Total Truth

I've got so many books that I wanted to read for so long, it is a wonder that I ever manage to make it through my personal "recommended reading" list. I heard about Nancy Pearcy's book last Fall (2004) and bought it this past Summer. Just this last week, I finally pulled it off the bookshelf and opened it up. Wow! The introduction had me acting like Pavlov's Dog...

Nancy begins where Franics Schaeffer ends when he explains his concept of illustrating truth as a two-story building - he's Two-Realm Theory of Truth. There is a private truth and a public truth and ne'er the twain shall meet. The Upper Story is where Nonrational, Noncognitive concepts live while Rational and Verifiable concepts take up the Lower Story. Upstairs is Values; Downstairs is Facts; Upstairs is the Private Sphere filled with Personal Preferences while Downstairs is the Public Sphere filled with Scientific Knowledge. Religion and Faith are considered upstair tenants.

There is a fact/value split - or better yet a secular/sacred split - that the world imposes upon us and, sad to say, we have, in many ways, accepted this within the universal church - at least in the United States. I've heard many times that we don't have a voice in the public square anymore, that faith is repeatedly privatized and internalized. That it's all about a personal relationship between the individual and God (which is true to a point) and we shouldn't be forcing it on other people. The phrase "That may be true for you but it's not true for me." is born out of this dichotomy - this postmodern way of thinking and viewing the world and it's seeped into the church now. It didn't happen last week or last year or in the 90's. It's been a slowly evolving movement that's crept in silently, over a long period of time and over several decades.

While I want to write more on this subject, I'll save it for another post. But I do want to mention that the main thrust of this book is how do we cultivate a Christian Worldview? That is a worldview that isn’t relegated to upstairs living. How do we break the cultural trend of having our Faith compartmentalized and effectively cross that barrier that has been erected? Nancy says that she will address those issues and give practical ways to apply it to our lives. I believe that it’s important that our faith permeates every aspect of our life and that it is not just left to worship time. But it seems to me that many Christians view their Faith as nothing more than a series of mini-doctrines (Virgin Birth, Sin, Salvation, Resurrection, etc.) and that these make no impact on their professional lives unless they happen to be in the ministry. Instead, a secular mindset is adopted Monday through Friday at the office and our Spiritual/Ethical/Moral mindset is left for Sunday. It’s a dangerous trend because allowing our Faith and the message of the Gospel to be repeatedly pushed to the rooms upstairs – we lose any force in following the Great Commission. If the Gospel is Private, then we have nothing to share with the World.

Shawn

A-Caroling we will go...

Wow - I have not had that much fun in a long, long time. I've never gone Christmas Caroling before and tonight we drove up to Anthem and met at Tom and Anne's home with a group from church. We went door to door to about 20 different homes and sang snippets of Christmas songs at each one. It was a blast. It's something that I've always wanted to do and it was terrific to see the joy on the peoples faces while we were singing for them - what a fantastic time.

After the singing, we went back to their house and had dessert's and drinks and just stood around and visited with one another. It was thoroughly relaxing and I hope that we get the chance to do it again next year. There were a couple of people with digital camera's so I'm hoping those will turn up somewhere along the way.

I have an idea...

It’s not very often that I dream big, but today, after Sunday morning service, I was. So a few weeks back I had the idea that while my class was studying comparative religions and worldviews, perhaps it would be good to have a guest speaker who had converted from a particular religion to Christianity come in and speak as an authority on that topic. So first up was the religion of Islam. With a little asking around I found a gentlemen in Chandler who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and was a staunch Muslim. He converted to Christianity a few years back and he did such a wonderful job in our class. Everyone seemed to really engage with him and enjoy the time that he spoke to us. So up next is finding someone who was of the Jewish faith and has since converted.

But back to my idea…how cool would it be to put on a day and a half event where you had different tracks and each track was a different religion. You could have Islamic, Mormonism, Hinduism, New Age, Atheism, Judaism, etc. and have different speakers talk about their conversion from those religions to Christianity. Also they could talk about how we, as Christians can better evangelize to those of different faiths so that we would be more effective in our relationships and witnessing to them.

I’ve got zero experience in this area, but it seems to me that it has the possibility of generating a lot of interest and could really be eye-opening to the Christian community. We could have some really solid practical application time.

Anyway, just a though for now – I’ll pray about it and if any one out there is reading this by chance – I ask that you pray about it too.

Overdue...

Looks like I'm late again - for what, I'm not sure.

40 days of prayer ended last Saturday and what a great time that was. I definitely learned one very good lesson that I hope to continue. I learned to be a lot more patient and tolerant of people through these last few weeks. It was harder to become upset with someone over the little things like being cut-off in traffic or a slow person in the check-0ut line. The reason is because the people that I had been praying for (and the entire church for that matter) were strangers to me - I had no idea who they were. What if he people that I had been praying for were some of the peopel that normally would get under my skin? How could I be mad at them in one sense and still pray for them sincerely in another? That didn't seem to consistent to me. Then it struck me that even if the person wasn't someone I was praying for, it could be somebody that someone else was praying for - whether that person was from Canyon or not.

It's really helped me put at least this little bit of life into perspective. It's helped me to become more tolerant of people and more willing to show them kindness because you never know who is praying for the person that is annoying you.

On to another topic - this past Sunday we had our church Christmas party and what fun that was. I haven't had the opportunity to play live in a few years so I was definitely rusty and not quite on with everyone else, but it was still so much fun to be in front of people again playing that I didn't care much at the time. However, it always hits me harder afterwards (like the day after) when I think "I should have done this" or "I could have done this better", "I missed that note vocally", etc. I know that I wasn't pleased with my sound and to me, when you are performing live, good sound covers a mulitude of sins and my sound wasn't that great so therefore it just magnified an average performance by me. I don't think going through my amp was the smartest thing I did, I probably should have let Garth run me through the board to be more "in the mix" with everyone else. But regardless, it was still fun and people really seemed to enjoy themselves that night which I suppose is the most important thing.