via technology (or make our lives “perfect” through, for example, the invention of side-effect free psychosomatic drugs which some scientists claim will fire the right biochemical pathways to make us feel happy and fulfilled all of the time no matter what), can we somehow also use technology to answer cosmic questions (or at least avoid having to ask them since the “need” for a God becomes irrelevant when we feel so good all of the time)?
At any rate, here’s the article: http://reason.com/rb/rb050102.shtml Stick with it past the first few paragraphs (especially you non-scientists) and it gets pretty interesting Most interesting line: “There is this strange urge in us to transcend our biology. If you can’t buy Christianity, there is a strong desire to create those same visions of heaven and transcendence through our technologies.” It’s all a little scary (and probably wildly optimistic at least in the next few decades), but it’s interesting to see how many people who would vehemently deny the existence of God or at least the validity of Christianity are so desperately seeking answers to the same questions God so beautifully answers for us.
This relates to our 40 days of purpose theme and I thought it was interesting. I was reading a Roger Ebert movie review of an old Italian film called “L’Avventura” and thought something he wrote was a very good point.
The movie basically concerns a number of idle and decadent rich people who go out for a cruise on a yacht. The girlfriend of a main character goes onto an island and disappears and nobody is able to find her (in the movie you never do find out what happens to her as the character is never seen again and is totally forgotten about by everyone else in the movie). It ends up that the guy hooks up with another girl on the cruise and everyone continues on with their lives. By the end of the movie it is shown that the lives of these people are empty and have no meaning.
Ebert writes:
“Why don’t we have movies like L’Avventura anymore? Because we don’t ask the same kind of questions anymore. We have replaced the ‘purpose of life’ with the ‘choice of lifestyle.’”
It struck me as very true and so I thought I would share it.
One of the things I am really interested in learning more about during the “40 Days of Purpose” is how to talk to other people about what they feel their purpose in life is. Even if people don’t want to talk about God or Christianity, they are usually at least a little intrigued by what they’re doing here on earth, and I think it’s a great way to open the door for a really meaningful (ie. not weather or TV-related) conversation with people we work with/go to school with/etc. — if we are prepared to give some solid answers explaining our focus on God and ask them some solid questions about their own views on what life’s all about. To do that though, I think we really need to understand their perspectives on life and what they “believe in” (because despite what people would claim, everybody has to place their faith in something). The one worldview that I have particular difficulty understanding in this context is athiesm or agnosticism. If you believe in absolutely nothing bigger than yourself and your life, how could you possibly get up every morning? What drives you to do good? This is a really well-written response from an athiest answering exactly that question:
What do you think? How would you respond to the logic used in the article? (this is basically the rebuttal to chapter 2 of “The Purpose Driven Life” I guess…
If you’re interested in more of these (ie. somebody actually comments!), I’ll post some other interesting worldviews I’ve found browsing the web in the coming weeks too.
Once we realize that we have hurt someone, because of our sinful hearts, how do we be forgive or be forgiven for our offence? I know that we should pray to God to show us our wrong doings (forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors) but what if we have really done a big one…..something that we feel that we will never be forgiven, as a matter of fact, we feel that we aren’t christian anymore because of it. How can we be sure that God has forgiven us…..now other christians….now the ones that we have hurt….How can we face our christian friends again? do we even have a right to be friends anymore? And what if I have been forgiven, but years later things pop up to bring back the horrible memories….Is this just the devils attacks or is there some unresolved sin? How do I tell the difference?
A question has been rattling around inside my head since last Sunday’s message and following discussion. In relation to telling the difference between God’s will and your own will, this was really well illustrated by Christa’s dramatic description of her struggles over the last few years. (Similarly, I have felt completely stymied in every attempt to accomplish anything in the last year , so this is really important to me.) Her suggestion was that when you know you’re doing God’s will, you just have to keep truckin’ no matter how discouraged you may become or how hopeless things seem. This is a common concept in both Christian and secular contexts - perserverance, fighting the good fight and all of that.
So… You’ve gone through the steps - prayer and study, talking with others, examined your motives and inspired desires - and you’re confident in your role in the body of Christ. You knew it wasn’t going to be a cake-walk, but you now realize its going to take an Abraham-sized helping of faith to follow God through this.
But what if God is telling you that you shouldn’t be doing what you’re trying to do at all? What if you misinterpreted God’s will? To persevere when God is trying to accomplish something different by you - that’s just plain foolish.
So… how do you tell the difference between when what you are trying to do is so important that Satan and all of his henchmen are out to discourage you at every step, and when what you’re doing is simply your own will and not God’s?
This is an update from Ian — keep him in prayer as he looks to finish raising support (see below for more information if you feel led to help out in this regard) and prepares to leave for Asia.
>> I thought I’d give you an update on where I’m at now. I just came back from our team orientation in Vancouver. I met everyone on the team and we had some good training time. I also found out that I will be in the same city that I went to on the other two short term missions a couple of years ago. All of the missionaries in that city have left, so our team is brand new and we will be pioneering ministries on two new campuses as well as continuing with another campus. There are 8 people on my team including myself.
I will be in Ham to meet up with people next week and say goodbye. The good news is that I need 90% of my full support before they’ll let me on the plane and I already have close to two thirds. To put it in perspective so you can know what to pray for… if 9 people committed $100/mo for 11 months or if 18 people committed $50/mo for 11 months or if 36 people committed $25/mo for 11 months, then I’d be all set to go and start reaching people for Christ.
I also don’t know if it’s a possibility, but I’ll keep you posted on the upcoming vision trips. Twice a year they send one week trips of supporters and potential stinters to our city to encourage us and see what the ministry is like.
I’ll try to be there soon. If you want to reach me, 519-438-9656.
We’re still looking for people who are willing to help out with ClubsFest on Wednesday, September 8 at McMaster (find out more about ClubsFest at http://www.getchurch.org/oxygen/clubsfest.shtml ) The poster board needs to be re-done (it’s at The Vine), an information brochure needs to be produced, and volunteers are needed to man the booth from 10AM until 3PM on September 8. Talk to Luke or Rick on Sunday if you can help out!
This is quite advanced notice, but if anybody is interested in enjoying the last long weekend of the summer by going to either the zoo or the Science Centre in Toronto on Saturday, September 4, let me know — I’m leaning toward the zoo, but I’m flexible. Admission for both places is in the $15-$20 range and I can provide transportation to at least the first four people interested. Just let me know by commenting on this blog or by e-mail if you’re interested.
Here’s another interesting piece from today’s Star about the growing differences between Canadians and Americans in attitudes toward religion (it’s really quite stark the contrasts!): Minding the God Gap Among the most interesting facts in the article: only 30% of Canadians classified religion as “important”, as did nearly 60% of Americans.
Also, since he will never do this himself, Kevin started a blog which is pretty entertaining (just don’t look for any deep insights — you can’t get too deep talking about Saved by the Bell) — http://sparse.blog.com
A few people have mentioned borrowing movies from me lately so I thought I would post my collection.
There are a lot of excellent films in this group but many of them would only appeal to specific tastes. This includes next weeks bible study feature “The Seventh Seal” which as we know has been described as a film which “at first glance…..would appear insufferable” (it actually isn’t).
The link will allow you to view a brief description of the films and some have my comments in the “My Details” section. All the movies are on dvd.
Thanks Jason, great idea — I set up a PhotoBucket account for our group (login - PMC-oxygen; password - same as the contact directory password I sent you by your e-mail last week). It’s really easy, just login, select the picture you want to upload (use the “browse” button and find the picture on your computer) and hit “Submit” - the picture will appear below the submit box. Try to make your pictures as small as possible before you upload so the blog doesn’t take five years to load!
When you insert an image into the text of a new blog you are writing (use the mountain portrait icon in the editor), just use the URL provided in the box underneath the picture on the PhotoBucket site as the image URL (all the other fields can be left as their default values if you like).
By the way, those were my Tobermory pictures (note to self - stop posting blogs at 1AM when eyes are awake but brain is asleep).
Thought I’d post a couple of pictures I took when I was camping near Tobermory (at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula) a couple of weeks ago — it is always so spectacularly mind-blowing to see God’s handiwork in person! The right-hand picture is at Flowerpot Island, a definite must-see if you’re ever in the area.
FYI - if you’d like to post a picture here, send it to me and I’ll send you back the link to refer to when you’re inserting it.
Have we truly grasped the Christian message if we take a great deal of pleasure in thinking about the destruction of non-christians? The final events, and judgement are neither ours, nor for us to think about; is it too simplistic to say that ours is simply the focus on the message of salvation, and to trust God with the details.
The condemnation of the Bible Belt is what turns many people away from Chrsitianity, and who can blame them? I don’t want to be around a bunch of sadistic, trigger happy judgers either.
Our conservative –conservative is an oversimplification of a body of beliefs. Not all conservatives believe the following, but the vast majority. I apologize to other conservatives - counterparts recognize the importance of justice,but define it improperly – Indeed justice lying within the will of God, consists solely of Compassion, Mercy and forgiveness (from the human perspective; God includes judgment for himself)… That is, Justice is an act of Love.
Sorry for the tangent, one last point; I will back down from my beliefs when I find a related passage that instructs me to not forgive, but to punish… (I’m condensing a rather large point here, as I only have a few minutes left on lunch.)
The books are tripe, and only help to hinder the true kingdom.
This article appeared in the Toronto Star recently — it’s an interesting non-Christian’s perspective on the events of Revelation (we had talked about this in our small group over the last couple of months). Obviously we would all disagree with many of the arguments made in the article, but it is well-written, very “geopolitically-relevant”, and raises many issues to which we should likely have some reasonable answers.
As requested, I prepared a webpage with instructions on how to use this blogging software — check it out at http://www.getchurch.org/oxygen/bloghelp.shtml (I am nothing if not at your service!)
Let me know if you have any other questions/things I should add to the help file or if you find something doesn’t work properly.
For anybody who’s interested (and actually reads this in time), a couple of us are getting together Saturday afternoon around 2:00 at Churchill Park (just north of King and Cline St. in Westdale) to play bocce and/or frisbee and/or frisbee golf — we’ll meet (weather permitting of course) at the fieldhouse between the two levels of the park
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