I’ve stayed out of the recent convos about contemporary worship because it’s a good and important convo re economic and power dynamics.

But I think what the convo misses is why contemporary worship remains so powerful for the masses. Here are a few thoughts:

1/5 Worship services are more than the sum of their parts. Sociologically, the text of a ritual is not the same as the performance of a ritual. Both matter. Theologically, the presence & activity of the Spirit transforms words & rituals, sight & sounds into an encounter w God.

2/5

“Bad people break laws” is not a good argument against making laws. The Bible is full of admonishments to mitigate the effects of evil and to restrain the damage evil people can do by means of laws and the just ordering of society. Laws deter. We don’t expect laws to eradicate evil. We don’t expect laws to redeem. But laws do the necessary work of fencing in the spread and impact of sin in a fallen world. The Bible operates on that presupposition.

One of the more brilliant bits of parenting advice that was passed on to us was to have a journal for each child, and for us to write what we see in them and what we think about them in it.

1/6 Over the years, we’ve written about the likes and dislikes, their little quirks and idiosyncrasies, their memorable little one-liners or retorts. For each child, there were far more entries in their early years.

2/6

We think of salvation as being saved from a place— hell or earth.
But Paul speaks of salvation as being saved from a time— this present evil age.

Even though this present age continues, Christians belong to the Age to Come. We've live in a different time zone. “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
Galatians 1:3-5 NIV bible.com/bible/111/gal.…

As a leader, people will frequently ask your opinion about all kinds of things.

The problem is, the more you give it (and you surely do have opinions on lots of things— that’s part of how you ended up becoming a leader!), the more these three things will happen:

🧵 1/4 1. The team will stop thinking for themselves; or at the very least, they’ll start second-guessing their instincts. It won’t be long before creative thinkers/leaders leave, and the team will be made up mostly of people who can guess, implement, & execute your preferences.

2/4

It is significant that the Nicene Creed speaks of the church within the article or stanza on the Holy Spirit.

There is no speaking of the Spirit without also speaking of the church; and there is no speaking of the church without also speaking of the Spirit. In the context of confessing the Spirit as Lord, as having spoken through the prophets, and as being worshiped and glorified, the creed leads us to confess our belief in the church. The church is where the life of the Spirit takes shape.

2/7

I am convinced that so many American evangelical academics have no clue how interdisciplinary work actually works. History, sociology, psychology, etc. form a lens to study “lived theology”. To discover toxic forms of lived theology is not to undermine confessional theology. 1/ One helpful tool for separating this is the “Four Voices” from Helen Cameron, et. al.

History, sociology, etc. explore “operant theology” and often how it may be dissonant from the “espoused theology”. But even when the espoused theology conforms to the formal & normative… 2/

Church Unity: A Short Thread

Unity in the early church was revolutionary— power differentials based on status, ethnicity, and gender were relativized if not neutralized by their shared faith in Christ. It was a unique community in the 1st century.

1/4 But unity in the early church was also costly: it required telling each other the truth in love in order for real reconciliation to take place (see Galatians 3).

And it drew lines of exclusion around issues of what we would call doctrine and ethics (see Colossians 2, etc).

2/4

This was a fascinating and insightful thread. I’d like to offer some brief reflections not as corrections but hopefully as expansions to this kind of analysis.

1. Analyzing CCLI songs is problematic because those lists are shaped by market forces. Thus saying that they are …

https://twitter.com/michaeljrhodes/status/1437861080936636425

…dominated by a handful of conglomerates/power houses is like stopping in a gas station and lamenting the lack of local produce or organic meat. These lists reflect which songs have the most market share, but not necessarily which songs are most likely to be sung in an average..

I believe in the power of practices and community to form a particular vision of the world in us. But tracing every wicked deed to a particular theology/tradition gives too much power to our ability to direct our own formation. The human heart is more stubborn than that. 1/ There is indeed such a thing as toxic theology, and it produces disastrous effects. Yet sometimes we act in accordance with our faith community, and sometimes we act in spite of it. 2/

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about favoritism because I’m preaching on James 2 this week. I used to think the opposite of favoritism is neutrality or evenness. But that’s not how the Bible frames it. After warning against favoritism as a contradiction to the faith, James shows... …what favoritism looks like: it looks like giving preferential treatment to those with high status or considerable wealth; in short: power. Favoritism is about favoring the powerful in order to gain from their power. But then, James says something about the character of God.

The whole silly argument about whether the halftime show was about the objectification of the women or the empowerment of latinas shows that in today world devoid of a moral matrix, our only way of making sense of goodness, truth, and beauty is power. (Thread) Some insist that objections to the objectification of women is not an out-moded moral standard, but instead more sinister: the attempt of white men/women to control brown female bodies. This, we are told forcefully by a social media mob corralling it’s own coercive power.

When people say the OT prophesied the coming of Jesus & therefore the fulfillment of prophecy is *proof* that Jesus is the Son of God, I say, “Not quite”. The OT had various themes & promises that came together in an unexpected way in Jesus that was clear after His resurrection. From a purely historical standpoint, you’d have to say that *something* happened that made Jewish followers of Jesus read the OT differently & see the Messiah in a scandalously fresh new way. Christians say that “something” is the resurrection. Here’s @profntwright on OT hope:

Don’t confuse charismatic theology w prosperity theology. Charismatic theology is thoroughly Biblical in its belief in a God who is dynamic & active in His world; and it’s Trinitarian in its inclusion of the Spirit’s agency & presence. If an umoved, distant sovereign is your version of orthodoxy, then you’ll see anything else as heresy.

A short thread on #work...

Why do we work?

1. For money/provision: But how much is enough? What about when we’re between jobs or retired?

2. For significance or status: But how high do you climb?

3. For meaning/purpose: But what if you don’t love your job? When we look at Genesis 1-2 and Psalm 8, we discover that work is a pre-Fall calling, and one that is connected to our glory!

Work is part of our glorious creational design!

This is a quick THREAD for people who think “modern worship” or “American evangelicalism” or megachurches are all show and entertainment to “attract” shallow consumer Christians: 1. A few big churches grab headlines for head-scratching gimmicky approaches to Sunday mornings. But don’t be fooled. Never universalize from the particular; particularize from the universal.

Let’s talk abt the “Two Kingdoms” theology that seems to underlie the way some think abt politics—separating a “heavenly kingdom” from an “earthly one”, allowing governments to do what they think is best for their people while the church just worries abt saving souls for heaven. First, nowhere in the Bible is the Kingdom split in this way. Jesus’s “Render unto Caesar” may be better understood (in the light of the Gospels using all the imperial names and claims for Jesus and not Caesar) as saying, “Sure, pay your taxes, but nothing is *really* Caesar’s.”

Col. 1:21-27 THREAD

Like a parent telling their teenager her own story to help her weather difficult years, Paul tells the young Colossian church their story from God’s perspective.

They once were...distant from God, living as if He were their enemy, acting out in evil ways. (We often think it’s the other way around: we did evil stuff, God made us *His* enemy, so we became distant. Paul says: You are distant because you made God *your* enemy in your own mind...and then acted in rebellion as a result....Like Harry Potter with Snape 😉)

I’m not a fan of the term “white theology”, for several reasons.

1. It makes the criteria for a theology its *origin* not its *object*. A theology is neither good nor bad based on where it come from, but rather on what it focuses on or espouses. Origin is not an irrelevant category when evaluating a theology, but it is not the defining category. Historical orthodoxy & biblical fidelity, are two examples of more relevant criteria.

The “Christ-hymn” in Colossians 1 deals with two great themes of Jewish theology: Creation and Redemption. The God who created would redeem what He made, and has the power to do so because He made it.

/1 Because God is the Creator, all that is created is worth redeeming. Because God is the Redeemer, all that is created can be redeemed. One speaks of the value of creation; the other to the power of redemption.

/2