Author: Jonathan Dodson

4 Reasons to Cancel Sunday Service

Posted on April 2, 2009

Last Sunday we canceled our Sunday gathering. We did not have inclement weather. The preaching pastor was not ill. The roads were not blocked. We canceled our service deliberately to take part in Austin’s annual Capitol 10K run and fun run. Over 18,000 people turned out this year.

The run benefits a local charity each year. This year it was Meals on Wheels, a non-profit that delivers groceries and provides services to the home bound and elderly. Our City Groups work with Meals on Wheels so it was a natural cause for us to support. We mobilized our church to participate in the 10K and had a big cookout afterward. In retrospect and in prospect, here are four reasons to cancel your Sunday service.

  1. It enables us to corporately Serve the City, Know the City. By canceling an age-old tradition of Sunday church services, Austin City Life church went public with their commitment to being a church that is genuinely for the city. Instead of gathering in our downtown venue while thousands of runners streamed by, we decided to join our city in a great cause of feeding the needy. We rubbed shoulders with people who need Jesus. We gained a unique perspective of the city. Approaching the capitol with a throng of people, we made our way up Congress St running right to the edge of the capitol building. I poured out prayers for our government and kept running. We saw neighborhoods up close, house after house of people who don’t know Jesus and prayed. We saw the unique architecture and marveled. Heard the great bands and cheered. Laughed at the ridiculous costumes and had a great time with our city. Cancel your service to serve and know the city.
  2. It reinforces how important it is to Be the Church. By canceling our Sunday gathering, we reinforced our belief that church is not merely what we do; it is who we are. Weekend services have actually replaced the church in America. Our landscape is dotted with churchless Christianity. As a new believer said to me recently, it doesn’t matter if I miss a few Sundays because I am with the church throughout the week. Canceling the event and spending time running, cooking, eating, and hanging out was a wonderful reminder that we are the church and that we need one another.
  3. It offers Sabbath rest for a driven society. When we canceled our service, we created much needed rest for many volunteers, deacons, leaders, and pastors. We also created the opportunity for the church to rest in a society that is driven and too busy. We had quite a few people that did not participate in the race. They took the opportunity to relax and enjoy a wonderful day without the demands of work or service attendance. Many of us remarked how nice it was to not be in the service. Is this because we don’t want to worship God, because we don’t love the Word of God, because we are slovenly and indifferent to the gospel? Not at all…but it could also be that it…
  4. Serves as a reminder that very often we are too busy for church. That Sunday “off” came as with unexpected level of refreshment for many? Why? Because very often we are too busy for church. We get so exhausted from our busy lives, that Sunday gatherings of the church are something we discipline ourselves to go to. We work so late that we don’t go to our City Group meetings. We are so exhausted from taking the kids here and there that we can’t imagine having the energy to have people over for dinner to share life with. Unexpectedly, canceling a service can lead people to repentance over sinful busyness and faith in the Sovereign supplier of all things.

Should We Fight…Virtually?

Posted on April 1, 2009

Though war hasn’t breached the shores of American soil in over a hundred and fifty years, America is no stranger to fighting. The steady stream of war headlines continue to remind us that there are many who fight every day to defend our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But despite these reminders, the presence of fighting abroad has left an absence of fighting at home. With very little left to fight for at home, Americans are turning to alternative forms of combat.

Virtual Violence

It’s ironic that the very rights our soldiers die to secure are the rights we fight to sabotage in the gaming world. According to a recent statistic, the online gaming industry will exceed movie rentals in 2009. Virtual fighting is among game favorites. The overnight success of games like The World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto demonstrate that our desire for a fight is far from gone. In a new game called Deadspace, the goal is not merely killing but dismemberment. Consider www.666games.net, a website devoted entirely to violent games like Whack Your Boss, The Torture Game 2, and Orchestrated Death. The 666 Games tagline reads: “Welcome to 666 Games, we serve you the most violent, brutal, sadistic and bloody flashgames on the internet. Always keep in mind it’s just digital violence” (emphasis not added). Is this the kind of combat we have stooped to? Killing our digital boss, torturing virtual people, and orchestrating death? Is our fighting pointed in the right direction? Josh Jackson, editor of Paste magazine, cautions our unthinking participation in violent media:

Violence in the media is a terrible thing. Except of course, for those great battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings…I am really repulsed by the idea of torture-porn flicks like Saw and Hostel, and don’t understand how anyone could enjoy watching them. And I’m bothered by games like Grand theft Auto that put you in the shoes of a gangster. Yet I gleefully watch Samuel L. Jackson burst onto the scene like the vengeful hand of God and lay waste to pathetic junkies in Pulp Fiction…From the Bible to the work of Cormac McCarthy, the best stories are filled with conflict, and often that takes the form of violent antagonists and heroes who fight for justice…So where’s the line?

Where is the line? As followers of Jesus in a digital world, we must wrestle with this question. How do we engage the violence in media? Do we passively participate by cheering our favorite fighter in Ultimate Fighting or should we flip the channel to watch a rerun of Friends? Should we actively participate in virtual slaughter and simply shrug it off as entertainment or does the gospel compel us to draw a line in the sand? What does the Bible have to say about violence and fighting?

Great Missiology from George Patterson

Posted on March 31, 2009

PlantR recently hosted two church planting practitioners who have worked all over the world in contributing to church planting movements–George Patterson and Tony Dale. Both contributors enriched our understanding of church planting and movements. This post will focus on Patterson.

Dr. George Patterson is Adjunct Professor of Intercultural Studies at Western Seminary and possesses 35 years of missions experience. At age 76, he is lively, insightful, and pastoral. It was a remarkable privilege to spend time with him. Making light of academics, his stated goal was to “easify church planting.” Patterson’s interactive discussion revolved around a 6 pointed star diagram that depicts seven non-negotiables in church planting movements.

patterson-diagram

This diagram helpfully brought together the elements of evangelism, worship. organizational structure, financial support, reproducible growth, leadership training all under the rule of Christ. As we worked our way around these points, Patterson provided refreshing, field-based stories and missiological insights. Instead of commenting on each one, I will offer a few of his insights here. We hope to get a U-tube video up soon.

Rabbit and the Elephant

Patterson pointed out there are three main types of churches—rabbits, elephants, and rabi-phants. Rabbit churches are small churches that reproduce quickly. If rabbits were killed as quickly they would quickly outweigh all the elephants in the world. Elephant churches are big churches that have longer gestation periods and reproduce much more slowly, but they are powerful. All too often the rabits and elephants compete instead of partner. A rabiphant church combines elements of a traditional, larger church with smaller missional units of non-tradtional missional churches. He averred that we need all three. This is often not the message we hear from micro/organic/house church voices, so that was refreshing.

Reproducibility

When asked what impedes reproducibility, Patterson offered a variety of insights:

When the sun rises and sets on the pulpit. Quoting from Jonathan Edwards, he  remarked: “A churches greatest weakness is invariably its greatest weakness taken to excess.” Pulpit can strangle mission and evangelistic reproducibility.

Pastoral training by apprenticeship not seminary. Noting that this practice has been effective throughout church history. He was quick to point out that seminary is not the problem, but the way students respond to formal education conditions them for churches that are not highly reproducible, low in cost, and missional.

A group small enough to do the one-anothering and fast reproduction is typically too small to be the church. Small groups cannot have all the gifts of Ephesians 4, nor can they sustain reproducibility. Therefore, the small groups need to rely on one another. There need to be strong relationships between small groups and lots of interaction in order to promote healthy, missional churches.

Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

Posted on March 30, 2009

It has been said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That the beauty of a person or thing is not intrinsic to that person or thing, but is determined by the person who views it. That beauty is subjective, relative, referential. What you find beautiful, I may find ugly but neither of us are right. What matters is that you like it, you take pleasure in it, and if you like it, it may be deemed as beautiful. It’s simply a matter of personal taste. I like Bach, you like Brittney.

Basis for Beauty

But does personal taste actually determine beauty? Is beauty really just a matter of taste, what you like, what pleases you, or does it possess more objective qualities? In his scintillating and illuminating book The Evidential Power of Beauty, Thomas Dubay offers a definition of beauty in line with Science: “the beautiful is that which has unity, harmony, proportion, wholeness, and radiance.” During South by Southwest I saw M. Ward at the PASTE showcase. He opened his set with a 10 minute instrumental, during which he manipulated five strings, a guitar, volume, and silence that evoked an eruption of applause. His songs contain proportion, unity, harmony. Then, I drove down the street to hear a raging metal band screaming at the top of their lungs as they shouted and played indiscernible notes. Very little proportion, unity, and harmony. Which is more beautiful?

Morality of Beauty

It was Plato that described the opposite of beauty as the unpleasantness of seeing a body with one long leg excessively. A disproportionate, asymmetrical person. They say that leading actors must typically have proportionate, symmetrical facial features. Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, regardless of how short they are, they are still considered beautiful, in part, due to the symmetry of their faces. Is beauty, then, not merely a matter of taste, but a matter of symmetry? Of Science? What then are we to do with Tom Cruise’s Scientologist judgment against fellow beauty Brooke Shields, who took medication for her post-partum depression? And what of Gibson’s drunkenness and anti-Semitism? Is there not a moral component to beauty? We should admire a person of great personal beauty, not merely based on their form but also on their substance. Personal beauty extends well beyond possessing physical symmetry. Beauty is moral. It is a virtue, an image of goodness as well as an image of proportion. And we still recognize this kind of beauty. We celebrate the music of Amy Winehouse but bemoan her drug addicted lifestyle. Fans roar when Barry Bonds hits a homerun, while jeering at the sight of his performance-enhanced head. A beautiful performance necessitates honesty, integrity, no cheating. Even a dishonest person appreciates honesty, but appreciation for morality does not require cultivation of morals. However, just because we can recognize the moral component of beauty does not mean that we are, in fact, beautiful.

How do you think Beauty should be defined? Eye of the Beholder? Scientifically? Morally? Why?

For more thinking on Beauty: