Common Grounds Online

Kelly Monroe Kullberg, The Given Life

     Today is the happy 6-year anniversary of my marriage to David -- a "youngish" widower raising five great kids.  Today is also the 1-year anniversary of my mother's near-death, and gradual recovery to something like a stable condition in assisted living. 

When I was engaged, a friend suggested that I reconsider the wisdom of marrying because the demands on the "sandwich generation" (those caring both for children and parents) would distract me from my larger cultural calling (the Veritas Forum, in particular).  To credit my friend's foresight, I really didn't quite grasp what I was signing up for, either in marriage or in parenting.  (I'm sure David didn't, either).  Nor did I request a crash course this year in geriatric endocrinology, cardiology and nephrology that help keep my mom closer to me on this side of heaven, while I was working, and while two of the children were finishing high school, one entering college, one marrying, and another giving birth.  Nor, for that matter, do I remember ever signing up for any course, or life, of adulthood in any real form at all.  

The truth is that I'm not much of a Giving Tree ... 

Scott Armstrong, Review of Deep Church, by Jim Belcher

The 19^th century German philosopher Georg Hegel was famous for his theory of the “dialectic.” He said an event or idea served as a thesis, there was then a sharp reaction to it known as the antithesis, followed by a synthesis, which sought to combine the best features of both the thesis and antithesis.  Got that?

            Well, if you do, you’ll appreciate Jim Belcher’s new book, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional.  Belcher, a PCA pastor from southern California, writes out of his own life experience; growing up in a traditional, conservative church culture, he was looking for greater intimacy, community and rootedness to the past.  He found his Protestant upbringing and experience to lack these things.  In more recent years, he observed a phenomenon and movement known as “emergent” which seemed to be “protesting” some of these shortcomings, calling forth with a prophetic voice for the church to change and was intrigued. 

            But he noticed something; in the last decade, traditional and emergent voices were like two ships passing in the night: they weren’t really talking to each other but past each other, speaking two different languages.  And because of this, both sides became reactionary, producing talks and books that tended to create “straw men” caricatures of each other that were often unfounded in reality.  And where there is no real conversation, there is no learning from each other.

            If they did, Belcher argues, perhaps they would discover a third way, what he calls “The Deep Church.”  In his book, Belcher critiques and praises traditional and emergent churches, looking for the best of both in order to be the church in the world.

Glenn Lucke, Formal Language & Church Work

*** Update ***

A number of students and graduates of these two schools have emailed, asking, "Me?" Others want to know about the breadth of the brush I'm painting with.

Overwhelmingly the students and graduates that I have encountered, from my point of view, are wonderful men and women and express themselves in a normal fashion. The post below was in reference to roughly 7 people who have applied for jobs or that I have met while recruiting at the schools. 

I've met or known scores of students and graduates from these schools who don't express themselves in a distinctively formal manner. The post below is about a subset-- a very small number of people-- who puzzle me with their formality.

Related, I've hired a bunch of students and grads from these two institutions who are STELLAR. While I have declined to hire those that strike me as too formal in their communication, I've hired multiple people from SEBTS and SBTS who are doing superb work for pastor-clients around the country. 

The pattern I've noticed is small, but I've witnessed it enough in the past 10 months to wonder about it and then write about it.

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In the course of running Docent Research Group, I meet a lot of seminarians and graduate students. Anecdotally (no social science research done), I've noticed an interesting pattern. A subset (not all) of the seminarians at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY and at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC that I have personally become acquainted with in person or by email (or reading their blogs) are more likely than seminarians from other institutions to use formal speech in person, emails and blog posts.

With a frequency that astonishes me, some (not all) of these seminarians express themselves in language that strikes me as very formal, even Puritan-esque. The language of Reformed systematics spills out in greetings and in email closings especially, but also in many other instances of written and verbal communication.

One commendable aspect of this is God-saturated speech. From my point of view, living and speaking in a way that demonstrates one's God-centeredness is a good thing.

Another commendable aspect of this way of speaking is that it surely reflects long hours of reading and reflection. In an age in which "thinness" (thinness of mind, thinness of character) is one of the most serious problems that evangelicals manifest, I applaud believers who devote themselves to study, to the life of the mind, and to wrestling deeply and thoughtfully with what it means to follow Jesus in our time and place.

And yet...

Justin Holcomb - The Inverted World of Grace

A few months ago, Rick Riley wrote an article titled “Hope” that was about a high-school football game Rick Riley wrote about recently. It was the Grapevine Faith “Lions” versus the Gainesville State “Tornadoes” and everything about it was upside down. 

When Tornadoes took the field, the Lions fans made a 40-yard “spirit line” for them to run through. They even made a banner for players to crash through at the end. It said, "Go Tornadoes!" 

As if that was not weird enough, more than 200 Lions fans sat on the Tornado side and cheered them on…by name. Tornado QB, Isaiah said, "I never in my life thought I'd hear people cheering for us."

Even though the Lions clobbered them, the Tornado kids were so happy that after the game they gave their head coach a Gatorade shower like they’d just won a championship. But then as soon as the game was over, uniformed officers escorting the Tornado players handcuffed to the team bus. The Gainesville Tornados were from a maximum-security correctional facility.

Cody Chambers, The Fruits of Adversity

Yesterday was noteworthy for two reasons. First, I joined a bunch of 20-somethings many years my juniors in taking the first exam of our medical school careers. It was certainly a unique event for this author who last took Anatomy and Physiology fifteen years ago. However, just as noteworthy was the sight after the test: a sea of humanity spread out from those lecture halls buzzing about those mean questions from those mean professors. We were all, suddenly, the best of friends. A guy I had never seen before smiled and said, “Hey, man, how'd ya do?” That lab mate who I thought had forgotten my name all of sudden wanted to run down the answers with me. We had been through the fire, but we had been through the fire together, and that made all of difference.

Jim Broyles - Assignment of Life Insurance

You'll just have to indulge my work-related tendencies and esoteric jargon for the post this morning -- but I won't apologize.  The past couple of months, my pastors have been trekking through the Sermon on the Mount, hovering the first few weeks on the beatitudes, knowing blessedness, and living in the knowledge that these things have already been accomplished on your behalf.  All great preaching, and I would highly recommend you check out the teachings on the Grace DC website. A few weeks ago, I was struck by the sermon surrounding meekness: "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5).

The sermon discussed self-promotion and our ability to justify our ongoing salesmanship of our own talents.  Our society subscribes to self-help books as though reading them will actually allow us to self-help.  I can't think of anything more appropriate for young people in our current economy to do than reinforce the strengths they have, play down the weaknesses, and nail those interviews.  Seriously, check out the Wall Street Journal career section (if you don't already) as see what we are told about progressing in our vocation.  Aside from a few nifty stories told there, you'll find the constant riff of building and refining your skills, then learning how to sell them.  This is not all bad, but there is certainly something to be gleaned from the repetition of this lesson.

Linc Ashby, The Death Machine and the Meaning of Life

I don’t know if I am one of many, or one of just a few, but this time of year has become for me a time for resolutions.  Usually reserved for first day in January, this is when my mind drifts towards those goals I hope to accomplish.  That’s why I found myself frantically trying to squeeze a work out in between the time we were dismissed from the all school faculty breakfast and the time we were scheduled to begin the first athletic council meeting.  I ran upstairs to the aerobics room, after taking a ridiculously quick and far too cold shower, beads of sweat quickly returning, shining brightly on my brow, towel in hand, courtesy of our trainer, Sean DelFavero.  “I was so excited about this meeting I just burst into a sweat,” I quipped, settling into my seat a few minutes late.

Excerpt From Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared Wilson

See my review yesterday of Jared Wilson's Your Jesus Is Too Safe.

Today I'm posting an excerpt from the book in which Jared writes about the Kingdom of God.
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“The kingdom is forcefully advancing, and forceful men take hold of it” (Matthew 11:12). Some translations read “violently” and “violent men.”

What did Jesus mean by that? What did this decidedly non-violent man who went around instructing people to turn the other cheek and bless those who persecute them mean with this violent imagery? In a time when some men really were trying to usher in the kingdom of God on earth through military insurrection and violent zealotry, what could Jesus be getting at?

I think he really meant that the kingdom comes in and smashes up worldviews and systems and tears apart the bondage created by sin and Satan. The kingdom coming into this world in the arrival of Jesus the King wreaks havoc among those opposed to it.

The proclamation of the kingdom’s arrival even begins with a battle in the wilderness as Jesus withstands the temptations of Satan (Matt. 4:1-11). And at the end he dispatches the devil, banishes him. Later, Jesus will tell a story to his followers outlining that the way to plunder someone’s house is by invading it and binding the strongman (Mark 3:27). This is Jesus alluding to what he’s doing to the sinful corruption of the prevailing system. He’s come in, whooped up on the devil, hogtied him, and now he’s taking all his stuff. He’s rescuing all held captive by fallenness.

Indeed, if you look at what Jesus goes around doing in his ministry, it really reflects this invasion-and-rescue idea. He makes sick people well, he makes paralyzed people get up, he makes the dead live, and perhaps most vividly connected to the notion of spiritual invasion, he goes around casting demons out of people. He literally frees them of their spiritual possession. He’s releasing the captives

Like any new king, he’s issuing pardons.

This is a pretty “violent” arrival for this kingdom. In Luke 10:18, Jesus tells the disciples, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from the sky.” Now, a lot of people believe this is Jesus referring to the fall of the devil way back at the beginning of time when he was an angel ousted from heaven by God for his insurrectionist pride. And Jesus’ words may indeed refer to that event, but in the context of this incident, the disciples are marveling at their ability to cast out demons, and Jesus is basically saying, “No duh. I gave that guy the boot. His power is subject to mine.”

So that’s what the kingdom does. Its arrival is violent, cataclysmic, shaking strongholds, putting the fear of God into rulers and religious leaders. It knocks the enemy out and sets the enemy’s prisoners free. It turns the tables over in the worldly culture. It turns almost everything upside down, which is to say, in God’s view, rightside up.

            So Jesus goes around making these kingdom proclamations, announcing and flat-out demonstrating that a new king is in town, but he also makes some declarations. His actions demonstrate the new reality of the kingdom’s presence, but his teachings tell us what life is like in the new kingdom. This is sort of like his first royal declarations. His unfurling of the new constitution. “This is how things used to be,” he says, “but now that there’s a new a king in town, things are gonna be like this . . .”

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Buy Your Jesus Is Too Safe.

Glenn Lucke: Review of Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared Wilson

Full disclosure: I chased down Jared four years ago as I read the Thinklings blog and marveled at his wit, intellect and erudition. We met at a Thinklings dinner in Christmas of that year, and later I hired him to work for Docent Research Group. Jared excels at this work! Additionally this year he co-authored/ghostwrote books for Docent clients who are two of the most prominent pastors in the country. He is gold.

Lastly, in this vein of disclosure, he mentioned me in the acknowledgements of Your Jesus Is Too Safe. In truth I did nothing for him or this book other than articulate the envy that seizes me when I read his stuff.

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 Things to love about Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared Wilson:

1. Jared marshals top flight biblical scholarship, owns it, and makes it digestible. 

 2. He slings the slang with the best of 'em.  His paraphrases provoke the mind and make it itch…they compel me to look afresh at biblical texts and living Jesus' teachings in my life today.

 3. Jared is funny. Page after page. Often a chuckle, at times laugh out loud funny.

 4. The focus, intensely, is on Jesus.

 You put all these 'things to love' together, and you get taken for a ride that is at turns illuminating, powerfully challenging, hilarious and inspiring.