First, Dr. McKnight and Zondervan thank you for the advance copy.

–
The Blue Parakeet is a text that discusses how we actually read the Bible. Dr. McKnight brings up two key ideas throughout his short work. His first organizing principle is the concept that the Bible was written in a certain period’s time and ways. The second is that we are to read the Bible alongside of tradition as opposed to through it.

Dr. McKnight seeks to challenge some of the assumptions that we have regarding how we read the Bible. He begins with a discussion of his own history where people would “read the Bible and do what it says” even though as he began reading the Bible for himself he realized that they did not do all it says. This then leads to the dominant question that he seeks to answer: how do we read the Bible in our times and our ways?

The book is divided into four parts, “What is the Bible”, “What Do I Do with the Bible”, How Do I Benefit from the Bible”, and “Women in Church Ministries Today”. The first section provides Dr. McKnight’s organizing principles. The second and third sections discuss the proofs and ramifications for his new hermeneutic. The fourth section provides an application to a particular issue within the Christian church.

Dr. McKnight writes an engaging book. I think that he has provided a useful challenge to the assumptions with which we tend to come to the Bible with. He also provides a wonderful framework for understanding the Bible as story.

Many, no doubt, will struggle with his section on women. I am not sure that he proves his point fully. I would like to see this section developed more in a future work.

In conclusion, I would recommend this text for those who are thinking about how to read and understand the Bible in a post-modern, post-Christendom context. I would caution the reader to read with a critical eye as it easy to get caught up in Dr. McKnight’s winsome prose. This will be a text that will be at the center of the conversation for some time to come.

The Hansen Report: Where Are You From? | Out of Ur | Conversations for Ministry Leaders.

This article is quality. I think that the ramifications are huge for a congregation like the one that I am a part of. We live in a suburban setting and there are tons of church choices.

This reality makes implementing change very difficult. The reason for this is that instead engaging with the body in the midst of change the “I will go to that other church” card is played. This also frees people from having to engage with the church when there are deficiencies.

When my wife and I moved back to the Detroit area we decided to choose a church and not shop for a church. This meant that we never visited a different church. We came to our church and stayed. No matter what.We believed that any weaknesses in the church were things that God had for us to step into there.

It makes me pretty sad and a little angry when people play the “we’ll just go to a different church” card. If there is a weakness in your church stand in the gap, and be a solution.

This doesn’t happen, I think in part, because there has been a loss of catechism and a loss of commitment to the vows made in membership. I think this happens because people seem to think that the grass is greener. I think this happens because people are unwilling to truly engage with the body of Christ. I think this happens because in the end people are self-centered and unwilling to die to themselves.

One of my good friends, Jose, says “It’s time to Ride and Die”, indeed it is.

Thanks Derek…

A Savior on Capitol Hill | [derekwebb.net]

I’m so tired of these mortal men

with their hands on their wallets and their hearts full of sin

scared of their enemies, scared of their friends

and always running for re-election

so come to DC if it be thy will

because we’ve never had a savior on Capitol Hill

you can always trust the devil or a politician

to be the devil or a politician

but beyond that friends you’d best beware

’cause at the Pentagon bar they’re an inseparable pair

and as long as the lobbyists are paying their bills

we’ll never have a savior on Capitol Hill

[Bridge]

all of our problems gonna disappear

when we can whisper right in that President’s ear

he could walk right across the reflection pool

in his combat boots and ten thousand dollar suit

you can render unto Caesar everything that’s his

you can trust in his power to come to your defense

it’s the way of the world, the way of the gun

it’s the trading of an evil for a lesser one

so don’t hold your breath or your vote until

you think you’ve finally found a savior up on Capitol Hill

A Savior on Capitol Hill | [derekwebb.net].

This book looks like one I want to get a hold of. The excerpt is pretty good stuff. I wonder, what would it mean to UnLearn church for my local congregation? Hmmm….I need to ponder this….

UnLearn Church

The next grand installment is coming to Church Remix. Zondervan was offering about 100 free copies of Scot McKnight’s new book, Blue Parakeet, to bloggers. I am excited to announce that my copy is on its way and as soon as it does the posts will be rolling in.

I am also thinking that I will be posting thoughts, random or otherwise, from my Older Testament class this semester. I think that there might be some useful insights from those earlier incarnations of the people God. What do you think? Just maybe?

That’s where things are headed.

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[where: 48188]

My son and I were worshipping together on Sunday and being the first Sunday of the month we partook in Communion. As the elements came to us, he smiled at me and we had the following conversation:

Ethan: Do I get some of that?

Me: No son. We need to make sure that you truly follow Jesus by faith and that you believe that he is your Lord and that he has forgiven you.

Ethan: I do Dad.

Me: Well, you have to get up with Pastor Doug and tell everyone that you do.

Ethan: By myself?

Me: Yep.

Ethan: I’m not ready for that Dad, but I can’t wait!

Amazing! This ties the whole thing together for me. We have confused the sacraments. For believing children communion is the place for the public proclamation of their faith. For the new convert it’s baptism.

Can you imagine what that day will be like when he stands before the world and proclaims his faith in the risen Messiah and claims him as his own and then joins with the community through The Meal?

Infant baptism, communion, all tied together. This is the beautiful way. This is the covnenantal way of our promise keeping and ever faithful God!

I read this article tonight and it blew my mind. I think it’s precise, well said, and poignant.

Today’s culture is adrfit. There is no longer an oppressive meta-narrative keeping everyone in check. Everything changes, and everything changes fast. If you have to wait more than a couple of minutes for your fast food you get upset. If the lines at the self-checkout are long you can’t understand why they don’t have more. People change their relationships almost as often as they do their underwear.

Yeah, it’s a different world. The change that has taken place has left many disillusioned, frustrated, and wondering if there is anything left that matters, that will be what it says it will be.

Many of the college students that I work with are looking for stability. They are desirous that somethign will deliver. They can see through all the bull crap that’s out there and so they are cynical. Who can blame them? Every week it sems that another “holy” man has turned out to be a pedophile or morally degenerate in some way. Every week sub concsiously they exclaim with the little boy, after the Black Sox trial, “Say it ain’t so Joe!”

This is where infant baptism comes in. More than that this is where the covenant promises of the holy, triune God comes in. He brings about the things that he promises to bring about. He makes sure that they happen, because he can.

I had a conversation one time with a gal about baptism. She was baptised as an infant in a “liberal” “church” of some sort. She had been going to a church in town and they were pressuring her to be baptised now that she was walking with Jesus. They informed her that her “first” “baptism” meant nothing since she was a baby and didn’t choose it and that her parents weren’t even Christians. Yet, to me it is amazing that the day she was bapised her parents, the congregation, and the officiant promised to lead this girl to Jesus. They covenanted with God and he made good. The promise was on him to make happen and he did. As she reflected on that reality she was deeply moved and drew nearer to the God who had called her as a freshman in college.

As I think about my two kids and their baptisms I am amazed at how the Lord is making good already. Our pastor prayed during Ethan’s baptism that he would be an evangelist and that he would take the gospel to the world. His first few weeks as a kindergartner, the first time he was ever around kids who weren’t “churched” he began inviting his classmates to know about God. I didn’t tell him to. He did it because “they need Jesus like me dad.”

In a culture, a world where no one makes good on their promises. God does through this rite of passage into the covenantal community of believers. God shows his faithfulness over and over again to the child who is baptised in the triune name of God. It does not save them but it initiates them into the community.

I can hear the naysayers already, “it doesn’t happen for everyone”. I know. I don’t know why, it’s a mystery. It seems more often than not in my experience that these promises made in faith turn out.

The God of the Bible is a God who covenants with his people and includes the children in that covenant. He always has, always will. Why are we afraid to trust him for our children? Why act like he doesn’t care, when he does? Why not show a cynical world the beauty of our promise keeping God as we remind our children, our friends, and those around us of their baptism and the promise that God is making good on?

Oh, for the world to see promises kept generation after generation.

I am on vacation in beautiful North Myrtle Beach, SC. Today is the last day. We leave tonight for Louisville and then on to Evansville. I will miss the beach!!

I have begun emailing with a close friend about Baptism. So, I thought I would begin my thoughts here. This first post is rough and raw. It’s the baseline argument for infant baptism. It’s not as nuanced as I would like, but, that will come later, maybe. The point of the following posts hopefully will be to show it’s importance in our culture.

The basic argument from my perspective runs like this:

1. God is a covenantal God and works out his will through the work of covenants. The ultimate covenant being that of the new covenant in the person of Jesus. The sign of the covenant began with Abraham as that of circumcision. This was the marker of God’s covenant people and was applied to male infants at eight days old. In Christ the covenant was no longer with an ethnic people and so the marker of the covenant was moved to baptism, this is now the sign of inclusion in the covenant community.
2. The NT references to baptism consistently speak of household baptism which is most easily and normally understood to include children.
3. Jesus blesses the children.
4. There is no statement of change to the inclusion of children in the covenant community. A change this radical would require at the very least Apostolic teaching, if not Messianic teaching.
5. Believers children should be baptised as covenantal members of the community of God’s people.
6. This in no way means that they are saved, it is simply the outward expression of God’s promise to bring about their salvation and that their parents and the body of believers will bring them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord believing him in his covenantal faithfulness for their salvation.

The Baptist argument creates a distinction that I do not believe exists in the Bible between Old and New Testament. I believe that it is a coherent whole which builds upon itself and finds culmination in Jesus. The Baptist position seems to argue for a decisive distinction between Old and New where once the NT was complete the OT becomes obsolete and is understood as a relic. That’s a bit over the top, but, well, I am on vacation.

The covenantal understanding of the story of the Bible is the only one that stands up to coherently reading the whole story of God. The Baptist position does great harm to Biblical coherence. In so doing removes the children of believers from the community of God’s people. It also does harm to the significance of communion which is truly the sign, biblically, of the adult who has “searched himself” and partakes with Christ at his table. The Baptist position does harm here as well by making the Communion table something that means little more than a once a month, or so, ritual of saltine scraps and warm juice concentrate.

So, I was reading some blogs recently, alot of them, about the missional church. I have been surprised by how mean people are, especially those who claim to be gracious, open-minded, post-moderns. It came to a head with the debacle between Obama and Dobson. The anger and dare I say hatred expressed by many toward both men (in missional circles predominantly at Dobson, in attractional circles predominantly Obama) was amazing.

The vehemenance can also be seen in conversations that have to do with the mega-church movement. I just don’t get it.

I understand being frustrated with other believers who disagree with you. It gets hard to keep on communicating the same thing over and over and people “just not get it”. I think it’s sad though when there is not an open heart and open mind that goes both ways. It seems like folks on both sides of the coin forget that they are indeed on the same coin and part of each other.

Oh, would it not be awesome for kindness, gentleness, and respect to be a real thing in the conversastion between fellow Jesus followers and even people outside the community? The more I interact across the board with people from different traditions in the faith I am seeing more and more the wisdom of my father-in-law who makes some clear distinctions between what should be discussed publicly and what should be done “in the family”.

I hope that if I ever come across this way that I will get slapped upside the head and fast!!

My friend Tim challenged me to go deeper with this. So, I have been thinking about it for the last few days and meditating some more about why Communion is so significant right now in our time and place.

I keep going back to mystery and transcendence. So much of our world today is “real” there is no imagination. There is no mystery. Our movies leave nothing to the imagination when it comes to sex, violence, or anything…really. Neither do sports. I was struck by this when I heard a caller on the local sports station talk about his experience as a boy going to his first Tiger game. He said that when he would watch a game on TV it was black and white. He had to imagine the grass being green, the colors of the uniforms, and the color of the stadium. He said that when he walked through the tunnel to enter his seats for the first time he was blown away by the color, the green grass, the green seats, the whiteness of the baseballs, the brownness of the dirt, the blueness of the steel. It seared deeply in his memory.

We have lost that. Now we have ‘High Def’ TVs were you can even see the sweat drip off the foreheads of the players and the individual blades of grass sway in the breeze. Mystery is gone.

That is the beautiful thing about the supper. There is a mystery to it. There is something that we can’t get our hands around. There is an engagement of our imagination as we enter into the presence of the raised Jesus with us at the meal (or snack as it is now). If we will engage our imaginations in the mystery of this sacrament then we can regain something that has been lost. We can enter into the story of our faith and with the church invisible taste and see that the Lord is good. In a culture where our imaginations are stolen from us, actually, where we willingly give our imaginations away, this is our one opportunity to engage them again and embrace the mystery that is supping with the Lord Jesus!

The second thing is transcendence. It seems that much of the Christian life is considered to be humdrum and boring. But, oh, the supper is anything but. It is in this supper that we enter into an experience with Jesus that is beyond us and takes from the normal and we enter into communion, into fellowship, into the presence of our Jesus with one another.

People want to know what is so different about the Christian life? Is it any different from being a good Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu? Yes, in every way! It is found in the transcendent reality of the supper. The supper should bring us into an experience that changes us and draws us into a passionate and emotional and physical and spiritual engagement with our Jesus. With the one who really died for us. With the one who looked at our sin and our turning away and went to the cross anyway. With the one who conquered death and thereby made us conquerors too. With the one whose love for the Father led him to that cross. With the one who sits at the right hand of his Father and intercedes for us. This is the transcendent reality that the Christian alone can experience as he or she eats and drinks with the Lord at his table.

Mystery and transcendence. These two things have been lost in our churches, our culture, and our world. They have gone the way of the dinosaur. It is in the Supper that we can reclaim them, reengage with them, and get lost with them again.

If you want a great picture of getting lost in the mystery and transcendence of the supper grab a copy of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis. The interaction with Aslan and Lucy in the house of the Magician is amazing.

Tim, I know that this barely scratches the surface. I can hardly put all this into words. I am still processing and am thankful you keep pushing and drawing me deeper.

As I begin to write this I am feeling a bit like I am walking on sacred ground. In the Protestant tradition we only have two sacraments: communion and baptism. I have been thinking a great deal about the role of both. As I mentioned before communion is on the top of my mind because I just finished reading a book about it by Robert Letham. It was fantastic!

First, what I am not going to do. I am not going to argue for the merits of the Reformed version (read Calvin’s) of communion. I will leave that to the places where it has been dealt with in full. If you want to know the differences between Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed understandings check out Letham’s text or the Westminster Confession of Faith.

So, what’s the big deal? We take communion once a month in our church and it’s a nice ceremony with saltine crumbs and a thimble of grape juice. This is the consistent mode of taking communion in any church I have been in. I have witnessed Catholic mass and also Lutheran communion. There really doesn’t seem to be much difference in “how” we go about doing it. There are obvious differences in why and what it means.

So, it’s a nice ceremony. The Elders always look good in their suits and the men and women who serve communion are very solemn. It’s nice.

But, is communion supposed to be nice? Is it supposed to be so solemn? Isn’t it supposed to be “communion” with the risen Jesus? If so, then so much of this ceremony seems to be a little askew from what it must really be.

Sitting in my chair I realized how individualistic communion is currently. Think about the first “supper”. The disciples and Jesus hanging out in an intimate setting, one of the boys even reclining on his chest. They were in a circle. They could see each other. They could smell each other’s nasty feet. I have been in a setting with college guys many times like this. My poor wife wouldn’t even go into our basement until I lit a match to “de-man” after Bible study.

I think that communion needs to be let loose. We need to realize what is really happening. We are coming into, entering into, the very presence of the risen Jesus. We take the “bread” and drink the “wine” and in so doing are united with Christ in community with other brothers and sisters in the body. I can’t see who is joining with me with Christ.

It’s me and Jesus.

This is not communion, not in its fullest sense.

In this culture we need to re-engage with the mystery, beauty, glory, and awe that communion necessarily is. We must elevate this sacrament back to its high, honorable, and lofty place.

It is mystical.

It is awe inspiring.

It is fearsome.

It is physically, emotionally, spiritually uniting with our Jesus.

Why don’t we use real bread? It’s inconvenient.

Why don’t we use real wine? It might be offensive.

Was the crucifixion convenient? Was Jesus blood spilled not offensive?

The “supper” is to bring us together to experience community with one another and with Christ. I think we need to move back into a mode of doing communion where we actually see each other. Where we rise and go to the front together. Where those under discipline can’t hid in their chair. Where the one outside the faith feels being left out. Where those in relationship with Jesus physically rise and stand shoulder to shoulder with their brothers and sisters.

Our covenant children watching and experiencing the longing to rise too.

The weight of glory as we together break bread and drink the wine. We would touch the broken bread. We would smell aroma of the wine and feel the warmth in our bellies as the wine hits.

In a culture that sees through the bull it is time that we return and embrace together the beauty and holiness of communion.

Think about it this way: What must communion have been like in the first century when the faithful were accused of being cannibals (eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus) and of practicing incest (for they were ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’) in the midst of their love feasts? Our communion doesn’t inspire this kind of response from a watching world.

I pray that we will embrace communion: the uniting of ourselves as the body of Christ with our head, the risen Jesus.

As I was catching up with my blog reading today in my quiet home, I thought, “It would be cool to link the blog to the stuff I am reading.” So, here it is: Stuff I am Reading

So, I have been writing a bit about the big picture of what missional is and exploring some things here and asking questions. Most of these questions I don’t have answers for, it’s a bit frustrating for a guy who usually has answers for EVERYTHING!

It’s hard to be in a place where you feel like everything is up for grabs. Where you are evaluating so much of what you believe and what you think. It’s good though because I am realizing how little I know and how little really matters. But, the things that do matter are critical.

In light of all this, I want to take a bit of a detour. I have been thinking a bit about two issues that seem to me as very important for our time.

Communion.

Baptism.

It seems that both of these issues are ones that either have been forgotten about (communion) or are taken for granted (baptism). Over the next couple of weeks or so I am planning on wrestling through why I think these two things are critical for recovery in this generation as we seek to engage with our God in his mission.

I just finished reading The Lord’s Supper by Robert Letham, so I will take up Comunion first and then Baptism.