Our Story

??NPR??: “Democrats Learn Lessons on Religion from Kaine Victory”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5008695&ft=1&f=1001. Fascinating story on the role of morality and religion in the political dialog. At our church during the election, this debate was palpable: everyone seemed to want a candidate that would hold conservative religious values (as the supposedly “religious right”) and pay serious attention to addressing the needs of the poor. Instead, we were forced into the morally awkward position of choosing one over the other.

Tim Kaine wins the Virginia by breaking all the rules: talking about God openly as a Democrat, opposing the death penalty in a state that supports it, even buying airtime on Christian radio (!). And, according to Howard Dean, this is the direction that the Democrats are looking to go as they open up to the religious conversation. Here are some thought-provoking quotes from the story:

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@1:34 on the radio ads:

I was stunned, I thought it was brilliant. Not because it was manipulative, but in fact here was a Democrat who was actually going into an explicitly evangelical Christain audience—a Roman Catholic Democrat. And finding a language that spoke authentically about his experience that had some resonance in that community.

— Shawn Casey, Wesley Theological Seminary

@2:32

Morality has been on every Democrats’ mind since the day after the 2004 election when they awakened to find that majorities of traditional Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and other religious people had voted Republican. John Kerry, a Catholic, could not even carry Catholics.

— Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR

@3:50

If the Republicans have been too controlled by a handful of religious fundamentalists, the Democrats have been too controlled by a handful of secular fundamentalists.

— Jim Wallace, Sojourner’s Magazine

@5:04

They saw Democrats anywhere from ambivalent to values and to faith all the way to anti-religious. And, they couldn’t offer a lot of examples for why they saw Democrats that way. It was more a sense that Democrats don’t talk about this and so the Right have been able to define the debate and Democrats and the Left in general have not engaged.

— Karl Agne, Democracy Corps

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??InterVarsity??: “Communal Discovery Bible Study Method”:http://www.intervarsity.org/biblestu/communal/ has some additional resources for Bible study leaders. I’ve linked to the “Color Me Meaningful”:http://www.kennsarah.net/2004/10/07/color-me-meaningful/ article before (circa 1986), and was suprised to find out that IV has renamed the Inductive Study Method and tweaked it a bit. I’ve printed some of the articles here, but haven’t read them yet, so I’ll reserve judgement ’til then.

Last week, I was asked by a friend to give a testimony at our “Testimonies of Amazement” service. I thought that it was a fantastic opportunity to tell the story of how Sarah and I arrived at the Village Church and how God has changed our lives since that day. This is what I said.

Good morning. I read a quote recently by Leonard Sweet that summarized well the story I’m sharing this morning. He said:

Sometimes life takes shape in such a way that a [person] is like the missing piece of a puzzle: the exact fit for the situation. Up to that point, the jagged pieces of your life don’t seem to fit into any significant pattern. But then life calls you out and summons you forth.

Last month, my wife quit her job at the horse hospital and we left our comfortable apartment in the suburbs. We settled in Newark, NJ for the sole purpose of living closer to our newfound love: the Village Church. Our friends and our relatives have each asked the same question over and over again: “Couldn’t you just have found another church where you were already living?”

The answer requires some explanation.

I have been a serious Christian since the age of 18 — mostly because one man had the vision and the humanity to spend four hours with me in a New Jersey diner, listening to me tell my story. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what Gary was doing was demonstrating the love of Christ to me. It was there, in our conversation, that God Himself was doing what he does best with His people: drawing others to Himself through the love of His church.

Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine what it must have been like for the disciples, traveling across Israel with Jesus, camping out with him and just…talking. I smile when I picture how Jesus must have listened to Peter tell his own story. Hanging out with Gary was a lot like that.

Shortly after I became a Christian, I discovered the Christian bookstore. I started listening to DC Talk when their latest album went platinum in the mid-nineties. I paid attention to the church services Christian radio. I went to CreationFest. I watched VeggieTales. In short, I had become part of a new marketing demographic — engaging in all the activities that I thought Christians were supposed to be doing.

At least, for a while. The years that followed that senior year of high school were filled difficulty as I tried to find clarity in a post-youth-group world. The open hostility of the university setting to the Gospel quickly alerted me to the fact that my spiritual journey to that point had been extremely shallow. I discovered that I had lost the ability to even speak the same language as my classmates — the same words that brought vigorous nods from the kids in youth group drew blank stares in college. It was another year before I’d meet another mentor, Jode, and really start to think through how effective our Christian kitsch — the t-shirts and bumper stickers and coffee mugs–are in our witness to those around us. These things, while not harmful in and of themselves, often provide a way for us to just broadcast the words of the Gospel without having to deal relationally with other people. It occurred to me that if this same culture can’t see truth of God written across the night sky and in the eyes of a child, then what makes us so sure that they’re going to hear it in our catchy marketing slogans?

So, I determined to relearn the culture from which I had so methodically isolated myself. I discovered a love for philosophy, and I cracked open those secular CDs. I started to engage in college ministry with InterVarsity and allowed God to stretch me by having tough conversations at book tables and campus events. I started to investigate how Jesus interacted with people and began to see how he went out of his way to care for and draw them into an understanding of his Lordship. Not as a convert, and not as a demographic, but as a person in need of healing.

It wasn’t long before I realized just how counter-cultural these ideas really are. My co-leaders in my campus ministry didn’t have the same convictions I did and I was discouraged with the overall lack of concern for intellectual integrity. Indeed, not only was my college ministry reluctant to engage students on anything other than moral grounds, but my church was also following a similar model. This frustrated me greatly because our neighbors have honest questions that begin at the very essence of who they are. They wonder in the midst of their broken relationships whether there is an answer to their heartache, whether there will ever be an end to their self-obsession. Alistair Begg put it far more succinctly than I could when he said that we cannot hope to overturn contemporary thought on the basis of having memorized five Bible verses. Our culture doesn’t need another neatly packaged value proposition–they need the church to lay its life down for others.

Shortly after my wife and I were married, we realized that we needed a change. Over the course of our relationship, we had watched friends and loved ones walk away from the church, highlighting for both of us just how critical it is for us to be sincere in our love and honest in our pursuit of these mysteries we proclaim. We decided to start looking for a church that held these same convictions.

When we first walked through the door of the Village Church in April 2003, it was like a breath of fresh air. We came to the Covenant Entrance service and were amazed at the life in this church. The Meditation opened with a quotation from a prominent author that simultaneously challenged and inspired. The Confession prayer described completely the state of my heart entering the building. And the worship–this church worships like our God is worth getting passionate about. But, the most outstanding display we saw of the church being the church was during the new members’ acceptance. We watched as Sam talked about each new member as a person, not as just another name on the church roster.

Sarah and I prayed about coming back here, despite the hour-long drive from Dover, NJ. Two weeks later, God brought us back to the church. We prayed that He would hasten relationships and that making friends in this new place would happen quickly. Immediately after that service, we were invited to lunch with fifteen people.

This is our testimony of amazement: that God, in His sovereignty, gave us individually the conviction of being real with people, and meeting them where they are. He did this, not so we would grow conceited in the church where we were, but so He could lead us here to this community, that we might partner together with the Village Church for the sake of the Gospel and to the glory of God.

He also provided Sarah with a fantastic job here in the city, and an apartment within walking distance of the Path, but that’s a story for another day.

Killing the Buddha. Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore.

Truth for Life. The radio ministry of Alistair Begg

I’ve been reading through 19 Gifts of the Spirit by Leslie B. Flynn lately as Ironworks continues through a series on spiritual gifts. (Pastor Todd, I’ll return this book to you someday, I promise!)

On the whole, Flynn’s writing exemplifies the hokey, pragmatic style that plagues much evangelical writing (why is it that we bury the wisdom of God in the foolishness of our own prattling?)–each chapter has at least three case-in-point anecdotes. However, in this latest chapter on the gift of mercy, Flynn writes with uncharacteristic acuity. You can feel his passion for the church to engage in acts of mercy as he quotes this political science professor at length.

The most important contribution almost all of us make in this world is in our interpersonal relations. Our personal acts of kindness and concern have probably a hundred times more actual impact on the lives of others than our advocacy of ‘enlightened’ social ideas.

College professors, for instance, may talk endlessly and learnedly about social reforms. Yet for all but a very, very few, I believe the only part of their lives that really makes much difference to the real lives of others is the way they treat their wives or husbands, their children, their neighbors, their students in and out of class–and the general moral example they set. The world would probably not be one whit the worse if 95 percent of all the books and learned articles were never written and most of the lectures never delivered. But each time an individual performs an act of kindness, someone’s life is brightened at least a little. Worsworth wisely spoke of ‘that best part of a man’s life, his little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.’

If the principal impact of almost all political activists is found not in their political ideas and activities but in their personal relations, then should not the churches largely concentrate on helping all of us make the most of our private lives and relationships? This is where the action really is; this is the crucial battle ground for 98 percent of us 98 percent of the time.”

–Reo M. Christenson, “The Church and Public Policy,” © 1973 Christianity Today

I praise the dance, for it frees people
from the heaviness of matter and binds
the isolated to community.

I praise the dance, which demands everything:
health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.

Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people,
who are in constant danger of becoming all brain,
will, or feeling.

Dancing demands a whole person, one who is
firmly anchored in the center of his life,
who is not obsessed by lust for people and things
and the demon of isolation in his own ego.

Dancing demands a freed person, one who vibrates
with the equipoise of all his powers.

I praise the dance.

O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven
will not know what to do with you.

—St. Augustine

General dissatisfaction with StudyLight (the ad banners, poor layout, and abundance of Christian kitsch on the homepage) compelled me to turn to Google for alternative tools for my Bible study. I discovered some truly fascinating developments in the use of semantic tools and web services that will empower researchers delve more deeply into the Scriptures.

Sean Boisen The Vision of a Semantic New Testament. The goal of the Semantically-Annotated New Testament Project (SemANT) is this: To annotate the New Testament with a formal semantic representation based on open Internet standards, producing a sharable resource that supports practical applications like meaning-based automated processing and integration with other resources. This is tremendous…Sean succinctly states the current problems of computer-aided textual research and how they relate to the Scriptures. Word-searches are not enough–we need computers to be able to contextualize the concepts that we’re looking for if we expect them to be of any real help at all. (Note: this document appears to be a work in progress).

Though this isn’t a focus on the semantic use of XML for processing and distribution of Scriptural texts, the Open Scriptural Information Standard also seeks to standardize the Scriptures into an XML schema. The OSIS format will enable content providers to maximize production, distribution, access, use, impact, and preservation of the Bible and related materials from all time periods.

More Googling → Eliot Landrum → Heal Your Church Web Site → The Bible as a Web Service API. This is a brilliant idea. Writing a web service enables developers to reach across the Internet and request information (in this case, Scripture verses) and use them in other applications. I had kicked around the thought of developing a Bible reference tool, but just wasn’t interested in the technical details of creating a database structure–which smacked too much of reinventing the wheel–or in the legal details of licensing a modern English translation. A web service API lets me write a web application with a minimal amout of effort, without having to concern myself with restrictive republication rights. Christianity Today has a layman’s article on what the English Standard Version API means to developers: Bible Is Getting Even Friendlier to Programmers.

Walter Kirn: What would Jesus do? That’s the convincing logic of the Ark: If a person is going to waste his life cranking the stereo, clicking the remote, reading paperback pulp and chasing diet fads, he may as well save his soul while he’s at it. Holy living no longer requires self-denial. On the Ark, every mass diversion has been cloned, from Internet news sites to MTV to action movies, and it’s possible to live inside the spirit, without unplugging oneself from modern life, twenty-four hours a day. This deconstruction of the Christian Alternaculture is not for the faint of heart (satire never really is).

I include the Walter Kirn article here because I think it so aptly demonstrates the critical importance of what it means for the Scriptures to be free. In the days of Martin Luther, the excesses of the Church and the illiteracy of the laity made Sola Scriptura one of the battle cries of the Reformation. The church of Luther’s time had no interest in educating the laity, because an educated laity might see no reason to pay out exorbitant fees for their souls that the Scriptures never called for. Seeing this, Martin Luther leveraged a recent technological revolution in data exchange–the printing press. He translated the Bible into languages spoken by common man and published hundreds of thousands of copies. Through his work, the Scriptures became the medium by which people learned to read and, in so doing, Luther overcame the power-mongering church and its tyranny of illiteracy.

Today we fight a similar battle. Though illiteracy is no longer a real problem for the majority of congregations, Kirn (among others) points out this new problem, this “alternaculture.” We’ve amassed this colossal marketing machine which seeks to imitate the successful media venues of our mainstream American culture. We’ve grown so accustomed to the constant noise channeled through Christian radio and television and this and that, I wonder if we remember what it’s like to be confronted with the Scriptures face-to-face. The ignorance of our generation is not from a lack of education–it’s from apathy. Consummerism has so enveloped our thinking that we’ve thoughtlessly bound even our canonical texts to excessive legal restrictions.

In Luther’s day, the challenge to free the Scriptures was one of language. Today, the challenge is one of license. The technological revolution for this generation is, without question, the Internet and its history of open data exchange. We need to provide the tools and ability to cut through the noise and confront people with the Scriptures once again. Though other obligations must be met before we see another honest reformation, these projects offer an exciting glimpse into how new technologies and open licensing can be leveraged in a new counterculture movement.

These were some quotes that were in our church bulletin from Sunday that I thought were worth sharing.

The opposite of love is not hatred; it is indifference. When we have learned indifference, when we are really skilled and determined at the business of ignoring others, of putting our own well-being, or own options, first–of thursting our own ego into life, as the ideal form of life itself–we may be quite certain that at that point, life has become hell. We need be no more thoroughly damned.
–Daniel Berrigan

My so-called love for humanity, for instance, isn’t something I get to carry around in my heart. It has to find application among the weird, desperate people who populate my daily experience. It has to put on flesh. If it doesn’t, I might take pleasure in the warm, fuzzy feeling of my personal, private faith, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to call it Christianity.
–David Dark

More writings by David Dark can be found here.