Happy new year.

Father, grant us wisdom in this new year.
Take us beyond our present limitations.
Guide us into your desired future.
Make us a people set apart for yourself.
Your Kingdom come, Your will be done,
On earth as it is in Heaven.
Amen.

Dad, mom, and I were arguing about whether the United States’ $350 million aid pledge for tsunami victims was generous or stingy. I said it was pretty stingy, but it looks like the US actually did pretty well (though we were far from the most generous).

This table shows the relative contributions of each nation. I have multiplied the aid/gdp quotient by a million, because it’s hard to read and compare numbers with leading zeros. Here is a more complete table of tsunami relief as a function of GDP.

+Not including additional contributions made by member nations
++Included for easy comparison
*Not including contribution via EU
Sources:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6767190/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29

Simple: Prime time TV ads for prescriptions drugs. These ads should be outlawed immediately. We have no business telling our doctors what drugs we need. Free pens and sticky notes for doctors are bad enough; the current level of big-pharma spending on TV ads is reprehensible.

Out.

I am about to start Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy, and already I am starting to anticipate some of the issues I expect him to address.

Foremost in my mind is this question: How do we determine orthodoxy? I suggest that there are two primary ways:

• Linguistic similarity
• Historical continuity

Of these methods, the first is more commonly preferred but, I think, inferior to the second.

A major criticism of the emergent phenomenon is that orthodoxy has gone out the window in a capitulation to postmodernism, religious tolerance, and theological pluralism. While some people who identify themselves as emergent have always thrown orthodoxy out the window, and are now doing it under the emergent banner, among most of us there is a deep-rooted desire to be faithful to the faith we have received,while at the same time not being jerks to those whose beliefs are slightly different from our own.

The question has always been, how different from me can you be and still be a Christian? Perhaps this is not the right question, but it is ultimately the only way we can ask this question as finite human beings. The primary way we determine how close other people are to us is by linguistic similarity.

This trend is the strongest among our Reformed brethren. Hank Hanegraaff is the king of orthodoxy-by-linguistic-similarity. If you have sound doctrine, are ready to give an answer for your faith, or have ever studied to shew yourself approved, you are probably deemed orthodox under this rubric.

But we run the risk of using the same words as our forebears in the faith, but with entirely different meanings. This is the ultimate exercise in theological futility, and I’m sure we all want to avoid making this mistake. The alternative is historical continuity.

Our Orthodox brethren point us again and again to the importance of carrying on what our spiritual ancestors believed and practiced. The modernist in me wants to chop off the “practiced” part, since we can surely come up with better practices (right?), but that hasn’t exactly panned out as we’d hoped. So we are again looking at what fourth-century monks did in the desert to find ways forward in spirituality and life.

Within the historical continuity approach, we can either use church councils as legal authority, or we can take the more authentically Orthodox approach and remember, as Karl says, that “100% of the Fathers were 85% Orthodox.” In other words, we look for trends and continuity. It is an American mistake to treat church history like the US Circuit Court’s history of rulings. It’s not about theological precedent and law, but about consensus forged over long periods of time.

How can you see into my eyes
Like open doors?
Leading you down into my core,
Where I’ve become so numb.

Without a soul,
My spirit’s sleeping somewhere cold,
Until you find it there and lead it back
Home.

Wake me up inside.
Wake me up inside.
Call my name and save me from the dark.
Bid my blood to run.
Before I come undone.
Save me from the nothing I’ve become.

Now that I know what I’m without,
You can’t just leave me.
Breathe into me and make me real.
Bring me to life.

Frozen inside without your touch,
Without your love, darling.
Only you are the life among the dead.

All of this sight,
I can’t believe I couldn’t see
Kept in the dark
but you were there in front of me
I’ve been sleeping a 1000 years it seems.
I’ve got to open my eyes to everything.
Without a thought
Without a voice
Without a soul
Don’t let me die here.
There must be something more.
Bring me to life.

Wake me up inside.
(I can’t wake up)
Wake me up inside.
(Save me)
Call my name and save me from the dark.
(Wake me up)
Bid my blood to run.
(I can’t wake up)
Before I come undone.
(Save me)
Save me from the nothing I’ve become.

Rewrite this at UrbanMonastery

Good Gnus is an open-source project to understand and authentically live out the Gospel.

Yet another chunk of wiki magic fueling the emerging church from UrbanMonastery.

In many institutional churches, only about half of the members are meaningfully involved. Many people attribute this phenomenon to a lack of commitment on the part of the inactive half, but I think another dynamic is involved.

I could refer here to any of a dozen personality tests that try to classify the differences between various personalities; they all tell us, in various ways, that different people prefer different types of roles. For people who like to perform a defined task week after week, there is no shortage of work to do in the local church. Keeping a church running requires a huge number of keep-the-machine-running tasks, and that’s fine for certain personality types.

For idea people, though, there is not much room. Institutional churches are structured to minimize innovation, because they presuppose that the necessary innovating has been done and has been processed into the systems that are currently in place. As long as these systems appear to be effective and efficient, there is little reason to encourage new ideas or changes.

I suggest that neither extreme is healthy. We need to find ways of living under God that are balanced, healthy, and consistent with what He seems to have intended. My personal tendency is to go in a hundred different directions with different ideas, leaving myself without enough time to pursue any of them adequately. I am an initiator, and I need to be surrounded by executors (people who carry things out) to balance out this tendency.

Perhaps the emerging church has more idea people like myself, who have found that there isn’t room for them in institutional churches. We risk many of the same problems, since having lots of ideas and no action is just as bad as having lots of repetitive action and no new ideas.

Thoughts on this situation? Revise this post at UrbanMonastery.

OK, I succumbed…

Which OS are You?

Hopefully I’m doing enough with my life…