Sounds like it'll be good

http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=11201

The Gospel According to U2, Part Two

In my previous post I gave a little information about my church background, both when growing up and now. I will now move on to a description of that Sunday morning in August.

This past summer, when I mentioned to my mother that I was going to be visiting Lubbock, Texas, for a wedding in August, she told me that Jack and Teresa Cooney now live in Lubbock. The Cooneys attended the same church as my family in Pullman, Washington, back in the early 90's. Their oldest children overlapped in age with the youngest three children in my family, so our families ended up spending a fair amount of time together. My mother also had a close friendship with Teresa Cooney, and they stayed in touch after we moved to South Dakota in 1992. I hadn't seen the Cooneys since the early 90's, and I thought it was pretty cool that I got to see them again.

While staying with them that weekend in August, they invited me to go to church with them on Sunday morning. Teresa told me that their church was a seeker-friendly church, modeled after Willow Creek. At that point, my curiosity was piqued and I was hooked. I have friends from BBC that have visited Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in California, and I have heard some extraordinary tales about those visits. For some time I had wanted to visit a seeker-friendly church for a Sunday morning worship service and see myself what it was really like. The opportunity had finally arrived.

We arrived at Live Oak Community Church shortly after the service began on the morning of August 7, 2005. The congregation was singing a song based on the Lord's Prayer. I hadn't sung the song before, but I liked the words (very biblical). The next song took me by surprise. It was "40," written by the Irish rock band U2. It's the last track on their third album, War, and it's based on the first few lines of Psalm 40. Even though it's a biblical song, it still felt strange to sing a U2 song in church. But that's the whole seeker-friendly philosophy: the church service contains familiar elements for non-believers so as to make the church service more comfortable for them. The next song we sang was a song I didn't know called "Let My Life Be Like a Love Song." The last song, though, was another U2 song! It was "Pride (In the Name of Love)." Sure, it contains one line that refers to Christ ("one man betrayed with a kiss"), but I was having a real hard time seeing how that song could be part of a Christian worship service. At that point I began to wonder if I wasn't really in a Christian worship service but was instead watching a U2 cover band. That's what it felt like, anyway.

I hadn't picked up a bulletin on the way in, so I was unprepared for the message. At BBC, the sermon usually consists of the exposition of a particular passage from the Bible. Sometimes it's a topical sermon, where a particular topic will be examined, with the exposition of particular passages that deal with that topic. That morning, at Live Oak Community Church, the title of the message was "The Gospel According to U2, Part Three: Bono by the Side of the Road." As I saw that title on the PowerPoint projection screen with a picture of the Bible and a picture of the band, it seemed that I was entering... The Twilight Zone ("do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do"). And in the twilight zone of a worship service about U2, the selection of songs suddenly made sense.

The message began with a brief introduction to the band U2, to Bono, his message, and his music. Not much time was spent addressing what kind of Christian Bono is (I suppose that would have been in parts one and two). The focus of this message was how Bono exemplified the parable of the Good Samaritan of Luke 10. Instead of just passing by the wounded neighbor on the side of the road, Bono helps him out, and he urges us to do the same thing (literally - the message included a video of Bono calling on us to help our neighbors in Africa by calling our congressmen and asking them to pass legislation to forgive debt to African countries).

After the service was over, I picked up a bulletin on the way out. It turns out that we had missed the first song of the morning, "When Love Comes to Town," another U2 song. Like "Pride (In the Name of Love)," it contains some references to Christ in the lyrics, but it doesn't seem that normally it would have any place in a worship service. Anyways, the service was a lot different than what I was used to (either from the churches of my youth or now at BBC). It was even more "seeker-friendly" than I had expected, too. With something that different, it's important to evaluate it carefully, and biblically.

The Gospel According to U2, Part One

The Gospel According to ...U2?
Nate Milne's Visit to a Seeker-friendly Church

Back in the first weekend of August I took a trip to Texas for a college friend's wedding. While there, I stayed with a family that I hadn't seen in over ten years who currently live in the same city. The wedding was on Saturday, and on Sunday I went to church with the family I was staying with before they dropped me off at the airport for my flight back to Worcester. The church service was rather... different. I'll attempt here to report on what I observed and make a few biblical evaluations of it.

First, I need to make known what my church background is. I was raised in non-denominational churches, what I would now call watered-down non-denominational evangelicalism. The teaching was heavy on the gospel, but it seemed that there were few if any other doctrines that received any emphasis. I knew from a young age that God was holy and that sin was rebellion and disobedience to God and that there was a penalty of death for sin. I knew that Jesus paid that penalty by dying in our place on the cross, and that he rose from the dead. And I knew that if we believe in him, our sins are forgiven and we have eternal life. But that was all I knew. I had seen enough gospel presentations to know the "bridge illustration" inside and out by age ten, but by the time I graduated from high school I hadn't a clue about the doctrines of the trinity, justification, election, the inspiration of scripture, sovereignty, providence, sanctification, etc. I also knew I was a non-denominational Christian, but I would have been unable to tell a Baptist from an Episcopalian or a Methodist from a Roman Catholic. All of those doctrines and differences were rarely if ever mentioned in the churches I grew up in (the problem of modern evangelical churches failing to teach their children is a topic for another essay).

That all changed when I moved to Worcester to attend WPI. I discovered the Christian Bible Fellowship @ WPI, a non-denominational Christian group on campus. I promptly hooked up with them at the beginning of my freshman year, and also, with a little prompting (and wake-up calls) from some older CBF'ers, I soon started attending Bethlehem Baptist Church in nearby West Boylston. The order of worship in the services was very similar to what I had experienced growing up, but the teaching was different. It soon became clear that I was no longer wading around in the kiddie pool of doctrine but was now swimming in the ocean. In other words, it was deep. Real deep. Within a couple years I was learning about all those great biblical doctrines I mentioned earlier and loving it. I was not only learning the Bible cover to cover but was also learning much about theology and church history. By the time I finished at WPI, I was no longer a non-denominational Christian. I am now a Reformed Baptist (1689 LBCF, with minor exceptions in regards to the Law and the Sabbath, to be precise).

The extent to which my faith had changed as it had grown over my college years wasn't obvious to me while it happened, but it was brought out in stark contrast one day in the spring of 2002. My experience at BBC was not the uniform experience of CBF'ers. One who remained a non-denominational Christian invited me to his baptism in Rhode Island one Saturday afternoon. Yet that morning, at BBC, we had a funeral for two twins who had died within a week of their birth. The atmosphere and message of those two events were like night and day. At the funeral, it was a very solemn, weighty occasion, where the gospel of Christ was clearly proclaimed, and the message was that we didn't know why God had decided to take these two babies home at such a young age, yet God is still sovereign and good, so we will worship him. The baptism, on the other hand, was a very happy, light-hearted affair, where the gospel of Christ was barely mentioned at all, and the message was that all these people were being baptized because Christianity is fun. But is Christianity fun when newborn babies die? The best way I can think of to describe the baptism in contrast to the funeral was this: It felt like a different religion.

Dope-smoking Christians?

http://www.christkirk.com/Literature/Marijuana.asp

You need to read this

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/09/20c.html

Wish upon a star

Wish upon a star
WORLD, September 24, 2005
by Gene Edward Veith

Reality TV falls into three basic categories: voyeur shows (Big Brother, The Anna Nicole Show), game shows (Survivor, The Amazing Race), and feel-good shows (The Nanny, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition).

Three Wishes (NBC, 9:00 ET) may be the ultimate feel-good reality show. Representatives of TV-land descend upon a small town, set up a tent, and listen to the people who line up with their supplications. The producers choose three deserving souls and grant their wishes.

A mother wishes for facial reconstructive surgery for her little girl injured in a horrible accident. The high-school cheerleading squad wishes for a new football field, the dream of a coach stricken with leukemia. A boy wants his stepfather to adopt him. The Hollywood visitors "work their magic," as they say, and grant the wishes. Everyone feels good. Everyone cries.

Contemporary Christian music star Amy Grant hosts the show, and she comes across as down-to-earth, sincere, and empathetic. She partially makes up for what is unsettling about the show: Hollywood comes across as an omnipotent deity who answers prayers, performs miracles, and changes lives.

On NBC's website, one can apply to receive the show's beneficence. "We are looking for emotional stories of people in need," says the site. "We want to help deserving people." The wishes have to "come from the heart" but there are "no limits to what this show can do or how many lives it can change. Anything you can imagine will be considered and price is not an object." Unlike the real God, who extends His grace to underserving people, and unlike Christians who are told to give in secret, NBC does its good works, literally, to be seen by men.