Viruses in our thinking

I ran my antivirus on my little netbook and nothing turned up but I ran my anti-malware program and turned up a trojan virus. In my reading and thinking I've wondering more and more how we buy into worldviews without being aware of the corruption. A good example is the church as a company and pastor as CEO, another is programs and good methods are spiritual. Another is because I feel I am spiritual therefore I am. A variant version is because I enjoy playing piano and singing I am entitled to do it in public in front of a congregation.

We are full of viruses in our thinking. Some of the worst are from the Pelagian virus family, sucha as "I will convert people", "we will bring in the kingdom of God" and, "I will make myself a better believer". I remember in my first systematic theology class the professor asked a simple question giving alternative positions and asked us to confirm which we believed and surprisingly everyone had a heretical belief!

We need both good discernment, wisdom and education in community to keep us aware of the viruses that are around.

For The Audience of One- Chapter 9

In this blog I'm going to try and be more of a push and pull technological expression. This will be an attempt to provide some questions for reflection on Mike Pilvachi's book For the Audience of One. Today is Spring and a time of new birth which is partially why Easter is near.

Read Chapter 9 For the Audience of One

How's your prayer life? Is what you're doing in public match your private life? How honest is your worship? Be honest here. God already knows.

1. What touched you in this chapter? What really caught your attention?
2. What upset you? What challenged you?
3. How to you respond to Mike's model of leadership and David's leadership?
4. Be honest, do you want to be a Samuel – Mike's version?
5. “God is less bothered with what I perceive as being the sins of the church and more concerned with my personal, well-ignored faults.” (page 132) Let God speak to you.

For The Audience of One- Chapter 8

In this blog I'm going to try and be more of a push and pull technological expression. This will be an attempt to provide some questions for reflection on Mike Pilvachi's book For the Audience of One.

Read Chapter 8 Creativity in Worship

Monotonous is boring but in fact means one tone, shade, or color. Are you willing to be more colorful, have more varieties and styles?

1. What do you notice about Mike Pilavachi's language in this chapter? How is his image of worship different from yours?
2. What is the difference between creativity and imitation?
3. What is the strongest image from this chapter? Why is it so?
4. Rather than focus on self, can you imagine encouraging other's creativity.
5. Read Revelation 4;11 slowly aloud as a prayer and wait quietly for God's response.

For The Audience of One- Chapter 7

In this blog I'm going to try and be more of a push and pull technological expression. This will be an attempt to provide some questions for reflection on Mike Pilvachi's book For the Audience of One.

Read Chapter 7 Worship and Spiritual Warfare

Sometimes fear is a darkness that overwhelms and in fact distracts us from anything of light. We feel we have to conquer the darkness rather than look to faith, look with thanksgiving on our journeys of faith.

1. What surprised you reading these few pages? Was this chapter something expected?
2. What are your experience of this in worship?
3. How important is preparation for spiritual warfare in worship?
4. How are you distracted or what do you do distracts others from God?
5. Read 2 Chronicles 20: 20-21 and spend time in prayer before worship.

Our Unique Call

So many terrible things happen every day that we start wondering whether the few things we do ourselves make any sense. When people are starving only a few thousand miles away, when wars are raging close to our borders, when countless people in our own cities have no homes to live in, our own activities look futile. Such considerations, however, can paralyse us and depress us.

Here the word call becomes important. We are not called to save the world, solve all problems, and help all people. But we each have our own unique call, in our families, in our work, in our world. We have to keep asking God to help us see clearly what our call is and to give us the strength to live out that call with trust. Then we will discover that our faithfulness to a small task is the most healing response to the illnesses of our time. Henri Nouwen Bread for the Journey

This is our purpose or meaning in life only discovered in the context of a continuing relationship, an attentive relationship, lived out in small minute ways. Often the big vision is not supported by small actions and we become guilty of hypocrisy. Let's live according to the moment in the light of eternity rather than try and capture eternity.

For The Audience of One- Chapter 6

In this blog I'm going to try and be more of a push and pull technological expression. This will be an attempt to provide some questions for reflection on Mike Pilvachi's book For the Audience of One.

Read Chapter 6 Prophetic Intercession

Honesty is so important especially with an omniscient God, a God who knows all. The honesty is for us and not for God. Openness reflects that vulnerability that God expressed in coming to earth and even relating to us.

1. What surprised you reading these few pages?
2. What are the elements of worship and what are your expectations for worship?
3. Are there desires in your life/heart that attracted to what is being said about worship?
4. Which stories upset you or made you pay attention.? Did they name something for you?
5. Read Psalm 42 slowly three times, read it aloud and pray for either yourself or someone you know.

What is this?

Welcome to Hatsune Miku. She isn't an anime character, nor is she a real singer. She is a Vocaloid voice created to run in a computer. However she sings in tune, in the right places. She's not a recording as such. She even sings with a Japanese English accent! Is this art? Does it have any claim for a place or is it simply a distraction as entertainment.

techno fast

An enormous danger to the Church is an unthinking Christianity that slips into society's patterns of living without investigating their validity. We should fear bandwagons that draw in participants who haven't really thought through the significance and meaning of a particular movement for their lives. Marva Dawn Truly The Community

Lent is a time for Christians to focus often giving up things. Fat Tuesday also pancake or Shrove Tuesday last week is a clearing of formerly luxury foods for the season of Lent. A few years ago I limited my tv viewing to one hour a day. Friends give up chocolate. This year in Italy catholics are urging switching off technology such as mp3 players and abstaining or reducing internet surfing or text messaging until Easter.

Of course the issue really isn't about denial but discipline and self-discipline. Reducing my tv viewing freed me up for reading more things. Since I now don't have a tv now, I've decided to ensure I do an hour of devotional reading a day in this season. Not Bible study nor prayer but devotional reading by trying to read good Christian literature. I avoid as much Christian fluff as possible. Marva Dawn asserts "How people think is the basis for who they become."

Makoto Fujimura asserts that "we carry the dust of Eden in our DNA. Now, as we face a world ... we need to understand that our imaginative capacities carry a responsibility to heal, every bit as much as they carry a responsibility to depict angst." I feel Lent is a time of simplicity getting rid of complexity in order to find God both in angst and healing. Recently I was reading about the Father General of the Jesuits, Pedro Arupe who after celebrating Mass in a slum in South America, was invited to a home by a big man. Arupe wasn't sure whether to go or not, but he went to a shack that was ready to collapse.

He had me sit down on a rickety old chair. From there I could see the sunset. The big man said to me, "Look sir, how beautiful it is!" We sat in silence for a few minutes. The sun disappeared. The man then said, " I don't know how to thank you for all you have done for us. I have nothing to give you, but I thought you would like to see this sunset. You liked it, didn't you? Good evening."

I missed the sunset but last night I looked at the moon and then at a very bright light in the sky. So bright it was difficult not to keep looking at it and wondering what it was. I know now it is Venus in the Western sky. Can we appreciate or wonder at the simple things when we have the distraction of other things? I'm not sure or not.

For the Audience of One - Chapter 5

In this blog I'm going to try and be more of a push and pull technological expression. This will be an attempt to provide some questions for reflection on Mike Pilvachi's book For the Audience of One.

Read Chapter 5 The Fruit of Worship – Holiness

Real freedom and hope comes in God and in Christ Jesus. With a willingness and desire for change. worship becomes what it was meant to be.

1. Do you agree with the idea that worship is for us and our feelings? Or Mike's position?
2. What is your current understanding on the purpose of worship?
3. What do humans need to do in worship?
4. How do you feel to be described as a broken pot? Can you accept it? If not why not?
5. Read 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 and ask God what it means to contemplate or to reflect Him.

Unthinking imitation

An enormous danger to the Church is an unthinking Christianity that slips into society's patterns of living without investigating their validity. We should fear bandwagons that draw in participants who haven't really thought through the significance and meaning of a particular movement for their lives. Marva Dawn Truly The Community

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, however the most dangerous form of discipling. Cookie cutter thinking forces others into molds and springs into judgmentalism when they refuse to conform to what we think they should. We do violence because the one who transforms is the Holy One, the mold is not what we think but Christ himself. Max Lucado talks about finding your sweetspot, like in a tennis racket if you play the ball or life out of that zone power, strength and skill come. Enjoyment and pleasure flow from playing there. This is the older aspect of calling. We have corporate callings as communities and also personal ones.

Whether it is imitating or taking on the values and methods of surrounding culture without careful thought to implications and language, or simply imitating and using Christian songs without thinking of the worldview they embody. Just because another Christian wrote a song does not mean we should taking it and use it without adequate theological reflection about its suitability. I am saddened to find people serving outside their sweet spot and they haven't thought about what is happening to them. They are living off their own energy rather than the joy found inside playing from the right place. I continue to argue that a need is not a call - a call is from God and from within the spirit. A calling if found it its life giving qualities. A need is gap someone is trying to fill.

I have never found it work to read a Bible passage, think and pray about it and choose a worship sequence. In fact it is life giving and affirming, to do the preparation, to use the songs and hymns personally and to run rehearsals and ultimately facilitate others. In fact , I miss it currently, though enabling others to get closer and find God is very satisfying. Finding your place, your calling requires energy but when you're playing out of your sweet spot you have life, energy, joy, fun, and you don't feel tired during it. Work is the sweat of the brow and effort and willpower; serving inside your calling brings life, energy from beyond self, and is worship.

With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith. 2 Thess 1:11

Refractions of light

I'm starting to review books and this is my first for Navpress.

Often the internal life of an artist is not easily accessible and yet Makoto Fujimura in Refractions: a journey of faith, art, and culture allows us to meet him in a very intimate way. I have followed his blog for a while and this book is a gem. He is an artist working in the space between the East and the West and working with mineral pigments, which catch the light and bend it in many ways, just like the essays in this book.

Makoto Fujimura is one of those one in a million people. As a visual artist, as Japanese American, as someone living in the shadow of Ground Zero, as man of faith and committed to community and culture, it is possible find at last someone, something authentic. One small flash of that authenticity is “Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to literally close our eyes to that beauty of the dying sun setting all around us”.

Refractions is not something you read through and feel you’ve done the book. It is not a work of fiction nor is it a textbook about faith, religion or art. It is about the internal spiritual journey, seeing, thinking, reflecting and refracting.

Trapped into Amusing ourselves

The Church stands at a critical juncture in history. More and more persons are becoming dissatisfied with the experience of liberal culture and the Christian community could offer an alternative society. We must ... understand the nature of the technological milieu in which we live in order to grasp more fully the kind of alternative that is necessary ... a myriad of factors have caused persons to become more and more isolated from one another. Marva Dawn Truly The Community

Last week I read about Dr Arig Sigman's article in the Biologist, the journal of the British Institute of Biology, which claimed the lack of real-world social interaction could make you more susceptible to cancer, dementia, heart disease, diabetes, influenza, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus etc. I also read some responses noting the weaknesses in Sigman's research but not refuting it.

But this week Baroness and Professor Greenfield, who is the director of the Royal Institution, a great scientific organization, has voiced her concerns that internet-obsessed children are losing their ability to concentrate and communicate away from the screen. Effectively the children's brains are being rewired. Greenfield is a professor of neuroscience and not a half baked politician. The British newspaper the Telegraph notes that a study from last year has showed that internet use can improve brain functioning and speed up general decision-making but the cost is loss of empathy and the ability to think in abstract terms. Furthermore there are possible connections with autism to be investigate.

It is twenty years since Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. He argued deeper than Marshall McLuhan not merely that the medium is the message but media inherently reduces messages. Thus a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Writing especially about television he comments that things are reduced down to entertainment. We have been reduced to the soundbyte.

I wonder about the internet. My posts are generally short. What am I exactly doing here? I'm trying not to be a blipvert. But the medium does reduce and limit. Rather I suppose I am wondering out loud and hoping someone might start or continue to think critically about the world around them.

Charles Colson, in Christianity Today in 2006 titled an article 'Soothing Ourselves to Death Should we give people what they want or what they need?' Poignant strong stuff.

I admit I prefer traditional hymns, buteven so, I'm convinced that much of the music being written for the church today reflects an unfortunate trend—slippingacross the line from worship to entertainment. Evangelicals are in danger of amusing ourselves to death, to borrow the title of the classic Neil Postman book. This trend is evident not just in theater-like churches.

I'm not sure if Colson is over-reacting but he is reacting to something which can be bad. self-indulgent emotionalism. I wrote about worshi-tainment when I started this blog and it still remains high on my radar. Tim Keller writes in the foreword to a book I've just finished (review to follow) that worship without the quality is intrinsically self indulgent because it excludes the stranger and the nonbeliever who have no relationship to those playing/leading nor to the God being worshipped. Whatever the medium, whether music, powerpoint, internet, etc, we need to understand what it is doing lest our ignorance and perhaps even our sins are visited on the next generation. Lest we become merely a reflection of our surrounding culture rather than an alternative.

Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true wisdom. All who obey his commandments will grow in wisdom. Praise him forever! Psalm 111:10