Bloodshed is not really a pretty subject. Sure, we see it pretty often on CSI and the shoot-em-up action of our movies and even video games. Still, bloodshed is a somber topic because it is not only about the loss of blood but also the loss of life. Yet in the Baptist churches of my youth I must have sung on the subject at least a hundred times:

What can wash away my sin?
 Nothing but the blood of Jesus;

What can make me whole again? 
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Why all the talk about blood? I must admit the college-educated, more urbane side of me squirms a little at the mention of the blood. I worry about what a thoroughly secular friend of mine would think about the song. In his mind, such a song would prove his point that Christian folk are strange people obsessed with strange ideas. What good is there in such bloodshed?

The rough streets of Houston provided the answer.Read more

I’m going to go out on a prophetic limb here and state that the postmodern zeitgeist is hung over. Gone are the heady, intoxicated days of liberation from transcendent norms and meta-narratives. The all-too-early wake up call of a deep economic recession and Gulf ecological disaster has the next generation groggily taking stock of itself and it’s coming up all zeroes.
 
Teddy Thompson is the only son of British folk-rock legends Richard and Linda Thompson. Two summers ago, Teddy released A Piece of What You Need for Verve. My favorite track on the album is “Where To Go From Here,” partly for its gentle acoustic rhythm and brush-on-snare sound, partly for its existential angst that demonstrates my aforementioned point.
 
The safe lie of the in between
I never lose but never win
I wait at the edge of lifeRead more

Excellent piece by Tim Keller via Redeemer's new City to City division. City to City is led, in part, by Scott Kauffmann, who is an uncommon blend of talent and humility.
 
Check out Keller's blog post about how and why Redeemer does multi-site, and how they are different from many other churches that do multi-site. Read more

The 19^th century German philosopher Georg Hegel was famous for his theory of the “dialectic.” He said an event or idea served as a thesis, there was then a sharp reaction to it known as the antithesis, followed by a synthesis, which sought to combine the best features of both the thesis and antithesis.  Got that?

            Well, if you do, you’ll appreciate Jim Belcher’s new book, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional.  Belcher, a PCA pastor from southern California, writes out of his own life experience; growing up in a traditional, conservative church culture, he was looking for greater intimacy, community and rootedness to the past.  He found his Protestant upbringing and experience to lack these things.  In more recent years, he observed a phenomenon and movement known as “emergent” which seemed to be “protesting” some of these shortcomings, calling forth with a prophetic voice for the church to change and was intrigued. 

            But he noticed something; in the last decade, traditional and emergent voices were like two ships passing in the night: they weren’t really talking to each other but past each other, speaking two different languages.  And because of this, both sides became reactionary, producing talks and books that tended to create “straw men” caricatures of each other that were often unfounded in reality.  And where there is no real conversation, there is no learning from each other.

            If they did, Belcher argues, perhaps they would discover a third way, what he calls “The Deep Church.”  In his book, Belcher critiques and praises traditional and emergent churches, looking for the best of both in order to be the church in the world. Read more

*** Update ***

A number of students and graduates of these two schools have emailed, asking, "Me?" Others want to know about the breadth of the brush I'm painting with.

Overwhelmingly the students and graduates that I have encountered, from my point of view, are wonderful men and women and express themselves in a normal fashion. The post below was in reference to roughly 7 people who have applied for jobs or that I have met while recruiting at the schools. 

I've met or known scores of students and graduates from these schools who don't express themselves in a distinctively formal manner. The post below is about a subset-- a very small number of people-- who puzzle me with their formality.

Related, I've hired a bunch of students and grads from these two institutions who are STELLAR. While I have declined to hire those that strike me as too formal in their communication, I've hired multiple people from SEBTS and SBTS who are doing superb work for pastor-clients around the country. 

The pattern I've noticed is small, but I've witnessed it enough in the past 10 months to wonder about it and then write about it.

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In the course of running Docent Research Group, I meet a lot of seminarians and graduate students. Anecdotally (no social science research done), I've noticed an interesting pattern. A subset (not all) of the seminarians at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY and at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC that I have personally become acquainted with in person or by email (or reading their blogs) are more likely than seminarians from other institutions to use formal speech in person, emails and blog posts.

With a frequency that astonishes me, some (not all) of these seminarians express themselves in language that strikes me as very formal, even Puritan-esque. The language of Reformed systematics spills out in greetings and in email closings especially, but also in many other instances of written and verbal communication.

One commendable aspect of this is God-saturated speech. From my point of view, living and speaking in a way that demonstrates one's God-centeredness is a good thing.

Another commendable aspect of this way of speaking is that it surely reflects long hours of reading and reflection. In an age in which "thinness" (thinness of mind, thinness of character) is one of the most serious problems that evangelicals manifest, I applaud believers who devote themselves to study, to the life of the mind, and to wrestling deeply and thoughtfully with what it means to follow Jesus in our time and place.

And yet... Read more

I have recently been studying Acts as part of our first teaching series with the Atlanta Eastside Project church plant and recently went through Acts 2:14-41, where Peter preaches a fiery sermon in response to a group of Jewish people gathered who heard all the commotion the Holy Spirit caused when He showed up in a house with wind, fire and foreign language miracles. The gathered folk had two responses to these signs and wonders: “What does this mean (spiritual seeking)?” and “They’re drunk (closed universe mockers).” To both, Peter responds with respect but boldness, laying out the Story, the story of why these signs and wonders have come (“The Spirit has come because the prophecies concerning the Messiah have come to pass,” Peter essentially says). And then Peter preaches the heart of the Gospel, ending by saying that Christ reigns as both Lord and Christ and calls everyone to repentance.
It is a fabulous sermon and full of theological orthodoxy but I have concluded that what makes this passage so profound isn’t just what Peter said but how he said it. Let me explain.

Read more

Continued from 10/4/07...

But still many common objections can easily put the brakes on compassion. One of the objections is that prisoners are just getting what they deserve. After all, as the saying goes, “You do the crime, you pay the time.” Or as Paul puts it in the book of Galatians, “A man reaps what he sows” (6:7).

While this is true, the connection between crime and punishment shouldn’t necessarily short-circuit compassion. In the book of Hosea, chapter 11, despite Israel’s sin, God is still moved with compassion for His people. He asks how He could give them up and He concludes by saying, “All my compassion is aroused.” Or as Jesus looks out over Jerusalem, you hear the compassion in his voice when He says, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Mt. 23:37). Christ has compassion on sinners and longs for them to change. Even while criminals serve their time and deal with the consequences of the sin in their lives, we can have compassion for them and long for their total restoration.Read more

A couple of months ago, I sat in a room of staff interviewing a potential candidate for a position with Prison Fellowship. After the usual peppering with questions, the candidate got a turn to ask questions of his own. He didn’t miss a beat. He wanted to know: “How do you do it? How do you have compassion for these people?” I was taken aback by the question. But it caused me to to retrace my steps on this journey of compassion the Lord has invited me on.

I had only recently celebrated my sixteenth birthday when I read Crime and Punishment. I remember settling into a hammock on my parents’ back porch not far from St. Petersburg, Florida, and being transported to the arctic cold of St. Petersburg, Russia, as I devoured page after page of the arrogant Raskolnikov envisioning, plotting, and finally killing an innocent old woman. As the investigating inspector circled closer and closer in on the guilty Raskolnikov, I found myself feeling paranoid. In fact, when my mom opened the back door to ask me a question one day, I literally jumped in fright. I knew it was only a matter of time before, we—I  mean—he, was caught. Read more

Recently I attended a gathering of Christian men and women who are in the scrum of lives and missions that Jesus has called into being.  What the Lord is doing across the US, and across the world, in micro and macro efforts, inspired me. It seems perhaps trite to say that He is a huge God with a deep love for people and the world, but those thoughts came to mind again and again as I heard brothers and sisters tell their stories of Jesus’ call on their lives. I’ve not felt real spurs digging into me, but figuratively I felt spurs stimulating me to think more about Jesus, to love Him more, to love my neighbors more, and to be more focused in doing the work to which He has called me. These young servant-leaders whose stories I heard at the gathering—these men and women are laying their lives on the line. As one organizer said, “These people are all in.”

How are they all in? 

One works in publishing, not only reading broadly and deeply himself, but also seeking to find and nourish Christians who can write great stuff across market niches. As in, write such great content that it transcends the Christian book ghetto. Read more