The Welcome Mat

Yesterday I spent the day visiting area churches. I was delivering promotional items and speaking to pastors about an upcoming event in Maury County. I visited about 25 churches and most were unfamiliar to me. I'd driven by them but had never stopped by the office. As someone who works in a church office five days a week it was interesting to experience it from the other side. My main observation is that church offices are not very welcoming. Here's a few reasons why...

1. You can't find them. Few churches have directional signs in the parking lot and most doors to the church are unmarked. At more than one building there were cars in the parking lot but I never found the entrance to the office.


2. When I did find the right door it was locked. I had to knock or push one of those intercom buttons and ask for permission to enter. What other office environment requires you to push a button and state your business before entering?


3. The decor is not very inviting or welcoming. Most of it says, "We spent all the money on our sanctuary and couldn't afford any comfortable chairs or nice pictures so here's an old metal folding chair for you to sit in as you stare at the wood paneling."


4. Secretaries are too good at their jobs. I would ask, "Is the pastor in today?" They would reply..."What's your name?""Is the pastor expecting you?" "Do you have an appointment?" "What do you want?" "Does he know what you want?" "Do you know the pastor?" (All are actual replies). I realize it's their job to be a gatekeeper but I started to feel bad for infringing on the time of such a very important person.

The pastors themselves were usually friendly and welcoming. And the secretaries warmed up to me once they figured out I wasn't selling anything or asking for money. But it got me to thinking about how churches conduct their offices. Why do we make them so hard to find? Why do we lock our doors and interrogate people before entry? Why do we decorate them like 1950s bomb shelters? Why are pastors so hard to see? I mean if ever there was an inviting and welcoming office environment, shouldn't it be a church office?

Just some thoughts to ponder. By the way, Sherri, if you're reading this I'll still ask you to cover for me when the pictorial directory salesman comes around. :)

Clever Mudslinging

In honor of all the political speeches out of the DNC this week...

Politics and political mudslinging have been around almost from the day prehistoric man discovered mud. However, over the past two centuries, American politicians have managed to refine the art. Sometimes elevating it to creative heights, but more often dragging it to bottomless lows. In the creative category, one of strangest campaigns ever waged was won by George Smathers against Claude Pepper for the US Senate in Florida in 1950.

In his campaign speeches, Smathers began referring to Pepper as "a known extrovert." He spat out the words with such disdain many in his audiences assumed the worst of Pepper. While Pepper was trying to figure out how to respond, Smathers revealed that his opponent's sister was "a thespian." He then accused Pepper's brother of being "a practicing homosapien." He charged that while attending college Pepper "matriculated" on campus and that he engaged in "celibacy" before he was married. Smathers won the election.

From Thomas Ayres' That's Not in My American History Book.

The Beginning of the End

It happened today. I never saw it coming. I figured I had at least two more years. We were waiting in the car line at school. I had the windows rolled down and was clapping my hands to some song on the radio. Lilly (my 3rd grader) reached up from the backseat, grabbed my hands and scolded me. "Dad, don't do that in front of the school. You're embarrassing me!!" And so it begins.

God's Love

The kids learned a new song in Kidstuf last month called "Your Love is Deep." The chorus describes God's love as ...

Deeper than my view of grace
Higher than this worldly place
Longer than this road I travel
Wider than the gap You filled

That first line is profound. Here's the actual song if you want to hear it...

The Shadow Side of Faith

A friend passed away this week suddenly and unexpectedly. I would guess that all of us have experienced that at some point in our lives. Whenever it happens there's usually a torrent of questions that flood our minds. Most are directed at God and some are fairly pointed. Not the kind of questions you ask in the presence of other people, especially Christians. We're afraid of how they might react if they knew what we were really thinking. They might think less of our faith or doubt our commitment to God or worse of all, try to explain or defend His actions.

So we keep our questions and doubts to ourselves. We confine them to private prayers (if we dare pray them at all), and we work hard to never let them slip into the public arena. I don't think it's helped us much. And I don't think it's very Biblical. Read the Psalms sometime. The ones they don't read during Sunday worship. The ask some gut-wrenchingly honest questions of God and they express deep emotions. The psalmists lay everything on the line. They don't hide their doubts, fears, worries, cries, questions, etc.

Yesterday I stumbled across that idea in Philip Yancey's book The Bible Jesus Read. He says that the majority of the Psalms take the form of a lament and only a minority deal with praise or thanksgiving. These two categories represent the two conditions in which we find ourselves: distress or well-being. In our modern practice of faith we speak to God more often of our well-being, but in the ancient practice of faith they spoke more to God more often of their distress. He continues...

King David specifically ordered that his people be taught to how to lament (2 Samuel 1:18). The lament in Psalms has little in common with whining or complaining. We whine about things we have little control over; we lament what we believe out to be changed. Like Job, the psalmists clung to a belief in God's ultimate goodness, no matter how things appeared at the present, and cried out for justice. They lamented that God's will was not being done on earth as it was in Heaven; the resulting poetry helped realign their eternal beliefs with their daily experience.

Dan Allender, a Christian counselor, asks, "To whom do you vocalize the most intense, irrational--meaning inchoate, inarticulate--anger? Would you do so with someone who could fire you or cast you out of a cherished position or relationship? Not likely. You don't trust them--you don't believe they would endure the depths of your disappointment, confusion.... The person who hears your lament and far more bears your lament against them, paradoxically, is someone you deeply, widely trust.... The language of lament is oddly the shadow side of faith."

5 Year Old Insight

The other night my Mom was quizzing Halle Jane about her first day of school. She had just met her new Kindergarten teacher and was giving Mom all the details...

She said, "I think Mrs. Tobin is a Christian."

"Oh really, why do you think that?" Mom asked.

"Because she talks really nice and does nice things."

Unwise Influence

Today I spoke about Colossians 4:5. Be wise in the way you act towards outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Part of the message asked how can we "be wise" in the way we interact with an increasingly non-Christian culture? I answered the question in the negative. In other words, here's some of the "unwise" ways Christianity has interacted or attempted to influence culture.

My top 5...

1. Affiliation with only one political party. Or better said, the belief that we could effect moral change by political means rather than spiritual means.
2. Our declaration of war against modern culture. Picketing abortion clinics, boycotting Disney, condemning Murphy Brown, attacking Harry Potter books, etc.
3. Angry debate and condescending conversation with all who disagree with us. Sometimes carried out in person but more often on bumper stickers, T-shirts or church marquees.
4. Refusal to engage in open dialogue on difficult and critical issues (i.e. evolution, stem cell research, the right to die, etc). We usually pull ourselves out of those discussions because our mind is already made up.
5. Loss of our distinctive lifestyle. Morally speaking, it's hard to tell the difference between Christians and non-Christians. Our ethics aren't any better, our charitable giving is about the same, our relationships don't fare any better, etc.

I probably could have thought of a few more but someone's already threatened to report me to the Christian Coalition.

The Creator of Evolution?

I'm plowing through a book right now titled The Language of God. It's not the kind of book I normally read and a bit over my head in parts, but a good friend has been asking me to read it. It's written by Francis Collins who is a nationally respected scientist and head of the Human Genome Project. This project focuses on developing a better understanding our genetic make-up through DNA sequencing. They were the first to map our DNA code and are discovering some of the DNA misspellings that lead to genetic defects. In short, this guy is pretty sharp. He's one of the world's leading scientists. He's also a firm believer in God.

You rarely hear the phrases "world's leading scientist" and "firm believer in God" in the same description, but that's Collins. He wasn't always a believer. As a former atheist, he once thought science and religion were two incompatible disciplines. How can you possibly merge science's natural explanation of the world (evolution) with religion's supernatural explanation of the world (creation)? Especially, when your study of DNA sequencing was pointing to strong evidence of evolution and natural selection. This was Collins' dilemma. Yet, he couldn't escape the questions of morality or our human desire for relationship. A completely natural explanation of the world couldn't account for these attributes. So after serious consideration of the claims of both sides, Collins came to a conclusion. Evolution is a reality but so is the existence of a Creator.

He rejects the notion of materialism/atheism (that something came from nothing for no reason), creationism (that God created the world in its current form, with all its complexities, in a literal six 24 hour days), and intelligent design (that evolution's failings to explain certain complexities points to evidence of a designer). Instead, he supports something called theistic evolution. The belief that the earth is billions of years old, we have evolved from simpler life forms and there are natural explanations for our biological diversity and complexity (i.e. evolution and natural selection). Yet, human beings are also unique in ways that defy these natural explanations (i.e. the existence of Moral Law or our universal search for God).

He explains...an entirely plausible, intellectually satisfying, and logically consistent synthesis emerges: God, who is not limited in space or time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law.

This view is entirely compatible with everything that science teaches us about the natural world. It is also entirely compatible with the great monotheistic religions of the world. The theistic evolution perspective cannot, of course, prove that God is real, as no logical argument can fully achieve that. Belief in God will always require a leap of faith. But this synthesis has provided for legions of scientist-believers a satisfying, consistent, enriching perspective that allows both the scientific and spiritual worldviews to coexist happily within us. This perspective makes it possible for the scientist-believer to be intellectually fulfilled and spiritually alive, both worshipping God and using the tools of science to uncover some of the awesome mysteries of His creation.

What you do think?

Paul's Thoughts on Intellect

When I said "more later" at the end of Tuesday's post I wasn't thinking about this post. I had another one in mind but it will have to wait. I stumbled across this passage yesterday while looking for some background info on 1st century culture. I'm teaching out of Colossians right now and have been talking about the prevailing philosophies of their day and time. These apparently contained Jewish elements (in the form of legalism) and Greek elements (in the form of gnosticism). The Jewish element tended to emphasize adherence to the law as a means to righteousness. The Greek element tended to emphasize attainment of knowledge as a means to righteousness. Paul says this is the means to righteousness...

For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. 1st Cor 1:19-25.

Two observations:

1. Paul was an intellect. He matched wits with the leading Jewish and Greek scholars of his day. So I don't think he's teaching us to shun intellect. He's just pointing out its limitations and Christ's superiority.

2. The line about "the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength." That's really good. Let that one sink in.