Author: Jonathan Dodson

Newsweek, Gay Marriage, & the Bible

Posted on December 9, 2008

If you haven’t heard of the uproar of the passage of Proposition 8 in California by now, here’s your chance to engage in a lively, current and intriguing cultural issue. The debate over the validity of gay marriage and gay rights isn’t new. What is new is a major periodical taking a side in the debate and making it a cover story. Newsweek’s cover story is Gay Marriage: Our Mutual Joy.

Wherever you are on this issue, you need to be there not by blind conviction but by careful and deliberate analysis of both sides of the issue. I have friends who are for and friends who are against. I have gay friends who think it is ridiculous to use the Bible to support gay marriage and friends who think it is silly to use the Bible to rail against gay marriage. And herein lies one of the key problems, those friends are “using the Bible” not faithfully interpreting it. Whatever your conviction is, if you use the Bible, don’t. Instead, interpret it as you would want your blog, paper, or will interpreted—word by word, aimed at getting the author’s intention, not in sneaking in your bias.

Newsweek offers one reading of the Bible. Get Religion offers another reading. Both pieces are pretty inflammatory and thin on reading the Bible closely. If you read both, I hope youll be convinced to read the Bible itself.  Grab a Bible, turn to the Concordance, and look up “marriage” and “homosexuality.” Then read two scholarly treatments of the issue here and work through some conclusions. Do it with integrity; do it in love, please.

Posted on December 8, 2008

Check out this post on materialism, faith, and the Christmas season.

Service in the Local Church Doesn't Have to Kill Her

Posted on December 8, 2008

On Sunday at our Deacon Training we discussed how be a deacon that doesn’t just do ministry. We don’t want to have deacons (or volunteers) that serve out of sheer duty. Rather, we want to cultivate disciples and deacons that serve from the strength that God provides in the gospel, thru the Spirit. Joyful deacons, not jaded deacons.

As Neil Cole points out, mundane service such as setting up or tearing down, can be disconnected from both the gospel and the mission of the church. It is unfortunate that mundane tasks are viewed as lesser, when in fact, they are frequently the greater task, requiring greater servants.

Service in the local church doesn’t have to kill her. In order to promote a gospel-centered approach to service in the church, we discussed what it looks like to connect the gospel to web design, media work, and traffic direction (and these are just Sunday examples; the church is much, much more). To cut to the chase, we concluded that publishing the gospel on the web has a remarkable impact on people who read manuscripts and listen to podcasts. For those that direct traffic, they are actually pointing people to Jesus, and some of these people have never really understood who Jesus is. Both traffic direction and media work contribute significant to the gospel-centered mission of the church, so deacons take heart.

But what keeps us from duty-driven service that leads to weariness and bitterness? The gospel. We spent some time considering how the three perspectives on the gospel ground us in Jesus and call us to mission. We also discussed the idea of leaning away from the gospel into people pleasing (not Christ pleasing) service or leaning into “screw the responsibility,” self-pleasing service. We were reminded that serving in the strength that God provides is essential to church-edifying, Christ-honoring work.

Instead of working to please pastors, we work because God is already pleased with us in Jesus. We don’t need the approval of pastors (though encouragement is important). The path of irresponsibility is also deceptively dangerous. Abandoning service to the people of God is an abandoning of the gospel, a gospel that has remade us to serve, that has wonderfully enslaved us in love to one another. Of course, seasons of rest are important, and one of our deacon candidates is in that season. In the end, we serve not to be spiritual but becase we are spiritual; we are new creatures who live out the new life we have received from the Spirit.