I’ll be back tomorrow and so will Stuff Christians Like.

Have a great Labor Day! (International folks, I hope your Monday is delightful too.)

I’m now a writer/speaker for Dave Ramsey. I live in Franklin, Tennessee. (Which is like Nashville’s older, cooler brother).

But how about you? What do you do for a living and where do you do it?

No pressure, I’m just curious and thought I would ask a short Saturday question.

So, what do you do and where do you call home?

1. Reacting to Anne Rice.

2. Sex.

3. Finding a New Church

4. Twitter

5. Having a “Life Verse”

THE 7 PEOPLE EVERY HANDBELL CHOIR NEEDS:

1. The Prima Donna

She’s is listed first because she’s always listed first. She’s better 
than you, and you both know it. She’s not happy unless she has at
 least two bells in each hand, and when members of your choir miss a
 rehearsal, she’s known to commandeer their bells and play them in
 conjunction with her own. She’s like the monkey grinder street musician that can play 47 instruments at once. She could probably play the entire piece by
 herself and doesn’t really need you, but one step at a time. She can’t
 just have a coup d’etat and overthrow the Director….at least not yet.

2. The Legacy

Her grandparents played handbells. Her parents played handbells. In a 
few more years, her daughter will be joining the choir too. This
 member has handbells in her blood. Sometimes she can become a Prima
 Donna. A Legacy member can be 
sniffed out by choosing older pieces of music. She will be unable to 
refrain from saying, “Hey, this is my grandmother’s handwriting on 
this music!”

 She may also subscribe to Reader’s Digest and love episodes of Matlock, which is a weird thing for a 17-year-old to do.

3. The Incredible Hulk of Handbells

Burly and strong, this token male plays the big bells. He’s the guy standing at his own table with at least a dozen bells larger than your head in front of him. Bells that you would need two hands for, he can pick up with ease in one. He’s like the Thor of handbells. And when you finally see a bell that takes both of his massive fists to hold, you think he could have given Quasimodo a run for his money.

4. The Handyman

This indispensable member of the choir often seems to be the most 
popular after rehearsal, with everyone crowding around him trying to
get him to tighten their bell. Give him a bell and he can have it
 fixed in five minutes with a screwdriver, duct tape, and bubblegum. You’ve got to love a choir that requires one member to a MacGuyver. 

This guy is like the NASCAR pit crew of handbells.

5. The Nickelback

This person either can’t read music or has very limited range, like a 
former trombone player who can only read bass clef. She’s sometimes
 mistaken as a Prima Donna because she’s so territorial, but it’s
 not about territory. It’s about being able to play. She can’t switch 
spots with you because she can’t read the music at the other spot. So 
please, stop bothering her. She is a one hit wonder, or rather a one bell wonder and she would sooner hit you over the head with her bell than give it up. Like Nickelback’s endless stream of songs that all involve you living like your dying, if today was your last day, remember the photographs, this person’s bell playing all sounds the same.

6. The Mercenary

This member does not even go to your church. Likely they attend a 
contemporary church nearby. So most Sunday mornings they’re singing 
their fancy hymnless devil music, but come Sunday afternoon they’re at your church 
ringing like the most holy. In rare cases, a mercenary plays at more
 than one church. This factor can be tested by trying to change the 
time of handbell rehearsal one day. If they complain, then it’s
 probably because they have another rehearsal to get to.

 They also tend to have above average forearms.

7. The Director

The Director has unnatural powers bestowed directly upon her by God.
 This crucial member has the power to make you take your hands off the
bells with a flick of her wrist. She’s been known to simultaneously 
direct and play to make up for that one empty spot. She can catch
 accidentally thrown bells out of midair. Often, she doubles as the 
Handyman. Don’t cross this magical creature. She holds more power in 
her baton than you will ever see in your life.

These are the people I’ve noticed in the various groups I’ve been in. 
(Yes, I’m the mercenary. I’ve simultaneously been in handbell choirs
 for churches I don’t even attend). If you’ve been in handbells, have
 you noticed these people? Which person are you? If your church doesn’t 
have handbells, then shame on you. You must go to one of those devil
 music places.

(For more great stuff from Amanda, check out her blog.)

The first one had a hardware and software failure.

The second one sounded like an old timey cotton gin. It was so loud she held it up to our landline at home when she was on the phone with Apple support and they urged her to bring it in. Immediately.

The third one? We’ll see.

The worst part is that she holds me responsible. Because I’ve had one for a year and like Apple, she assumes that I might have hand built these defective iPhones. She’ll call me in the middle of the day and say, “Guess where I am, the Apple store.” Then she’ll get a new iPhone and shake her head at home. Thanks Steve Jobs.

Experiences like this have probably jaded me a little about technology and all the advances in convenience and awesomeness we’re supposed to have reaped. (Although we still don’t have Back to the Future hoverboards.) That’s probably why when someone sent me something crazy that churches are starting to do, I got worried.

I’m talking about fancy pulpits.

My friend Dennis sent me a link to an interesting site called “pastor gear.” On it, they had a new pulpit that was designed to hold the iPad. I’ve joked about pastors reading Bible verses from the iPad during sermons, but this is a whole new level. I do have some thoughts about this though:

1. Depending on where your church is, you might get pulpit jacked. Seriously, don’t be surprised if at someone steals your pulpit for the iPad.

2. You can’t preach a sermon about how badly the church needs people to tithe from a fancy, iPad equipped pulpit. You can’t.

3. You’re probably going to be tempted to play Angry Birds or Bejeweled during the middle of a service.

4. Based on my experience with AT&T reception, don’t be surprised when you lose a connection and your sermon “gets dropped.” I expect a whole lot of “can you hear my sermon now?” from the pulpit.

5. I like pastors who sometimes punctuate a message by hitting the pulpit with their fist. Please don’t replace that movement with a swipe of the iPad touchscreen. It’s nowhere near as dramatic.

6. If you’re going to preach from an iPad you better have the typos fixed in your worship music slides. And you better retire the waterfall or sunrise backgrounds you use for every song. You can’t update the pulpit and then keep the rest of your church old school.

7. If you get one of these fancy pulpits you won’t be able to store random, weird things in those big coffin sized pulpits we used to have. Those things are great, they’re like the attic in Goonies. Full of treasure maps and oddities.

As many questions as I have about these new pulpits, that’s not the technology I’m most concerned with. What really keeps me up at night is the thought of ushers being equipped with tasers. I recently read that right now, every three minutes in America, someone gets tasered. Let’s pray we never have ushers who are allowed to jolt you a little in order to make you scoot in to the middle so that late comers can sit in your row. Imagine tasing someone in the neck who was too slow with the offering basket?

The implications are horrifying.

What technology would you love to see added to church?

Race cars, lasers, aeroplanes, it’s a duck-blur.

Might solve a mystery or rewrite history …

If you grew up like I did, you know the next words that to gem of a song. It’s “DuckTales, ooohhh, ooohhh.” That’s the chorus to the show DuckTales. My wife bought volume 1&2 on DVD for the move up to Franklin, Tennessee and my kids have loved them. And why shouldn’t they? That song is the jam. I hope someday that Timbaland and Justin Timberlake will do a remix. Maybe even throw in Ludacris. He makes his own cognac now, how easy would that be to rhyme with the word, “Quack.” (Sippin on Luda cognac, while my books Huey, Duey and Louie say, “Quack, quack.” Phresh!)

The only thing is that my four-year-old daughter, McRae or what the streets call her, “Crae Bear,” can’t say the names of the kids. She calls one of them “Gooey.” So at dinner she is constantly telling us stories of what sort of tomfoolery or donnybrooks Gooey has gotten into lately.

Kids are like that. They are fountains of fun, constantly bubbling out ideas and questions and quotes that are hilarious. But sometimes, they punch you in the stomach. Sometimes they throw curveballs you don’t see coming and that’s exactly what my 7-year-old L.E. did two days ago.

I was putting her to bed, at 6:45PM, which is probably my only gold medal parenting move. They get up at 6:45AM so they need the sleep, but we were out late one night at 8:15PM and one of my kids said in wonder, “Look at all these people out so late, why are they still awake?”

We had finished reading a book and I was about to turn off the light when she sat up and said, “Dad, I have a question for you. What have you noticed is my talent?”

Maybe that doesn’t sound that big to you, but what I heard was a little different. In her simple question I heard, “Dad, you know me best. You and mom are the people I trust most. Please define me. Please tell me why I’m special and what I’m good at. Please tell me who I am.”

That’s what I heard, but the crazy thing about her question is that we adults still ask it. Today, across the planet, people like me and people like you are going to walk out their front doors and ask people they see, “Who am I?”

At jobs, we’ll ask our bosses and coworkers to define us.

At school, we’ll ask our teachers and classmates to tell us we’re special.

At home, we’ll ask our spouses or boyfriends and girlfriends to tell us we matter.

In a thousand ways today, like a seven year old who is moldable and curious and undefined, we will seek out friends and strangers, bosses and spouses and ask them who we are.

And the sad thing is, the answers will fail us.

They won’t satisfy, they never do. That beat, beat, beat of our inquisitive heart will not be stilled by their words. That hurt, hurt, hurt of our heads will not be numbed by our accomplishments. That hope, hope, hope of our souls will not be quenched by this world.

And so we’ll ask someone else, we’ll seek it somewhere else, we’ll sit up in beds and classrooms and cubicles and say, “What have you noticed is my talent?”

But let me save you the time, let me save you the trouble of digging through the mud for an answer that will ultimately prove hollow. For although I might not know you, for although we might never meet, I do know the God who knows you, and he is not quiet about who you are. Actually, he won’t stop talking about who you are.

You are the reason he rises in the morning. (Isaiah 30:18)

You are the one he quiets with love. (Zephaniah 3:17)

You are the one he longs for. Not just likes but longs for. (Isaiah 30:18)

You are a child of God. (John 1:12)

You are an heir to the throne. (Galatians 4:7)

You are his workmanship. (Ephesians 2:10)

Today, the world and the people in it will try to tell you who are. That’s just how this planet spins, but that’s not an open question. That’s already been determined. Whether you’re a mom in Australia or a student in Ohio, a teacher in London, or a surfer in California, I already know who you are.

You are the only part of creation God breathed to life. (Genesis 2:7)

And that’s enough.

That was the title of a post that was written in response to a CNN article I wrote. In the post the author ripped me apart, questioning my love of democracy, apple pie and freedom.

But I think it was a joke. It has to be, it was so over the top and hateful that I have to assume they were just joshing. (I’m bringing the words, “joshing” and “no doy,” back by the way.)

My biggest clue that it was a joke was that they didn’t use the preferred way to express Christian angst … the open letter.

An editorial device in which you vocally, visibly pen a letter to a person or company and then post online or in a newspaper, the open letter is a staple of Christian rage. We are to open letters what Shakespeare is to plays. We are able to craft them like no other. They flow from our pens like water down a cold Colorado mountain. We type them with the speed and intensity of a red bulled hummingbird.

Maybe you’ve never written one though. Maybe you’re not aware of how to handcraft this type of missive. Allow me to provide you with:

The 6 rules of writing an open letter

1. Always address your open letter to someone famous.

No one wants to read your open letter about your next door neighbor whose dog uses the bathroom in your yard. You won’t get any attention from crafting “An open letter to Frank Johnson.” Boring. Instead, write the open letter to Miley Cyrus’ parents.

2. Explore the “open tweet.”

Traditional handwritten open letters are so 2000 and late. Consider penning an “open tweet.” Much shorter, but yet still highly public, the open tweet is a great way to express your anger. I’ve mentioned before that someone once tweeted that they were going to stop following me on twitter because I tweeted about the Oscars too much. That was a well played open tweet. (In my defense, had I known his personal limit for Oscar-themed tweets, I would have been able to accommodate him.)

3. Always ask for something wildly difficult in your open letter.

The point of an open letter is to ask some wicked famous to do something wicked difficult. Dear Google, please remove all porn from the internet permanently in the next 48 hours. Thank you.” When it comes to the open letter, remember, “Go big or go home.”

4. Never try any other method of contact first.

I’m not famous, so I should never get open letters written about me, but when someone does criticize me and I write back, they rarely respond. That’s because most times, criticism online isn’t about creating real, tangible change or resolving an issue. It’s about attention or frustration. So don’t email a person or contact their website, go right to open letter mode.

5. Wait 24 hours before you post or share your open letter.

Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team, posted an open letter after LeBron James said, “I wish I could quit you, and it turns out I can.” The NBA fined Gilbert $100,000. I don’t have that cash and if you don’t either, please be very, very careful about waiting 24 hours before writing your letter.

6. Use capital letters sparingly in your open letter.

IF YOU YELL THE WHOLE TIME, NO ONE WILL READ YOUR LETTER. YOU NEED TO DROP LITTLE “YELL GRENADES.” HAVE A normally capitalized paragraph and then out of nowhere, blow something up like, PLEASE STOP SELLING RAP ALBUMS WALMART! Boom!

A Christian list with 6 points and not 7 is just begging for an open letter. Before you pen one though, how about helping me complete this list?

Have you ever seen an open letter you thought worked well?

Is there anything you would add to this list on how to create one?

Where her first book was for pastors, this book is for everyone. Anne was kind enough to share one of the essays from the book. Anne decided to share seven essays on seven different blogs, this being the second. To read the rest of the essays, check out the links at the end. Anne is also giving away a copy of her book to two commenters, chosen at random, on Friday. So check out the question at the end and leave a comment to be entered to win.

You can pick up a copy of the book here.

The free essay is after the jump.

Essay #2 – The Final Brick

As I got older, the disconnect between what I’d read in the Bible and what people in the church would actually say or do became more apparent and more confusing. If there was anything being a Very Traditional Southern Baptist taught me, it was that I needed to know my Bible.

I think that if those really mean, really political people in the church really knew the power the words of the Bible held, they wouldn’t want us reading it and memorizing it so much in Sunday school. Themes of grace, forgiveness, and love are woven in and out of the tissue-thin pages. But proof of the opposite is more than often what so many of us experienced if we’ve spent any amount of time in church or around church people.

When I was sixteen, my family was at the last church my dad would ever pastor. It was in the booming town of Abilene, Texas. We had lived there around three—maybe four—years, and the inevitable mess of real life began to take its toll. People began to show who they really were, complaining about this or demanding that, and justifying their actions with “for the Bible tells me so,” or “My daddy laid the foundation of this church,” the latter statement carrying more weight than the former.

My dad, who was the senior pastor at this church, was passionate about caring for people who are far from faith. Because he believed everyone in the church should participate in helping others, he taught classes coaching people on why we should be concerned for our community and how to love people when they are going through a difficult time.

However, most people at this particular church had been members for life. Nobody had ever asked them to step out of their pews before. To them, you went to church three times a week, and that was how you found Jesus and built your mansion up in heaven. My dad was the one getting paid to care for people. Why in the world would he ask them to do the same without getting paid for it?

His challenging the status quo did not sit well with some of the congregation. After a few months of tension and secret meetings, my dad was asked to resign his position at one of the church’s monthly business meetings.

And they didn’t ask kindly either. An avalanche of insults and lies tumbled down on my family and on another pastor in the church who supported my dad.

Things got ugly.

My mom started to cry.

People started yelling.

Filled with teenage impulsivity, I stood up.

I was done not saying things in church.

Flipping my Bible to Ephesians, I started reading about the unity of the church and how we needed to do everything to preserve it. How dare these people call themselves followers of Christ when all they did was fight and hate and lie? Still out to prove my point, I quickly thumbed to John 13 (see, all those Bible studies did come in handy) and said that the world is supposed to know we’re followers of Christ by the love we have for each other. What if someone who wasn’t a Christian had been sitting in the meeting? How would that person see Christ?

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. And in my ears. And in my throat. And feet. I realized what I had just done and felt a little dizzy.

Being a teenage girl and trying to preach (sorry, teach) unity to a Very Traditional Southern Baptist Church as they’re in the middle of splitting isn’t the best way to have a message received. The rage the church members were projecting on me floated across the sanctuary to the second row and burned up my face. I turned a Bloody-Mary mix red, a combination of anger and embarrassment.

Nobody said a word, but it was crystal clear I needed to leave. After regaining the feeling in my legs, I stormed out, slamming the heavy wooden door behind me. That night, I felt like not only had people abandoned us, but we had been abandoned by God. I wrote a letter to Him, addressing Him as “Nobody,” about the faith I was about to leave behind.

Another brick had been placed in the wall I had been building around my heart in an attempt to protect it from the damaging battles that raged in the church.

And this brick was the final one.

My dad resigned as pastor of that church at that meeting, and both he and my mom began searching for jobs. Whoever got the best job first would determine our family’s future. More than likely, we’d be moving.

Again.

——

Have you ever had an experience where how people in the church acted and what the Bible says didn’t' line up?

——

For the first essay, visit Don Miller’s blog here.

For the next essay, visit Carlos Whittaker’s blog here.

“I think when you put sex and spirituality in the same bottle and shake it up, bad things happen.”

I disagree.

Although that specific quote was about Lady Gaga, I think it’s indicative of something much bigger and much worse. Put simply, our culture has divorced God from sex.

I’ve long said that popular culture often acts as if God might have invented humanity and thus sex, but he was completely caught off guard that sex was an enjoyable activity. He was convinced it was a very clinical activity designed for baby making. But then Prince showed up and told us all that sex was in fact awesome. Upon hearing this, God was as shocked as I was the first time I used the Shazam app on my iPhone to automatically tell me the name of a song I was listening simply by me holding up my phone near the speaker. (I swear, that thing is voodoo.)

That’s what we’ve been told. That God and sex don’t go together. And if you say something enough times, people start to believe it’s true. Even pastor’s kids like Katy Perry will reinforce the barrier between God and sex. You can’t have both in the same bottle. They’re oil and water. Cats and dogs. Spencer and Heidi. They just don’t go together.

So what has our response been to this dynamic, to the idea that God and sex shouldn’t be in the same sentence?

I’d love to say Christianity has knocked it out of the park and ransomed the beauty of this gift from the world, but I’m not sure we have. In fact, I think we’ve caused our own damage in four ways:

1. Sometimes, we teach guilt, not abstinence.

I touched on this a little in the Stuff Christians Like book. Lots of our churches and youth groups teach kids for years that “Sex before marriage is bad.” And I agree with that message. I’ve seen the damages of pre-marital sex hundreds of times. The challenge though is that’s only half of the message. I wish when we taught abstinence we would say, “Sex before marriage is bad, but sex when you’re married is awesome.” Because what happens is that during your formative teenage years you hear over and over again about how bad sex before marriage is. And your head and heart shorthand that idea and just tell you that, “Sex is bad.” Then you get married, on your wedding night, you’re supposed to magically, instantly shed all your guilt and fear about sex. We’re taught guilt for years and then left on the doorsteps of our marriages to figure it all out by ourselves.

2. We have very few ways to discuss it.

Because of this site, people often send me links to Christian stuff they think is funny. Every now and then, I’ll get links to “Christian sex sites.” The sites are typically forums where Christians talk in an honest and holy way about their sex lives. Now for the majority of us, that last sentence was weird. Let’s be real, our sex lives are not something we collectively talk about a lot in Christian circles. Our finances, our parenting, our jobs, our in-laws, deep regrets from the past, we’ll touch on anything in a small group. But broach some sexual topic at your next small group and people will look at you like your F to the E to the R to the G to the I to the E. That’s off limits. It’s supposed to be beautiful and holy and loving. And yes the world is attacking it everyday in thousands of ways, but you’re supposed to discuss that on your own as a couple. Maybe you’ve had a different experience in small group but we were in one that didn’t touch on that subject for the first three years or so.

3. We write 10 books about lust for every one book about the gift of sex.

God Bless the stuff folks like xxxchurch.com are doing. Buy Breaking Free or the Samson Pirate book. I love both of those. I’m happy for all the work that’s being done to free people from the bondage of sexual addiction. But I wish that for every time I heard about the poison of lust, I heard about the perfection of love. I wish every time someone preached on the problem of sex, someone preached about the untamed awesomeness of sex. The conversation has become very one sided when it comes to Christians and sex.

4. We’ve made the crayon box pretty small.

Have you ever prayed before sex? Have you ever applied every ounce of God given creativity you have to it? Have you ever made a Christian songs sex tape? OK, that last one is impossible, Michael W. Smith just doesn’t make music like Sisqo. But seriously, I think to some degree we’ve bought the lie that the world gets to have wild, crazy sex and Christians, holy folks like us get to have black and white, two dimension sex. But what if that’s wrong? What if the God who overflows us with love and hope and mercy, wants that part of our lives to be as big and as colorful as two married people could possibly imagine?

Those are the problems, or rather some of them, but what’s the solution? What’s the answer? What’s the fix? Those are fair questions, but there’s no way I could possibly solve the sex situation in a blog post. Here though is what I hope.

I hope that every time we say sex before marriage is harmful, we’ll say “sex after marriage is neon awesome.” I hope that some well-designed, honest Christian sex site will launch. (Feel free to use the variation, “Sexy Stuff Christians Like.”) I hope that Thomas Nelson and Zondervan and Baker and some other folks will release some wild books about the goodness of Christian sex.

Until then though, until all of those things happen, you should at least go download Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” the Sundays, “Wild Horses,” and Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You.” Those are all some pretty fantastic make out songs.

Your turn, what are your thoughts on this subject? Are we Christians getting it right or wrong when it comes to sex?

The result is his book, “God and Football: Faith and Fanaticism in the SEC.”

Zondervan has been kind enough to donate 5 copies to readers of Stuff Christians Like.

To enter, simply comment with an answer to this question by Tuesday, August 24.

“What’s your favorite sports team?”