charlieDEAN’S Blog

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Okay, he’s continuing the list of theories of atonement from the last session.  I’ve missed a few…Actually…I missed most of them… Session Four is a Question & Answer… you’ll have to pony up $35 and attend the conference if you want the Q&A.  It’s too hard to take notes on! Grace & Peace…enjoy the snow! 

Cross-Centered PreachingIt seems that the intent of this session is to talk about the differing theories of atonement.  He’s arguing that we hold all of them as true & relevant to pastoral ministry and not pit one against another

•  you’re not preaching Jesus until you preach his death 
• “I believe that across the world, the doctrine that is most under attack is the doctrine of the atonement.”
• Paul was not speaking hyperbole when he said, “I seek to know nothing, but Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2)

1. The big idea of the cross is the penal substitutionary atonement, and nothing else.
2. “Christus Victor” — Jesus defeated Satan
3. Christ is our redemption – 
4. Jesus is our new covenant/sacrifice
5. Jesus is our justification  (on N.T. Wright: his stuff on the kingdom and the resurrection is amazing…but when it comes to justification it’s “swing & a miss.”  Wright tries to marry the reformation doctrine of justification and reconcile it with catholicism.)
6. Jesus is our propitiation (God’s wrath is averted because of Jesus.)
7. Jesus is our expiation (he takes away the wrong done to us…cancels all sin)

I’m at Riverside Community Church in downtown Peoria today for a one day conference with Mark Driscoll.  As normal, when I attend a conference, I’ll take notes here.  For the most part, I’ll simply record what he’s saying, and then wrap up with some of my own thoughts later.

•  ”our church does a lot of things, but the teaching of the Word is the tip of the spear”
• how you preach will be driven by what you think about the Bible
• there are different ways of teaching (expository, textual, topical) and they’re all fine, but make expository (working through books of the Bible) your bread & butter.
• Questions to ask about preparing a sermon:
  • What does the Bible say?  (Not what do I want to say?)
  • What does it mean? (This is where you start into commentaries…for the first question you meditate, pray, read the Bible, etc.
  • What will make this memorable?
  • What will the objections be to this truth?  (Assume resistance — assume that people will make excuses in their mind.)
• What does this mean to the gospel?
• How is Jesus the Savior?  (Say the name of Jesus all the time.  Everyone defines “God” in whatever way they want.)

I know this post is going to send you “Mac haters” into maniacal giggling fits of glee, but here goes anyway… I’ve been a Mac-user for just over a month now.  So far, I’ve liked everything about working on the Mac OS…and I love my 15″ MacBook Pro.  Except this:When I just got my new notebook out of the box…one of the first things I had to do was type my name, and the “c” key was unresponsive — or at least you had to give it extra-emphasis to get it to work.So I took it in to the local authorized Mac repair place and wow! do they lack customer service!  (When I’ve called Apple, they’re great…just the local place is frustrating.)  Anyway, they replaced the keyboard…no problem (once they returned my calls, emails, etc.)  So, I thought everything was fine, and then that night as I shut off the light in my office and the backlighting on the keyboard started to come up, it suddenly went off and started to flash…Long story short…after countless emails to the local repair center and after taking it in 3 different times, and getting the keyboard replaced (again) as well as the whole top replaced, yesterday I boxed it up and sent it back to Apple.Lucky for me, my friend Adam had an old iBook sitting at home that he only uses as a backup, so he’s letting me use it.  It’s not near as fast as my notebook, but it’s better than sitting in my office staring at a wall!Hopefully I’ll have my notebook back early next week. 

Before the industrial revolution, most people didn’t “go to work.”  Work was on the family farm, or one’s trade was plied in the home.  With the advent of machinary and the factory, men (and eventually women) started leaving their homes 8-12 hours a day to “go to work.”Another of the changes that’s happening in my life is a convergence of “home life” and “church life.”  With my office here at home I find myself much more a part of the rhythm of my family and I also find my family more attuned with the rhythms of my ministry.It probably means that I’m actually “working more hours” than I did when I worked in an office, but if feels like less.One of the coolest things, in my opinion, is that every morning, because I start the day fairly early and my office is right next to my two oldest sons in the basement, they come in and say “good morning” to me right after they get up — and they get to see their dad, with his Bible open, reading — and that too, is a good thing. 

Okay, I joined a new gym 3 weeks ago, and I do have sore muscles…but that’s not what this post is about.This season of life is interesting…everything is changing…developing new rhythms and patterns of doing life & ministry.One of the things that’s quite different is my own personal study/reading habits.  Someone was asking me yesterday about what is driving us in planting Imago Dei, and for me at least, one of these things that’s burning in me is a passion to teach the Bible. (Maybe someday I’ll do a post on my perception of a growing Biblical illiteracy in the American church, that deeply saddens me.)And so, for maybe the first time since leaving Seminary, I’ve found myself deeply reading commentaries — and not just sections, but actually reading through them.  Currently, our leadership team is working through 1 Corinthians, so I’m reading The NIV Application Commentary: 1 Corinthians by Craig Blomberg (one of my seminary profs), Conflict & Coommunity in Corinth: a Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians by Ben Witherington and on occasion I’m consulting NICNT: The First Epistle to the Corinthians by Gordon Fee.It’s work, but very invigorating — stimulating intellectual/spiritual muscles that I haven’t flexed in years.Good stuff. 

Last week, I talked about being a “vision collector.”  And before I throw you this quotation about that idea, make sure you read the comments…Brandon’s is great with additional catagories of “vision filter” and “vision reminder.”

Anyway, I’m almost finished with Tim Keel’s book Intuitive Leadership, and in chapter seven, “Being Here, There and Everywhere,” he spends considerable time interacting with Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class (which is now on my “to read” list, for sure).  He’s talking about theories of emergence and emergent thinking and talks about how ideas and creativity isn’t a one-way street — that they should come through a dynamic flow & interaction between “top-down thinking,” and “bottom-up” thinking.  Keel quotes Alan Roxburgh in his book, The Sky is Falling!?!:

“…the role of leaders is to cultivate environments that release the missional imagination of the people of God.   Leadership as cultivation is about creating environments within which God’s people shape their own missional life.  This accounting of leadership takes seriously the biblical understanding of the people of God as the place where God’s Spirit is most specifically at work.  It is in and through God’s people that God’s future emerges.”

Here’s where the rubber hits the road.  For me, as I lead our leadership team at Imago Dei, some of the questions that I think we have to come back to over and over again, if we’re are going to create an emergent environment, are these:

• What is God doing in our community?
• Where do we see new, creative ways of thinking/doing things in our church?
• What is capturing the attention of the prophets, artists, musicians and people who are “in the trenches”?
• How do our young members of the community think?  (I’m convinced that God often stirs the hearts of young adults first.)

Just for fun, I’m asking what you would do with this scenario:

I have no idea where this idea sprouted from, but earlier this week Caleb and Gavin who are almost 7 & almost 5, decided to write God a letter telling him how much they loved him.  So they wrote notes and left them Tuesday night at the ends of their beds so God could come in the middle of the night to take them away.  When Tuesday morning came and the notes were still lying there on the bed, they — and especially Gavin — were crushed.  So on Wednesday night they left the notes again, and this time, in his bedtime prayers Gavin earnestly asked God to take his note.

So here’s the quandary: if you were Jennifer and I, do you go into their room at night and take the notes off the bed?

Obviously, I know what we did…and I’ll tell you in advance, we laughed about this for a couple minutes on our leadership team and there was no consensus.  I’ll let this go for a little while, then I’ll tell you what we did.

In a recent meeting, a friend used this phrase “vision collector.”  I can’t remember what he was referring to specifically, but that phrase really stuck with me.  Here’s why:

When you read stuff about leadership, you often hear that “the leader” is to cast vision for “the people.”  It’s very stratified.  If you’re the big dog, you get to determine what all the “troops” will be doing to accomplish your vision.

What if my job as leader isn’t to always be the one who comes up with the vision, but the one who collects the collective vision of everyone in the church?  What if my job is to listen to stories and hear different people’s passions and then figure out how all those visions, put together, create THE vision.

It seems like it would be hard work — but, I wonder if it’s much more faithful to this verse, than one leader as the “vision creator.”

Now, I’m not saying that my vision for the future in inconsequential…obviously, as the lead pastor at Imago, my dreams/desires/vision for the future is a significant piece…I’m just trying to say, I don’t think it’s the only piece.