Presby-Musings

I recently read a blog post from a mainstream, conservative evangelical Christian blogger/author that leveled some damning accusations toward three authors/Christian thinkers, who I admire: Rob Bell, Donald Miller and Bryan Mclaren. All three of these men had once been included beneath the mainstream, conservative evangelical umbrella, but (according to this blogger) they had strayed from orthodox Christian belief and become "universalists," who believe that God lets anyone into heaven, not just those who follow Jesus. In our current culture, a Christian leader, pastor, author, theologian, etc. being labelled a "Universalist" by mainstream, conservative evangelical Christians is the post-post modern equivalent of being anathematized--a practice the early church fathers employed to rid themselves of heretics and people who had too much imagination when it came to Christian beliefs. I realize that I just oversimplified and caricatured the development of or...

When I was a kid and played sports, the only people who got trophies were the people who actually won something. Now everyone gets a trophy just for showing up.  But despite the love-fest of indiscriminate trophy distribution at my children's awards ceremonies, everyone knows who the star on the team is.  Everyone knows which team beat all of the other teams for the entire season, even when the league officials fervently avoided keeping score.  We may all want everyone to get a trophy and feel good about themselves, but we know that not everyone deserves one.  We also know that life isn't fair, and that sometimes even when we work hard, play hard, try hard and want something hard... it doesn't always go our way.  I've noticed that the kids who tend to perform better than their peers at sports, scholastics, you name it, also tend to complain about the seeming lack of fairness inherent in the "Everyone's A Winner" approach. Because we all know that n...

I've been thinking about theology lately.  More specifically, what sort of theology(ies) have both formed and informed my own.  Over the next few weeks I will be posting about these influences in a series I'll be calling, "Why I Am..." For those of you who are familiar with Brian McClaren's work, you will naturally assume that I am ripping off his book "A Generous Orthodoxy."  And you would be right.  Then again, there are no original ideas left, really.  Everything is a riff on an original.  At least that's what I'll tell myself. In this entry, I'll be relating Why I Am A Calvinist.   In a nutshell what I am calling Calvinism is probably better understood as Reformed Theology.  It is a way of understanding God that has it's foundations in the works of John Calvin, but also other of the famous Reformers from the 16th and 17th century.  What we know as Calvinism is grounded in five essential beliefs, known as the "Five Points...

One of the worst things that you can experience as a kid is being picked last for teams on the playground. There’s not much that sucks worse than that, to be honest. I would like to say that I don’t know what that feels like. I would like to say that I was never picked last, because then I could sort of maintain this image that I have of myself---an image of a guy who was always so athletic, so popular, so good looking that he never watched all the other kids on the playground get picked for a team while he stood there in shame and self-pity staring at his shoes. A few years ago, when I was still doing youth ministry, I would play football or basketball with my students during our youth group gatherings. Prior to the games, I would name two captains and then they would divvy up the players among them. It wasn’t the best way to divide teams because the process itself usually ended up categorizing people based on friendships and athletic ability. Then I started to notice that I was ge...