Debt as a Percentage of GDP

Here is a fact. By the late 1940's the debt as a percentage of GDP was about 110%.

Here is the best graph I can find. It shows the debt from the '50s to present. The point is EXPECT HUGE DEFICITS TO BAIL US OUT OF THE PRESENT CRISIS. The debt could go to about 15+ trillion (GNP is around 12 trillion)


















I think the question of sacrifice is a valid one. What is ahead of us is some heavy sacrifices including a season of HUGE deficits followed by an era of higher taxes.

The Stimulus Package and The Need for Wealth Distribution

In my first post on the financial crisis, The Depression in the Financial Markets – The Solution is Wage Inflation via Tax Policy posted on September 16th, I suggested that the root cause of our financial woes is ultimately a lack of demand. At the root of this problem is wealth inequality.

The middle class squeeze leads to low consumer confidence. People begin to stop spending. For example, high gas prices pulled people's discretionary funds into fuel and retail sales of items like cars begins to slow. Such a trend begins to spiral into recession. The root cause is a lack of wages rising with prices of vital items. Low wages lead to lowered demand which leads to recession.

In the current crisis, this slowing demand is multiplied by a crisis in the financial markets. The financial crisis has many causes but one of them is that on the fringes people that are squeezed begin to default on their homes. In situations where financial institutions are highly leveraged the result is failed banks.

So what is needed of course is a bailout of the financial institutions by creating liquidity and the government acting as the guarantee of certain failing types of financial services. Basically, the government has to inject into the system more cash. This addresses the financial crisis but what about the recession. The recession is addressed by one fundamental type of action. The government must put money in the hands of consumers. This happens though tax cuts, a stimulus plan and general wealth distribution.

Yes, wealth distribution.
Why Wealth Distribution is Needed
Lets simplify the scenario to make the situation clear. Let's say that one person owns all the food and has all the cash. What will happen to his food selling business. The food will rot and the people will starve. The problem is people cannot buy the food. There is no demand. In this situation, in order to save the wealthy man's business, he has to give money to the consumer. In order to stop a recession and save capitalism requires wealth distribution when wealth inequalities are overly polarized.

Life is like a game of monopoly. If one person has all the money, the game is over. The game comes to a halt. In order to start the game again, you have to give some money to the losers. In times like these, we need demand side economics to drive demand and re-start the economy. Some politicians may call this socialism but in fact this is simply economics 101.

brad

Uncommon Wisdom - The Need for a Life of Strenuous Thought

I often quote what I think is a quote from Charles Spurgeon in reference to George W. Bush. Spurgeon said, “It takes thirty years to prepare a sermon”. His point is that inspiration and insight into the mind of God and the scope of the themes of scripture takes a lifelong commitment to the study of scripture and its application in one’s personal life. Such a quest involves a life of strenuous contemplation of the ways of God. Such a life is a arduous seeking for wisdom.

The bible calls us to seek wisdom in our youth so that in the time of calamity she may be found. The fool, in their moment of need, will cry out for wisdom and she will not be found. Wisdom or skill in any area of life is not easy to come by but must be diligently sought over a lifetime.

In today’s world, this is even more true. We live in an ever increasingly complex world. In our modern way of life, if we are to contribute to society we must become a specialist and an expert. The wisdom of expertise only comes from a lifelong quest for knowledge in one’s chosen are of focus.

The founding fathers were stunning in their commitment to the study of governance. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were intellectuals in the extreme. Out of the strenuous work to understand the history of governance, they studied the history of the Classical period and were literate in the original languages of the Greco-roman world. John Quincy Adams was instructed to read Cicero in the original Latin by his father when he was a mere twelve year old boy. The seeking of knowledge and wisdom was considered a civic duty. The fact of the matter is that wisdom is not a commonly held commodity and common sense is no wisdom at all.

But in the 21st century, we have come to believe that if a person is “one of us” and is not an elite or overly educated person, then he or she is more likely to have the common sense needed to represent us and understand us. This principle flies in the face of the reality of the process of obtaining wisdom in any area of life. Would we want one of “us” common uneducated folk performing open heart surgery on our father or proposing a treatment for our wife’s breast cancer. Do we want the doctor who finished in the bottom quarter of his class? I contend that it is even more difficult to govern a nation.

Do you want a doctor to fix your car or a car mechanic to do your plumbing? Neither ought we to expect a business man to be an expert at governing.

If we have learned anything from the Bush years, it should be that we do not want a common mediocre student or intellect as President of the United States of America. The myth that the elite students of the world make poor leaders is simply nonsensical. Real problems, complex problems, require the best and the brightest that the nation can offer if we are to find the nuanced and balanced solution that can withstand the test of time. What we need are intellectuals and students of history to lead the institutions that effect us as a society, both church and government. What we need is a person who has struggled to understand and sought wisdom all his days. If we have learned anything from recent years, may this be the lesson we have learned.

Health Care - Krugman Article

This week is definitely going to be about mudslinging tactics (or is that strategy?) and health care policy. I admit Krugman of the NYT seems to just speak DNC talking points, but the guy is a pretty smart guy. Great article this morning.

Krugman on health care.
brad

Financial Bailout defeat in Congress - A Cowardly Lack of Leadership

For many years, I refused to delve into politics or economics for that matter as I did not want such issues to alienate people from the message of the Kingdom. Times have changed and the need for voices is urgent. Such voices are not coming from congress.

In a move that is pure politics, house members on both sides of the aisle ignored reality and listened to the panic of their constituents. Such caving to public outcry is not leadership.

David Brooks says it well, in his Nihilist Revolt editorial in the NYT:

They (congress) have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this country is being governed.

showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed. They did the momentarily popular thing.

What we need in this situation is authority.

The American century was created by American leadership, which is scarcer than credit just about now.

What has happened is "chickens coming home to roost". The republicans and some liberal democrats have such disdain for government that they refuse to lead with government action. The following are elements of this total inability to lead:
1. Ideology. We have seen the fruit of ideology in the Bush administration. Ideology is the stubborn adherence to ideals without regard to the changes in situations and circumstances. This is not a time for conservative ideals. What is needed is pragmatism and nuance.
2. Politics. When acting in a crisis one must let the facts and our reason guide us and public opinion must be ignored. Such political expediency transcends party affiliation. Such are our times.
3. Anti-intellectualism: As I listen to the naysayers of government action, I am appalled by the lack of depth and both presidential candidates are not helping the discussion. Where is Robert Rubin? Where is Robert Reich? We need students of history to solve difficult problems like those we face today. In the dialogue, there is no substance. Such depth what really amounts to wisdom is the product of a life of strenuous study of policy and governance. Unfortunately, the public no longer trusts intellectuals so they place "one of our own" in office. That's fine if there is no need to solve a difficult problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

We must question ourselves as to whether this is the first major blow to the head of American leadership in the world. It is time we begin placing in leadership both in the church and the state leaders who are equipped intellectually to look the facts in the face and take pragmatic and effectual action.

brad

Understanding N.T. Wright - Tools for the Task – Part 2 - Critical Realism part 1

In my first post, Tools for the Task part 1, I discussed N.T. Wright overarching goal or his life work. N.T. Wright has embarked upon what he calls the Third Quest. Wright’s quest is to, in light of the abundance of extra-biblical evidence concerning 1st Century Judaism, develop a historically grounded hypothesis about how Christianity developed. A key quote for N.T. Wright, having reflected upon the first two quests for the historical Jesus is “when all was said and done, they dug a well and found at the bottom a reflection of themselves.” Wright is saying that these theologians used methodologies which were not critical enough and their conclusions ended up being a reflection of their own preconceived worldviews. What happened in the 20th century quests for the historical Jesus is that the theologians did not utilize the proper historian’s “Tools for the Task”. The result is the pop culture misconceptions about Christian origins which I wrote about in Part 1 of this series.

The First Tool for the Task – Critical Realism
Defining Critical
In our family, I often ask my older children the question, “What is the worst thing a person can be?” The answer they usually give is, “A compliant thinker”. Next I ask, “And what is the opposite of a compliant thinker?” The answer they give, “A critical thinker”. In my mind, one of the great enemies in the 21st Century is anti-intellectualism. To use our intellect and to be lifelong learners, we must understand what it means to be a critical thinker.

A critical thinker is a person who is constantly pursuing a revision of two perspectives: first, the perspective given to us and, second, our own perspective. In other words, a true critical thinker is constantly aware of how his own preconceptions and the preconceptions of others undermine learning and getting the process of getting closer and closer to reality. This critical approach is the first tool for the task which is the critical side of critical realism. To be critical means being constantly aware of the role that perspective plays in the telling and listening of any and all truth claims. Being critical is in many ways the foundation of the scientific method. We are constantly seeking to re-evaluate and therefore improve our understanding of reality by questioning and challenging both our own understanding and the accepted wisdom. We ask ourselves, “Is there another perspective which can help me see things clearly? What is the tellers stance? What is my stance?" We are always aware that, as subjects, both the teller of the truth and the hearer of the truth participates in the knowing process. Therefore, as learners we must use certain tools to be enable us to be skillful critics of both ourselves and the accepted wisdom in order to be active and skillful critical thinkers. To be a critical thinker, one must be both arrogant enough to question the accepted dogma and humble enough to critique one’s own preconceptions.

So that is the critical part of “Critical realism”. The next term to understand is the term "realism”. I will discuss this term in the next post. As we proceed, with other terms which N.T. Wright spends considerable time defining including, “worldview”, “theology”, “story”, “hypothesis and verification”, we will come to see how incredibly helpful these tools are to understanding both the biblical texts and the origins of Christianity.

Week Round Up - Financial Crisis

This week I for the first time got a little passionate about policy. In these posts,
1. The Depression in the Financial Markets – The Solution is Wage Inflation via Tax Policy
2. More on the Financial Crisis
My approach is to actually look at the root of the financial problems. Look beyond deregulation and the need for more liquidity to why are people defaulting on their mortgages.

What the government has done is protect money market mutual funds which is absolutely essential to assure that these safe havens are sustained. These are funds that many companies use to hold cash that ultimately is needed to make payroll. But this is only an emergency measure. The root causes are not yet being deeply and honestly discussed.

Here is a fact -

The pricier loans in the jumbo category racked up delinquency rates that are more than triple what they were just a year ago, and those overdue payment statistics may quadruple before the end of 2008. - Sept 2, 2008

Jumbo prime mortgages are foreclosing. The definition of a jumbo is a loan that is beyond the limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which is $417,000). The real reason the mortgages that are failing are jumbos is because jumbo loans are needed to buy houses in the market since the housing boom of 2002-2006. But nonetheless, the people failing these types of mortgages are prime borrowers.

Also what is happening is that due to inflation MANY people are forced to take out HELOCs to pay the bills. This puts the first mortgage at risk. All this comes back to wages and inflation.

Everyone normally looks at the "the mortgage crisis" but seemingly ignores at least one side of the mortgage problem: low wages with respect to inflation and the middle class squeeze. Everyone seems to think the only problem with the low value of mortgage backed securities is the sub-prime problem, but this is not the source. These fire-priced mortgages that Lehman owned were not sub-prime but "alt-A" and "prime Jumbos". What happened is that these specific types of securities were being downgraded from the "AAA" rating. This downgrade forces money market mutual funds to sell as these funds are required to only hold "AAA" assets.

Why are alt-A graded loans failing? An alt-A is really a loan to a person with a credit score of 580-680 (below 580 is sub-prime)? It has to be because these people's wages didn't grow as expected in a normal cycle. The current statistics are worse than normal. Folks, this has to be wages.

I still hold to wages and inflation being at the root of the problem. The thing to look out for in the policy of a given candidate is what policies will be put in place to deal with the following:
1. Out-sourcing
2. Middle class tax cuts
3. Alternative ways to incentivize wage growth

brad

More on the Financial Crisis

This is my second political posts in two days...If you haven;t read the first post read it here:
The Root Cause of the Financial Depression

This second post is my editorializing on today's freakonomics post in the NYT.

Why did Freddie and Fanny fail:
Update; WaMu is up for sale today. WaMu is the biggest savings and loan in America

From the NYT: Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals

Fannie and Freddie were weakly supervised and strayed from the core mission. They began using their subsidized financing to buy mortgage-backed securities which were backed by pools of mortgages that did not meet their usual standards. Over the last year, it became clear that their thin capital was not enough to cover the losses on these subprime mortgages.

Why did Lehman fail:
…Why did the financing dry up? For months, short-sellers were convinced that Lehman’s real-estate losses were bigger than it had acknowledged. As more bad news about the real estate market emerged, including the losses at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, this view spread….Lehman’s costs of borrowing rose and its share price fell. With an impending downgrade to its credit rating looming, legal restrictions were going to prevent certain firms from continuing to lend to Lehman.

Again can you say housing….It all goes back to people trying to turn sub-prime mortgages and Lehman and Fannie and Freddie and everyone else sports fans are caught holding the bag. Why did this happen? Because in Bush’s first term, it was politically expedient to push home ownership especially in light of the opportunity due to de-regulation.

How about A.I.G.
Here it is…
A.I.G. had to raise money because it had written $57 billion of insurance contracts whose payouts depended on the losses incurred on subprime real-estate related investments. While its core insurance businesses and other subsidiaries (such as its large aircraft-leasing operation) were doing fine, these contracts, called credit default swaps (C.D.S.’s), were hemorrhaging.

Why did this housing market problem happen?
People took too much risk and believed that something had changed in housing and therefore prices would never go down. This was a really stupid idea based in wishful thinking. The only way we could have believed this was that when all these sub-prime variable mortgage loans came due there would be INFINITE DEMAND for houses. But instead, there was a glut of houses and very little demand. Why so little demand? Low wages.

So why did people choose to believe what amounts to self-deception?
Greed and because de-regulation allowed them to do it. To do what, to put all of us at risk for the big bucks.

So this is my point about why it makes no sense in my mind for Christians to believe in republican free-market ideology. We as Christians know that the world is driven by greed and the will to power. So why are we against regulating greed and power in the markets. Because Christians have been duped by right wing politics that bundled together right to life issues and right wing economic dogma.

So why did we fall for this trap? It is because of our anti-intellectualism and our lack of thoughtful dialogue in our own communities about politics and other such issues. There is no room for discussion because there is such a huge social cost for not heeding the party line. Trust me. I know.

Brad

The Depression in the Financial Markets – The Solution is Wage Inflation via Tax Policy

My annual political post...

From the very beginning, I was against the Bush tax cuts. Back then, I refused to enter the fray of politics as a pastor, so I kept my mouth shut except around the dinner table. The reason I was against the Bush tax cuts is that I do not believe in the ideology of supply side economics in the information age. There is too much access to market data, and, therefore, businesses do not invest in growth without strong demand data. Due to the access to data, the 21st century is a demand driven economic world. What is needed today is a balanced approach which supports business and also supports the consumer. Immediately, we need a pendulum swing toward support for the consumer. The crisis we are in today is 100% the result of a lack of money in the hands of the consumer caused by relative wage deflation. Let me explain.

In our current financial crisis, the problem is that the financial markets are getting tight. Insurance and mortgage companies like AIG are having trouble getting credit to make and insure loans. The result is we have a bottleneck in the financial system. The cause of this bottleneck is because AIG and others cannot put up enough collateral for the loans they need. Why all of a sudden are the big financial institutions unable to put up enough collateral? It is because the only real paper of value that they hold is “mortgage backed securities”. It ain’t called real estate for nothing. As we all are so very aware, people are defaulting on mortgages. Therefore, mortgage backed securities are not great collateral. It all comes down to the housing market.

Well, who pays mortgages? Well, people do. The middle class pays mortgages, and the only way to slow down the bleeding in the housing market is to increase the cash in the hands of the middle class. Currently, the middle class is experiencing the big squeeze. In simple terms, us middle class folk will rent before we will starve. We will default on our mortgage and rent before we will stave our children. Thus, the middle class home owner numbers are shrinking, and the lower middle class renters numbers are exploding. This is the big American economic nightmare. The answer to this housing/mortgage problem is not a stimulus plan. The money is not in the coffers of the government. Excluding the sub-prime side of the mortgage crisis, the problem is wealth inequality and relative wage deflation.

The actual big money that is needed to bail the system out is in the hands of employers in the form of business profits. Sorry sports fans but the real root cause of this problem is two-fold. First, it is an ideological drive to support supply side economic policy (i.e. republicanism) and its big policy application, the Bush tax cuts. The fact is the trickle-down didn’t trickle down in the global economy of the 21st Century. Greed got the best of us this time.

The answer is simple – tax policy. What must happen is the government must make a tax policy which gives tax credits to businesses for wage increases. If a company shows an increase in wages to employees, then they get a tax credit. Otherwise, they get a big fat tax increase on profit. This problem we are in is a serious housing crisis that only employers can solve and employers will only solve this problem by raising wages when the government forces their hand. The only question is how hard the government should push.

The bottom line is it all comes down to demand and, specifically, demand for MORTGAGES. The only way to drive demand for mortgages is to increase the wages of the middle class. The only people who can increase the wages of the middle class are employers and the only way this can happen is TAX POLICY.

Jesus is the Christ - The Promise That We Will Never Thirst

All the Promises are Yes and Amen in Christ
Jesus the Christ Promises that His disciples will Never Thirst

We have so far established that the Gospel is the proclamation that “Jesus is the Christ”. Next, we need to understand the extent of the change we can expect as a result this new reality that Jesus is the Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth. Life as human beings know it and as we experience life has changed profoundly. In this section, I intend to elaborate upon the scope of this new life we can experience. Looking at human existence and at the 21st Century church, we might think that certainly not every thing has changed. Life is certainly not “heaven on earth” for every Christian. Also, many preachers in the church take advantage of people by promising blessings from the Gospel that are not actually promised. Nonetheless, my aim is to show that at the most important aspect of human experience a great change has taken place which effects our experience of life quite profoundly and to such a positive extent that our testimony will be that we have found the key to life and happiness. So let’s look at what aspect of human experience that has changed now that Jesus is the Christ and that he is Lord of both heaven and earth.

An overview of the Promises that Jesus makes to those who place their faith in Him
To understand the transformation of life which Jesus brings it makes sense to look first at the promises Jesus Himself made to those who place their faith in Him as the Christ.

Let’s begin with an over view of the gospel of John.
In John 4, Jesus, speaking to a Samaritan woman says,
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is who says to you ‘give Me a drink’, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water…whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst”.

Picking up the metaphor of water in chapter 7, Jesus says,
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the scriptures said, ‘from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.”

John the author explains in the next verse saying,
“This He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive”.

Here Jesus is bolding making Messianic claims by saying that the promises of a time of refreshing and restoration had arrived in Himself and that the promise of a river of living water would come to all who put their faith in Him as the Christ. So what does this promise of “never thirsting” and having from our innermost being flowing a river of living water.

First, what does it mean that whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst.
First, this promise is a reference to the believer’s experience. To thirst and to have that thirst quenched with spring water is the analogy Jesus uses to describe the blessings that He brings to those who believe in Him. Consider a man lost and without water for a day or two. He hears from a fellow traveler that there is a spring about five miles due west. The man points the way to the spring. The direction is clear and the man gives a few land marks to follow. Our thirsty man starts in this direction. He goes over the hill and sees in the distance a pool of water. He begins to pick up his pace and begins to feel hopeful. With the water about twenty feet in front of him, he smiles in relief. Everything is going to be alright. He sits at the pool of water and begins to drink. He can feel the satisfaction of his body. He splashes his face. He rests and spends a few hours drinking deeply. This is a picture of the Christian life. Christianity is not about hoping to one day drink but Jesus says He will send His spirit and we will actually drink to our satisfaction and this experience of satisfaction will flow from us and satisfy others. We not only will drink from the well of blessing that Christ brings to us but we will be a source of this blessing to others.

Often Christianity is seen as a journey to heaven or a life of hope but in Jesus’ promise Christianity is not a life of hope or a life of hoping to one day drink the living water but is a life of actual drinking. Jesus gives us water and we drink it. This point is essential to understand. The experience of faith is not the experience of hope that helps one endure. This would be to describe the Spirit like a map directing one on a journey to water and life as the journey, but this is not the metaphor Jesus gives. Jesus says that we will actually drink the water. The promise of Jesus the Christ is that whoever is thirsty “let him come to me AND DRINK”. The life of the disciple is not essentially one of being inspired and encouraged to continue in the journey but to regularly arrive at an experience of drinking. This speaks of a spiritual experience of actual conscious connection with the Spirit of God which results in satisfaction and restoration.

The analogy of the man in the desert actually can be contrasted with the Christian walk in that the desert traveler’s level of desperation is not experienced by the disciple of Jesus as shown by the saying “never thirst”. The disciple is never so distant from the Spirit as to have his dryness be described as thirst. Personally, I do not know if in the physical sense I have ever actually experienced thirst. I have certainly had an experience where I desired to be satisfied by water but never in a situation where I was desperate for water. I have all my life lived in a home or was near running water. All I have ever had to do was to make a short walk and I could satisfy my thirst. Never have I been in a situation where I was at a loss as to where I could get water to satisfy my thirst. So too with the disciple, who has learned how to follow Jesus or as we shall see learned how to follow the teachings of Jesus. The disciple is a person who has learned how to get to and how to drink spiritually.

To explain this essential point I must jump ahead a little. In the next section, I will discuss mankind’s true problem as a lack of ability to live beautifully and morally. The root of this inability is a lack of conscious contact with our Father in heaven. Our emotional make-up “under the sun”, in a state of separation from conscious awareness of God according to the truth, is to lack what it takes emotionally and psychologically to love in every circumstance. The difference between the disciple and natural person is how we respond to conflict. The disciple who has deep in his or her emotional make-up an awareness of God’s love has the power to turn the other cheek and forgive and love his enemy from the heart. The power to live beautifully and morally and filled with unconditional love is conscious experience of God in the moment of conflict.

For example, I met just the other day a man who drank himself to sleep every night. He was filled with self-loathing that he could not drive from his consciousness without the aid of serious self-medication. This man is experiencing desperate thirst. He is filled with 10,000 various forms of fear and anger. His need is discipleship. Discipleship is the process where through obedience to the spiritual ways of Jesus our perspective on life becomes immersed in the presence of the grace and love of God. This new awareness of God empowers us to live a life satisfied by God alone, and, having learned this way, we are equipped to give to others a cup of water to quench their thirst.

This ability to satisfy one’s spiritual need like a person drinking water is not an ability all Christians possess. This ability is the outcome of the process of discipleship. Many Christians who have never been discipled are as spiritually dissatisfied and live lives just as dysfunctional as anyone. More on this later.

So this first saying of Jesus reveals that Jesus promised us that we would experience a life of satisfaction which He calls “never thirsting”. This is a promise which few have faith to believe but the fact is Jesus said it and to believe in Jesus is to believe Jesus. If we remain thirsting then the problem is a lack of understanding of the dicipleship process in our life. We lack the training on how to go about the process of drinking. The answer is not to lessen the promise but to acept the challenge to become a student of Jesus and enter into the promises of the Christ.

Kingdom Living - Inaugurated Eschatology

Here is my idea of the day:
We live before God not "just as if we had never sinned" BUT just as if Adam had never sinned.

Balanced by being wise as serpents and innocent as doves, but you get the idea.

Understanding N.T. Wright – Part 1 - Tools for the Task

“Tools for the Task” from The New Testament and the People of God

Introducing the Question of Christian Origins
Upon reading “Tools for the Task”, part II of N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, I found the principles so helpful that I feel compelled to share the wealth. This section is pretty heavy lifting for the uninitiated layman like myself. My aim here is to shed some light on how the principles, the Tools for the Task, that Bishop Wright introduces to the reader are actually quite common sense but also quite profound and practical.

To understand the epistemological framework that N.T. Wright is building as the Tools for the Task of his study of Christian Origins, it is helpful to know the kind of knowledge he will be attempting to obtain. In his life work, Christian Origins and the Question of God, Bishop Wright is attempting to answer some very pertinent and practical questions. In our 21st Century western culture, there is great confusion surrounding the origins of Christianity. This quagmire of opinions plays itself out in the media, in academia, and in the minds of both the educated and the not so educated. It seems every pseudo-intellectual with a Mocha Frappuccino has an opinion about the origins of the Christian faith, and all these opinions seem to be a pop version of the last 100 years of academic criticism. N.T. Wright’s quest is to utilize sound historical and philosophical methods to make a systematically thorough analysis of the question of Christian origins.

Many of the scenarios that play out in the popular culture in the form of popular myth surround the question of “Who is Jesus?” One common myth is that Jesus never proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. In this view, it was only the church that developed these messianic claims. In this scenario, we have Jesus of Nazareth, the “historical Jesus”, on the one hand, and the Christ of faith, the creation of the church, on the other. Such a view is quite well-developed within both academia and the popular mind. The fact is that academic, “historical”/critical research and theory has found its way into almost every nook and cranny of the popular mind. One example of the popular mind is quite archetypically represented by the pop icon John Lennon when he said, “I’m all right with Jesus but his followers were a bunch of stupid blokes.” This sentiment takes as accepted knowledge the dogma of the popular myth of Christian origins. This perspective accepts a restructuring of history which sees Jesus as an enlightened mystic, but the apostles or the biblical writers (that is, the early church) as primitive-minded folk who misguided their faith into Jesus and thus created the personality cult of Christianity.

Such a view takes many forms in the popular mind. For example, I have an acquaintance, an intelligent and educated man, who believes that the most likely scenario is that Jesus didn’t even ever exist. This reconstruction starts with the idea that there is a gap between the historical Jesus and the Christian faith as developed by the biblical writers and takes this gap to its logical extreme. This scenario simply says that if what we know about Jesus is actually the construction of the minds of the biblical writers, and if this construction is divorced from actual historical events, then on what basis do we believe that there was ever even a Jesus to begin with? The assumption is that there are actually no historical events which are the referents of the biblical texts. The biblical texts, from this perspective, represent entirely the mind of first-century fanatics. So the question is, "how do we know or can we even come to know anything at all about the actual historical events referred to by the biblical texts?" Answering these questions is vital because the historical events are the actual ground of historic Christianity.

As we ask these questions in order to uncover the history behind Christianity, (i.e. Christian origins), it will not do to simply either accept or reject biblical authority. This is the approach of the anti-intellectuals otherwise known as fundamentalists. Biblical authority as the sole basis for our epistemology is fundamentally circular logic. How do we know the truthfulness of the biblical history? We read the bible. It is easy to see the circularity of this reasoning. Instead, we must develop some tools for the task. In my next post, I will discuss what appears to me and to N.T. Wright as the best way forward.

The Moral as Opposed to Ontological Nature of Character

Christianity is learned more like gymnastics than geometry.

In discipleship, it is vital that we realize we are teaching practices and activities and often activities of the heart. The practicioner eventually becomes skilled at these activities. Such an activity might be something like the skill of not resisting evil in the moment of conflict. This is a complex skill that take a lot of practice not the least of which is acts of prayer and practicing the prssence of God.

Goal of all activities is to develop a skill that translates into habit. The activity is to become reflexive or habitual. When an activity is a reflex or is habitual then that activity is said to be part of the persons character. In this model, character is not seen as something ontological but something moral. The reality is that the person with the character trait has a particular moral habit. By moral, I mean that the activity is a path taken in the context of many possible actions. Morally we exist in the realm of possibility. When a particular action or activity is taken consistently and habitually then the activity is called character. Character is then an aguired skill. Therefore, character is a moral choice that is made habitually. The actor has a moral skill or ability to perform the moral actions consistently.

Such character is learned more like gymnastics than geometry.

brad

Jesus is the Christ – The Gospel Proper

I have noticed a huge gap in the thinking of today’s Christian. It is that when I ask what does “Jesus is the Christ” mean very few people give even a vaguely sufficient answer. If we do not know the content of this foundational Christian truth, then dare I say that we do not know the Gospel!!!

In all the literature, I find very little that gives a valid emphasis or a valid definition to the proclamation of the early church that "Jesus is the Christ". This is a serious problem.

Peter’s confession was just this that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. John wrote His gospel “that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ and that by believing we might have an eternal quality of life”. Yet, we do not believe that Jesus is the Christ if we do not understand what is meant by the proclamation “Jesus is the Christ”.

Here is the biggest problem in the Church and is at the root of all, yes all, our theological confusion and lack of moving forward in following Jesus, we do not, generally, know the promises that are granted through faith in the Gospel that the Christ has come.

Most people when I ask what does Jesus is the Christ mean say it means he is our savior and that He died for our sin. Certainly, the Christ did save us by dying for our sin. This event of the cross is in fact the central work of the Christ, but this is not the totality at all of what it means to believe that Jesus is the Christ. If we believe that the Christ means that God sent His Son to die for us then faith in the Gospel provides forgiveness of sin. If this is the Gospel, then it follows that the result is that those who believe this gospel will one day die and be granted access to heaven. The response to this is to serve Him out of gratitude. This is how the gospel is most often presented. But this is only a partial gospel.

Jesus is the Christ means much more than our sins being forgiven.

Jesus is the Christ means that the Christ, the anointed King whom God promised to send has come and He reigns over all heaven and earth in wisdom and power. The promise is that when the Christ comes He will bring to earth the kingdom of God. To believe the gospel is to believe first that Jesus is the Christ and that He is alive. Therefore all the promises are yes and amen in Him for He is the promised Christ. Because the Christ has come and He has poured out His Spirit on all who believe, we are now empowered to follow Him into His kingdom. The kingdom of God is within our reach today. The Christ has come!!!

The immediate relevance of this message is absolutely life changing. If the Christ has come, then every thing has changed, and in deed every thing has. We have access to the presence of God through His death and we walk in His power over sin and all our spiritual enemies because of His authority. I could go on and on but for this post suffice it to say that the key of keys for our generation is to rediscover the biblical gospel that Jesus is the Christ and to understand all the depths of the promises of God that are implied in this proclamation. If we begin first with understanding and believing this message then we will find that what necessarily follows is faith for the immediate presence of the kingdom

brad

Faith in Jesus as the Christ; Faith for the Kingdom of God

I remember when I was in seminary, one of my professors said that when we pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” that we were praying for the second coming of Christ. This view, though extreme, is believed to a strong degree in the churches today. In the last post, I attempted to explain that whatever the kingdom is the kingdom is at hand. By at hand, Jesus meant “within reach”. The kingdom has drawn near to you, reach out and grab it through repentance and faith.

So the view of the kingdom as the return of Christ is a total misreading of what Jesus meant by the term the kingdom and it is at exactly this point that the church has gotten the gospel fundamentally wrong. The gospel promises the kingdom to the believers and we are to repent and press into the kingdom. This is in fact the meaning of the term “Christ”. When we say Jesus is the Christ, we are proclaiming or believing that Jesus is the one who can bring to earth the kingdom of God and that that kingdom life is available immediately.

Faith in Jesus as the Christ
We are saved through faith that Jesus is the Gospel. The Gospel is simply this, “JESUS IS THE CHRIST”. If we believe this gospel, we are saved. But if we do not know what the term Christ means or what it is the Christ brings to us how can we believe God for it. If we do not understand what we are saying when we say Jesus is the Christ, we do not have saving faith. We have no idea what the Gospel actually is? It is on this point that so many people who claim to believe that Jesus is the Christ appear to remain unchanged.

To believe that Jesus is the Christ is to believe that Jesus is the one who can bring you the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. This is saving faith in Jesus as the Christ. God has appointed one king, one leader, one Christ to bring to mankind the kingdom of God. This one king is Jesus, the Christ. It is through His blood that he has redeemed us, qualified us for the life of the kingdom and it is by this atonement that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to life and experience this kingdom today. So faith is faith that Jesus is the Christ and the Christ is the one who brings to His subject the Kingdom of God. So what is the Kingdom?

The Kingdom
The kingdom is defined clearly in scripture, “The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. Do you believe that Jesus can bring you a life of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit? Many people who claim to believe Jesus is the Christ do not believe that He can bring them righteousness. These people believe that Jesus can bring them righteousness when they go to heaven or at His return but they do not believe in a righteousness that is available today. They do not believe that the kingdom is available on earth as it is in heaven. This faith is faith in a righteousness in heaven or on earth in the age to come. But Jesus promises a righteousness immediately present in the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ brings to us a life, a kingdom life, of righteousness now through the Holy Spirit.

This is not a positional righteousness. This is not a righteousness in heaven but not on earth. If you believe this faith for a later righteousness, then you do not believe the totality of the blessings of the Gospel. The Gospel promises righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit in this life on earth as it is in heaven. Repent and believe.

This righteousness is not a perfect ed righteousness for certainly there is a fullness to come and a final battle to be won but the kingdom life of victory is available today through the work of the holy spirit and to believe in this immediately present kingdom quality of life is to believe in the Gospel.

brad

The Kingdom of God is At Hand

Writing in 1963, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the great reformed preacher, makes this concise statement about the present church's approach to the faith in his book The Kingdom of God:

“How does it come to pass that, with open Bibles before them, men and women should be wrong not so much about certain details with respect to the gospel, but about the whole thing? …wrong about its foundation, wrong about its central message, wrong about its objective, and wrong about how one comes into relationship with it.”

Lloyd Jones is commenting on Jesus’ announcement of the Kingdom of God which Lloyd-Jones understands to be the essence of the Christian message, “The Kingdom of God is at hand repent and believe!!!”. Lloyd-Jones is exactly correct in his articulation. The most foundational problem with the present church is that the church has gotten the gospel wrong.  If we understanding the concept of the Kingdom of God, this formulation of the gospel is the most effective path to clarity the message, the promises, and the objective of the Gospel.

The Hebrew Mind in the First Century
We know that in Jesus’ time the Jewish expectation of the messianic kingdom was primarily political. The Messiah, the greater David, would bless all mankind by placing the Jewish nation in power above all nations. The Spirit of God would rest on the Messiah, the anointed one, and He would rule, through the state, in righteousness. Abraham’s vision of a city in whose architect and builder was God was seen as a vision in which the law would be fully instituted and established through the Messiah's reign.

The Kingdom of God is the establishment of God’s rule on earth. The Jewish people and the Jewish leadership of Jesus’ day understood this rule of God as requiring primarily, or at least fundamentally, a political and legal reigning. The expatiation was that the Messiah would take over political and military power and establish the Law, the Torah.

The Jewish people, understandably given their status at the time, saw their problem as political. Therefore, it is understandable that they saw the solution as political. But Jesus, the true Christ, came to the Jewish people and revealed an entirely different problem and therefore an entirely different solution. Jesus did announce the immediacy of the Kingdom, but not a political kingdom. It is the path into the kingdom quality of life that set Jesus Christ and the First Century Christians apart from the Jewish expectation.

The key to understanding the Gospel is that Jesus’ proclamation was and still is that the Kingdom of God  is at hand. Our response is still to be repentance and faith. Our faith still is that Jesus is the Christ who will bring the kingdom quality of life to earth. The kingdom is both God's reign on the earth and a truly heavenly quality of life. The promise of the kingdom is that these aspects of the kingdom are immediately available. BUT the realm of this kingdom is presently limited to a non-political realm.

At hand
The meaning of this at-handedness of the kingdom is that a truly heavenly quality of life is within reach. Something is ‘at hand'.  It, the promised rule of God, is within arms length, within reach. The kingdom is at hand. The kingdom of God is within our immediate reach.

Believing in this "at handedness" of the kingdom is the exact problem with the modern proclamation of the gospel. The kingdom so often is seen as something we enter after we die. The kingdom, in this view, is not at hand at all. We come to saving faith, in this common evangelical paradigm, so that when we die we go to heaven. The kingdom of heaven is made available through the gospel only after we die. The kingdom, in this view, is actually not at hand at all.

Another less than complete view sees the kingdom as "at hand" but this immediate access to the kingdom is merely positional. This new status is in the heavens, but the heavens are not on earth. The great problem with this view is that our real problems, our marital happiness, how to maintain relationships, practical problems of well-being, are not solved by the gospel until heaven comes to earth in the future. Answers to real life problems, in the now, must be answered outside the gospel. This false view of the kingdom as purely heavenly, out there, supports a low view of the practical power of the Gospel to provide blessedness on earth.

The Reformed View
The reformed view sees the kingdom as both already and not yet. The already aspect of the kingdom is that the best part of heaven, the presence of God and the necessary spiritual power to live in progressive victory over sin, is currently available. The reality is that the kingdom of God is a truly happy and heavenly quality of life. This quality of life is progressively available to the believer through faith in Jesus Christ. This new quality of life progresses from the inside out and is the exact answer to the practical problems of human kind. A truly happy and heavenly quality of life is available immediately to the believer. This quality of life is not a new social or economic status, and it is not something that is so heavenly that it does not invade the conscious experience of the believer. Instead, the kingdom of God is the experience of heaven on earth through a Spirit to spirit walk with God. The kingdom of God is “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. The true gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, delivers a practical righteousness, a practical peace, and a practical joy to the follower of Jesus Christ.

The gospel brings to the believer the one thing needful to experience the good life. The one key characteristic of heaven is here now. This key characteristic of heaven is not, first and foremost, that there is no political oppression. Jesus, the Christ, did not deliver His people from political oppression. The key characteristic of heaven is not that there is no poverty and no suffering. Jesus, the Messiah, did not deliver His people from poverty and suffering. NO! The key characteristic of heaven is that God is present to the believer in their earthly experience. Jesus brought this one aspect of life to His followers at His coming. While He was here, He was the presence of God, as he prepared to leave this earth, He proclaimed that it was better that He leave. The purpose of His leaving was in order to bring the presence of God to His followers through the Holy Spirit. It is better that Jesus left because the best part of heaven, the power and presence of God, is now available to a greater degree to a greater number of His followers.

This truly happy and heavenly quality of life is indeed immediately present through the Lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives. Repent and believe the great news.

Good News - Fewer teens are having sex

Fewer teens are having sex. This is really interesting and dramatic news statically speaking. The numbers really are significant. The question, I think, is what is the cause? It would only be speculation but I think contributors are:

1. A better economy: A good economy has a deep effect on peoples stress level and the need to medicate with irresponsible behavior. Kids see the system working and they plan for the future and therefore act more responsibly.

2. More open communication: Education is always good. We are more open and therefore kids are more prepared for the onslaught of sexual feelings and how to again act responsibly when faced with a sudden decision.

Any ideas as to the cause of this blessed upturn in responsible behavior.

God Bless, brad

"Whole of the Moon" by the Waterboys

YouTube - "Whole of the Moon" by the Waterboys

Oh my!!! Lord, Inspire us again!!

The bestest Everest - Stevie Wonder ~ Superstition

Stevie Wonder ~ Superstition

Can you say Groovy like Stevie!!!????!!!

It Just Doesn't Get any Beter than This - Stevie Wonder - Master Blaster(1982).mpg

Stevie Wonder - Master Blaster(1982).mpg

The Teachings of Jesus and the Nations First Hospital

Pennsylvania Hospital History: Stories - Nation's First Hospital

Christopher Hitchens has written a book with the sub title "How Religion Poisens Everything". This I think is the most ignorant thing I have ever heard.

The above story tells how a quaker named Dr. Thomas Bond came to Benjamin Franklin to start a the first hospital. The hospital was then given the theme from Luke 10, "Take care of hi and I will repay you". This quote is from the story of the good Samritan, a story where Jesus teaches that true goodness of character is not founded in our heritage but in whether or not we care for the physical needs of others.

The power of Jesus' teachings especially the story of the Good Samitan to inspire care for the poor cannot be underestimated. For exaple, there is the teaching in Matt. 25 that to the extent that we care for the poor to this extent we are caring for Jesus Himself.

Meekness and Turning it Over to God in Prayer

I am daily, well at least today, earning the surprising power of turning a problem over to God in prayer. For example, today I had a problem at work that I turned over to God in prayer and said, ‘God, I cannot fix this. Please fix it. I give this to you”. To my amazement, God again has done for me what I cannot do for myself. God honors when we let Him do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. This is meekness. Meekness is giving the management of what we cannot control over to the One who is the manager of the uncontrollable in our lives.

I cannot control whether a door is open in the gospel. God controls this. I cannot control other people’s attitudes and when I ask the Lord for help inthese things that I cannot control. He goes to work. This is meekness.

This is a discipline of turning over to God our anxieties and asking Him to control things that I cannot control anyway. My children’s attitudes. My friends brokenness. My wife’s happiness. I cannot control these things and this powerlessness with respect to circumstances outside my control lead me to either try to force my will on others which is evil or to give it over to God and rest or to just stress out about the problem. Only one option is righteous and there is only one path to peace in such situations. This is the path of meekness.

In business this is a big source of stress. We need to learn to spot these anxieties and what we cannot control and respond with joyful hopeful faith filled prayers to our God who loves to act for the sake of the meek.

God Bless,
brad

miles davis and john coltrane

I have tried to post this video a bunch of times. If this works , I am going to go on a musicology binge and preach the gospel of music for a bit.

My Music: THELONIOUS MONK - Blue Monk

I know I haven't been posting much though a lot has been going on. I think I will post some of my favorite music as music is such a huge part of my experience and my loves. Here is the master of masters - Thelonious Monk playing "Blue Monk". Make sure you make it through the solo. It starts around 3:00. This is the best blues ever. UNREAL. We are truly wonderfully made. Pure mastery.

Christianity and the Problem of Existence

“This is life to know God” – John 17:3

Thesis: The problem that Christianity is mandated to solve is the problem of sin. Mankind falls desperately short of the glory of God’s moral perfections. The ultimate root cause of mankind’s sin problem is his alienation from God. Both of these points are agreed upon by all Christians. But where Christians differ is in their understanding of the Gospel’s role in solving the problem of our subjective experience of life, what I am calling "the problem of existence". In what follows, I will attempt to show that to solve the sin problem we must solve the “problem of existence” or the existential problem of fear, shame, guilt, alienation, powerlessness, and hopelessness. This problem of existence is only solved through conscious contact with God. In other words, the key to solving the sin problem is to solve the subjective experience of alienation from God and not just the objective reality of alienation from God.

Where Christians Agree – Our Problem is Spiritual
As Christians, our faith is that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world. The good news, the salvation, that we preach is that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that the kingdom of God addresses the true root cause of the human dilemma. Our faith is that the true human problem is not a medical problem; it is not a political problem, BUT we preach that at the root cause of all of human misery is a spiritual problem. That spiritual problem is first and foremost that mankind is alienated and separated from God, our Father and our Creator. Upon being reconciled with God, the most basic and fundamental problem with human existence is addressed and the potential at least for a better existence is within reach. All Christians agree with this most basic gospel. Human beings are objectively alienated from God and Jesus Christ has provided the solution to this problem.

Where Christians begin to diverge in both theory and in practice is with respect to the extent to which the Gospel solves mankind's subjective experience of this alienation from God and the role that our subjective experiences of God play in overcoming the problem of sin.

The Conservative Evangelical Approach to the Human Problem
Before I begin this discussion, I would like to say that I do not think the labels conservative and charismatic are all that helpful. Nonetheless, I am going to use these terms to illustrate a distinction in approaches to the faith, and I think making this distinction is important to validate the role of experience in solving the problem of sin.
Speaking as a conservative evangelical, we might approach the human problem using the following line of reasoning.
Mankind's fundamental problem is the problem of guilt. The human being is guilty before God, and this guilt is an objective fact. Our subjective experience of guilt, if we are aware of it, is the consequence of a real objective guilt. We have within us an understanding of the will of God and the law of God. The law of God is written on our hearts as a consequence of being created in the image of God. This knowledge of the moral law of God is intuitive and essential to being human. In fact, it is this claim that our moral sense is a by-product of the metaphysical reality of God that new atheists, like Richard Dawkins, contend is not a metaphysical reality at all but is merely a by-product of evolution. In other words, morality is an evolutionary imperative not the imperative of our unseen and metaphysical nature.

The evangelical answer to how the gospel meets this fundamental problem is as follows. Faith is the acceptance that we are indeed objectively guilty and through faith alone in the biblical or apostolic understanding of the crucification of Jesus Christ reconciles us with God. The result of our faith is that we are positionally or objectively no longer guilty before God. Our status with God is objectively changed. What is key to this approach to the gospel is that the subjective problem of guilt is not the real problem and therefore the subjective problem of guilt is not the aim of the gospel. If one “feels” forgiven or not is not essential. If one “feels” forgiven is a secondary benefit but not essential to solving the human problem. This benefit is at best only partially experienced in this life but will be profoundly experienced only in the life to come. Here is the key difference between the charismatic/Pentecostal Christian and the conservative/non-charismatic Christian. The conservative believes that a profound change of character occurs through faith in the objective element of the gospel regardless of one's subjective experience of forgiveness and God's love. In fact to expect a profound subjective experience might lead one away from simple faith in the objective facts.

On the other hand, Charismatic/Pentecostal Christian agrees with the objective aspect of the Christian's salvation through faith alone but the more charismatic Christian adds that the Gospel fully intends the Christian to experience their reconciliation with God subjectively or in their conscious experience. In fact, in practice the Charimatic leaning Christian beleives that subjective experience through the Holy Spirit is necessary to have a profound change of character. (Note: I agree with the connection between experience and life transformation but I do not think the profound change of character lasts more than one day at a time. I find I only act truly beautifully when I am in that instance experiencing God's immediate presence.)

In this regard, and I hope I say this correctly, I side with more the Charismatic camp of the church. This distinction is absolutely vital, and is foundational with respect to our expectations of the Gospel and our methods in discipleship. Here is where I need to say this correctly.

The most basic difference between “charismatc/pentacostal” Christians and “conservative” Christians is the extent to which they directly address "the problem of existence”. By “the problem with existence”, I mean the problem of the “feeling” of fear, dread, insecurity, guilt, defeat, and shame, just to name a few. The real power of the gospel is it’s ability to directly address one’s subjective conscious experience of life. I am firmly find myself in this more spiritual or experiential approach to the Christian faith and I intend to argue and contend for this approach as the only path to a testimony of life transformation.

The "Conservative" and the “Charismatic” Approaches to the Faith
Let’s begin to look a little at the difference between these two approaches to the faith.

Both approaches, conservative and Charismatic, see the ultimate root cause of the problem as mankind’s objective alienation from God, but the extent to which the gospel directly meets and solves a person’s existential problem or the problem of existence is quite different in the two camps. For the conservative, and again I do not like these labels, the existential problem or subjective problem is not seen as within the chain of causes and problems that the gospel is directly addressing, or, stated even stronger, the subjective conscious problems are only solved when they are ignored. In conservatiev thinking, to confess and seek a better subjective sense of well-being can sometimes be seen as selfish. Furthermore, in some conservatiev Christian worldviews, the solution to the problem of temporal happiness is only expected to be experienced in the next life. On the contrary, in more experience focused approaches to the faith, it is the subjective problem of fear and guilt and shame that the gospel is meeting very directly. If we view the gospel as directly meeting the subjective or existential problem of fear and guilt and shame and hopelessness, then our ministry and our Christian practices are greatly influenced by an approach which places such a high value on experiences of God.

The Problem of Sin
The differences between these two perspectives on the gospel become very apparent as we begin to approach the problem of sin. Christian discipleship seeks as its fruit victory over sin. (Note, I think focusing on sin is very very appropriate and helpful.) The problem that the bible commands us to address is the problem of sin. I contend that the problem of sin is only solved when we solve, day by day, the subjective problem of fear, guilt, shame, anger and all the innumerable inner problems that we encounter as living, conscious, moral beings. Fear and shame and anger and hopelessness, the dread of existence, is only met by the immediate conscious knowledge of God. To know God in our experience is life.

When we discuss as a community what we are attempting to give to the thirsty sinner, my answer is always the presence of God or “the worship experience”. For example, a person is lonely. They feel helpless and hopeless. They seek to medicate this problem through innumerable dysfunctional means. We all desperately need to feel good about ourselves and our place in life. Most human beings simply ignore these problems and medicate to some degree. This intentional ignorance is called denial. This denial works well until we decide in earnest to tackle the problem of sin.

Focusing on sin and our character flaws and shortcomings surfaces our need for a change of our inner person and profound changes to our inner motivations. Over time as we continue to battle, if we are honest, we come to the conclusion that at the root of our problems is the problem of subjective alienation from God. We live out of a deep impulse toward self-preservation. Self-preservation leads to anger and resentments and a million other fors of self-centered fear. The call to live the cross becomes to us an impossible quest. Our carnal attempts to solve the problem of sin makes us aware of our inner motivations of fear and anger. we thirst for a better more holy existence where we can say we truly live in love and freedom instead of fear and resentment. We sin because we thirst and we thirst for God. The solution to the problem of sin finds its power in the conscious experience of peace and safety that come only from God. The solution to sin is in overcoming the subjective problem of alienation from God.

If this is our approach and our understanding of the disolution to the problem of sin, then we do all we can to help people experience God directly. Our worship practices are acts of seeking God. Our confession practices are not a duty but a means to obtaining eyes to see God. Our acts of service are a means to find God in doing good work with God. All of these disciplines are means to finding true freedom from the self-centeredness that characterizes all life apart from conscious contact with God.

My experience in my personal life and in ministry is that people, myself included, only act truly lovingly and selflessly when they are immediately aware of God. I only understand grace and mercy when I experience grace and mercy from God.

Picture a broken sinner and all his dysfunction. Is there any way for this person to have a profound change of character without a direct experience of God Himself? If he is alone and fearful and shattered by trauma and shame, how can we help? We cannot. We can only help to the extent to which God is present with us. It is only God’s voice that can tell this person that they have dignity. Only God can speak to the spirit of a person.

The Woman At The Well
Jesus’ ministry to the woman at the well is a wonderful text to understand how real salvation in this life works. The woman at the well was a religious sinner. Jesus cut through all this smokescreen of religion and asked her to "go get her husband". This question was intended to surface the SIN PROBLEM. Jesus went straight to the point and surfaced the sin problem. Then, what did Jesus offer the woman to solve this need for real salvation, salvation from the practice of sin. He said… “You come here because you thirst, I give a water that if you drink it you will no longer thirst”. Thirst is a subjective sense of pain. This thirst is the subjective problem of our existence. Jesus was speaking of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit meets us at the point of the problem of our existence. The holy spirit meets us in our fear and our dread and our hopelessness and purposelessness and He fills us with a joy unspeakable. Only a subjective experience of God that meets directly our "problem of existence" that solves the root cause of our natural life. It is only this blessed inner knowledge of God that leads to victory over sin.

Conclusion
Therefore, how are we to minister? We must understand that in order to meet the real spiritual need of people, we must offer them God Himself. We give to people the subjective existential experience of conscious contact with God as the only solution to their problem. We must focus our eyes on our sin to constantly place ourselves in a place of utter dependence and need for God. We must understand that the only power that we have over sin is the power of a conscious relationship with Jesus Christ.

God Bless,
brad

Organic Church and The Starfish and the Spider

I am a very slow yet thorough reader. So reading a book is a big investment for me. I am reluctant to invest time into reading when I could spend the time with a person.

That said for me to recommend books is a big deal.
So here are two book recommendations.

First,

Organic Church, by Neil Cole. My recent posts on The Necessity of Cell Groups of Two or Three Interacting Daily and The Church or the Kingdom were reflections on this book. I will re-read this book periodically to keep myself focused on what I believe God is doing in our lives.

Second recommendation...

The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

I opened this book this weekend and so much of what this book says explains how the early church functioned. I will definitely post on the ramifications of this book and the truth about leaderless organizations that Jesus commands when He said..."call no one on earth your leader".

God Bless, brad

The Necessity of Cell Groups of Two or Three Interacting Daily

All life consists of cells. The body is made up of living cells. If the body is not made up of cells, you cannot call it a body but a machine. Any organism that is not made up of cells is not actually alive. You can have a body that has dead cells, but it is necessary to remove the dead cells if the body is to live.

Jesus made disciples in small groups or in cells. Jesus never commanded us to make churches but only to make disciples. We make disciples in the smallest group level of 2-3 individuals walking with Jesus on a day by day basis. The best possible small group structure is 2-3. This structure of smallest groups is the foundation of all living bodies or living organisms. The foundational structure of the body is small groups of 2-3 that live together on a daily basis. Any other structure in the church is useful to maintain unity for greater city-wide purposes but only the cellular level is absolutely indispensable. It is disciple. We make disciples and equip the saints by teaching men and women to make disciples in the cell group level of the smallest groups.

How I think this works, at least in my experience, is that such intmate relationships that are focused on the teachings of Jesus and living them out surface our problems. We are broken people and our brokenness become apperant if we allow people to know us on a daily basis and if we allow them to speak into our lives. It is not that small groups work in themselves but that these relationships surface and make visible our weaknesses. Couple this surfacing of problems with the covenant to give and take spiritual direction and you are on your way to desperately needing the power of the Holy Spirit.

The training of leaders is training leaders to make disciples in the smallest groups of 2-3. many men and women are not called to provide spiritual direction in larger groups like house churches but all are called to provide leadership at the cellular level. Everyone is called to make disciples and this equipping is fueled when we develop a cellular structure of disciple-making relationships. By doing this we can release leaders like Jesus released leaders. Jesus recruited his church and ALL the members of His church were released into leadership. This is true for a few reasons. Most importantly Jesus only recruited fourth soil believers. Work only with people who are willing to be disciple-makers at the cellular level. Place all our effort at the cellular level where ALL the members are being equipped to be leaders of groups of two or three. This is the foundation of the church and the focus of almost all of our attention.

So principle #1 is that the primary group where all the actual work is being done is at the cellular level of groups of two or three that interact with each other daily.

This group of cellular discipleship interacts daily in one way or another. This discipleship is daily relationship of prayer, worship, confession, and contemplation of the teachings of Jesus.

Principle #2 is that leaders are released to lead intentional discipleship relationship that meet daily. Leaders are men or women who are capable of:
1. Meeting with one or two people daily.
2. Communicating the teachings of Jesus both the Sermon on the Mount and the parables from their own experience.
3. Have a practice of daily worship and prayer in private.
4. Are able to lay hands and pray for others.
5. Are equipped to teach others to make disciples.

Principle #3 – If your church is not made up of people in smaller groups of two or three, then you are not making disciples. The purpose of the church is to make disciples. The church exists to make disciples.
1. Everyone in the church is challenged to participate in daily smaller groups of two or three and to be equipped to lead these smaller groups.
2. If it is not a distinguishing mark of your church that everyone needs to be making disciples in daily covenant relationships, then your DNA is wrong. Somehow we haven’t set an example and articulated an example of a life transformation model that works. I am convinced that the only way to get victory over besetting character defects is to live in discipleship daily. I am not saying that daily discipleship works but that daily discipleship is necessary for human beings to live in faith. Such a faith is so aware of it’s weakness that daily confession has become the means of surfacing our weakness and abiding in Christ. If there are people in your church who think the weekly meeting is where discipleship happens, your DNA is wrong. Stop doing church and start over.

Think about it for a second. Jesus said, “If your brother sins against you 70x7 times a day forgive him.” This passage is speaking out of the context of living in community and how these relationships surface our brokenness. It is this process of surfacing our brokenness that leads to walking in weakness and grace.

Principle #4 – The purpose of larger groups is to equip the members in making disciples. This is accomplished primarily through teaching the teachings of Jesus and the scriptural commentary upon the teachings of Jesus.
1. Do not attempt to do the work of the group of two to three in the larger house church meetings of individual confession and prayer for one another.
2. The larger group is to teach the apostolic teaching and proclaim testimony of what is happening in the smaller groups (i.e. on the street).

God Bless,
brad

My Son - Kurt Cobain

The Church or the Kingdom

In our community, we are continually asking, “What can we give to people?”. The answer is often that we can give them a level of community that will teach them a new and healthy way of life. When community is the answer to how we help people, the mandate is to build community and to emphasize dialogue about real life problems and the principles that are foundational to functional living. Such an emphasis is a huge step forward compared to the come to church on Sunday and then you are on your own. With people like myself that are way to damaged to make it on my own, the Sunday and Wednesday routine just doesn’t work. For the sick, authentic community is an absolute necessity to a sane life. BUT!!!, this emphasis on COMMUNITY IS NOT THE ANSWER to the “What can we give to people?” question.

Conversion to the Church or Entrance into the Kingdom
The above scenario where a new believer enters a Christian community that meets daily and studies the teachings of Jesus is a good thing, obviously, but I have no interest in converting people to Christianized social work. We must be very self-critical and precise in what are we really offering people. What we are offering people is LIFE IN THE KINGDOM THROUGH THE IMMEDIATE POWER AND PRESSENCE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT THROUGH FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST. The answer to the question, “What can we give to people?” must be THE HOLY SPIRIT on a daily basis. We must beware of converting people to the church.

The Real Problem with American Evangelicalism
If you are reading this article, I am assuming you are looking for more than the mainstream church has to offer. When the mainstream church honestly answer the question, “What can we give to people?”, the answer is that we can offer good programs and clear bible teaching. We may say, “We offer relationship with Jesus Christ”, but if the by relationship with Jesus Christ we mean the immediate power and presence of the Holy Spirit then the mainstream church cannot honestly testify that we offer people a life of relationship with Jesus Christ. The daily power of the Holy Spirit has not been my experience of the life of the normal church-goer. No what the church offers is programs and teaching. In other words, the church offers people church. The real problem with the church in America is that we convert people to church and not the kingdom. BUT if we in the home church, simple church, organic church simply convert people to daily, authentic church as opposed to weekly superficial church, we are merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titantic. The problem with the mainstream church, and I believe the mainstream church is on its death bed in America, is that church life does not necessitate authentic spirituality and does not model the life in the kingdom. Life in the kingdom is living daily filled with the power of presence of Jesus Christ through the daily imitation of Jesus Christ in community.

The Emphasis of the Church Growth and Mega Church Approach
The church growth approach taught pastors to make sure that all the processes were in place to assure that people have a positive experience in church. The program of the church needs to be excellent to attract a crowd. The speaker must be entertaining. The music must be excellent. The programs must be fast paced and offer relationship with nice people and the parking must be sufficient. If we do this well, people will be attracted to the church and this will expose the masses to the word of God and the gospel. In this approach, we are really converting people to church attendance. The program takes most of the pastors time. He is the director of a presentation. This approach has led to the total carnality and impotence of the church. This is not how Jesus Christ made disciples. Only true spirituality and the offer of the power and presence of Jesus Christ in our daily lives demands everything from the baptized. We have made the gospel palatable in order to baptize people into the church. Such an approach caters to second and third soil hearts. Such an approach is total folly and bears no fruit that remains. If your pastor is concerned for even one instant about the flow of the service, I contend this is completely wrong headed. Jesus sent seekers who were not totally repentant away. Jesus said things that were totally offensive in order to separate the second and third soil people from the good and pure hearts. Our goal should be like Jesus’. We should try to offend people with the demands of the cross and the kingdom life. Only the call to live in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit daily demands everything from us.

The Necessity of Community
Even when the mainstream church offers, the power of the Holy Spirit, the mainstream church cannot deliver. When a seeker comes into the church and we offer them the kingdom life through the immediate power and presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, we cannot deliver on this offer without daily community meetings. Jesus Christ couldn’t deliver the kingdom without walking daily with the disciples. Are we so anointed that we can deliver bread that magically nourishes people for a week at a time? It is impossible to live by faith in the immediate reality of the kingdom without daily corporate prayer and worship and contemplation of the apostle’s teachings. The corporate life models for the new believer what it means to pursue God in prayer and worship. We teach how to confess and repent in the presence of God.

I once had a home churcher ask me sarcastically, “What we have to pray for it to be church?” My answer is “No, we have to pray passionately with true authentic repentance for it to be church!!”. Church is a group of people encountering God in spirit and truth. Church is not Christian potluck. In the book of Acts, the church met daily but they didn’t meet to have potluck. People are not afraid of potlucks. People were afraid to enter the early church and be double minded. God showed up at the meetings. People got healed at the meetings. The prayer and the teaching was 200 proof Holy Spirit. A new believer will not experience the life transformation that we call the kingdom without this type of community on a daily basis.

When we answer the “what can we give to people?”, we offer them a life in the power of God. In doing this, we must offer them to be immersed in the teachings of Jesus. We must offer them corporate meetings everyday BUT if we end with principles and community and do not lead people all the way into the presence of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, we still have merely converted them into the church. We do not baptize people into the Church, we baptize people into Christ. We are offering people a daily relationship with the living risen Jesus Christ. Jesus is alive. Jesus is powerful. Jesus delivers. Nothing short of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit will deliver those around us.

God Bless,
brad

Christianity by Total Immersion

Come and Walk with Us as We Follow Christ

In this post, I am going to attempt to answer the question, “What are we really trying to do in our faith community?”. The best answer to this question is that we want to be able to call people out of the world and into the kingdom way by saying “come and walk with us as we follow Christ”.

Last night, we had a meeting at our home. There was a nice sized group of people including a family who was visiting for the first time. I am sure the visitors went away thinking “that is a pretty nice group of people” BUT...that is no where near enough. As a community, we still lack the daily rhythm to call people out of the world and into the kingdom by simply saying “come walk with us as we follow Christ. Walk with us and you will come to know what it means to walk in the kingdom of God. You will come to know freedom from sin and true happiness….”

Baptism into a Daily Way of Life
As a good evangelical, I was taught that baptism really means immersion. The application of this etymological truth was that the proper mode of baptism was total immersion. It is true that baptism best symbolizes our life in Christ when we totally immerse new converts as opposed to sprinkle them, but we throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water if we miss the real point of baptism by total immersion. The application is that discipleship into the kingdom only comes through total immersion in the new language of the kingdom life. When we are baptized, this event is a symbol of our commitment to total immersion into the body of Christ. If the church is to honor the baptism of the new convert, we must be able to offer them Christianity by total immersion.

What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander
To be able to offer the kingdom to those we meet obviously takes a very “all in” lifestyle. We often say in our community that we minister as much for us as for those we minister to. When we realize that discipleship is by total immersion it is we who must go through the change of lifestyle so we can call others to come walk with us. The every day discipleship immerses our community in the language of the teachings of Jesus. Daily encouragement makes the insecure confident. Daily immersion in discussion makes the biblically illiterate biblically literate pretty fast. The point is to be able to call others into the process, or so we are told. But the benefit we reap ourselves is so great it is hard to say what is greater the benefit we bring others or the benefit we receive ourselves.

Boldness
We often ask ourselves, “should we wait until we are very consistent and strong in our meeting frequency before we start doing outreach to others?” I think the answer to this is no, not really. It is in the asking others to join us that we are forced to be more consistent. When we say, “Meet me at my house every night at 6:00pm”, we are pretty “all in”. Now we have to play the hand all the way out. We have to start being consistent because we have commitments to others that we need to honor. This boldness spurs us on to being more and more daily.

The end of it all is that total immersion is the biblical mandate. It is the meaning of our being immersed in the body of Christ in baptism. So many find they cannot find the kingdom and yet they have no total immersion model to follow and no total immersion community to join. If we find ourselves in this situation, risk is needed. Where ever two or three are gathered is church. Find one friend and challenge each other to live out discipleship by total immersion. Once we take this first step, we will find we are not far from the kingdom.

God Bless,
brad

The Art of Holiness and Spiritual Progress

As many of you know, our family has moved out of the more institutional approaches to the Christian faith into what is often termed a more organic or simple approach. I personally prefer to speak of our move as from a more academic approach to the faith to a more monastic or intentional community approach. Our current goal is to find like minded families who are interested in living in community in such a way that meetings are available every night in homes and that in these meetings the primary focus is how to live out and practice the teachings of Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. Though I would personally never attempt going to meetings every night, it is very helpful to have meetings available every night. Currently, we have families who are committed to opening their homes on Monday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday AM and Sunday PM. The primary learning technique is to allow the close proximity of our living to surface relational, emotional, and spiritual weakness in all of us. Let me begin by saying, this new simply approach to the faith has been quite fruitful with our children. Later in this post I will describe how we do church in our home.

Why Begin Outside the Church
The Benefits of Daily Community
The current misconceptions regarding how to approach Christianity and a lack of proper language in Christian circles to explain and train one another in the methods of sanctification and spiritual progress is so acute that I find it necessary to go outside of the majority Christian culture in order to develop what I understand to be a disciple making community. One element is the understanding of the need for community. Our approach as we are practicing it today sees community as a pre-requisite for spiritual progress. In the intentional community approach, the need for skills in conflict resolution, humble confession, giving and receiving spiritual direction, and forgiveness is absolutely crucial. Community surfaces our immaturity, and our weaknesses become opportunities to learn the teachings of Jesus. This progress only happens in the context of intentional community and in an all-in approach which embraces weakness and confession. In this context, mentoring and discipleship becomes an organic characteristic of our Christian life.
While our approach to the faith takes a daily practice of community as a prerequisite to spiritual progress, we also are developing a different model to our actual meetings which focuses on the learning of practices and spiritual disciplines more than the development of a worldview. In the institutional church, we are taught that Spiritual growth comes through the listening to and sometimes discussion of concepts when in fact spiritual progress is attained primarily through repetition of certain practices. Like any other activity, Spiritual progress comes through the development of certain talents and skills. Church meetings are modeled more after a sports practice than an academic classroom. Again, Christianity is learned more like gymnastics than geometry.

Ultimately, Christianity is not a body of truths to be intellectually known but a body of practices to be learned and skills and talents to develop. I think of the Martial Arts. In the Martial Arts, skills are learned, a certain type of kick or a certain type of stance. Or we could use the analogy of ballet. The result is a dance but the method of learning is repetitive practice of skills. Then the skills are put together like sentences in a story and the dance is developed. Church then is to be modeled after a ballet or Martial Arts lesson where we learn and practice skills as opposed to an academic exercise where we discuss and learn truths.

Our Family Church
In 2006, we began doing church differently. Though we have always led “small groups”, recently we began doing church in our home using a model where doing church was learning a skill and not a set of truths. To know Christianity is to know how to live a certain way in imitation of the life of Jesus Christ and not to develop a worldview or a theological system. It is difficult for me to explain how revolutionary this approach has been.

We began by asking ourselves what skills do we find essential to living a morally beautiful life. The conclusion we came to, my wife and I, was the practices of prayer and worship. Ultimately, it is affection and encounter with God Himself that is the foundation of all holiness and commitment to the ethical commands of Jesus Christ. If my children learn worship and pray, then I can trust the Holy Spirit to mold their affections.

So we are teaching our children not about prayer but actually how to pray. As a specific skill, we have been teaching our children how to use silence to adjust our attitudes and enter into worship and thanksgiving, reflection and confession, and preparation and petition. We begin in silence and thanksgiving. Next, we work together on some project like practicing music. In the course of the “band practice” there will inevitably be some conflict. After the band practice, we use the conflict as a teaching point to reflect on the teachings of Jesus. After discussion, we return to prayer and confess our weaknesses humble ourselves. This always ends in a wonderful time of worship and joy. We close by praying for the rest of the day and any people we are planning to meet that day.

The church time becomes a model of the daily cycle of morning prayer, daily work and evening reflection and worship. Our goal is to live this daily cycle every day and to teach this spirituality to our children.

So far, we are seeing spiritual growth both in ourselves and in the other folk who are taking this journey with us. We are hoping that as we learn this model through a few years of practice that we can bring our approach to the faith to those in the institutional church that are seeking to become and to make disciples of Jesus Christ.