Last Week at Tov Unleashed

Mike Bird kicked off last week by reminding us that the Bible was not written about us or to us but it is for us:

Mike Bird helpfully writes a chp that says the Bible is for us but not to us and not about us. To read the Bible well we need to defamiliarize ourselves with the Bible enough to distance it from our own world so we can sensitize our ears enough to hear the text as it sounded back then.

If we disrespect distance we distort the message (96).

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Then I posted about a survivor-sensitive approach to allegations, and some have suggested survivor-centric is a better expression:

When a person makes an allegation against a pastor, priest or church, the first thing that happens is that the pastor-led response turns the situation into a legal challenge. By this I mean the church’s side becomes the Defendant and the accusing person becomes the Prosecution.

Turning the situation into a legal challenge ruins it and the church immediately begins to take a path of failing to be the church. Instead of seeing the Survivor, who has been a victim of sexual assault or harassment, as one deserving to be heard, as one in need of confession, apology, and repentance, as one in need of grace and public affirmation, the church sees the person as Accuser. Often enough the person is publicly maligned or gaslighted or silenced. The person is objectified as Accuser.

We continued our series about Rebekah Eklund’s book on the beatitudes with a look at peacemaking:

This means evangelists are peacemakers, and conversion is peacemaking.

Eklund points us to reality worthy of being faced: if peace with God is required to be a peacemaker, if and if such peace is through Christ alone, how can Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and Kofi Annan but such good peacemakers?

Have we jumped the rails when we turn peacemaking into the evangelical evangelistic method of peace with God before peace can be accomplished? Is that what Jesus was talking about: peace with God? Or was Jesus talking about a group of Galileans he was observing who were at odds with the Zealot option, the warmongering option, and saw in them the way of the kingdom of God?

Many have learned to avoid Revelation in Sunday morning sermons, and we took a survey of pastors on this very topic.

One of my hunches over the years is that pastors avoid preaching from Revelation. Yes, they preach from the occasional text – “I stand at the door in knock” or one of the worship songs in Revelation. But my hunch has been that they just don’t want to get into it for fear of what some will say or for fear of what others will say.

Someone’s gonna get ticked off. So, avoid the book.

What about types of friendships?

In the classical world and after much discussion revolved around friendships. Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship still generates plenty of questions. I list some questions below.

Have you ever sat around assigning your friends to the these three types of friendship, and then thought about what that assignment means?

If Aristotle was accurate in describing the three kinds of friendships (utility, pleasure, and virtue), it can also be said that each kind of friendship has a distinct purpose or goal for that friendship.