The idea:

When we took that drive back in the summer and observed this sub-culture we recognized immediately two predominant things that interested them: basketball and hip hop music. We knew that we had the facilities and guys who could connect with these young men through basketball. We said, “This is out there but what might really be cool is a hip hop service of some kind with open gym afterwards…”

The young men:

They were 19-29 year old young men who play basketball nearly every single day, wear baggy clothes strategically placed to show off inked skin, work (or don’t work) part time to support various addictions, go from relationship to relationship sometimes producing children, and are heavily influenced regardless of race by hip hop music. These men, we recognized, may be directionless now and lacking maturity, but in reality they are the future of our community. They are in desperate need of being rescued by King Jesus and maturing into a manhood that is more about biblical masculinity than a macho bravado and locker room mentality. We decided that we were going to try our best and go after these guys.

What did we do? We started an open gym night in an amazing gym facility that God has provided at our campus. We began to have 20 or so guys showing up every week with whom we were building relationships. Then, we began to plan and promote a community 3 on 3 tournament. The event was a huge success. We had over 150 people in attendance. That meant more relationships and more chances for Gospel witness because since then we have been having at least 50 guys show up for each week’s open gym.

Read it all here.

Ortlund describes our American idolatry, which not the real Jesus, but a shallow phony.

Our local deity is not Jesus. He goes by the name Jesus. But in reality, our local deity is Jesus Jr.

Our little Jesus is popular because he is useful. He makes us feel better while conveniently fitting into the margins of our busy lives. But he is not terrifying or compelling or thrilling. When we hear the gospel of Jesus Jr., our casual response is “Yeah, that’s what I believe.” Jesus Jr. does not confront us, surprise us, stun us. He looks down on us with a benign, all-approving grin. He tells us how wonderful we really are, how entitled we really are, how wounded we really are, and it feels good.

Jesus Jr. appeals to the flesh. He does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him. He is not able to understand them, much less impart them, because Jesus Jr. is the magnification of Self, the idealization of Self, the absolutization of Self turning around and validating Self, flattering Self, reinforcing Self. Jesus Jr. does not change us, because he is a projection of us.

It is time to tear down Jesus Jr. It is time to rediscover the real Jesus. Still today, even to us, his invitation stands: “Come to me” (Matthew 11:28).

Christian hipsters like music, movies, and books that are well-respected by their respective artistic communities–Christian or not. They love books like Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider, God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. They tend to be fans of any number of the following authors: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Brennan Manning, Eugene Peterson, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, Soren Kierkegaard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robison, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important.

Christian hipsters love thinking and acting Catholic, even if they are thoroughly Protestant. They love the Pope, liturgy, incense, lectio divina, Lent, and timeless phrases like “Thanks be to God” or “Peace of Christ be with you.” They enjoy Eastern Orthodox churches and mysterious iconography, and they love the elaborate cathedrals of Europe (even if they are too museum-like for hipster tastes). Christian hipsters also love taking communion with real Port, and they don’t mind common cups. They love poetry readings, worshipping with candles, and smoking pipes while talking about God. Some of them like smoking a lot of different things.

Christian hipsters love breaking the taboos that used to be taboo for Christians. …

HT: Josh Reitano

1.  Limit the total media exposure experienced by your children.  The statistic that the average child and adolescent is immersed in the media for 45 hours a week should be sufficient motivation for parents to hit the brakes and gain control of media exposure.  Access to entertainment media should be a privilege earned, not a right assumed by the child.

2.  Do not allow children and teenagers to have televisions and Internet-connected computers in the bedroom.  There is simply too much danger in unsupervised media exposure, and too much temptation in terms of both quantity and content.  No child needs a television in the bedroom, and a computer connected to the Internet is an invitation to disaster.

3.  Make entertainment media a family experience.  There is a massive difference in the experience of a child watching programming alone and that same child watching with a parent.  Parents should be in unquestioned control of media decisions.  Parents should also be eager to discuss what is seen with teenagers and children, helping them to grow in discernment and judgment.

4.  Parents have to do the hard work of actually knowing what their children and teenagers are watching, playing, hearing, and experiencing through media exposure.  No one said parenting was supposed to be easy.

5.  Realize that a revolution has taken place in the lives of children and adolescents.  The emergence of social media technologies means that children (and adolescents especially) now expect to be in constant communication with their peers.  This is not healthy, sane, or helpful.  All of us — children and teenagers included — need a break from this immersion.  Put a charging dock in the kitchen and confiscate cell phones as the kids come in the door.  That will send a message the old fashioned way — in person.

6.  Take a regular look at what your child is posting and what others are posting on his or her social media sites.  Look at the instant messaging exchanges and emails.  You are the parent, after all, and your child’s access to these technologies should come with the open and non-negotiable requirement that parents see it all.

7.  Remember that saying “no” is a legitimate option.  I do not believe that saying “no” is always the right response.  The media bring opportunities for good as well as for evil.  Children and teenagers who are never allowed access to media technologies and entertainment will emerge into adulthood with no powers of discernment.  But “no” is sometimes the best and only appropriate answer, and parents should always be ready to use it when needed.

Way to go, Al. You can come over to my house for coffee next time you’re in town. And then I’ll kick your butt at the 3rd person shooter of your choice after we take in a Cav’s game while Twittering live commentary on our PDAs.

This album was marketed using the increasingly popular give-it-to-me-for-free-and-I’ll-pay-what-I-think-its-worth strategy. This was a good move, since most Christian bookstores wouldn’t stock it anyway because it contains such incendiary language as “sex” and “whore” and he dares criticize the Republicans as the Messianic party.

Released in 2005, this is during the 2nd Bush term where Republicans appeared poised to rule for a generation.

My, how things have changed.

There is one stanza from the song King and a Kingdom that sticks out to me:

there are two great lies that i’ve heard:
“the day you eat of the fruit of that tree, you will not surely die”
and that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class Republican
and if you wanna be saved you have to learn to be like Him

What I find ironic is how relevant this sounded three years ago and how completely upside down and irrelevant this sounds now.

While visiting an African American church service recently, I was fascinated by how many Obama T-shirts were being worn by the attendees. Probably about the same percentage of cars sporting a “W” bumper sticker in a suburban church’s parking lot.

Another line from the song bears repeating, and this time it is directed squarely at those on the left:

My first allegiance is not to a flag, a country or a man…my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood… Its to a King and a Kingdom.

Here’s the point: George W. Bush was hailed as the standard bearer of consevative Christian idealogy and is leaving office with an approval rating hovering around  Jeffrey Dahmer’s. Obama is on the fast track to iconic status as a young and compelling black man in the nation’s highest office.

But perhaps his followers can learn from those disppointed soldiers in W’s army. To quote Derek Webb once again, “We’ll never have a savior on captial hill.”

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine published an article called Jesus Made Me Puke where he goes undercover to a church retreat in Texas to get a look under the hood of evangelical Christianity.

Here’s the accompanying photo.

Of course, while we are told to respect all religions and are spoon fed this “all paths lead to God” nonsense, Christianity is routinely treated with ridicule and contempt.

Taibbi could have gone to a church with some intellectual credibility, but he rather chose to go to the Christian circus that epitomizes evangelical cheese just to watch the Charismatic chaos.

He wasn’t disappointed.

Stay with me, I’ll get to the puke part in a minute.

Here’s the drill: he pretends to be a seeker and attends Cornerstone Church’s Encounter Weekend. That’s John Hagee’s church, and he is a Christian Zionist who wants to fast-track Armageddon so we can usher in God’s kingdom.

Taibbi’s a cherry picker who went after an easy target. But if you’ve ever wondered what honest skeptics wonder about Christianity, look no further. He is blunt in his assessments:

When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television – great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair.

We don’t get to see the utterly bats**t world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act – toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers – and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church.

What he discovers “backstage” is a level of weirdness that would qualify for a witch trial in an earlier generation. The main speaker for the Encounter weekend, Phillip Fortenberry, is an ex-military macho man who continually tells the audience how many manly pieces of military equipment he can handle.

This macho image is important for Fortenberry, because Christian men are weak. Taibbi tries to dress the part:

My disguise was modeled on other men I’d seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I’d been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-p***s look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

Shipwrecked masculinity. That’s what outsiders think of Christian men.

The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called “the wound.” The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.

Unfortunately, Christ was not very well presented as the solution. Pop-psychology ruled the day:

But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to “find your wounds” (”My husband hid my Saks card!”) at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.

He explains that Christians are actually faking their way through religious exercises.

The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene – even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry – outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest – in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the “work” of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

I think Taibbi is on to something here. In a religious environment such as this, where external conformity is paramount, one could find themselves easily slipping into a routine of conditioned responses to certain spiritual stimuli. We should be on guard against this.

For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath.

Ironically, Taibbi is somewhat prophetic here. He is complaining about people who are, in Jesus’ words, “whitewashed tombs,” who clean the outside of a cup while the inside is still dirty. I think Jesus would agree with that last quote.

Back to Fortenberry. After this intense and protracted weekend full of gut wrenching and emotion inducing meetings and group counseling sessions, they reach the final climactic “Deliverance” service where they can finally receive the healing they came for.

His description sounds more like Voodoo than any variety of genuine Christianity. This is the puke part, by the way.

What happens next is this: Fortenberry starts to call out “demons” from the stage and casting them out. Demons of pornography, drugs, addiction, gossip, and so on. This continues for a long time as his voice escalates and people start to get worked up. Fortenberry instructs people to open their mouths so the demon can come out of them. He tells them to not pray, because they need to have a clear path for the demon to travel as it is passing out of them.

Life coaches are literally given barf bags to take to people who vomit out their demons.

Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.

It was obvious that virtually everyone in the crowd was playacting to some degree or another.

Taibbi left the Encounter weekend with his notebook full of juicy anecdotes to share to Rolling Stone readers who I’m sure were all too eager to pass judgment on all of evangelical Christianity based on the behavior of these folks.

I have two responses to this.

First, Taibbi was wrong to target a church that would provide such fodder simply for the purpose of making fun. You can’t judge all of Rock music based on the burnt couches and trashed hotel room antics of Guns-N-Roses, and you can’t judge the truth claims of Christianity based on excessive and superstitious people who are deluded and worked into an emotional frenzy by a psycho-spiritual manipulator.

I would love to see the article that would be written after spending a weekend at a retreat with John Piper’s church, or RC Sproul’s church. If its Charismatics he likes to target, then go to Mark Driscoll’s church or to CJ Mahaney’s church.

These men are some spiritual heavyweights who are more interested in exalting the sovereign Christ than toying with the emotions of people with real needs.

Secondly, although I’m embarrassed by the goings on at the Encounter Weekend of Cornerstone Church, these men and women are my brothers and sisters in Christ. These people who are rolling in the aisles and foaming at the mouth and puking into demon bags are my brothers and sisters in Christ and I will proudly claim all of them. I will not be ashamed of those for whom Christ died. Their behavior is unacceptable, but they are God’s children.

If Taibbi wanted a freak show, that’s what he got.

But I have been pointing out for a long time on this blog the very fact that Jesus values things that are backwards.

Taibbi looks at these people and sees losers, posers, freaks, and idiots.

Jesus looks at these people and says:

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:11-12)

Beyond this, it isn’t accurate. Let me demonstrate.

Pop quiz: How many African Americans are in Dave Matthews Band? Look closely.

Answer: there are 5 members in the band. There are two white guys. And there are four African Americans. How is this possible? Dave (2nd from the right) is from South Africa, making him both white and African American.

Alan Keyes argues that the label “African-American” only belongs to those who are descended from African slaves. But this does not do justice to African Blacks of non-slavery descent.

Unfortunately, any politically correct term can develop pejorative uses over time, creating the ever present cycle of new politically correct terms.

I am frequently at a loss as to the most appropriate and respectful way to talk about race with African-Americans. It seems that either way, there is the potential for offense.

In the opinion of the NYT editorial, the term “colored” works just fine. Provocative…

Ephesians 5:18ff says this:

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Ephesians 5 is a great example of the purpose that God assigns to singing in his church. The positive command in 5:18 is to be filled with the Spirit. How, one might ask, is this to be accomplished?

There is a head command (be filled), which is followed by several modifiers (participles in Greek) that shed light on the command. It looks like this:

Be Filled (the command, imperative tense)

Paul is saying here that there are at least 5 different ways to be filled with the spirit, three of which explicitly involve some type of musical expression.

Simply stated, God has sovereignly ordained music to be an important vehicle of being filled with the Spirit.

We may speculate as to why God has done so. Does God particularly enjoy the sound of our singing? Is his impressed with our inventive meter or new discovery of words to rhyme with “grace”?

No, I believe it is much more practical than that. Many would argue for a “lifestyle of worship” which isn’t limited to music. Granted. But singing is exclusively musical. That’s what singing is; it is music. Paul commands the use of singing as a subset of filling with the Spirit, which biblically is connected to the Word.

Here’s a summary of my view: since the filling of the Holy Spirit is connected with the proclamation of God’s word (the book of Acts consistently demonstrates this), and since singing is commanded as an important vehicle of being filled with the spirit, singing is the easiest way to internalize and memorize Christian truth.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts about the power of music and why it is essential for Christian instruction.

1. Music is memorable. It internalizes truth through rhythm and melody.

2. Music is repetitive. Repetition is key to memorization.

3. Music is participatory. It belongs to regular people. The simplest and youngest people understand it. No PhD required.

4. Music is portable. You can take it with you when you leave and sing it whenever you want.

5. Music is reductionistic (this is a good thing). It takes complex themes and distills them down to their bare essence. Take the book of Proverbs, for example. This book contains reflections on the Torah and reduces them to pithy statements.

Imagine how powerful this is: short poems about God and the Christian life are hammered repeatedly into the minds and hearts of every congregation member, who largely memorize every word and spontaneously sing them throughout the week in the shower, car, or wherever, which ultimately become unconsciously internalized and integrated into one’s worldview.

Worship music, in my view, is one of the tools God uses to pound his truth into the minds of believers. This is exactly the sentiment of Deuteronomy 6:4-6:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. ⁵ You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. ⁶ And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. ⁷ You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. ⁸ You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. ⁹ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.