No, I'm not telling Don Carson to listen up. I'm telling YOU to listen to Don Carson. Mark Dever interviewed Don out at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School -- where Don teaches -- earlier this year. This newly posted interview is the first of a two-parter. It is very good! Click here to access Observing Evangelicalism with Don Carson.

I'm learning to listen to my wife. It's part of what it means to live with your wife in a considerate or understanding way (1 Pet. 3:7).  And, she is generally correct about things I routinely overlook.

An anonymous visitor to my site didn't find the video I posted there and linked to here re: changes with the national coordinator of Emergent stuff very funny. The video used a movie scene featuring a distraught Adolf Hitler and his advisors in a bunker to parody the Emergent shake up. My wife didn't find it funny either.

So, I've removed the video and the previous post. And, with sincerity, I apologize to all those offended by the video and its use of that scene to poke fun at Emergent leaders and Minnesotans. Please pray that those offended would receive this apology in the spirit in which it's intended, and that I would exercise better discernment.

Grace and peace in Christ Jesus our Lord, who saved us from the holocaust of God's wrath, and made us wretches a holy nation.

Thabiti

"Apart from small groups, is it possible for a church of 300+ to be united in purpose and so connected that all suffer/rejoice together and that all have "the same care for one another"?"

That's what one person asked in the comments thread to a post Matt Schmucker ordered me to write on technology and community.  Speaking of Matt... it must be nice to sit around and listen to Sovereign Grace-produced T4G CDs and demand that other people do all the real posting!  But I'm not bitter or anything.

The post on technology and community is here for any interested.

The question above is a good question, and it seems to be based on the premise "large is bad for community."  At least there is the presumption that beyond certain membership limits, community simply cannot be meaningful.  And so much of the writing on "community" carries this tone if not this explicit teaching.  To have "community," we're told, we must have small clusters of people that really get to know one another.

But let's take the question in two parts and invite everyone to dive in on this.

1.  Is it possible for a community of 300+ "to be united in purpose"?  I'd say very definitely "yes."  In fact, there are organizations and groups far larger than this that unite in purpose.  We read of the early church: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.  Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.  All the believers were together and had everything in common.  Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.  Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts." (Acts 2:42-46a)  We're talking a church of a few thousand at this point, certainly larger than 300.  And they were united in purpose because they were united in the apostles' teaching.  And they met together--not once a week--but every day in the temple courts!

We see other churches exhorted to the same like-mindedness (Phil. 2:2) and unity (Eph. 4:1-6).  And praise the Lord, I think there are plenty of living and breathing examples of this kind of common cause among churches today.  Many church leaders rather skillfully use their church's statement of faith, covenant, budgets, membership practices, and the Lord's Supper as means for cultivating common cause and unity.

2.  Is it possible for a community of 300+ to be "so connected that all suffer/rejoice together and that all have "the same care for one another"?"  Again, I would say "yes."  That's the very thing that is so striking about 1 Cor. 12:24-25--"God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.  If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it."  This is God's work.  "In fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be" (1 Cor. 12:18).  The Father intentionally organizes the body in such a way as to: (a) rule out division in the body, and (b) promote equal concern between the parts.  That's what it means to be the body.  "The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body.  So it is with Christ." (1 Cor. 12:12).  And this is God's work.  The more I stare at 1 Cor. 12 the more enamored and awed I am of the church.

If we aren't doing this, we aren't being the body.  But if we are doing this, God is wonderfully at work, and it probably means we're working very hard at it and that the "equal concern" isn't necessarily expressed in equivalent ways.  In other words, "showing equal concern for each other" does not mean that 299 members provide precisely the same response with the 1 member suffering/rejoicing.  There may be different responses and yet equal concern.  And, I've seen this maintained in a congregation of 500.  That congregation had an active small group ministry, and lots of good things happened in them.  But the members owned the whole body, and the equal concern was expressed in things like the evening service, table fellowship (which we see in Acts 2:46b), individual acts of care and service, as well as coordinated acts of empathy and love.  It takes all of that, but it's very doable with God's help and the blessing of His Spirit.

I'm convinced that one of the reasons our churches aren't as strong as we would hope is that so few Christians have actually had this experience in a local church and consequently so few expect to see it happen or to contribute to it happening. 

Well, that's my quick two cents.  Others??

I have really enjoyed listening to the recordings of 5000+ attendees singing to the Lord at Together for the Gospel '08 (I got an early version!). Sovereign Grace Ministries recorded and produced the album and the whole project fits their slogan: Sound+Doctrine. This would be a great Christmas gift. Pre order at the Sovereign Grace website. Happy listening!

I sat down this morning to write a post on procrastination. But a quick Google search revealed the CJ Mahaney has been blogging on this topic for over a week now, so instead of writing something new (and inferior) I will commend those three posts (so far) to you.

I am a reforming procrastinator. I hate details, I eschew schedules and calendars. I would rather stick a fork in my eye than sit in a planning meeting. My thinking is that people of extraordinary talent and brilliance simply don't have a mind built for grasping petty details, like whether or not NFL games can end in a tie. Hold on, everyone knows that. Never mind.

But recently I've come to grips with the fact that my procrastination does not serve well the people I lead. It works out OK for my sermons since my family has learned to adjust to my way of doing things (yikes... I don't like the way that sounds). But I notice that large administrative tasks that I must address as the pastor (e.g., the church budget) often get done at the last minute, with unnecessary stress to people who are more organized and scheduled than I am.

As I said, I am reforming. In God's wisdom, I am married to the most organized woman ever to walk the earth. So she's running my Google calendar for the time being. I find the seven (7!) to-do lists a bit overwhelming, as it's stressful to see all of the tasks that you don't have time to do listed out in black and white. But I think that I've accomplished more administration (including administrating the church administrator) this week than I have in the last three months.

If you're at all like me, take a look at CJ's posts. Don't wait. Dig around in your soul and you'll probably find a lot of selfishness and escapism. But the good news is that Jesus died to deliver us from those sins as well!

Greg, I look forward to your post about being a self-righteous Type A calendar fascist.

I don't know why he "selected" (read, "commanded") me to do this assignment.  But, hey, Schmucker is the shadow government behind all the 9Marks conspiracies, and when he says "jump" you don't ask questions before, during, or after the jump.  I think he's descended from czars or something; so he's used to ruling and getting his way.

Case in point: I'm blogging about the use of technology in churches as an effort to build community.  You've probably seen at JT's blog the link to some social networking software developed at Mars Hill and now purchased by Zondervan.  Other churches are using Facebook.  Some use blogs.  Me.  I'm old-fashioned.  I use a black-and-white "membership directory" with photos and contact details.  I use it to schedule lunches and dinners, though I have to use this ancient piece of technology called a telephone (land line; I don't have a cell phone... which is also old... or a crackberry which is newer... but isn't that getting old, too?). 

Anyway, we can't escape technology.  Every since some caveman (young earth guys, please relax; it's just an expression) used a stick to whack berries off the high limbs, we've been technology obsessed and immersed.  There's no escaping it.  First came notches on trees, then the abacus, then calculators, then personal computers.  Technology is a part of life.  That's a given.

But what role should it play in the life of faith?  What uses are appropriate and inappropriate for the gathered life of the church?

I really don't know.  Matt made me blog on this.  But here are some early thoughts.  I'd be interested in yours.  And just to prove I really don't have any good thoughts about this, I need you to know that most of these thoughts (the good ones, anyway) came from a pastor's conference call I had the privilege of participating in yesterday.

1.  Technology can't be used to build "community" for those who don't have it.  So, don't make this a big part of your strategy.  Most older members of most churches aren't connected and don't want to be.  And, they remember the days when you actually had to talk to people to say you had some fellowship.  You're probably not going to serve them well by going Facebook on all the announcements, etc.  And as one young, hip pastor pointed out, we don't want to encourage the "ghettoizing" of the young members of the church.  The young are over connected.  Encouraging them to "build community" by going tech probably won't be helpful for any Titus 2 ministry you're planning.  A third group that this won't work for is the poor.  Most of the world doesn't have computer and Internet and wi-fi access.  Some of the poor in our churches don't.  And if we're talking a non-U.S., non-Western part of the world, even more don't.  So, if doesn't work for 1st century Jerusalem then it's probably not necessary to what Christ had in mind when He built His church (His community, gathering, assembly).

2.  Which brings me to the second caution: we should avoid thinking of technology as in any way essential to being the church.  Some folks write as though the future of the church depends on this thing I'm typing on.  It doesn't.  Never has.  The Bill Gates of Hades shall not overcome the church Christ builds.  There's always something the culturally savvy tells us is do-or-die for the church.  They forget that Jesus said He'll build it--without computers--thank you very much!

3.   Don't use technology in any way that actually undermines community or contradicts the nature of the body.  For example, virtual communion is a bad idea.  The very nature of communion is spiritual fellowship together, as the assembled community.  Or, I would argue, preaching at a camera and beaming the image into homes, across laptops is not the same as being the body.  If the technology undermines all the "one anothering" that's supposed to be going on, it's not helpful to community.  The problem: the prospect of this happening is probably more likely than we think.  Most of the technology "solutions" the advocates offer are actually voyeuristic avoidance of genuine life-on-life community.

Perhaps the western church has been so long without genuine community, life together, that we've sunk to the point where pixels easily replace people.  Be careful that in the name of building community, you don't actually end up demolishing community.

In related news not controlled by Matt Schmucker:

Justin Buzzard offers some guidance about using Facebook.

Respected pastor Josh Harris only spent one week on Facebook.

And I am too.  But Trueman is more eloquent commening over at Ref21:

Am I alone in being sick to death of all the trendy talk about `culture'?   A biblical approach to reality seems to involve, first and foremost, a commitment to the notion of essences.  Culture is very real but, as a social construct it is not the ultimate reality; nor is it, therefore, the ultimate reality.   This seems to me the problem with much postmodernism: it's obsession with culture at the expense of essence has created moral chaos.  For example, how can one have inalienable human rights when there is no inalienable human nature?  Hence the silliness on the left these days where -- surely to Marx's horror! -- moral equivalence arguments are made between feudal genocide, as in Saddam's Iraq, and poverty in post-feudal democracies.  Any Marxist knows that capitalist democracy, for all its faults, is superior to feudalism in every way.  Christians should take a leaf from the books of the palaeo-Marxists and return to talking about nature and essence, not culture.

What about you?  Are you with Trueman, or do you think the current Christian fascination with 'culture' and 'engaging culture' has merit and steam?

IV. We Are Looking for Men Who Are Already Recognized as "Elderly"

- We want men who are known, because they attend.

- We want men who are known as a person of love.

- We want men who are known as a person of wisdom and knowledge and confidence

- Discipling others, serving faithfully.

- Putting the church’s interests above his own.

- All this makes you a center of gravity in the church. Not a loyal opposition center-of-gravity, but a person whom the people of this church are already gravitating to as a pastoral figure.

- We want to say, “How could we not recognize this person as an elder?”

In the past week and a half, I have been fielding more than my normal number of questions from people about the antichrist. It seems that the election results have gone in ways that make some Christians fear that the end times are upon us and evil is making its climactic rise to challenge the authority of God.

Now first let me say that, as much as I am sinfully tempted to snigger at people who see the Book of Revelation under every rock, Christians certainly need to be wise and watchful as they live in a fallen world. So maybe the president-elect is the antichrist. But then again, maybe Tony Romo is. Time will tell. As an Eagles fan, you know which way I'm leaning.

Here's what I think about the question, though:

I don't know if Obama is a Christian or not. If he's not, then he's antichrist in the sense that anyone who is not for Jesus is against him (Luke 11:23). But then so is my next door neighbor who smokes pot in his garage until 5:00 AM on Sunday mornings. Whether or not the president-elect is for Jesus or against him isn't my call to make.

But more importantly, this question seems to take a very America-centric view of eschatology. Monsters like Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and Josef Stalin have all risen and fallen and have not been the harbinger of the end times. But this guy wants to socialize our health care, and Jesus is supposed to be so enraged that he will come storming back to save us?

Please. The Christian faith is doing great. Christ's church is being built. The gospel is exploding in other parts of the world. It's not the end of the world... just because you think America's going down the tubes or because you don't like the guy elected to lead one branch of the government for the next four years.

If you're struggling... just take a deep breath, put down your copy of Left Behind, and pray for the president-elect.