This Week at Tov Unleashed

It’s been a wonderful week here at Tov Unleashed, where all the posts are thoughtful, all the commenters civil, and all the conversations good-looking.

Photo by Taras Shypka on Unsplash

We began the week on the note of listening better:

The song 1776 in Hamilton gives this advice: “Talk less. Smile more.”

Greg Mamula, inTable Life: An Invitation to Everyday Discipleship, would modify that a bit with “Talk less, listen more.”  (By the way, there is no good reason for you and your churches not to read this book together and then to begin to practice table life.)

A friend of mine told me recently that the best form of evangelism today includes listening more, talking less.

So our question for today is: Are we listening?

Or, Who in our churches is not being heard?

Then my son, Lukas McKnight, opened up a wonderful conversation about whether or not NCAA athletes are given a just wage. (I agree with him, they are not.)

NCAA sports are big business. Bigger than most of us may know. My sources tell me Mike Krzyzewski makes some $7 million per year in salary with some $3 more million in bonuses. How much do his players add to their pocketbooks? Without disputing the value of a college education at Duke University with its network of successful people, the pleasure of celebrity and fame, and the 24-7 attentiveness of tutors, trainers, and sustainers, the players will walk away from the university with nothing in their bank accounts.

The question: Is the NCAA system just?

Rebekah Eklund is leading us into lament and she connects lament to doubt in her new book Practicing Lament:

Unwavering faith comes easily to some people. Not to me. For me faith has often been “a leap into the darkness of the unknown, a flight into empty air,” which is how the theologian Karl Barth describes it.

Lament, of course, also contains a “Nevertheless”-- a “but,” a “yet”-- when it makes the turn toward stubborn trust even in the midst of suffering and sorrow. “But, I will trust in you.” “Yet, I will sing of your steadfast love.” Lament is praise from within the whirlwind, not in the stillness after the storm. It seems to me that’s why lament, even at its most bitter, still represents an act of faith. Even when it can’t even manage that turn to praise, even if the “yet” dies on the lips of the lamenter, it’s still an act of faith, because it turns toward God to address God.

Lamenting is not a sin. It doesn’t display a lack of faith or trust. It reveals the opposite: a deep and abiding trust, however faint, however shaken, however wounded, in a God who hears the cries of God’s children.

Is doubt, then, a sin? Of course not. 

Aaron Griffith’s new book will be a show stopper for many. Prison ministries are in need of more serious participation:

4 ministries to prisoners began in the 1800s, 15 more between 1900 and 1950, 26 in the 1960s, and 140 more in the 1970s. These ministries were nothing less than home missions and they were (1) evangelistic, (2) entrepreneurial and grassroots, (3) and they were like other mission works – could they be ecumenical? Do they favor the prisoners or the system?

In addition, there was the problem of how connected they should be to the law or and order system and how accommodating, compliant should they be the with the more state-approved chaplaincy program? So the questions asked by Aaron Griffith in his new book called God’s Law and Order.

One of the major themes of prison ministries was preaching to those in prison, pressing for decisions and conversions, seeing the only lasting solution in the inner work of Christ through the Spirit so that conversion only led to a new life. Many of these ministries had little to nothing to do with any sense of prison reform and often they supported law and order.

Who are the Nones?

If you want to pastor, minister to, or evangelize the Nones it’s a good idea to figure who they are and why they are now disaffiliated. Last week we looked at the Why? This week we look at the Who are they? question.

Every pastor, every professor, every church leader and every internet magazine needs to read Ryan Burge’s new book, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.

Numbers matter. Numbers don’t tell the whole story but numbers also don’t lie.

Burge looks at cohort, education, gender, and race.

And conversion, one of my favorite academic, personal, professorial, and pastoral topics:

Trying to define conversion in a meaningful way is not easy, so I will go to two major scholars of conversion theory. In doing this, let me emphasize that the scholarly discussion of conversion avoids specific theological terms, so sometimes this can sound a bit clinical and artificial — but I want to emphasize that it isn’t. Conversion is a profound spiritual moment and/or process that, at the same time, can be analyzed on the basis of “what we can see.” …

For my take, which can be found in Turning to Jesus, I see conversion essentially as the transformation of our identity from a self-identity to a Christ-identity.