This Past Week at Tov Unleashed
We began the week on a high note by reminding us all that a good church tells the whole of God’s story and not a short, it’s-all-about-us story:
A good, or tov, church has a calling to tell God’s story. They tell the whole story of God’s whole people. Toxic churches tell their own story as if it is the church’s whole story. Good churches baptize their story into other stories in the history of the church. Toxic churches tell their story as if it is the best and brightest and biggest in the history of the church. So much so the other stories are piddly little stories.
Churches are called to tell God’s story, and God’s story is a good story, as Greg Mamula, inTable Life: An Invitation to Everyday Discipleship, explains. This book, by the way, is a DMin thesis Greg wrote at Northern Seminary and then converted into a more practicable book. I must announce, however, that this is the kind of thesis theme that we especially like at Northern in our DMin in New Testament Context program.
The Lenten practice of lament leads into Holy Week, and no day is more for lament than “Good” Friday and Holy Saturday. So we turned to Rebekah Eklund:
Is there lament in the New Testament? As Rebekah Eklund states, if the tragedy of the NT is the death of Jesus, and if in that death Jesus conquers evil, why lament? “If God has won, is there anything left to complain about?” That is, is lament a non-Christian form of address to God? See her new book Practicing Lament.
We turned on Wednesday to eight probing questions by Jemar Tisby in his new book, How to Fight Racism:
So, in exploring our own racial identity, Tisby asks us to ask ourselves eight questions:
1. What is my earliest memory of race?
2. Have I had any negative experiences associated with my racial identity or that of someone else?
3. When did I start growing racially conscious?
4. From whom or in what period of life did I learn the most about race and diversity?
5. Can I describe the different stages of racial identity development I’ve gone through and what made me aware of each? [conformity, dissonance, resistance and immersion, introspection, and integrative awareness]
6. What concerns me most about my racial past?
7. What encourages me about my racial past?
8. Why do I “do” racial justice? What is its purpose for me?
Ryan Burge’s new study of the Nones is worth your careful reading:
We are looking at Ryan Burge’s new book, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. I consider it one of the most significant books in the last couple years for those who want to understand American Christianity.
Some boldly declare they know why and get others to believe them. Burge knows the data are complex and complicated. There is no one reason why the Nones are rising.
Our lecture on Friday was about types of conversions, and I appreciated the thoughtful comments in the discussion box:
Each local church, whether radically independent or associated with a larger denomination, institutionalizes a conversion orientation. A church does this by the way it presents the gospel, by the way it teaches Sunday School, by the way it preaches from the pulpit, by the way it shapes the programs and platforms. Some kind of conversion theory is at work in every church. One can, then, look at conversion as location — as something happens in connection with a specific place and time.
As I point out in Turning to Jesus, each church institutionalizes this process in one of three orientations, or at least a mixture of them. And we each come to faith in one of these orientations or as a result of a combination of them.
Thinks of subscribing to get these posts in your mailbox each day.