word from God

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Want to control your flock?

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TNIV video

Here's a video explaining one of the most misunderstood, and best translated, Bibles out there:
the TNIV.

See also Rob Bell's video here.

music as a form of biblical exegesis

Jim Gordon comments (tellingly, in a post on Leonard Cohen):

"One of the areas I'd like to spend time learning about is music as a form of biblical exegesis. Not the advanced technical stuff about aesthetics and hermeneutics - but the more straightforward use of words and music to sound the depths, to explore the options, to guage the texture of a text. Not just the obvious choices like Handel's Messiah, Bach's Matthew Passion, but lesser known texts which form the basis of musical compositions, or which are echoed in the songs that move us. I once arranged a service around the theme music for the film "2001 Space Odyssey" (Also Sprach Zarathustra) played as background to the first verses of the Gospel of John. That's the kind of hermeneutics I mean. The intentional and imaginative juxtaposition of biblical text with music which is totally unrelated, until it is brought into conversation with that specific text and we hear the words and we are affected by the music, we hear the music and we are interpreted by the words."
Jim Gordon, link

I've heard the sermon on sex, but how about..

"While it is likely that you have heard at least one sermon

on how to think in a Christian way about sex,

and the requirements of church budgets make money an annual topic,

chances are you have never heard a sermon on how to be stewards of cultural power."

—Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.226

Bath and Meal

Tucked away in Volume III of Oden's Systematic Theology, p. 274, is this:

"In acts of mercy to the homeless, the poor, and the alienated, the serving church offers simple acts of cleansing and feeding. Nothing is more prized to the homeless than a bath and a meal. Nothing is more characteristic of the church's identity and self-offering than bathing and feeding."

A good word, you say, but how is that news?

These three sentences introduce, not a section on social ministry, but (amazingly, without commentary on the radical retooling it entails), the section called
"Bath and Meal,"

which (of course) means:

baptism and communion!

How about that? "Sacrament" as an offering to the poor, and service to the homeless.

Or the other way around?

Matt on Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders)

Matt Cleaver:

• 13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 1
• 13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 2
• Why Seminaries are Irrelevant: A Postscript