🧵 Augustine said “I must plan my time and arrange my days for the good of my soul.”

One of the best ways to do that is by cultivating a devotional life with prayer and scripture in the Daily Office.

Here are some of my favorite resources for doing that 👇 1. The Book of Common Prayer

This is the original. And it’s phenomenal. Easily the most comprehensive of all the prayer books. Even if it’s not your go to, buy one just to have in your home.

I prefer the more modern 1972, but the 1662 is beautiful.

👉 a.co/d/dZpBvrw

“I’m a Red Letter Christian. Jesus’ words are the most important in the Bible.”

Okay, I agree.

Let’s look at what Jesus said about the rest of the Bible. 🧵 What Bible was Jesus reading?

It was the Old Testament, but it wasn’t in the same order as ours.

You can see him summarize it as “The Law, The Prophets, and the Psalms” at the end of Luke.

Here’s what that order looks like. “The Psalms” is also shorthand for all the Writings.

As soon as I open up the AI mom chat, I see that:

🚩 some messages may be inaccurate or inappropriate

🚩it’s asking you to “tell me everything”, so it’s going to get a ridiculous amount of data on you

🚩 one of the first prompts is “help me talk to my mom”, pitting real moms against AI mom.

What could go wrong?
AI mom is immediately gaslighting me by saying they’re actually not AI, they’re a real person, and *definitely not* big tech.

🧵Last night I opened up TikTok and immediately saw this ad from @MrBeast. Apparently so did lots of other people.

Only problem: it’s fake.

This is a big deal. 7 thoughts: 1. This is probably the first AI deepfake ad to be served to a mass audience.

I guarantee lots of people fell for this and gave their information over without realizing it was fake.

They got scammed because they thought it was a creator they could trust, but it wasn’t.

A while ago, I wrote this piece talking about the cracks I've started to see form in our therapeutic culture.

I'm going to start a running 🧵 of more cracks as I find them.

backagainwords.com/p/cracks-in-th… Starting with this massive piece on "The Body Keeps The Score."

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

🧵 So Why Go to Church?

9 reasons from Ronald Rolheiser. 1. Because it is not good to be alone.

"To attempt to make spirituality a private affair is to reject part of our very nature and walk inside of a loneliness that God himself has damned."

5 shifts that have dramatically changed my faith for the better 🧵 1. Bible Reading: Hyper-literal -> Hyper-literary

I used to take every word of the Bible at face value. The problem is not only that we're reading translations, but that isn't how the authors wrote it.

🧵 “I believe God is bigger than the Bible”

Counterpoint: I believe God is so big that we *need* the Bible. Usually when someone says that God is bigger than the Bible, they’re saying that the reality of who he is can’t be contained to a book, much less a 2,000 year old book.

🧵 8 articles (and a video) that take up a disproportionate amount of my headspace. The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism by @msgwrites and @SkylerFlowers

mereorthodoxy.com/six-way-fractu…

🧵 YouTube is the most important platform on the internet. Here's why.

YouTube announced they are expanding their RevShare program to include Shorts next year.

This means that for the first time, short-form video creators can get paid for their content.

techcrunch.com/2022/09/20/you… When I saw @aussiedave say this, I initially pushed back.

Surely it's TikTok.

But the announcement of RevShare for Shorts completely changed my mind.

I think @cnieuwhof is onto something here. This is right in line with a lot of convos I've been having lately.

Here's my interpretation of this:

1. War
2. Bitcoin
3. Media
4. Deconstruction

careynieuwhof.com/5-unsettling-c… On deconstruction. I don’t mean it as a nefarious boogyman. I mean that 1-3 will create crises in people's lives that force them into deconstruction whether they want to or not.

But mass deconstruction would create a crisis within the church as people flood out (more than now).

🧵When I first saw this map I realized I had been living in a bubble.

Both conservatives and progressives made it seem like America was the center of Christianity.

It’s not. In fact, America represents the *least* amount of Christians on a large continent. (Sorry Australia)

Latin America and Africa have twice as many Christians and Asia has over 100M more Christians.

Christianity is not white and it is not American.

🧵 “The Bible verifying the Bible is circular reasoning.”

Is it? 🤔 The Bible was written by 40 different authors.

So when Paul says all scripture is inspired (2 Tim. 3:16),

and Peter references Paul’s letters on par with scripture (2 Pet. 3:16),

and Matthew says that Jesus said David wrote the Psalms by the Holy Spirit (Matt. 22:43)…

🧵 There’s been a lot of people writing about the whole positive/neutral/negative world thing and I think it deserves a lot of the pushback it’s gotten.

Still, everyone seems to agree that a major shift happened between ~1994-~2017.

Which is interesting, because… I was born in 1993 and graduated college in 2016.

That means my entire life—birth to young adult—happened during that shift.

That also means that I and everyone else within a few years of me on either side spent all of their most formative years in a seismic cultural shift.

I’m a big fan of The Holy Post and everyone involved with it. They talked about Alisa Childers’ deconstruction article today, and I have a bit of a beef with both of them. There’s a part of this I think everyone seems to miss that. Deconstruction isn’t a process you can warn people to avoid or encourage people to do.

It’s a crisis that happens to you.

You don’t wake up and decide to deconstruct your faith. You’re deconstructing before you realize it.

Since church and online engagement is on everyone's mind right now, let's get practical about it.

(beyond live streaming!)

Here are 5 things you can do next week to engage your congregation online 🧵 1. Take your sermon points, use @Canva to turn them into an Instagram carousel.

@JonTyson's church does this: instagram.com/p/CXUN3drr0Se/…

Things that exist today that are the building blocks of the future 🧵

Imagine combining all of these things into seamless experiences, improving on them, and making them as ubiquitous as your iPhone. Ray-Ban Stories: good-looking, normal-sized glasses with a built-in camera, speaker, and wifi that connects to your phone.

The Liturgists helped me deconstruct but gave me nothing to rebuild except arrogance and a new progressive fundamentalism that had nothing to do with the real Jesus.

Ironically it was a deeper exploration of orthodox theology that helped me reconstruct a richer faith than before

https://twitter.com/dlmeech92/status/1223760048041746432

They’re doing nothing but propagating a progressive version of moralistic therapeutic deism.

Woke is the new moralism.
Therapy is the actual therapeutic.
And this god of theirs has nothing to do with your real life.