Ethereal Thought Train

Merry Christmas from the Engstrom Family!

Todd Engstrom — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:32:21 +0000

Merry Christmas from the Engstrom Family!

Updates on Camden

Todd Engstrom — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:58:25 +0000

For anyone who actually still reads this blog, you can find updates on my nephew Camden here:

http://camdenmoore.wordpress.com

Thanks for praying for him!

Reflecting on Camden

Todd Engstrom — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 02:15:08 +0000

As I’ve been with my family through the ordeal with Camden, there have been a few thoughts that have really struck me. In no particular order, here they are:

-I learned what it is like to beg God…really beg, like I’m desperate for you to do SOMETHING beg. I’ve fervently prayed many times, but I’m not sure I’ve ever gone through a cycle of desperation, resignation, hope, desperation, resignation, hope so many times. It resulted in me simply praying a repetitive prayer to God…I almost felt like a whiny child, and it was good for my soul.
-I learned to be thankful to God for the simple act of peeing. For Camden, this was a major problem for the first 48 hours, and we were overjoyed when he finally did. I’ve never really even considered how relieving myself is a gift of God’s grace. Funny, even a bit gross, but true nonetheless. Even the seemingly banal things of out lives are capable of bringing thankfulness and glory to God.
-I was reminded of the power of a praying community, and blessed by the saints of God both in Austin and all over. I was also reminded that those who don’t love Jesus often have more compassion than those who do…neither compare to the compassion and mercy of the heavenly Father though.
-God is faithful and mighty to save, even when we doubt Him.
-There are untold reasons for everything, but I was grateful to see how this difficult situation was used to catalyze great faith in many, though it was a costly way for the Lord to do it. Only an eternal perspective can make sense of temporal suffering.

Pray for my nephew Camden

Todd Engstrom — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:38:05 +0000

My new nephew Camden was born on April 14th, but has had some serious complications. Initially, he had under developed lungs, and needed a respirator to breath for him.

After about 24 hours and noticing some troubling signs, they took a sonogram of his kidneys, only to find that one was not there and the other was severely malformed.

There are other complications as well, but these are the primary drivers of his illness. They are currently trying to decide the best course of action, but he will definitely need dialysis and a kidney transplant moving forward.

Please spend some time begging God to heal this precious little boy!

Emmaline Elizabeth Engstrom!

Todd Engstrom — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:16:52 +0000

Glory to God! We are so excited to announce the birth of our daughter Emmaline at 5:13 pm on January 25th…she’s beautiful!

Merry Christmas

Todd Engstrom — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:11:44 +0000

Merry Christmas! I pray that the incarnation of our Savior is precious to you today!

Below is our family Christmas card and letter, just in case your interested in a bit of whats going on with the Engstroms.

Ministry vs. Discipleship

Todd Engstrom — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 01:12:15 +0000

My friend Sean Eppers posted some content on the Woodlands Point Pastor’s blog that Tyler David and I did on “Ministry vs. Discipleship” for one of our staff meetings awhile ago. Below is a sample:

Ministry	Discipleship
Reactive	Proactive
Ministry tends to involve a much lower level of relational investment, and for both parties there is a relative degree of anonymity	Discipleship requires a high degree of vulnerability for both parties
Meets immediate, felt needs	Transforms lives and success is replication
Often times leads to immediate results and draws crowds	Often painstakingly slow and difficult with one step forward and two steps back

You can find the rest here. Thanks for posting Sean!

Together For Adoption – 2010 Conference

Todd Engstrom — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:38:21 +0000

This fall, the Together for Adoption Conference will be October 1-2, 2010, in Austin, Texas, hosted by The Austin Stone Community Church and Hill Country Bible Church (the conference venue), and in partnership with Hope for Orphans.

The theme is “The Gospel, the Church, and the Global Orphan Crisis” and I have the privilege of teaching a breakout session on Involving Your Missional Community in Orphan Care.

I hope to see you there!

The Church and The Surprising Offense of God’s Love

Todd Engstrom — Tue, 11 May 2010 14:54:40 +0000

I’ve been reading The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love by Jonathan Leeman, and although I’ve had some disagreements with the book, it has been an excellent read. I wanted to share a few quotes that have been particularly challenging for me.

Below is a good challenge to teaching “community” as the solution to our problems in the church rather than the gospel:

When the theologian or pastor talks the talk of relationship and community rather than the talk of obedience and holiness, he just might be hawking a postmodern prosperity gospel. The poor man’s prosperity gospel is: “Never mind all that stuff about obedience and holiness; Jesus wants to make you rich and happy!” But many of us today in the West are rich. We don’t need the poor man’s prosperity gospel. Rather, we suffer from ennui, angst, and media overload. The relationships we do have are shallow and unsatisfying, so the intellectual sophisticate offers a postmodern prosperity gospel instead: “Never mind all that stuff about obedience and holiness; Jesus will give you relationships, purpose, community.

Next, some thoughts regarding the degradation of external authority, and the true problem of individualism:

I do not believe that the communitarian proposal provides any true antidote to individualism and its corollaries such as consumerism. They argue that community is the antidote to individualism. It’s not, which brings us to one of the central themes of this book: the real problem is anti-authority-ism. At the risk of sounding like the late modernist Friedrich Nietzsche or the radical postmodernist Michel Foucault, it’s all about power. At the risk of sounding like a fundamentalist Sunday school teacher, it’s all about disobedience. Some contemporary writers get this; others don’t. It’s not quite enough to say that the problem of modernity was individualism, because the term is too vague. The problem bequeathed by Descartes and everyone of his ilk is more accurately described as autonomous individualism—auto-nomos meaning “self law”—where we’re letting the adjective, not the noun, do the real work of making our point. The solution to individualism is not community. The solution—one fears to say it without pages of qualifications—is to reintroduce a conception of submission to God’s revealed will as it’s located in the local church. The campaign that Western culture has been waging for several centuries for the individual has been a campaign waged against all forms of authority. From elementary school through graduate school, Western educators have taught us to question authority: the authority of the church because of what it did to Galileo; the authority of the king because of his usurpations; the authority of the majority because of its tyrannies; the authority of males because of their exercise of brute strength and acts of oppression; the authority of the Bible because of its alleged contradictions; the authority of science because of its paradigm shifts; the authority of philosophy because of its language games; the authority of language because it has been deconstructed; the authority of parents because they’re not cool; the authority of the market because of its extravagant inequalities; the authority of the police because of their fire hoses and night sticks; the authority of religious leaders because they’ll make us drink the Kool-Aid; the authority of the media because of its biases; the authority of superpowers because of their imperialism. Are there any authorities left to question? When it comes to what we should believe and how we should live, a ubiquitous suspicion of authority lurks in the minds of most Westerners today, in part because we’re familiar with authority’s savage history of abuses.

With respect the previous thoughts, below is the solution Leeman proposes:

The solution to individualism is not community. The solution—one fears to say it without pages of qualifications—is to reintroduce a conception of submission to God’s revealed will as it’s located in the local church.

His basic argument is that submission the the local church is essential to the nature of biblical community which rightly reflects God’s glory in the world. We simply cannot reject authority in favor of egalitarian community because it undercuts the very nature and character of God. This book has been an excellent balance to many of the other books I have been reading as of late.

Finally, in an unrelated note, I found this quote to be helpful in articulating a God-centered view of the value of human life:

What’s interesting to notice in the Genesis 9 passage cited above is why human life is described as “precious”: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (v. 6). The preciousness of human life, it seems, is found entirely in the fact that humans image God. Our worth is derivative. It’s derived from the one we image. Killing a human is wrong not because God loves us more than anything, but because he loves his own glory more than anything.

Good Friday – Isaiah 53

Todd Engstrom — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:28:15 +0000

Isaiah 53

53:1 Who has believed what he has heard from us? [1]
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected [2] by men;
a man of sorrows, [3] and acquainted with [4] grief; [5]
and as one from whom men hide their faces [6]
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
9 And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.

10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief; [7]
when his soul makes [8] an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see [9] and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, [10]
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, [11]
because he poured out his soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and makes intercession for the transgressors.