MondayMorningInsight

I Don’t Think T-Dog is Reading the Same Bible as Us…

2009-11-20T12:45:02+00:00

You gotta love cable access shows, especially when you pair a really serious KJV guy with someone who wants to talk about this particular Bible passage...

Let Henrietta and Merna Be the First to Wish you a Merry Christmas!

2009-11-20T12:42:27+00:00

A special thanks to the folks at Tominthebox for sharing this wonderful Christmas song. I hope you enjoy!

Kenny the Banana Makes his Debut on Christian TV

2009-11-20T12:37:21+00:00

Everyone loves a person in a giant banana suit. Especially Christians. Come on... you know you like it! What's the weirdest thing you've ever seen on Christian TV? Todd

Gotta Love Jack Van Impe… But Come On…

2009-11-20T12:29:33+00:00

Jack's now predicting the Tribulation to begin because of the new One World Order (John 2:34) brought on by Barak Obama (Isaiah 6:42). I've watched Jack Van Impe off and on since I was a child (Ez. 7:19), and he's always had a plan (Mark 2:14) that kept us on our toes (Lev 2:34) and prepared us for what is to come in the next six months to two years (Phil. 3:14). What do you think? (Hez. 3:31)?

Stressful Jobs that Pay Badly: #10 Pastor; #5 Worship Pastor

2009-11-19T14:06:20+00:00

You think your job sucks? You may have just gotten some confirmation. According to this article from CNNMoney.com, two major church roles have the distinction of being the most stressful jobs that pay badly! Coming in at #5: Music Ministry Director Median pay: $40,800 % who say their job is stressful: 67% You may not think of people who plan, direct and conduct performances for religious services as being under a particularly high amount of stress. But they also choose the appropriate psalm or hymn for every wedding and funeral -- only some of the most important events in a family's life. And those stressful situations can create some demanding clients. "Every now and then you'll get a strange request," said Dan Fenn, Music Ministry Director at St. John's Lutheran Church in Northfield, Minn. "A couple of years ago I got a request to play the Beer Barrel Polka at a funeral. You have to ask yourself, is this appropriate for a worship service?" Coming in at #10: Minister Median pay: $45,300% who say their job is stressful: 71%They may answer to a higher calling, but all that spirituality does not come stress free. It's a lot of responsibility being an authority on morality. Leading religious worship every week and providing spiritual and moral guidance can be a heavy cross to bear for those in the ministry. "People who are deathly sick, people with substance abuse problems, things of that nature, that can be emotionally draining," said Father Dan Skvir of Princeton, N.J. "I've had calls at 2 or 3 in the morning to come and attend to someone, people in imminent danger of death." You can read more here... What do you think? Todd (Thanks to Jimmy for the heads up to this article!)

Pick a Faith Already: The Changes in Church Affiliation in the US

2009-11-19T12:55:26+00:00

A Pew Research Center survey showed Americans switch religions often. Here are just a few famous people known to convert their beliefs more than once. According to the survey: Americans change religious affiliation early and often. In total, about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives. Most people who change their religion leave their childhood faith before age 24, and many of those who change religion do so more than once. These are among the key findings of a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life. The survey documents the fluidity of religious affiliation in the U.S. and describes in detail the patterns and reasons for change. The reasons people give for changing their religion - or leaving religion altogether - differ widely depending on the origin and destination of the convert. The group that has grown the most in recent years due to religious change is the unaffiliated population. Two-thirds of former Catholics who have become unaffiliated and half of former Protestants who have become unaffiliated say they left their childhood faith because they stopped believing in its teachings, and roughly four-in-ten say they became unaffiliated because they do not believe in God or the teachings of most religions.1 Additionally, many people who left a religion to become unaffiliated say they did so in part because they think of religious people as hypocritical or judgmental, because religious organizations focus too much on rules or because religious leaders are too focused on power and money. Far fewer say they became unaffiliated because they believe that modern science proves that religion is just superstition. Catholicism has suffered the greatest net loss in the process of religious change. Many people who leave the Catholic Church do so for religious reasons; two-thirds of former Catholics who have become unaffiliated say they left the Catholic faith because they stopped believing in its teachings, as do half of former Catholics who are now Protestant. Fewer than three-in-ten former Catholics, however, say the clergy sexual abuse scandal factored into their decision to leave Catholicism. Read more here... Also for a slideshow of some more infamous people who have changed their religion repeatedly, check this out... Todd

New Lutheran Denomination Ready by August for Current Disgruntled ELCA Members

2009-11-19T12:50:05+00:00

A fracture of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America became a real possibility Wednesday with the announcement by dissidents they will have a new Lutheran denomination ready for launch by August. That marks a speed-up in plans by Lutherans who oppose the ELCA’s decision to allow gay clergy to be pastors. “Every day we’re hearing from people asking us to do something, so we are responding,” said the Rev. Paull Spring, chairman of Lutheran CORE. CORE, an umbrella group of Lutheran organizations, led the fight against the gay-clergy vote at the ELCA convention in August in Minneapolis. The measure, which required a two-thirds majority, passed by one vote after days of contentious debate. At the time, ELCA officials asked unhappy members to take no quick action in response to the vote, and delegates to the CORE meeting in Indianapolis agreed to wait a year before moving to split from the ELCA. But last week the second-largest Lutheran congregation in Minnesota, the 4,500-member Hosanna Lutheran, announced it changed its mind about waiting and will take the first of the required two votes to leave the ELCA by mid-December. CORE organizers said their accelerated exit strategy is not tied to any particular church’s decision not to wait. The change in timing is the result of a sense of growing impatience among an increasing number of congregations, said Ryan Schwarz, the chairman of CORE’s Vision and Planning Working Group, the committee that will draw up the framework for the new denomination. “When we talked about waiting a year, we never intended to sit around for a year and just contemplate,” he said. “We expected to do planning. Now we’re also going to be doing the legwork in terms of creating a new church body.” The ELCA has 4.6 million members nationwide. It has 10,391 member churches. Splitting from the parent denomination is not going to be an easy decision for some churches. Of the 87 congregations that have informed the ELCA they are considering leaving, the vote to split has failed in 28 of them. Read More Here

Are Breast Implants a Sin?

2009-11-18T14:05:19+00:00

It all started with this quote from Ingrid Schlueter yesterday: "Breast-enhancement surgery for purposes of engendering male lust is no way to represent Jesus Christ." I was reading my RSS feeds yesterday and saw an article entitled "Carrie Prejean, Sexting, and a Lost Generation". Interesting title, I thought. Then I read the quote. It was interesting and provacative. So I twittered it. It ignited a firestorm on a couple of Christian discernment blogs. And, as usual, Ingrid and her supporter Ken Silva, took me to task. Here's my original tweet: "Breast-enhancement surgery for purposes of engendering male lust is no way to represent Jesus Christ." Ingrid speaks. Ingrid responded on her blog, saying that my tweet was "snarky". Um, all I did was post a quote (along with a link to her blog). Here was her response: So does Mr. Rhoades feel that surgical breast enhancement for the purpose of male is a good way to represent Jesus Christ? I’m interested in that line of thought. Does he have a wife? Does she know what her husband is saying on Twitter? Is she OK with that tweet? Do the “ministry” guys who follow Mr. Rhoades also follow the breast enhancement ministry line of thought? Just asking. So, I guess I'll just answer: First of all, I do have a wife. Thanks for asking. Her name is Dawn. She read the comment and laughed. She suggested that some people have too much time on their hands. She does read my tweets. As for the ministry guys that follow Mr. Rhoades (I guess that would be me), I guess you've all been put into the 'pro-breast ministry' camp. If you want to change affiliation, unfollow immediately (I guess). Let me say, first of all, that I am pro-breast. But to be honest, I've never taken the time to think about the potential sinfulness of breast implants. So... how did we get from a simple accurate quote put in a tweet, to me being 'pro-breast ministry'? That's a leap that I doubt anyone could explain. But seriously... there are two camps here: 1. Carrie Prejean: Quoted as saying: "I think it's a personal decision. I don't see anywhere in the Bible where it says you shouldn't get breast implants." 2. Ingrid Schlueter: Quoted as saying: "For the sake of Carrie’s soul, somebody needs to explain the rudiments of the biblical gospel to her." Let me say: I have no reason not to believe that both these ladies are my sisters in Christ. Both have professed Christ as their Savior. Yet both have extremely different views. Both profess to love Jesus, but both live out that love in desperately different ways. About the original quote from Ingrid. It may surprise her that I actually AGREE with her statement. IF breast enlargement surgery is done for the purpose of getting men to lust after you, it is definitely no way to represent Jesus. My problem with the quote is two-fold: 1. I do not believe that all women who get breast enhancement do so for the express purpose of making men lust after them. 2. I do not believe that all men are sexually aroused by breasts that have been augmented in some way. Does the Bible forbid breast implants? Of course not. Does it promote them? Of course not. And I'm fine with that. Why make a big deal out of something like that? The issue of sin and past lifestyle decisions comes into play here as well. Prejean definitely does have a past. She's done some things that she'd rather not have everyone know about. When you're a Christian in the spotlight, those are never great things to have lying around in your closet. When they are exposed, it is ugly. But you can always count on a great group of Christians ready to beat you with sticks: “Nothing is private,” complained Carrie in a TV interview last week. No, Carrie, not even privates are private. For the sake of Carrie’s soul, somebody needs to explain the rudiments of the biblical gospel to her. (Family values are not the gospel.) Her mentor can move on from there to help her understand biblical modesty and decency. Christ has been mocked and shamed, not because Carrie stood up for traditional marriage, but because she did so in a barely-there bikini. Christ is mocked and shamed every time we sin. But thankfully, we have a Savior who forgives. What do YOU think? Todd PS -- I also thought it was interesting that the term "Sexting" was used in the title of Ingrid's post. Not sure why she used that other than to grab our attention. The article had nothing to do with, or even mention 'sexting'. Also, Ken Silva reminds me that if the men won't speak up, then God will raise up women (like Ingrid) to speak to us: Ken posted: "I’m wondering where the men are in the Christian blogosphere, for if they won’t speak the Lord will use women." Ken also writes: And I also wonder, is Rhoades now prepared to defend Prejean’s “need” to have her body surgically altered in order to better serve Jesus by winning so-called “beauty contests,” and/or to more alluringly model skimpy outfits and underwear? My answer: WHAT? I don't understand how you got to that line of thinking! I'll just answer the question in this way: I really have no concern (nor is it any of my business) how large (or small) Carrie Prejean's breasts are. I simply don't care.

Creativity and Imitation: How to Get More Great ideas

2009-11-18T12:42:45+00:00

Fast Company asks the question: But can society organize itself in such a way as to maximize the number of good ideas it produces? It might sound like an impossible question, but Stefan Leijnen and Liane Gabora at the University of British Columbia in Canada have created a clever mathematical model that offers an answer. Their key insight is that creative ideas can only spread if they're actually adopted by others. Too much creativity, and there's not enough imitation--ideas die on the vine, because there are so many of them and few ever catch fire. For good ideas to spread, there's an optimal balance to be reached between creating and imitating. Leijnen and Gabora modeled that dynamic, and they found that to optimize the profusion of good ideas, we should spend less than 50% of our time on creativity. If some individuals spend all of their time creating new ideas, then they shouldn't comprise any more than 30% of a population. Now, the model is obviously a gross oversimplification of how the real world works--and the model depends crucially on its assumptions about the rate of uptake in ideas. But it does offer some interesting insight to the eternal question of how much time an organization should spend inventing ideas, and how much time it should spend vetting them. Organizations and societies that spend too much time on ideas see their overall fitness decline. Interesting. Could this be true for churches as well? If churches spend too much time on 'ideas' will their overall fitness decline? Maybe we need to spend less time on new ideas, and more time vetting the ideas we already have in our churches? Read more here... Thoughts?

Creating a Culture of Urgency in Your Church

2009-11-18T12:37:16+00:00

My friend Chris Elrod had a great post on his blog yesterday about the culture they are trying to create at Compass Point church... Here's what Chris said... I think it's what the mission of the church is all about. Every hour of every day people are dying without Jesus…and going to Hell. At Compass Point we remind our folks of that each time we meet. We want to create a culture of urgency to reach people far from God with the message of Jesus Christ. We want to take those that have accepted Christ and help disciple them into mature followers of Christ. We want Compass Point folks to know that time is wasting and that every person they meet…might need to meet Jesus. It is urgent that people live each day intentionally looking for opportunities to talk to others about Christ, to be a witness with the way they conduct their lives and to invite people to church. We emphasize that nothing they can do in society, in their jobs, in academic life, in their goals, in their plans…can ever top the importance of reaching people for Christ. Compass Point needs to live in a constant urgency that people need to hear…and see…the Gospel in everything we do…as a church…and as individuals. Thanks, Chris. (You can read more about Compass Point and Chris everyday at his blog). QUESTION: How do you create this type of culture of urgency at YOUR church? Do you? I'd love to hear your thoughts.