How an Ex-Audiofile Rediscovered Music
Years ago as a teen, I found myself mowing yards and making money only to sink it quickly in CD purchases. That was the 90s when CDs were the only way to go and $14 would seem like a bargain. Then the Internet happened.
In 1999, I arrived in high school and heard a few peers talking about a bountiful forrest lush with free music called Napster. I had dabbled in a bit of online file sharing, but when I obtained Napster, the world changed.
Everything
was
free.
As Napster, Aimster, Morpheus, Kazaa, etc rolled on, my CD purchases slowly faded to where by late college, I was buying just a couple albums a year. It was all free. The music industry made it hard to justify buying anything, so I didn’t. Yahoo Music, Napster Free, file sharing, and later YouTube made legitimate file streaming possible. I quit pirating music, but rarely bought an album.
After college, save for a few bands a year, I stopped listening to much music at all. My taste became soundtracks and sitting in silence more than hearing anthems. It was cheaper, relaxing, and I had YouTube. I bought stuff on occasion through iTunes and Amazonmp3, bought on a very rare occasion.
Then came a month ago. A friend of mine demanded that I test-drive Spotify, a European imported music subscription service. I immediately thought it’d be another lame DRM nightmare.
It wasn’t.
For $10 per month, it’s an all you can download buffet of insanity. Rare tracks and a hot community. Over the last month, I have begin to rediscover the joy of music. The prophets. The eery melodies. The worship. The hooks that make you scream in your car, knowing the car at the stoplight next to you has someone watching.
It’s good to have fun again.
Repenting
Repenting is a tough thing to do. A lot of times, its easier to hold dearly to the things that we know we should rethink and change. I suppose the things that are hardest to repent might be the most important.
When I repent of my screw-ups, anger, jealousy, etc, I will find ways to examine it. Journaling. Sitting in silence to meditate about it. Exploring how it came to be. I pray for God to forgive me of the problem and to help me to see an alternate way of thinking or living. Sometimes, I’ll even attempt to imagine life without the issue.
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence - religious meaning, God meaning - apart from God as revealed in the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds…a crowd destroys the spirit as thoroughly as excessive drink and depersonalized sex. It takes us out of ourselves, but not to God, only away from him. The religious hunger is rooted in the unsatisfactory nature of the self. We hunger to escape the dullness, the boredom, the tiresomeness of me…a crowd is an exercise in false transcendence upward, which is why all crowds are spiritually pretty much the same, whether at football games, political parties, or church.
Source: http
Rebuke
Years ago on an old blog, I received a comment that was the harshest rebuke I’ve ever received. The blog itself has questionable content, but looking back, this rebuke is still awesome.
What life-long profound and comprehensive discipline have you engaged in to enable you to presume to lecture others on how they should live?
Who were/are your LIVING Spiritual Teachers? Such Teachers being necessary to guide you and more importantly to challenge you to examine ALL of your ideas and opinions about quite literally everything.
Have you been humbled by your own sweat and suffering?
If you read the biographies of the great Saints and Realizers from all of the traditions you will find that most of them went through a profound ordeal of struggle and testing until they came to their Spiritual maturity—it often took decades.
You are mortal and entirely subject to the Mercy of The Divine. You own nothing and know nothing. There is not anything to be believed that is the Truth.
You must be touched in your feeling by the unspeakable suffering of this world, and thus become broken hearted. It is only on that basis that you can truly serve others.
Everything else is just an extension of your own unexamined obnoxiousness, and your drive to achieve power and control over others.
Source: crossexamine.wordpress.com
Re-placing Scripture
I’m a fan of the Bible. I’ve read it more than any other book and am moderately familiar with portions of its origins, (take the Deutero-Isaiah controversy or the “Q Source Hypothesis,” for example). All that being said, over the last few years, I’ve heard voices muttering concepts about the Scriptures that have helped me to re-place the Bible in a healthier context.
I work in a relatively large church with a student ministries department. Over time, I’ve become quite aware that students don’t read books. No - I mean they really don’t read books. This is probably rooted not just in our YouTube culture, but the way in which schools present the concept of learning. I digress and hope to live to write about that another day. Its something of a new illiteracy, only this one is self-inflicted.
In 2004 as an experiment for a class I had taught to teens in a program called Remnant, I had students all turn their Bibles in and held them captive for a week, leaving just one Bible for the lot of 30 of them to rip pages out and pass it around like some kind of persecuted church. The experiment proved interesting: all but 4 of them lived their lives no differently. I suppose its odd that it took me 4 years to begin to ask more about it.
By 2008, I began to be nagged with a question: how do we teach students Christian thinking when they don’t read the Bible? Now mind you, I grew up in a non-denominational, Baptist-ish context, so this was a lethal question to me.
I entered a thought experiment: if the global church seemed to get by prior to Gutenberg’s printing press (and the birth of Western mass-literacy), clearly there are principles we can apply to our context today. The answer is in their liturgy, authority, and stories. Theology prior to the 15th century was passed on like a torch to the next generation, and even among the Hebrew people, through stories and songs. Those who composed these mediums were very cautious with vocabulary selection to be clear, succinct, and to describe God as God is (through good hermeneutics and a Christ-centered focus).
All this being said, I still study Scripture, but I have come to value the global church much, much more than I once did. I trust the church, who gave us the Bible. The notion that one can be a Christian without the church is intriguing given the source of its canon.
Moving forward, I won’t ever tell students not to read the text (I actually do encourage it). As someone who would like to see them “get it,” my dream is to see the stories, emotions, themes, and melodies of the text come alive in their lives so much that they want to live lives that are fully alive.
Update: Below, you’ll find links to three past blogs on the subject from an old blog of mine.
1) Facing Illiteracy
2) Facing Illiteracy Revisited
3) Facing Illiteracy (Part 3): Christianese
Phelps
Tomorrow, I’ll be interviewed by a radio show on KVCO of Concordia, Kansas sometime from 5-7 PM. It might turn into a returning segment with the host. This week’s topic will be the lightning rod of controversy that is Westboro Baptist Church and the Phelps family. For those of you who have managed to avoid this group’s message, it involves a strong disdain for homosexuality and major contempt for any nations or individuals that do not condemn the LGBT community. This is escalated to the point of the church picketing events, including the funerals of American military personnel.
Most of the criticism hurled their way involves the rhetoric they use, questions about a loving God sending people to Hell, court cases involving their right to protest, and counter-protests against their protests. Nearly the entire global Christian response has been to condemn their message, but in an age of 10,000 popes, it doesn’t slow them down.
Worth noting is that Phelps was very involved in the civil rights movement in Kansas decades ago on behalf of the black community, even taking buckets of criticism for standing up for the black community.
Having had a Westboro picket event at my own church, I’ve seen the ramifications firsthand. Christians should pray for this community to grow and change and for God’s grace and mercy to reign with this interpretation of Scripture. Its a cancer that affects the global Church’s image.
As an aside, for those that like these sort of matters, Phelps and company are Hyper-Calvinists, which raises questions about why they actually care.
Review: Love Wins
I finished up Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins yesterday and have been surprised at the number of people asking what I think. I think all the hoopla surrounding the book is pretty staggering, with Good Morning America interviews, Twitter melting down with talk of theology, and more. Under his own admission, the book says nothing new - its a composite of a lot of other’s views with Bell’s style. That being said, there’s a lot to discuss.
Disclaimer: If you have already decided this book is a heresy having not read the book, this review is not for you. Please close this page and move along.
Love Wins takes on a tone different from Bell’s other work, the most successful being Velvet Elvis. The chapters are considerably longer. The stories are more sobering. The fluffy footnotes are replaced by a list of recommended books at the end, not surprisingly including C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright. Yet, Bell’s trademark pages with a lot of
very
short
sentences
are still present. Bell has matured, having dealt with being a public figure and pastoring a large church for several years.
Theologically, this is not the work of a universalist. It does, however, swing that direction. Bell is still well within the creeds, even citing Athanasius, the ever controversial Origen, and others as being in the same ballpark. Bell gives a light-hearted walk through the few references to Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and Sheol in the Bible, then uses it as a platform to say that we know very little.
Not surprisingly, Bell’s great hope is the resurrection, with Bell even taking a veiled shot at escapist theology. What causes all the controversy is his assertion that after death, God’s love is so big that He can (and wants to) be united with all believers. What we do in this life does matter, but in the aion (age) to come, the gates of Heaven on Earth will remain wide open for others to jump into the Kingdom of God.
Bell does a fair job of addressing questions about eternity and the elusive word “forever,” though this is not a scholarly work. It doesn’t belong in seminaries as a textbook. This belongs in bookstores for however long it lasts (probably not longer than twenty years) for everyday readers to engage in questions about postmortem issues if they are willing to be open to asking hard questions about our assumptions.
If its a scholarly work you are looking for, might I recommend Canada’s Bradley Jersak’s Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, as a thorough treatment of the issue. Jersak owns this topic with his under-rated work that for the serious-minded Christian would make a great “next step” following Love Wins.
Back to Love Wins, do I recommend this book? If you haven’t ever questioned our cultural assumptions about after-death issues and are willing to be wrong, its a good start. Bell’s writing style makes it easy to pound a 25 page chapter and smile along the way because even if he’s wrong, having a really excited view of how big God’s love is will probably not steer one wrong. Under his own admission, this book has more questions than answers. If Western Christians are willing to engage in this questions and dialog in healthy ways, it will have done its job.
Dark
I would like to post more, but I’m tired of being criticized. So I don’t.
Forming Teens
I work full-time in a youth department for a large, suburban church. I have been there as a student or leader since 1999 and have seen several “cycles” of students come and go. All the while, it seems that there’s an underlying belief from parents and students that weekly Wednesday night experiences and supplemental meetings become the primary means of formation for young people.
This may instantly seem like a soapbox about students needing to spend time privately worshipping God and praying. It isn’t. Those may have a great deal of advantages, but at this point in my career, I am not convinced that this is the main way students are formed spiritually or in general maturation.
Several years ago I encountered a teenager we’ll call Ted who often seemed like things were just not working out in life. He would attend church and had a stable group of friends who did the same, but this young man had a darker side. Ted’s anger was hidden, but burned with a hidden ember about his misfortunes, so the slightest hint of people possibly not having the most noble of intentions toward him would eat him away.
After months of being around him, I realized there had to be more to the story than a series of unfortunate events. I had seen Christians prophesy about great things Ted would do in his future, which actually freaked him out more than it encouraged him. Upon probing and being more observant, I discovered more of Ted’s story.
Ted’s mother had been in jail for several years with no end in sight. His dad had moved from recreational drug use to a habitual use of drugs that would relax the mind or produce hallucinogenic scenarios in his mind. Ted and is brother had been hurt a lot by his maternal and paternal guardians, but had never had real parents who showed him love.
As Ted grew up, the view of affectionate love and responsibility he had gained from his mother had left him unable to make commitments and unable to trust others. His mistrust for the primary authority in his life (his biological father) and only seeing leadership through anger and pain had left him now unresponsive to matters that lacked emotion and never feeling like he could be good enough for anyone.
Ted was left with wounds he inherited without chromosomes. Ted’s parental influences may give him a limp for quite sometime, if not the rest of his life. For Ted, trusting an earthly father has made trusting what Christians call a “Heavenly Father” a difficult translation. The idea that love involves sacrifice for others or working in concert with the desire of another is unfamiliar at best. For Ted, it’s all an uphill battle.
I write all this as an example of something I have pondered for years about the nature of youth ministry. The amount of time students are formed by their church is meager despite our best attempts at programs, camps, trips, and the elusive “perfect service.” Children are primarily formed by their parents and guardians. Through recovery processes, some of this can be overcome, but the most formational ministry a child will encounter, whether positive or negative, will be in the home. To this end, I offer a few honors:
- To those parents who refused to sacrifice their children at the altar of Convenience in a hospital bed, your gift of life is precious.
- To those parents who have never hurt their children, thank you.
- To those parents who care, I salute you.
- To those parents who model weekly church attendance and respect for authority, you are heroic.
- To those parents who attempt to raise children to be full of values that are consistent with Christian ethics, your children will bring you great joy.
- To those parents who display the beauty of an ongoing relationship with God without creating a performance-based system of approval, your children will find it easier to serve God.
- To those parents who trust God with their parenting so much that they choose not to overprotect their children so they can help them along in decision making instead of treating young adults like young children, you are the ultimate parents.
The job of the youth ministry has transformed with the culture over the past decade to encompass supplementing parenting or in some cases replacing parenting. It is with great honor that I connect with this generation and crave to see those who have been wounded find new ways to walk and thrive. I am not yet a parent and humbly pray that I will have the courage and humility to make good decisions one day.
A Prayer for Parents
Almighty and intelligent God,
You have blessed us with the gift of passing your Kingdom to the next generation.
Grant that we may make wise decisions that train our children.
Give us grace as we give you space to be trusted instead of choking on our insecurities.
We are kids who grew up and had kids. Teach us childlike faith.
Make us creative and help us to always model genuine love before all other things,
Just as the Father loves the Son, the Son connects with the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit serves the Father today and forever.
Amen.
Why an Apple Hater got an iPad
This week, I tweeted that I had obtained an Apple iPad. My work laptop had died, and after a month of pondering and researching, i made the decision to move to Cupertino. Those who know me well know that I have a strong disdain for Apple, despite having been a former iPhone owner. I figured that explaining how I ended up with this may help some others as they consider iPad.
To begin, let’s talk about tablets. I have liked the tablet concept all the way back to the mess that was Windows XP Tablet Edition. I have owned a netbook and notebook computer, but the instant-on ability of s tablet form factor fits my workflow better. Most of my job involves going from meriting to meeting, conversation to conversation, service to service. Tablets have many downsides, but with a desktop at home and computer workstations I can borrow at work, i had options.
I was an early adopter of the first generation iPhone. I loved its cutting edge technology, syncing eith media, and web browsing. Over time, I grew to hate AT&T for a variety of reasons, but also disliked Apple policies. The absence of letting me, the user, choose whether or not to be able to use Adobe Flash remains absurd to me. Apple has prevented many great Apps from being downloaded (see the Google Voice debacle, for example). Apple prevents innovation that could unlock the potential of their powerful devices.
I took my smartphone business to Android with a couple devices and liked it. Android has a platform from Google that lets a person install other Apps, systems, and tweaks that even the carriers hate. Android allows Adobe Flash, but has a much smaller App Market and battery issues. I still recommend Android phones over iPhones, but for an iPad, the story changes.
Google is currently on the cusp of releasing Android 2.3, aka Gingerbread. Ginger improves many things, but Google has openly said They really wont address tablet functionality until Android 2.4, aka Honeycomb later in 2011. Tablets with Android currently are running what is literally a tweaked mobile phone system. Even the 7” Samsung Galaxy Tab is far from fully ready for prime time despite some nice features.
The January Consumer Electronics Show will feature a slew of Android Tablets, including the one that tempted me, the Notion Ink Adam. Notion is a fresh company out of India with a great product but questionable support and policies. With a work device, I can’t take risks. Until Google has released a genuinely tablet-oriented OS, there is iPad and a horde of pretenders.
If I were making this decision late in 2011, it would have possibly gone a different direction, but the Android market is just not there. So I here I sit, having blogged on an iPad. After one day of use, I have already found my suspicions to be true. Its quick and handy. I also have run into 3 pages where I wanted Flash and wish it had a camera. But for my workflow, this appears to be a good fit. And maybe, just maybe, Uncle Steve will let up in his old age.
