A father takes his two sons to see a minor league baseball game in Florida. They arrive to see the game has been called on account of rain, but rather than leaving with long faces and disappointment, they see kindness all around them. They score pretzels, a treasured baseball, a program, get their picture taken, and are escorted out like VIPs.
I’d say the Brevard County Manatees (and their staff) made some fans for life. Check out the whole story.
Francis Chan has been the senior pastor at Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, CA for 16 years and is the author of the best-selling Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God. Speaking at a conference last week, he expressed his frustration over “comfortable” Christianity.
“You go to church these days and you stare forward and sing a couple of songs and listen to the message and go home,” he said.
He feels Christians should live according to the Gospels and like the Church’s early believers who “denied themselves, took up their crosses, sold their possessions to the poor, and shared everything they had.” Interestingly, Chan says he gets more resistance to his “radical” lifestyle from fellow Christians than from non-believers.
Last week, Chan announced he was stepping down from Cornerstone Church and that he and his family were moving to a developing country.
Ditch the stair-master, toss the wheat germ. Turns out that simply being kind to others is more beneficial for your health than exercise and healthy eating. It might even give you superpowers!
I always thought Christians would be devout environmentalists. I mean, if you believe that the Earth is God’s creation, wouldn’t you do everything you could to preserve His work? Turns out I’m a little naive on the issue.
This is a terrific article about Rich Cizik and his conversion to the climate change cause. Mr. Cizik used to be vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). His “awakening” started in 2002 when he attended a conference where Sir James Houghton, a leading British climate scientist and promininent evangelical, was speaking.
“…for three days in Oxford, England, Houghton walked us through the science and our biblical responsibility. He talked about droughts, shrinking ice caps, increasing hurricane intensity, temperatures tracked for millennia through ice-core data. He made clear that you could believe in the science and remain a faithful biblical Christian. All I can say is that my heart was changed. For years I’d thought, ‘Well, one side says this, the other side says that. There’s no reason to get involved.’ But the science has become too compelling. I could no longer sit on the sidelines. I didn’t want to be like the evangelicals who avoided getting involved during the civil rights movement and in the process discredited the gospel and themselves.”
Cizik went to work. In 2004, he got the NAE to issue a paper “For the Health of the Nation” calling for “creation care” and living sustainably. Two years later, he helped organize the Evangelical Climate Initiative. Not everyone was pleased.
“I had people on my board who said, ‘Don’t touch the issue. If you do, we’ll make your life very difficult.'” Twenty-two evangelical leaders signed a letter urging the NAE not to take a position on global climate change.
But he pressed on…
Cizik believed he could still preach the gospel while also talking about these kinds of issues. “You need both. To go to bed at night and say that over a billion people live on a dollar a day and can’t go to bed themselves with a full stomach, can you live as a Christian happily in your suburban home, driving your SUV? Of course you can’t. Not as a real Christian. And if you happen to be a liberal, conservative or centrist, I don’t care. The gospel has priority over politics.”
Most people think Christianity is about 2,000 years old and that it began with the birth of Jesus. Diarmaid MacCulloch begs to differ. In his new book Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, MacCulloch talks about the origins of the Church and how they set the stage for the appearance of Christ.
Yesterday, NPR ran an interview with MacCulloch that I found fascinating. It’s a wide-ranging discussion covering why some countries embrace Christianity and some don’t, why the Virgin Mary is more important to Catholics than to Protestants, and more.
I encourage you to click the link and give a listen. Hearing MacCulloch speak, I immediately thought of Robert Langdon in Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. See if you get the same impression.
Yiksa Miksa, maybe I need to re-think this “act of kindness” (AOK) weekly post idea. In searching for poignant stories of people selflessly helping others, as Jesus requests/commands, I found mostly stories of kind acts turning into disasters or rudely brushed off by the recipients. Like this one and this one and this one and this one. And then there’s this one, where the woman practically DEMANDED the kindness (which kind of evaporates the positive glow, at least for me).
Finally, I found this story. You could definitely argue that the act itself was miniscule, but as a dog lover who recently lost his dog of 14 years and remembers oh too well that last walk, I say it qualifies.
Two-thirds of Americans believe the Bible’s version of the creation of the world. That is, 10,000 years ago, God created the world and populated it with animals (including people) and plants. This belief always struck me as objectively and obviously and plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face absurd. Particularly when you can waltz into your nearest natural history museum and look at (and touch if you’re lucky) dinosaur bones that are millions of years old. But what do I know?
Which is why I found the video below so interesting. Dr. Bruce Waltke, a conservative, evangelical scholar, recently made this statement about evolution:
“To deny that reality will make us a cult–some odd group that’s not really interacting with the real world.”
The response was predictably fierce. Watch the video.
We created What He Said for many reasons. One, because the Bible is a hard book to read. We thought that designing the words of Christ in a new, easy-on-the-eye layout would help people get to the essential Christian lessons of love and peace and tolerance much easier than all the Bibles in their homes that never get pulled off the shelf and really read. And two, because we saw (and see) so many examples of self-proclaimed Christians acting in ways completely contrary to their professed faith. Maybe if they had an easy guide to the teachings of Christ they might reconsider some of their beliefs. And put the guns aside.
This article/editorial discusses “false witnesses” in the ever-growing movement of hate groups:
“It always seemed to me that there was a whole lot more to being a Christian than just believing in Jesus, that too many call themselves that without really knowing what it means and, in far too many cases, to justify behavior that is the antitheses of true Christianity.”
In discussing the arrest of the Michigan couple planning to kill law-enforcement officers, Dan Thomasson continues:
“The problem is that these people aren’t alone. Disaffected, ignorant followers of the philosophy of violence are popping up everywhere. They’re being helped by the Internet and the easy access to weapons. The high rate of unemployment has left otherwise normal citizens disaffected and vulnerable to the likes of those who hide behind religious masks and crazy schemes. Be careful. They aren’t Christians.”
Seven world-class religion scholars are convening in New Orleans this weekend at the 6th annual Greer Heard Point Counterpoint forum. The topic? “The Message of Jesus: What Did He Really Teach?” The headline event has the following heavyweights going toe-to-toe on their beliefs:
It’s tough to pin down the real story about Valentine’s Day. One, there were a lot of early Christian martyrs named Valentine. Two, the most widely accepted versions deal with a Valentine from 269 AD.
Anyway, this Valentine was a Roman priest who was jailed for either refusing to renounce his Christianity OR for secretly performing marriages for Roman soldiers (the Romans thought married soldiers were not as effective as single soldiers…fascinating link to today’s Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell debate). While in jail, Valentine either restored the sight of his jailer’s blind daughter OR was in love with this daughter and wrote her a note on the night of his execution, signed “From Your Valentine.”
You can read about all the legends and the birth of a greeting card juggernaut here.
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