Amateurs and Experts

There are certain things that separate amateurs from experts. These distinctions are neither “good” nor “bad”, they’re just distinctions. I certainly couldn’t be (nor would I want to be) an expert in everything I like to do. The experts welcome and seek out other experts. But they don’t listen to everyone. Amateurs tend to not listen to anyone, and stay in their little bubble, sheltered. Experts push themselves and their field further. Amateurs are just trying to get something done, and done is good enough.

There is something I don’t understand, however: a person with no drive to be an expert at what they love to do (whether it is what they get paid for, or a hobby they are working on). I don’t mean an expert with degrees, or a lofty status. I just mean a plain expert. Anyone who is anyone in the hobby knows them, and knows their dedication and expertise. Maybe it is only a few people who love something that much that they put in the time to be an expert in their community.

One thing that makes me mad is being stuck in an insular group of amateurs. When expertise is written off as “not the way we do things”. Or not in line with our values. When all either of those statements really mean someone is uncomfortable. I’ve found not being comfortable is the best place to be in life.

Amazing Truth

I can’t even begin to articulate how amazing this is. Click the image to see other true and humorous ones.

Christians and Education

After all, isn’t “Jesus Loves Me This I Know” all we really need to know for a quality ministry? No – resoundingly not. – Jesus Creed

A few facts, Christianity has always existed in a pluralistic society, a society that has a choice about religion. Christianity is not a personal religion, it has something to say (“Jesus is Lord”) to the world around it. That Gospel message is seen both in talk and action. The world is increasingly casting Christians into a position where they are not allowed to engage in the public sphere. What that means is that Christianity will fail to be able to preach the Gospel (not even that it won’t be “successful”, or convert people, but that our words won’t be allowed to have influence in the wider world). Why? One reason is education.

In both the ministry setting, and a Christian college setting education is lacking. In either the baptist or pentecostal denominations the percentage of college graduates is ten percent less than the national average. For a long time I’ve been noticing a serious decline in the quality of schools (something I would not pin on the “secularization” – they’ve been secular for the last 100 years).

Instead of an anti-intellectual stance, or a stance of “that is all secular, and we know secular is evil”, we really need to focus on education from a Christian perspective. More power to you if you can home school your kids and they can get into a great college. But one of the skills that I have found to be absolutely necessary is critical thinking. It is a hard thing to teach. In our ministries we have taken in the underprivileged and taken advantage of. They haven’t learned how to live in the world. And we offer classes to teach them about credit, budgeting, all the things they never had an opportunity to learn, and we do it from a Christian perspective. This is the attitude we need to embrace, taught by people who went to school for accounting or tax law. But we have to do it for more subjects.

In the future we need a product that can rise to the challenge and withstand the rising tide of secularism – or new age mysticism.

We need University Ministries that can train and engage students, scholars, and yes, professors, in an intellectually stimulating, rigorous, defensible faith.

We need to encourage Christian thinking and scholarship and we need rigorous grappling with the issues; with ideas defended before the larger intellectual community – our cultural ἀγοράν (agora).

This latter is a real problem. Much of what passes for scholarship used in University Ministries simply won’t stand the test. To quote Kent Sparks: if the academy must criticize our scholarship, let it be because it rejects our Lord, not because our historical and exegetical judgments are poor or even silly. As a biblical scholar he is commenting on his field in particular, but this can extend to fields of science and social science, humanities and beyond. And sometimes “silly” is too kind a word for the reality of what we put forward as evangelical scholarship.

Subvert Success

I’m really liking this by Trevin Wax:

• We subvert the Caesar of Success whenever we, as a community of faith, reject the idea that bigger is necessarily better.
• We subvert Success when we go from riches to rags on behalf of the world’s poor rather than finding our hope in moving from rags to riches…
• We subvert Success when our churches partner with one another, not as competitors, but as co-workers in the kingdom…
• We subvert Success as businesspeople when we are willing to downsize, to take pay cuts to spend more time with family, to refuse a promotion that will sacrifice church and family ties.
• We subvert Success by praying for our competitors’ success, by thanking God for the success achieved by others, just as the early church prayed for the governing authorities who were persecuting them.

I think these very ideas of subversion are the key behind finding an alternative dream that we can have in this world. I think “doing theology” (even in the particular fashion that I’ve become accustomed to, through the history) is imperative for the Church. As I read tonight about some of the early Church fathers, theology equipped the Church how to think about the issues facing them. We desperately need that in our churches. We increasingly look like the world in our reasons and motivations.

On Optimization

It seems to me that optimizing is a bad thing. I don’t mean “optimizing” in the “make things run more efficient” way. I do mean “optimizing for one thing at the expense of something else”. OK. Maybe a little optimization is fine. But I’m convinced that optimizing is ruining our quality of life, and our world.

Optimizing shows us just what you value. One of the more important things that we can’t replenish is time. So we optimize for time. We try and do as many things in parallel. Work while watching TV. Do the laundry while cooking dinner. Now, if you don’t care about what’s going on on the TV, or if the laundry machine is putting suds all over the floor – go ahead, ignore them and the world will be fine. However, if you care about what you’re eating spend the time. What happens when you care about optimizing your time against what you’re eating – you get fast food, a billion dollar industry that is destroying our quality of life. Because it, somehow, is more important to save thirty minutes than buy food that will make your years worse.

What else do we optimize for? Money. Businesses optimize for the shareholder to get as much money as possible. That creates the leveraging of the future for the present. Optimization has created the mess we are in today, not just greed.

I just finished reading Let My People Go Surfing by the founder of Patagonia. I was floored by the wake-up call Yvon had to make. He had to realize that optimization was killing the nature that he loved. The only reason he started his company was to make gear so he could go out and climb, hike, and surf. His optimization was to enjoy nature. However, the business was destroying it. He changed how he (and now many others) did business. He was forced to balance. Balance money with the natural world he loved so much.

We need balance in our life. We can’t exclusively optimize for time, money, fun, or anything else without looking at what we optimize against. Optimizing for something means you can’t do something else. And I have a real sense that the world will be drastically changing in the next twenty to thirty years. We optimized for cheap energy. It will be gone. We optimized for everyone owning their own little (or big) cars, houses, toys, and everything. That is unsustainable. We have leveraged the future against the present. It will haunt us. Get ready for change. Stop optimizing or die.

What is Your Life For

Every so often a perfect storm happens. They are a perfect storm of ideas for me. Lately, I’ve heard from Shane Claiborne (I have his first book, but haven’t read it yet). I read Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard, while reading The Resurrection of the Son of God. And watching the finale of Battlestar Galactica created this really weird confluence of thoughts in my head. I find all these are very romantic and persuading ideas. They pull hard on your soul, they force you to feel, force you to recognize the short-comings, and the high calling to which each person has within them.

We have a drive within us – no matter how much we’ve suppressed it with our rationalizations, faults, mistakes, and fears. We have a drive to do what we love. Sometimes we need to find out what we love, and we all should. I don’t have a concrete idea yet either. But I have a good feeling it involves pushing yourself to the edge. Encountering your limit, learning something about yourself, and about the world in which you live.

We have so many edges. I’m on the way to pushing myself to the edge physically. Gearing up for a long summer of Ultimate takes it toll, and I’m certainly not there yet, despite the fact that I’m already faster than I was last summer. I’ve pushed myself past my personal edge as well. I’m well beyond anywhere close to who I was. I long to be able to push myself professionally. Currently I’m just trying to get caught up to what I’ve had in the past working environments. From there I’ll be in new territory. I’ll be pushing myself religiously/spiritually when I get to school as well. I can’t wait to be pushed there.

In the future I hope I can use who I become to help others realize they need, and can push themselves. I find myself amazed that people aren’t interested in living their life in such a way to come out changed. If your life results in zero change, what was it’s purpose?

Workouts

After some discussion last night, I wanted to at least write down what I’m doing. If for nothing more than a look to see the progress I’ve made. These workouts are all designed to make me leaner, and faster. Bulking up is very easy for me, and I do not want to bulk up. These are just some of the quantitative exercises I’m doing. Lots more are qualitative and writing down a weight is useless.

• Weight: 230, Height: 6’2, Build: Brick Wall
• Squats: sets at 245
• Single Leg Press: sets at 270
• Lunges: sets with 40lb dumbells
• One Mile Run: 6:40
• Pull-down: sets at 160
• Crossover Cable: sets at 60

We’ll see how the improvement goes

Conservativism?

What do you have when you have a person who is…

-passionately against abortion and gay marriage (and able to explain why)
-self-identified as a “conservative”
-able to relate their social, cultural and political beliefs to their beliefs about God
-not distinctively anchored in the historic Christian faith, particularly its beliefs about the authority of scripture, the fall, the church, the Gospel and the Lordship of Jesus Christ. These doctrines seem to play little or no part in this person’s thinking/living.

Is this a disciple of Jesus Christ? Is this a picture of what the church is to produce?

I love the term Internet Monk gave to this: “limbaughization“. The Church is to produce Christians that are thoroughly shaped by the Gospel. And the Gospel is not defined by cultural or political positions in relation to the greater society.

From Death

Ben Myers talking about:

William Stringfellow’s theological writing is pervaded by the conviction that the resurrection of Jesus frees us from the dominion of death. The world is ruled by principalities – by suprahuman, suprapersonal institutional powers which bind human life to the service of death. But the gospel sets us free to live and work within these institutions as servants of Christ; we are freed from the dominion of the principalities, since the resurrection of Christ frees us from the fear of death. Since death is the only power with which the principalities can threaten us, we have nothing whatsoever to fear! This, for Stringfellow, is the gospel; this is the Christian life.

I haven’t gotten so far yet to be able to do pure theology like this. I’m forced by method to start with the history. And looking at the history I see it perfectly valid that Jesus’ actions fall directly into this category. When he is healing this is what he is doing. When he is feeding, this is what he is doing. When he is dying on the cross this is what he is doing. It brings the resurrection to the forefront, the ultimate vindication of Jesus’ message. Without resurrection, Jesus is another failed prophet, as Schweitzer would say.

This idea explains why the Gospel message is subversive to the politics in the first century. It explains, in the realm of inaugurated eschatology, why a community would form around this resurrection. It explains the actions of such a community like the early Church in the world around them, well into the second and third centuries.

History is the study of how things came to be. There is no doubt that events led down a certain path. History, with the appropriate method and hermaneutic can show us how things went down that path. Theology is something else. Theology is derived from action, from words, and from God.

Western Un-Civilization

[HT: Naked Pastor]

If you are a Christian and think that we are in some kind of “Christian country” I hope you reconsider. If you really think you’ve learned all the things it takes to “be a Christian” from your youth – please think again.

If you are an atheist who discounts Christianity because of the ‘default’ cultural upbringings of the people who tend to believe in it – think again.