Jack Miller on how grace changes the heart:

I’m glad for what God enabled you to emphasize – that God has a gracious heart toward us in our sins and that sanctification as well as justification is of grace. You would think that would be self-evident, wouldn’t you?

…I do not think that an emphasis on grace leads to a soft ministry on sin and the severe demands of the law. Actually it seems to me that such grace teaching makes it possible for sinners like us to hear the hardest things said about our sin patterns, and that can lead to a healthy sorrow which then leads back to sanity, i.e. repentance. (pp. 59-60)

I could be wrong, but I sense that the ground has shifted.

A few years ago, what we now call the emerging church was fresh and connected with a lot of us who were a little weary of the church growth movement and a pragmatic approach to faith. This movement has been somewhat helpful, but it wasn’t without its problems – some theological and some due to the fact that it was still, well, emerging or deconstructing. But I sense this first phase has lost some steam – not a completely bad thing. The emerging church was never the point. (By the way, LT has a stimulating post on this today).

It really seems that just as the emerging movement seems to be slowing or changing, the Reformed movement has taken over, as suggested by Christianity Today and others. What’s interesting is that there is a real missional edge to this, as evidenced by guys like Tim Keller (see Keller’s The Missional Church in PDF). It’s not your mother’s Reformed church. It’s theologically robust but also contextual and it’s making an impact. It’s also more theologically conservative, but it’s solidly missional.

What do you think? Do you sense some of the same things happening?

My brother Kevin got a call today telling him that my Dad has been taken to hospital. When the meals-on-wheels people delivered lunch today, they could hear him inside the apartment, but he couldn’t make it to the door. They called the police, who broke into the apartment and took him to the hospital. (My Dad is in his eighties, and lives in England alone.)

It seems like my Dad has really gone downhill quickly lately, and it’s not like he was good to start with. He’s lost a lot of weight, has stopped dressing, and has become even more confused.

Seems like it’s a good time to look at getting him moved into a safer housing arrangement, although who knows what will happen in the hospital. Not sure what all of this will mean but we’d appreciate your prayers.

While travelling to England, I read two of Robert Quinn’s books, Deep Change and Building the Bridge As You Walk On It.
These two books aren’t about leadership techniques. They are about what it takes to change yourself – not surface change, but deep change. When this happens, you are able to lead others, regardless of your position or role.
Quinn argues, “Anyone can become a leader of change, but to do so requires the transformation of self.”
Quinn says that most of us (individually and in organizations) enter into the normal state of being through entropy. In this state, we are externally driven, internally closed, self-focused, and comfort-centered. In this state, we lose energy and eventually experience slow death. Most of us live in this state because of fear and self-preservation. Most people and organizations in this state don’t know what to do to get out, so they try harder and use techniques or behaviors to change, which does not work. (I’ve got bookshelves of books that try this approach.)
The way out is not through technique. It is through deep change. The cost is high; our organizations cannot change until we change. We cannot change until we move past techniques and actually deal with some fundamental issues.
At the heart of deep change is what Quinn calls the fundamental state of leadership. In this state, we let go of control, and become purpose-centered, internally directed, other-focused, and externally open.
This isn’t a super-human state. In fact, we’ve all lived in it. Quinn provides some good advice on how to spend more time in this state (it’s never permanent). It involves “being the change you want to see in the world” (Ghandi). Building the Bridge is very helpful for giving practical advice on how to experience this state more frequently.
I appreciated these books for a lot of reasons. They deal with root causes rather than symptoms. They are about being before they are about doing. They speak of the power of any person, regardless of position, to enter this state and transform those around them, although sometimes at great cost. You don’t have to be in a leadership position to lead.
These aren’t Christian books, but I’ve been struck with how many of the principles are biblical, especially the sections on the importance of inner transformation, and the necessity of risking self for the sake of something greater. The fundamental state of leadership resembles, on a lot of levels, how Christ lived, and the sort of dynamic you witness in the book of Acts.
I still have a lot of work to do in applying these books, and working through the exercises in Building the Bridge. They are two of the better leadership books I have read in a long time.

Encouraging day today. Hung out at home a little more than usual and took it slow. Two encouraging meetings took place today.
One was with Mike Todd. Mike is one of the first bloggers I started reading. I was excited to finally be able to meet him today. We shared lunch and gabbed. He said a lot of good things. I hope he writes a book but if he doesn’t, I’m stealing his stuff and publishing it. I walked away encouraged by what God is doing in his life, and grateful to have made a face-to-face connection.
Tonight, our church board met. We’ve been having some really good meetings this year, facing up to where we are and rethinking what we ought to be doing. I wish I could report that we have all the solutions but we don’t. What we do have is a set of three really good priorities and a strong desire to act on them. I have the sense that we’re not just playing the church game, we’re actually trying to get into some Kingdom business.
That was a good day. As Samuel Pepys would say, “and so to bed.”

The Arts & Faith Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films from Christianity Today

What do you do when you pay for the new, licensed version of Movable Type, but when you log in through TypeKey it says, “An error occurred: You haven’t bought anything.” I guess you wait for support to respond to your e-mail. Sigh.

From the U.S. News and World Report (selected paragraphs):

What would Jonathan Edwards think of suburban Chicago’s Willow Creek Community Church, where every weekend some 17,000 congregants arrive in their Chevy Tahoes and Toyota minivans to worship in the enormous brick-and-glass auditorium? More specifically, what would the 18th-century Puritan preacher who penned the fire-and-brimstone sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” make of “seeker-friendly” services that use “drama, multimedia, and contemporary music” to serve “individuals checking out what it really means to have a personal relationship with Jesus”? Gazing across the packed rows, would Edwards recognize the modern face of the religious movement that he played such a key role in launching…
…particularly since 9/11, evangelical notions about God’s special covenant with the American people have contributed to a quasi-religious nationalism that casts America as the chosen nation engaged in a righteous struggle with evil…
Evangelical scholars and intellectuals especially lament the decline of the evangelical mind since the generation of Edwards. During the last century in particular, says Wheaton College’s Noll, “Christian reasoning as a whole, through use of the Bible, theology, and doctrine, simply hasn’t measured up. The scandal of the evangelical thinking is that there is not enough of it, and that which exists is not up to the standards that Edwards established.”

A fascinating and somewhat disturbing article.

My open source/wiki writing experiment is struggling a little because we don’t have enough people contributing. Go over and leave your mark. Don’t be afraid to edit what has already been written, or to disagree with a point. Have some fun.

I’m doing a sidebar for an article of mine on sermon plagiarism. The sidebar is on sermons that others preached that I wish I had. In other words, sermons I wish I’d stolen.
I have my own list, but I’m open to your nominations. Any sermons – either recent or historical – that have been so good that you wish you had preached them? You don’t even have to be a preacher to answer this one.
Note: I don’t want to get into the morality of sermon plagiarism here. That’s not the point of the sidebar. I’m just asking what sermons have been so good that you’d be tempted to steal them.