A friend of mine is working to set up some house churches. I have always liked the idea of house churches or house church networks. I have always greatly preferred them to cell churches. Cell churches utilize aspects of house churches, while disempowering them (which often is rather sad). That being said, I have to …
Month: December 2012
Christian Medical Missions Book
Book (or is it booklet? It's not very long) based on my dissertation. Feel free to look it over. Plan to expand it in the next few months and remove some more of the stilted dissertation-ese language.
St. Joseph at Christmas
We know Joseph gets downplayed at Christmas. I suppose it is understandable. But let's just take a moment to think about his role. David Zimmerman in "Comic Book Character" notes that mankind takes on four major roles in the Bible. In the Bible, God clearly takes on the role of hero, not people. However, people …
Absurdist Contextualization: A Serious Business
Few things are as boring, generally, as reading a work on sound theology. Yet if you go into a bookstore (Christian or otherwise) there are shelves of Christian Books. You can find books on: How to be rich (and telling that there is something wrong with you if you are not rich) How to be …
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Church Ministry Symbiosis
I like to describe churches as having three basic ministries. These are: 1. Community Care. Care and development of people within the church family. 2. Church Growth. Activities that would expand the local church family (outside of biological growth I suppose) 3. Missions. Activities that focus on expanding the kingdom of God without necessarily expanding …
Nice article the continues the question of "The Cross and the Sword" in the context of Christendom and Missions History
God, Paradigm, and Ockham’s Razor
<Warning!! In ancient times I was a mechanical engineer and for awhile a nuclear engineer. So I used to know something about physics. Now that I am a theology type... I have fallen behind in the natural sciences. So if you are underwhelmed with the science side of this post, no problem... but I believe …
Searching for “Radical” Christians and Dynamic Equilibrium
I have seen a lot of articles FB posts, podcasts, and such talking about how people (particularly youth) are supposed to be “radical Christians.” I was originally going to write a cautionary note on this. To me the term “radical” suggests rebellious and reactionary (and noisy and odd). And while there is some truth in …
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Christmas. It’s Okay… Really.
A few thoughts on Christmas. May as well get the thinking started now. 1. It is OKAY to Christianize a pagan holiday. <An Issue of Contextualization.> Some are bothered by this and make this a big issue at certain times of the year. But Christianization is simply the subversion or reinterpretation of symbols. This is …
Congregational Leadership Wheel (and Missions)
I don't normally emphasize my Baptist ties on this website since I don't see that sound Christian Missions should be particularly denominationally driven. If one is focused on God's Kingdom, you don't focus on your own fiefdom. However, I have been seeing more and more problems with self-destructing leadership in both church and missions. The …
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