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My latest column at Christian Week:

Dallas Willard, author of books about Christian spiritual formation, writes, "We must flatly say that one of the greatest contemporary barriers to meaningful spiritual formation in Christlikeness is overconfidence in the spiritual efficacy of 'regular church services,' of whatever kind they may be. Though they are vital, they are not enough. It is that simple."

This drives pastors crazy because we know it's true.

Regular church services are most of what some churches do. Close to half of my week as a pastor is spent preparing for services. Most congregations structure their buildings around space for services. When we say that we're going to church, we're really talking about attending a service. If we cut back what we do as a church, the last thing we'd ever cut is our regular church service.

I'm sitting here listening to Canada Live With Matt Galloway on CBC 2. They're playing Serena Ryder's show at Hugh's Room. Amazing! We tried to get to this show but it was sold out. Now I get to listen to it anyway.

If you haven't picked up Serena's album If Your Memory Serves You Well, check it out. I'm loving it. One of my best finds this year.

We've been chatting a lot this past week about social justice. One commenter wrote this at Paul Martin's site:

What is better? Bread that causes you to never hunger, or bread that fills you only for a time?...BOTH are important, but feeding the soul with the bread of heaven is the far greater of the two. If you are doing both great. If you are emphasizing the physical needs over the spiritual you are not doing what Jesus did.

Of course, this raises all kinds of questions and issues. When it's put crudely, social action is seen as something "even atheists can do" and therefore vastly inferior to evangelism. If you have a choice between offering someone a cup of cold water or telling them about Christ, the argument goes, let them go thirsty - if you have to choose. Social action is seen as a secondary duty.

But maybe we're not exactly framing the question properly. Maybe better questions are ones like these: What does the gospel mean for whole people, not just souls trapped inside a body (which is a lousy way to see people anyway)? What does the gospel mean for societies and structures? Or is it all about spirits and heaven one day when you die?

Tim Keller gets it right in his book Ministries of Mercy. He argues that Christianity leads to a completely different type of social action than anyone else can do:

Only the ministry of the church of Jesus Christ, and the millions of "mini-churches" (Christian homes) throughout the country can attack the roots of social problems. Only the church can minister to the whole person. Only the gospel understands that sin has ruined us both individually and socially. We cannot be viewed individualistically (as the capitalists do) or collectivistically (as the Communists do) but as related to God. Only Christians, armed with the Word and Spirit, planning and working to spread the kingdom and righteousness of Christ, can transform a nation as well as a neighborhood as well as a broken heart.

Exactly right.

Keller later argues that social relief work is not secondary. "Jesus uses the work of mercy to show us the essence of the righteousness God requires in our relationships...The striking truth is that the work of mercy is fundamental to being a Christian."

Keller later quotes Robert Murray McCheyne, a preacher from 150 years ago. McCheyne says that when Christians ignore the poor, he worries about the poor - but he worries even more about the Christians. Speaking of Matthew 25, he said:

You heave a sigh [for the poor], perhaps, at a distance, but you do not visit them. Ah! my dear friend! I am concerned for the poor but more for you. I know not what Christ will say to you in that great day...I fear there are many hearing me who may know [now] well that they are not Christians, because they do not love to give...Oh my friends! enjoy your money; make the most of it; give none away; enjoy it quickly for I can tell you, you will be beggars throughout eternity.

Social justice and social action are not secondary. They are fundamental to the gospel and what it means to be Christian.

I just listened to last week's MacBreak Weekly and learned the following:

E-mail is old school. Only the old use it. Texting/instant messaging is the way to go.

MySpace is so 2005, maybe 2006. Facebook isn't it. Virb is in.

I should be using Twitter a whole lot more.

I really can't keep up. I'm like so January 2007.

Last Saturday's Restoring Justice conference began with a video by Tony Campolo. I summarized some of the video in my notes, but now you can watch it for yourself.

Tony's sometimes accused of neglecting evangelism in favor of social action. That accusation doesn't seem to hold up, at least in this video. He states that we must preach a gospel that delivers people from personal sin and we must also call people to action in the sphere of social justice. We can't sacrifice one for the other.

So here it is. Thanks to Nathan for posting it.

It was fun live-blogging the Restoring Justice Conference on Saturday. Thanks to Nathan for asking me, and to the other guys at Epiphaneia for putting the conference together.

My notes are available as blog posts, but they're also available as one long HTML document and as a PDF document (requires the free Adobe Reader).

Wow, this day has gone fast. It's been great to connect with some friends here. The speakers have been great.

The best part of the day for me hasn't been the speakers or the people I've bumped into, even though that has been great. The best part is that I've sensed a groundswell toward embracing a holistic faith. There are lots of hard questions about what this looks like, but it's real and it's happening, at least among the crowd that's here.

Some are scared by what used to be called a social gospel. It's time to move beyond this and to embrace a biblical faith that is concerned not only with personal salvation but with issues of justice. In other words, to embrace a biblical faith.

We're now in the last session with Shane Claiborne of The Simple Way. Some highlights:

We are in a world that is starved for imagination. We need a church with imagination. Jesus had great imagination - he never did anything normal. Jesus healed people, so he picks up dirt and spits on it and wipes it on his eyes. He answers a question about taxes by getting coins from a fish's mouth. He did this in a culture obsessed with cleanliness. As I read the things he says, I think, "What if we really believe he meant it?"

Ever since I read his book The Great Giveaway, I've been a fan of David Fitch. It wasn't too hard to decide which seminar to attend when Fitch is in the house, even though some of the other seminars look really good.

Fitch is asking how justice works itself out in a smaller church (churches that aren't mega churches). How do we prevent justice from becoming big business? The danger is that we make justice a commodity and a technology. In other words, how do we prevent ourselves from turning justice into another program at our local church? Dave has already outlined some of his thoughts at his blog Reclaiming the Mission - parts one, two, three, and four. Justice cannot become just another thing that people have to do. It's what we do because of who we are.

It is easier to do justice at a distance. Our real challenge is to recover a connection between the local church and the poor. This requires resisting a few urges, and changing the emphasis in our preaching, our practices, and our patterns of life.

I'm back a little late from lunch. The restaurants in the area weren't prepared for all of us from this conference, and we had pretty slow service. We had great company, though, which made up for it.

The second main session has begun. Jim Wallis of Sojourners is speaking. Wallis says that he it's important that we clear up the confusion about what it means to be Christian. People tell him that they didn't know you could be a Christian and care about poverty.

The story of Luke 14:15-24, the parable of the banquet tells us what God is like, Wallis says.

We tend to blame the poor on one side, or debate the causes of poverty on the other. Jesus points to something different: inviting them in. It's about a welcome table.

It's about inclusion, bringing people into community with us and incorporating their needs with ours. Poverty is resolved by bringing people into community and relationship.

I'm now in the first breakout session. Lots to choose from, but that's where I'll just have to order CDs to I can listen in to what happened elsewhere. We've chosen a session with Shane Claiborne. Shane is author of The Irresistible Revolution and founding partner of The Simple Way, a radical faith community that lives among and serves the homeless in Kensington, North Philadelphia.

Shane grew up in northern Tennessee, which is about as far as you can get from inner-city Philadelphia. He grew up thinking that good people go to church. Some do, but it's not so simple. Sociologists say that those who go to church are more likely to be racist, pro-militaristic, etc. than the general population. We did a word association game and asked people what they thought of when they heard a word. When we said church, they came up with words like bigot, hypocrite, hatred, boring. They did not say love, grace, community.

Some of what Shane said:

I volunteered on the Bush-Quayle campaign. I was pro-life but didn't offer to take in unwanted babies. I was against homosexuality but didn't know anyone who was gay at first. My struggle has been to humanize what I've talked about.

I began to see the world differently. I remember a church that was evicting homeless people from their property. Someone hung a banner over the church: How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?

I think I've learned the first lesson of live blogging. We left a little late from home and got almost all the way here before I realized that I had forgotten my power supply. I turned back home to get it. I called Charlene in the other car on the cell to let her know but she never got the message; she called me back but my phone was on vibrate. We eventually got here but not without feeling a little frustrated, but we're here and it's nothing that a coffee and cookie from the FRWY cafe won't fix.

Lesson number one: Don't forget the wires at home.

The first session began with a video clip from Tony Campolo, who's been in the news following an appearance on CBC this week. Tony talked about the dichotomy that's developed between gospel and social action, and reminded us that this dichotomy hasn't always existed. The gospel is not just about an individual's reconciliation with God; it includes that but it's more. Christians have always been concerned with issues of justice as well.

There is, Campolo says, an interactive relationship between individuals and society. We must not only preach a gospel that gives people freedom from sin. We also proclaim a gospel that transforms society. It's not one or the other; it's both.

The first session is Ron Sider. Ron described three realities:

One - In the next 24 hours, 35,000 children will die from conditions we know how to fix. 1.2 billion people try to survive on a dollar of day. Another 1.8 billion live on two dollars a day.

Two - There are thousands of biblical verses about God's concern for the poor. Jesus said if we don't care for the poor, we go to hell.

Three - What Christians are doing. Stats show that Christians give about a quarter of a tithe to the church. People who live in the richest countries are getting richer, but are giving less toward the gospel and the poor.

A crazy week is coming to an end, and I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. I'll be attending the Evolving Church conference in Oakville and live blogging the event. Drop by tomorrow; I'll be posting as often as I can about the day's proceedings.

Of course, it's not too late to sign up if you'd like to be there in person.

When we got back from Boston on Sunday night, we found that our house had been broken into while we were gone. Here's the first thing we noticed as we came in our house:

There was more, lots more. You can see the evidence here. Food for the kid's lunches the next day, an amazing meal (the best curried chicken I've ever had), fruit, flowers, and more.

Who was it? We eventually found some clues to the identity of the perpetrators in a signed card. Friends and family from church. As I said to Charlene, it's hard to know who you can trust these days.

Seriously, what an amazing way to come home. Pretty amazing to have people in our lives like this!

At the end of my defense on Friday, when the lights had gone out due to a power failure, Haddon Robinson asked me what I enjoyed and what I would improve about the D.Min. program.

Here's what I liked:

• You don't get to study under someone like Haddon Robinson every day. He wrote the book in preaching, and he's quite an incredible man - and the real deal as well.
• I've made some really good friends in my cohort. Some of these will likely be very long and significant ones.
• I really did learn a lot, not only about preaching but ministry in general. It has changed me and what I do.
• Writing the thesis was a lot of fun and a really good experience, and I think I learned a few things there too.

What was bad about the experience? Nothing really, unless you expect too much from the D.Min. And one can never forget what Gordon-Conwell professor and curmudgeon David Wells wrote about the degree:

Not surprisingly, in recent years seminaries have found it important to think of themselves as comparable to other professional schools, such as those for law and medicine, and many now offer the Doctor of Ministry degree as a further means of establishing this parity. Unfortunately, the typical seminary does not offer training that can compare with the rigor of these professional schools. The Doctor of Ministry degree is in fact not much of a doctorate; the standards one must meet to receive this degree are frequently below those required of candidates for the Master of Divinity (a degree that not too long ago was called the Bachelor of Divinity). It is a case of professional elevation not by accomplishment but by linguistic inflation. What used to be the minimum level of knowledge for entry into Christian ministry, gauged by a bachelor's degree, has out of professional necessity and a wave of the magician's wand now become a doctorate by the addition of what may amount to little more than refresher courses.

It's a good experience, in other words - but don't take the whole doctor thing too seriously.

I ran into three others from my class this afternoon before my defense. Two of them were getting their thesis printed onto the right paper for submission and checking. They seemed happy and told me that the examiners said that they expected four of us to pass today from what they had read of our work. I wasn't sure if that boded well for me since I knew there were at least two of us left.

The defense was fairly low key. They asked what I had learned and then went through areas they had flagged. Haddon challenged me on one area (the issue of exemplary preaching, as argued by Greidanus). He also let me know when I had overstated things. "I don't buy that," he'd say. Overall they seemed happy with my work. So, I passed!

I have about an hour's worth of editing to do but otherwise I'm done. Time to go out and celebrate. I think we'll be heading out to Famous Dave's. We'll save the real celebration at Legal Sea Foods for grad weekend.

Snowing like crazy here. Glad I'm not driving down today.

We were going to Boston one way or another at noon, hoping to get through the border without Charlene's birth certificate, which has been at the Passport office since January.

Good news - a replacement birth certificate just arrived! Should make getting through the border a whole lot easier.

I keep coming across quotes on presenting the gospel, which was a hot topic of debate around here a week or so ago. Just read this from my thesis - forgot it was there!

The New Testament never offers the blessings of the gospel as separate items on a shopping list. If they are not offered in this way, then we should not preach them this way. The gospel does not invite us to take forgiveness, but to take Christ. All God's blessings are in him: none of them are found apart from him. The whole gospel finds its coherent center in him. We either take him as he is with all his gifts and demands, or we stand apart from him. We cannot divide him in pieces.

The most searching question to be asked of our preaching is not "Are we preaching forgiveness or repentance or holiness or faith?" but "Are we preaching Christ?" (Colin S. Smith, "Keeping Christ Central in Preaching, from Telling the Truth)

Reminds me a little of Piper's book God is the Gospel. There are lots of implications if we take this idea seriously.

It's a much more relational approach. It's similar to when I got married Charlene. She had a car and some other stuff we've enjoyed. But they weren't really even on the radar. What I mostly got was Charlene. The rest was just extra stuff thrown in.

Christina went skiing with her school for a week in January. Ever since then, she's been begging us to hit the slopes together. We finally did yesterday at the Mansfield Ski Club just north of Toronto thanks to our friends the Campbells.

I'm 39, which some people might say is a little late to start skiing. Christina did amazing and had no troubles with any of the runs. Charlene hasn't skied in about 20 years but did just fine. As for Josiah, he moved from the bunny slopes to blue square (intermediate) in no time. That kid can travel.

As for me, I had a bit of trouble at the top of the blue square slope but I think that was more psychological than anything. Once I got going I was fine. We all had way more fun than you're supposed to on your first family ski trip, and I think it's safe to say we'll be going back to the slopes next year. Maybe winter's not all bad after all.

Another blog attempts to answer this question, and includes this quote from Darrell Guder:

In the exploration of the missiological implications of reductionism, I have stressed that the reduction of the gospel to individual salvation...is the gravest and most influential expression of the human drive for control...A reduced gospel trivializes God as it makes God into a manageable deity.

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LT writes:

I think one of the biggest things ailing the western evangelical church is poor theology, particularly in the areas of salvation and transformation. Our understanding of what it means to follow Christ has been skewed through sales pitch conversions. Over the last couple hundred year's evangelists have made it progressively easier for people to respond to their pitch without thinking through what they are really getting in to. They have reduced discipleship to eternal fire insurance. Without a proper understanding of what it means to follow Christ people remain untransformed and thoroughly fixated on their own "spiritual needs".

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My friend Bill Kinnon let me know of a new video he's posted highlighting the work of Allelon:

Allelon has a nifty new website with some great new features. Looks amazing.

(The upcoming event at Richview with Al Roxburgh is a joint event sponsored by Resonate and Allelon.)

In just over a week, I'll be defending my thesis in Boston. It's kind of a funny feeling. It feels like a long time since I've worked on my thesis. I'll have to review it to remember what I wrote, which is probably an important part of the defense process. I'd appreciate your prayers for this next Friday.

Charlene and the kids are scheduled to join me in Boston. It's March break so we're going to make a bit of a vacation out of it. One problem: Charlene's birth certificate has been at the passport office for a couple of months. She still doesn't have any ID that will allow her to enter the States. We've ordered a new birth certificate but it still hasn't arrived. We're hoping that something will work out so she'll be able to come.

In a week and a half, once this is all over, I want to jump in with a series of blog posts on repentance. The recent posts on Static have generated some good discussion, and one of the questions that's come up is what certain words mean. I'm looking forward to tackling this issue the week of the 19th. Should be interesting!

Finally, in case you've forgotten, don't forget that Al Roxburgh is in town, at Richview, on March 19. More info here. If you're local, I hope to meet you there.

I heard Cornelius Plantinga speak to pastors yesterday on "What I'm Still Learning after Thirty-Five Years of Preaching". Plantinga is president of Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids and author of Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, which was Christianity Today's Book of the Year in 1996.

Plantinga has a sharp mind and spoke well on topics such as the local nature of preaching, how different types of reading help the preacher, on preaching sin in a no-fault culture, and more.

My notes from yesterday are online as a web page or as a PDF document (requires the free Acrobat Reader).

Eight years ago, this amazing kid came into our lives. We almost lost him before we ever got him, which makes us appreciate him even more.

It's hard to believe it's been eight years, and it's hard to believe how amazing a kid we have. In any case, happy birthday, Josiah!

The topic around here the past few days has been the scope of the gospel. We're so used to talking about it in terms of individual forgiveness that it's easy to lose sight of what it's really about. Not to mention that we don't consistently get what the gospel looks like on an individual level either.

Marc Vandersluys has been talking about this too. He asks, "Where on earth did we get this notion of Jesus 'Your Ticket to Heaven' Christ?" Referring to N.T. Wright's Simply Christian, he writes:

Biblical faith, according to Wright (and others such as Dallas Willard, I believe), the belief that God is "setting the world to rights", as Wright would put it: restoring justice, truth, beauty and spirituality (and forgiveness fits in there as well!) through the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Christ. And we play a role in this: the Church is to bring God's future-when heaven and earth with permanently intersect or overlap--to the present. We are to live out (perhaps as practice) God's future of justice, mercy, beauty, spirituality and forgiveness here and now. As Wright puts it, Christianity is about "life after life after death"--not about where we go when we die, but what happens after that, when the end and eternity has arrived, when creation is restored, when Jesus reigns and God once more walks among us.

Then today I heard Cornelius Plantinga Jr., president of Calvin College (more on that later). I was flipping through one of his books during the break and read this:

At their best, Reformed Christians take a very big view of redemption because they take a very big view of fallenness. If all has been created good and all has been corrupted, then all must be redeemed. God isn't content to save souls; God wants to save bodies too. God isn't content to save human beings in their individual activities; God wants to save social systems and economic structures too...

Everything corrupt needs to be redeemed, and that includes the whole natural world, which both sings and groans...The whole world belongs to God, the whole world has fallen, the whole world needs to be redeemed - every last person, place, organization, and program; all "rocks and trees and skies and seas"; in fact, "every square inch," as Abraham Kuyper said. The whole creation is "a theater for the mighty works of God," first in creation and then in re-creation.

Marc writes, "God isn't working on evacuating us from the world, leaving it to rot--God is working to restore the world, to set it right, and church (and that includes you and me) is to play a part in that!"

We talk about salvation being great, but it's even better than that. That's why there is no one gospel presentation. It's much different, much bigger than we may have been thinking.

The other day in a comment, I made reference to an article in Christianity Today called "Jesus and the Sinner's Prayer." The article is now online. It explores why what Jesus said doesn't usually match what we say.

Mediocrity and hypocrisy characterize the lives of many avowed Christians, at least in part because of our default answer to the salvation question. Anyone can, and most Americans do, "believe" in Jesus rather than some alternative savior. Anyone can, and many Americans sometimes do, say a prayer asking Jesus to save them. But not many embark on a life fully devoted to the love of God, the love of neighbor, the moral practice of God's will, and radical, costly discipleship.

If it comes down to a choice between our habitual, ingrained ways of talking about salvation and what Jesus himself said when asked the question, I know what I must choose.

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Imagine one day you witness an accident. The person who caused the accident is clearly injured but conscious. There are other victims of the accident as well, including damage to some nearby property.

The person who caused the accident is clearly in the wrong, and will face legal consequences. But he also needs medical attention. What do you do?

This is a fairly weak analogy, but I hope you see some parallels. According to theology, all people are legally guilty before God. But we're also injured. Not only have we injured ourselves, we have also done great damage to the entire world. We also have massive legal issues before God.

Is it right to focus on the legal issues? Paul does in Romans - not exclusively, but it's where he starts.

Perhaps surprisingly, Jesus did as well. But guess who he did it with? The religious establishment - those who were so confident in their driving that they denied that the accident was a problem. Jesus hammered them, the proud religious people of his day.

But to those he found who were bleeding, Jesus reacted very differently. He didn't deal only with their legal issues. In essence, he didn't just hand them a lawyer's card saying he could deal with their charges. Instead, he showed compassion and friendship. He cared that they were bleeding. It's not that he didn't care about their legal issues. It's just that he also realized that they were injured as well. He cared about their health. He cared about restoring them to who they were supposed to be.

I don't know if this metaphor makes sense. Maybe. If it does, though, I think it might have implications for how we care about people. We won't just hand a "get out of jail" card to bleeding people. There's more.

In Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson warns us against the mistake of thinking that the "biblical world as smaller than the secular world." This happens often:

Tell-tale phrases give us away. We talk of "making the Bible relevant to the world," as if the world is the fundamental reality and the Bible something that is going to fix it. We talk of "fitting the Bible into our lives" or "making room in our day for the Bible," as if the Bible is something we can add on or squeeze into our already full lives...

As we personally participate in the Scripture-revealed world of the emphatically personal God, we not only have to be willing to accept the strangeness of this world - that it doesn't fit our preconceptions or tastes - but also the staggering largeness of it. We find ourselves in a truly expanding universe that exceeds anything we learned in our geography or astronomy books.

Our imaginations have to be revamped to take in this large, immense world of God's revelation in contrast to the small, cramped world of human "figuring out."

Peterson compares us to warehouse dwellers, who spend our whole lives in a warehouse and don't even know that a world exists outside. When we open the Bible, we enter the unfamiliar world of God. "Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this." We:

...open this book and find that page after page it takes us off guard, surprises us, and draws us into his reality, pulls us into participation with God on his terms...

...when we open the Bible - we enter the totally unfamiliar world of God, a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us.

We do not try to fit Scripture into our experience, because this would be like "trying to put the ocean into a thimble." Nor do we "read the Bible in order to reduce our lives to what is convenient to us or manageable by us." Instead, we "want to get in on the great invisibles of the Trinity, the soaring adorations of the angels, the quirky cragginess of the prophets, and...Jesus."

I need to remind myself of this quite regularly. We've been chatting quite a bit about God's story being much fuller and richer than we normally think. Every time we think we have it down to a few simple points, it's probably time to step out of the warehouse again and "enter the totally unfamiliar world of God, a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us."

George has been pushing me to answer how to tell his friend about the gospel. He's not quite happy with my answer yet, but that's OK.

I'm suggesting that the best way to do this is to first grasp the Gospel in all its fullness and not settle for the bullet points.

I realize that this doesn't seem like the most practical step to take. We're all busy and we live in a Coles or Cliffs Notes world. But if we're really serious about communicating the biblical message, we'd better learn it first.

It's not that we have to tell everyone everything we know. As Ron Martoia writes, to communicate well you always have to be a couple of levels above the level of the material you're communicating. "You have to have knowledge at level seven to communicate well at level five." My doctor knows much more than he tells me when I visit him. At least I hope he does, or I'm in big trouble.

So that's the first part - getting to know the rich, expansive, multi-layered story of God better. Hard to argue against really.

The other practical thing we can do is to work hard at sensing how people's lives and yearnings connect to the God story. This is harder to do if your God story is only a few bullet points.

In Static, when a couple pushes Ron about what they're going to say to their friend about the gospel, Ron surprises them with his response.

"Yeah, but, Ron, what do we tell Marty?" Jess was nothing if not persistent. We were a mile away from Outback now. She was feeling that the impending encounter was just minutes away, and she was trying to hasten us along.

"How about nothing?" I asked.

"What?" Jess stopped tapping on the dashboard and slapped her hand on her knee.

"How about listening for the 'hints' in the conversation? How about a commitment not to tell Marty anything for a while? What if we decided to learn how to ask good questions first? And what if we decided to listen carefully? What might happen?"

...Jess let out a sigh. "Isn't that really just giving up, Ron?"

"Or is it really learning to love Marty?" I countered. "Learning to appreciate him? Learning to discover who Marty is? Is it learning to look for God, who is already at work in Marty's life? Is it really the more difficult work of connecting a real person--with his own issues and problems, emotions and pet peeves, challenges and potential--to God? Okay, I admit it, Jess. It's not easy and quick. It doesn't fit on a napkin. It's not a sound bite. But it may be what's required. If we don't do that, then we may miss what God is doing long-term in Marty's life. We may miss the variety of ways in which God wants to connect to all the different 'Martys' he has placed on Main Street, in Jackson, or wherever."

I saw this happen last year. My role was more of a bystander (midwife?) to what God was doing, rather than salesman.

I'm pretty sure that canned gospel presentations aren't the best way to connect people to the God story. Getting to know the story, and then helping people connect to it in a way that's in line with how God is working in their lives, is far better I think.

From my sidebar:

I think we may need a hobby.

Sometimes the seemingly unrelated strands of my life seem to come together and make a little sense. I am pastor of a traditional church and (mostly) love it. Yet I am sympathetic to some of the yearnings of younger evangelicals who feel like we've settled for a truncated gospel. I'm also in the very last stages of a D.Min. and chose a topic that's essentially about shaping our lives around a God-centered message rather than a human-centered one.

And sometimes that all comes together and makes sense.

I felt that way as I read the last chapter of Ron Martoia's book Static. Having known Ron for some years now, and having compared him at one time to Jordon Cooper on steroids, I enjoy interacting with Ron and what he's been thinking about. Especially when it's about something as important as the gospel.

Ron writes:

I realize that when we remove the abbreviated and skewed version of God's story from our minds, we all feel like we're floundering a bit. But what we have in its place is a much fuller and richer story, a far more beautiful, elegant, and powerful story we can invite people into. For so long we have communicated things with such static...We have made unclear what should be crystal clear.

This story can't be reduced to a few bullet points or a quick soundbite, at least not without losing a lot:

What we have...is the wild and woolly complete story of God, as recorded in the Bible. The story tells us about who God is and how he relates to real, often complex, people in a variety of different circumstances. It's a complex story because it's a real story about a real God. It can't be stripped down, reprocessed, repackaged, and served to us with fries on the side. It's a multicourse dinner at Outback that we spend time to enjoy--not a McDonald's Value Meal we gulp down in minutes.

Ron says that people generally know deep down that the "complexities of life can't fit on a single crumpled-up napkin. Believe me, I've tried that approach."

It's about much more than a formula.

The hardest part about moving to the fuller and richer version of the story is that it involves questioning some of our cherished assumptions that we've read into the story, but aren't really there. It involves refusing to "add material to the text so that it will say what [we] want it to say." Ron writes:

It's time we let the New Testament stand on its own. The writers don't need our help, and God certainly doesn't. When we let go of our fetish for control and certainty, we will be able to say that the biblical story is multilayered, ambiguous at times, and even sometimes paradoxical, but it must be allowed to speak.

You likely won't agree with everything in Static, but that's okay. It will push you to wrestle with the biblical text and understand the story of God in new and more accurate ways. It's actually good if you wrestle with what he's writing rather than just accepting it.

For those of us who are longing for more than the abbreviated and skewed version of God's story, Static is an important book. I'm glad that Ron wrote it.