Road Trip...See ya

I shall be taking a vacation soon- a hot air balloon trip around the world.

Just kidding, actually I will be road tripping it to Charleston, South Carolina, then Wilmington, NC, then the Outer Banks, then Nashville, TN. This will be my first visit to Music City, although I'm afraid I won't be there long enough to enjoy what it is best known for: the 1352 guitar pickers that are all better than me(see Chet Atkins). I will be going to an event called "The Call Nashville" which will I think prove to be nothing if not interesting.

Accompanying me on the trip will be the infamous John Mahshie, sole proprietor over at Relevant Revolution and creator of Sermon Jams. Sermon Jams is a project that anyone interested in preaching and/or hip-hop music should check out(free listens online) because it is the beautiful and unexpected wedding of the two. Exquisite beats mixed with Martin Luther King, Alistair Begg, Heidi Baker, and others. Mahshie is onto something here...

So the upshot of the road trip is that I won't be posting for the next week or so here. Ok, ok I know I haven't posted in the last month or so, but it helps me feel like a real blogger when I announce that I won't be seen in the blogosphere for some time, and then imagine the cries of dismay going up from my millions of fans.

Until next time, as John Mahshie says: Peace in the Middle East.

Dreamland

"If we actually began to remotely try to act the way we are commanded to by Yeshua, it would uproot every single thing we have based our lives in thus far. We do not try to do it, because we honestly do not believe the promises Yeshua makes us."

This was written by Leopold over at Water For Words, in the midst of a remarkable post that bears a very careful read.

In fact, I may just grab the ball and run with it here for a few lines:

I was recently wondering, and I wondered myself into a frightful prospect, that the Christian Church is not actually the Christian Church. What if what passes for the church in America is actually just another idol-worshipping pagan religion, and has nothing to do with the actual, mysterious, God-defined Body of Christ. What if the actual Body of Christ was an indigenous people in the Amazon basin that have no geo-political influence, who do not have the Bible, who do not worship in any way that is judged proper Christian worship by any standard the nominal church holds to. What if these are the chosen people through whom God will realize the Kingdom, and the Christian world is just a label that has ceased to mean anything real because everyone under that label has refused the spirit of God? What if this nominal church is actually just another facet of the world which Jesus had to overcome in order to bring his Kingdom among us? What if none of us, for all the salvation prayers we've uttered, all the church services we've attended, all the abstinences from petty sins, all the religious art and music we've created, all the spiritual emotion we've put on display, what if none of us is actually a Christian? What if the real Body of Christ, this tribe of Amazonians, is yet to be revealed and is simply awaiting God's command to burst forth on the world, proclaiming the Gospel and setting captives free like the apostles? What if what we thought was the Gospel was actually so far from it that we in America haven't heard it yet?

Following this trip to Hypothetical Dreamland, I had to dwell for awhile on the fact that many under the Christian banner do in fact exhibit Kingdom love, joy, peace, and power as we find in the Gospels. Just not enough to make a blip on the nominal church's radar screen. But I think the hypothetical scenario witnesses to something important: that Christian doesn't mean Christ, that church doesn't mean Church, that moral standards don't mean God's Law, that being right doesn't mean Truth.

If everything that was considered Christian burned up right now, including ideology, theology, organization of local churches, political power and influence, the well-marketed Christian "art" forms, the lexical canon known as Christianese, radio preaching, vast discursive structures designed to defend Christian morality, all appearances of holiness and righteousness, even the Bible...

...How many would remain the sons and daughters of God, and how many would disappear like threads woven into the fabric of what John called "the world?"

Are You Sick of Preaching?

I know a friend who is sick of preaching. Or at least poor preaching. She doesn't go to church largely for this reason, and recently posted an online invitation for Christians in her area to meet and pray, worship, read scripture, and experience Jesus together. In this post, she mentioned that preaching turned her off, for the sake of finding people in a similar predicament as her. Her first response? A street preacher claiming to "help" her(he used the word) who quoted several scriptures concerning how the people have turned away from good teaching(no doubt he was showing a "backslider" her error).

Well, needless to say, my friend felt that her problem was belittled, that scripture was misused, her intentions unaddressed, her discouragement about church confirmed, and that she had been preached to poorly. Draw your own conclusions.

Does anyone else feel this way about preaching? Is good preaching difficult to find, or perhaps non-existent?