Just got forwarded an email chain letter urging me to vote in an MSNBC live-poll…

Here’s my problem - I may have a “yes” or “no” opinion on the question, but I absolutely do not agree with either of the elaborations.

Regarding the first, the “principle of separation of church and state” is not a proper Constitutional legal doctrine… the only constitutional principles are “free exercise” and “no state establishment”.  So if “In God We Trust” should be removed, it would have to be on the basis of it either inhibiting the free exercise of religion (which it clearly does not) or because it somehow establishes a state church (which it also does not, although strident secularists would argue otherwise).

Regarding the second, the phrase does have historical and patriotic significance, but these cannot be decoupled from its theological significance.  While it clearly does not establish a state church (as I have claimed above), it does have religious significance, pointing to the fundamentally theistic philosophical foundations for our system of law and governance.

Of course, speaking as a Christian I find it deeply ironic that we print “in God we trust” on the instruments of Mammon, in whom we actually trust.  Were God actually an object of trust in any practical sense for America as a nation or its people, perhaps I would see more virtue than parody in the slogan.

The hot debate between Darwinists and Intelligent Design advocates is whether “design” is a detectable property of a system.  The ID hypothesis votes yes, its opponents vote no.

So the other day I was random-link-cruising and happened upon some articles and discussions about Yucca Mountain, and particularly about the “warning label” problem: how do we mark the Yucca Mountain facility in such a way that all comers will recognize it as “dangerous” even if those comers are not English-speakers (10’s of years), familiar with Post-enlightenment Western culture (100’s of years), users of “language” as we understand it (1,000’s of years), or even recognizably “human” (10,000’s or 100,000’s of years).

It struck me that this is simply another face of the “design” question: the DOE wants to make it unambiguously clear to an observer with whom they have nothing (practically speaking) in common and to whom they will communicate nothing except a single physical artifice that (1) the artifice was deliberately designed by an intelligent agent, and (2) the intent of the designer was to warn the curious away from the site.  So success rests upon the existence of some empirical means of detecting not only design, but intent.  If the site can be misunderstood as a potentially natural phenomenon (e.g., genetically-modified blue cacti) or its purpose is misunderstood by a civilization with a different cultural lexicon (as, e.g., a “place of honor”), the project will have failed.

Then I had an almost comical daydream about Richard Dawkins’ great⁶⁰ grandson (60-some-odd generations from now) standing before an apparently sealed-up wall, Geraldo Rivera style, lambasting his critics’ quaint but preposterous notions that the triple-triangular megaliths surrounding him are anything except aethetically fortuitous freaks of geology which our psychological evolution happens to have predisposed us to be both fascinated and horrified by, and that he intends to prove first-hand that there is nothing interesting about the site.  Bring in the robot-piloted hyper-backhoes and start digging!

Here’s an idea that will revolutionize church finance:

Pre-paid tithe and offering cards.

Someone needs to jump on this and make it happen.

You’re welcome.

This is a rant.  Consider yourself warned.

We live in what may be the most opulent, gluttonous, self-aggrandizing, selfish, arrogant civilization on the face of the earth.  We bear children not as the natural fruit of loving covenant and an expression of God’s providence, but because we decide we’re “ready” and we “want” them.  We have unfettered access to stores of knowledge beyond our remotest sense of comprehension.  We set aside a decade for “adolescence” in which we grant almost-unfettered economic freedom with near-total liberty from legal, moral, and cultural responsibility, and consider it destructive to impede the total moral free-agency of these formless and void wanderers. All but a sliver of the severely destitute live with conveniences and luxuries beyond the imaginations of millennia of the world’s wealthiest men, and many of the world’s people even today.

Living in that kind of world, I can’t see how anyone can open their Bible, stand up in front of hundreds (or thousands) of gathered believers on a Sunday morning, keep a straight face, and tell them how to have an even more comfortable, fulfilling future.  I don’t see how someone can look at himself in the mirror after telling an eager flock of God’s people that the Apostle Paul, writing to them from a prison cell, clothed in rags, and nearing the end of his life at the hands of a pagan government, wants them to be “winners” according to the exact same measure of “success” used by that pagan government (money, influence, popularity, power).  I am dumbfounded at the rush to remove from Christian believing every burden which might actually mark us as “Christian”, and their replacement with burdens of trend-chasing, status hoarding, and cultural conformity.

I say all of these things as a guy who loves churches that “understand the times”, that engage with culture in their forms and language and structure and outreach, that minister to practical needs, that produce well-balanced intelligible influential Christians to the glory of God.  I’m just getting quite fed up with the ease with which the unnegotiable first things are “swept under the rug” or treated as of “secondary importance” to those things which, frankly, are passing away.

Never, ever, ever let go of the gospel.  Never, ever, ever stop preaching the goodness of God, the awfulness of our sin, the awesomness of God’s judgement, the sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion, the power of Christ’s resurrection, or the responsibility we bear as His representatives and body here on the earth.  Never, ever, ever think there’s anything more important than that to put in front of your people.

Okay, end of rant.  I feel better.  Don’t you?

As I was walking out of CostCo this evening, I passed a couple coming in.  They were definitely a couple — holding hands, speaking fondly to each other, walking with that shared rhythm that people who have been together for a while sometimes get.

He was about 6′4″ with two-foot long dirty blond dreadlocks, dressed head to toe in linen and hemp.  She was about 5′8″, a smartly-dressed professional-looking brunette, like Jennifer Garner in the first season of Alias only prettier.

Such is Seattle.

Freakin’ Awesome.

I r stonishd that u reads otha book, It not realz gosple at all. Sumbunny is can pervert gosples 2 confooz u. If me or ne buddy elz preechedz more diferanter gosples than other gosples, they be doin it wrong. ditto 4 empathis. I am try to get cookies from mans or from Ceiling Cat? If to try to pleas mans, not be srvants of Christ, and that badz.

As an economy, we are completely overrun with entertainment, and the mediasphere is perennially saturated with amusements, diversions, and spectacle.

With that in mind, it may come as a complete surprise to some that our culture is insufferably boring, or that we as people are intolerably bored pretty much all of the time.

This raises an important question for all of us Church thinkers: “Why, then, would we want to experience this in church, too?“

Something to think about.

In case you didn’t know, the church plant Heather and I had been going to more or less since we arrived in Seattle - Christian City Church Seattle - had to close its doors a few months ago. This was our second time in a row playing a significant roll in a relatively new congregation (before coming to Seattle we were heavily involved with Newsong CC in Westford, MA), and we were pretty well exhausted, so we’ve been taking it easy for a few months, taking a bit of a sabbath from throwing ourselves into “big church”. But now it’s time to get back out of our shells and be a part of something bigger than our own preferred circle of friends (our “organic church”, if you will).

Now, my tastes in church are pretty unusual, in that I don’t see a dichotomy between good theology and felt experience. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a church where either was taken as far as it should be, and that makes it really hard for me to be content in a church that settles for doing one moderately well at the expense of neglecting or abusing the other. We need to know God truly, and we need to connect with Him intimately, and what I really want to find is a church that is growing in the practice of doing both.

Having said that, it shouldn’t surprise anyone out there who knows the Seattle church landscape that we’re having a rough time finding the right one. A few of the contenders we’ve had the most experience with:

Mars Hill Church - Heather says I have a total man-crush on Mark Driscoll, and she’s probably right. For my money, he is far and away the best bible teacher in the country right now, and I’ve borrowed more than a few sermon points and presentation patterns from him. That said, his congregation (I’ve now visited three of their campuses and Ballard multiple times) is consistently standoffish and disengaged when it comes to worship singing. (I’m reminded of a church in Boston that I wrote about years ago.) Now, Mark said just last week (skip to 7:58 in the video) that he wants for his congregation to get more expressive/involved/engaged in an encounter of worship in their services, and he seems really sincere and serious about it. But he’s said that before - several times - and, in visiting from time to time over the course of the last three years, I haven’t seen any movement (literally or figuratively) to speak of on that front.

Blue Sky Church - Our contender with which we have the least experience and about which we have the least information, my admittedly underinformed impression is something like this: A Vineyard breakaway (because apparently the whole VCC movement has gone at best soft-egalitarian and at worst anti-complementarian) that seems to have its theology straight (albeit more minimalist than I like - no doubt a product of their Vineyard roots) and seems to want to have engaging worship experiences, but seems to lack the kind of catalytic culture-building leaders who can actually shape a congregation that gets into that sort of thing.

Christian Faith Center - Casey Treat’s multi-campus (Federal Way/Everett) church. We visited a few times and watched their TV show a few times, and I have a lot of friends who are former CFC-ers. Their worship is earnest (if a little dated), but when preaching on “faith” Casey sometimes seems to almost bend himself (and his text) over backwards to get it around to the “what’s in it for you” angle. Now, I do believe that the Bible makes promises that we need to know about, but if I’m not sure if my senior pastor is keeping the first thing first (God’s Glory at All Times in All Circumstances Regardless of My Blessed or Unblessed State) and the way-down-the-list thing way-down-the-list (He will bless you abundantly), it does a number on my confidence in his ability to be a shepherd after God’s heart.

The City Church - whose leaders are friends with some of the Christian City Church guys. I’ve been really impressed with what I’ve seen of the youth ministry (Generation Church/Judah Smith), although I’ll grant there is probably some doctrinal inconsistency in there to be wary of. But I can’t go to youth church anymore (if you’ve had a beard for more than a decade, it’s time to get out of youth group) so I have to look first at my experiences with their “main” services, and my main complaint is that I’ve yet to hear a message - live or on TV - that makes me uncomfortable enough with my own sin to actually want to repent of it. Maybe it’s Wendell’s personal politeness or maybe it’s an errant theological politeness, but it fails to grab my heart and demand my allegiance to the God who made me.

Lots of Little Churches - there are plenty of church plants out there that haven’t cracked 100 (yet, or in a long time; many never will, or never will again). The last three churches I’ve been involved with have been in this category, the last two for Heather. While I admire and cheer for what these guys are doing, we need to find someplace where we can seek some help from an existing, established, credible ministerial infrastructure without immediately getting recruited to help build it. I need to recharge with a taste of the innumerable multitude shouting “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and unto the Lamb” in a way that yet another clan of 50 simply can’t offer.

I write these things not to rip on any of the above churches. I think all of them have something worthwhile to contribute to the Body of Christ in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. I guess my main point is that, as a war-wearied and theologically savvy church seeker, it’s hard to find a church that’s publicly honest about their weaknesses and areas they need to grow. I think Mars Hill comes the closest on this point (having seen more public apologies from Mark Driscoll than from every other Evangelical leader in America combined), but I’m also worried that they’ve just got so far to go in figuring out what it means to encounter God in a corporate setting that it will quench something that’s always been really important in my Christian walk.

P.S. - There are other churches we’ve considered and even visited which I won’t mention in the interest of being charitable. Let’s just say “I want to be around winners, so I go to X church” commercials turn us off almost as much as idolizing Rob Bell, transmogrifying the gender roles debate from a Biblical issue into a “justice” issue, or bling pastors preaching bling gospels. If any of those sound familiar, sorry, I’m probably talking about you. Big things matter, and those are all either big things or they point directly to fundamental big things that allow/cause them to happen.

It’s an election year, so it’s no surprise that everyone is getting all up into a huff trying to defend their own pet political positions. My personal favorites are the socialist statists who think that having a massive federal institution like Medicare or Medicaid is what Jesus had in mind when he said “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Let me make sure I’ve got this straight: Jesus wants us to cheer for a Caesar who will take care of “the least of these” on our behalf so we don’t have to get involved? If I’m to take Jesus seriously here (which I have no reason not to do), someone who champions Medicaid in Jesus’ name is handing Jesus over to the authorities to be dealt with by the professionals. Now, maybe I’m reading too much into that, but it seems to me that didn’t go very well last time.

I read a verse like that and I am cut to the heart because I know that I haven’t done what I ought, and I know that I can’t take a shortcut by voting for the guy who says the right thing or cheering at a rally or wearing the right colored ribbon. I have to get involved. I have to walk down the street and treat the homeless drunk on the sidewalk like a human being. I have to give my own money to a starving child in Honduras. I have to be ready to be a safety net (as in, a roof and warm meals and love and support and counsel and friendship) for my family or friends when they get sick, lose a job, get shipwrecked. I can’t pretend that I’m “doing it unto Jesus” by sloughing it off on a faceless bureaucracy. I have to give, I have to see, I have to touch, I have to participate.

HT: Douglas Wilson and an unnamed Christian sister at work who prompted me to write this.

First and foremost, props to my retail brethren at Amazon.com for getting GTA 4 out for delivery on zero day. My copy is in a Big Brown UPS Truck on its way to my doorstep even as I write this.

Second, props to Misha Glenny for publishing McMafia only a few weeks before GTA 4 dropped. It’s a fascinating read about global organized crime, with a particular emphasis on the rise of major criminal syndicates in eastern Europe around and following the time of the demise of Soviet Communism. Highly recommended for more reflective gamers who might like some serious background on where our fictional protagonist Niko came from.