The Center for Gospel Culture Blog

Introverts in Evangelical America  

StaffSeptember 30, 2010 

Some interesting thoughts from Adam McHugh, the author of Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture.  Here is an excerpt from this article:

I saw the need for a book on this topic when I realized that our cultural slant had infiltrated some wings of the church, especially mainstream evangelicalism. As I say in Introverts in the Church, entering your average evangelical worship service feels like walking into a non-alcoholic cocktail party. Evangelicalism has a chatty, mingling informality about it, and no matter how well-intentioned that atmosphere is, it can be a difficult environment for those of us who are overwhelmed by large quantities of social interaction and who may connect best with God in silence. Sometimes our communities talk so much that we are not able to express the gifts that we bring to others. If we are given the space, we bring gifts of listening, insight, creativity, compassion, and a calming presence, things that our churches desperately need.

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Inception: Desire & the Gospel  

Jeremy M. MullenSeptember 29, 2010 

In Inception, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio’s character) explains the central premise of the film: “What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate.” Cobb and his colleagues can sneak into the dreams of other people, and their goal is to implant an idea so deeply in the persons mind that it grows and captures the imagination. Therefore, the most cherished desires of the heart matter more than any argument. 
 
It’s an interesting idea, but it is basically an old gospel realization. Christianity has, at least since the time of Augustine, insisted on the biblical notion that we act out of the desires of our heart. Our greatest problem is not our desires, but our lack of deep-seated desire for God. In an early nineteenth-century sermon entitled “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” Thomas Chalmers said:
 
You have all heard that nature abhors a vacuum. Such, at least, is the nature of the heart, that thought the room which is in it may change one inmate for another, it can not be left void without pain of most intolerable suffering. It is not enough, then, to argue the folly of an existing affection… It may not even be enough to associate the threats and terrors of some coming vengeance with the indulgence of it. The heart may still resist every application, by obedience to which it would finally be conducted to a state so much at war with all its appetites as that of downright inanition... The best way of casting out an impure affection is to admit a pure one; and by the love of what is good to expel the love of what is evil. Thus it is, that the freer gospel, the more sanctifying is the gospel; and the more it is received as a doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according to godliness. This is one of the secrets of the Christian life, that the more a man holds of God as a pensioner, the greater is the payment of service that He renders back again.
 
Similarly, about a century later, C. S. Lewis, in “The Weight of Glory,” puts it this way:
 
The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

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Urbanization and Christianity  

StaffSeptember 24, 2010 

 

Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes about the relationship between the reality of the rise of cities throughout the world and the influence of Christianity in these cities.  He opens his article by saying, 

The human future is an urban future. In one of the greatest social shifts of all human history, over half of all living humans now inhabit cities. Driven by population shifts, immigration, and human reproduction, massive new cities are springing up all over the globe. Will the church rise to this challenge?

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Health and Wealth Gospel?  

StaffSeptember 22, 2010 

In a recent Op-Ed piece by David Brooks of The New York Times, he looks into the life of David Platt of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, AL and how he is challenging the tendencies of evangelicalism preaching and living out a skewed gospel message.  

Here is an excerpt from this article:

Jesus, Platt notes, made it hard on his followers. He created a minichurch, not a mega one. Today, however, building budgets dwarf charitable budgets, and Jesus is portrayed as a genial suburban dude. “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshipping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshipping ourselves.”

Next, Platt takes aim at the American dream. When Europeans first settled this continent, they saw the natural abundance and came to two conclusions: that God’s plan for humanity could be realized here, and that they could get really rich while helping Him do it. This perception evolved into the notion that we have two interdependent callings: to build in this world and prepare for the next. 

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Theologians in the Local Church  

StaffSeptember 22, 2010 



A helpful summary of Alister McGrath's book, The Passionate Intellect, can be found here.  The summary highlights the role of theologians in the local church and the unique contributions they are able to make.

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Preaching The Gospel Every Week  

StaffSeptember 22, 2010 

Three influential pastors, Mark Dever, Mark Driscoll, and James MacDonald, discuss how they are intentional about preaching the gospel in every sermon.  

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Science and Faith  

StaffSeptember 15, 2010 

For years, the relationship between science and faith has been discussed and debated in many different arenas.  Of particular recent note, is Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and his discussion with Peter Boyer of The New Yorker.  

Here's an excerpt from a press release regarding an article that Boyer wrote regarding Collins:

In the September 6, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Covenant” (p. 60), Peter J. Boyer talks to Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, about the August 23rd ruling that halted federal spending on embryonic-stem-cell research, and explores the political future of the debate. Collins is “the public face of American science and the keeper of the world’s deepest biomedical research-funding purse,” Boyer writes. “There wasn’t much doubt about Collins’s ability to handle the formidable challenge of running the N.I.H.,” but the initial objection to him was his Christian faith, which puts him in the minority among his peers in the National Academy of Science. It was clear, Boyer writes, “that Collins’s handling of stem-cell policy would be the critical test of his vow to separate faith from secular duty.” Before Collins had a direct say in the Administration’s decision on stem cells, “he had been personally torn by the ethical questions posed by stem-cell research.” But a year after Obama’s appointment of Collins, he seemed “an inspired choice,” Boyer writes. “The President had found not only a man who reflected his own view of the harmony between science and faith but an evangelical Christian who hoped that the government’s expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research might bring the culture war over science to a quiet end.”

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The Power of Language  

StaffSeptember 13, 2010 

An article on how language can affect how we experience the world. What might the significance for communcating the gospel be?

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

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A View of the Suburbs  

Jeremy M. MullenSeptember 09, 2010 

 

In the Arcade Fire’s breakthrough album, Neon Bible, they presented a dark, sustained critique of religion. In a similar fashion, their new album, The Suburbs, takes aim at the failed promises of suburban life. Both albums benefit from an avoidance of scathing, didactic claims; instead, they rely on a series of vignettes that make the point forcefully from many directions. For example, the song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” opens this way:
 
They hear me singing and they told me to stop,
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.
These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose,
But late at night the feelings swim towards the surface
‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine.
They’re calling out: “Come and find your kind!”
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small,
That we can never get away from the sprawl.
Living in the sprawl, the dead shopping malls
Rise like mountains beyond mountains,
And there’s no end in sight. I need the darkness.
Someone please cut the lights!
 
There are many ways to interpret the distinctively urban turn of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. (There are even more predictions about what the future may hold for the American landscape.) Moreover, the church has finally begun to turn its attention back to the cities – also for a myriad of reasons. But perhaps the most compelling reason for the abandonment of the suburban ideal is that the dream no longer seems very compelling. It had become an alternative gospel – a way of avoiding sin, guilt, and misery. But somehow all of those things crept back in. Arcade Fire’s vision of endless “dead shopping malls” is a metaphor for the seemingly hopeless suburban trap. By contrast, the stunning vision in Revelation 21 and 22 of the fusion of the new heavens and the new earth presents us with a hope of human flourishing – a world that is also a city, as well as a garden and a temple.[1] The death of the suburban dream – though costly to some churches who married their ambition to it – only makes the gospel seem that much more beautiful.

[1] This strange collision of images is the subject of a profound study on the presence of God by G. K. Beale, entitled The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (New Studies in Biblical Theology 17; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004).

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prelude CD Release Concert  

StaffSeptember 09, 2010 




A free CD release concert is scheduled for this Friday, 9/10 in Boston.  If you are in the area, we highly encourage you to come and invite others to this event.

Listen to music samples from this CD on www.citylifemusic.com and you are able to pre-order your CD today!

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Facebook as a Tool for Ministry  

StaffSeptember 01, 2010 

Tim Challies has written a helpful piece on the positive benefits, but also the cautions, of utilizing Facebook as a tool for one's ministry.  His comments are well balanced and there is a general encouragement from Challies to use Facebook with caution, as with any social networking tool. 

Here is a helpful excerpt that highlights this:

As you consider using Facebook in your ministry, or as you consider how you are already using it, spend a few minutes thinking about what Facebook hasreplaced. It is generally true of new technologies that they do not just add something to life, but that they also replace something that is already there. In the case of Facebook, it may well be that it is replacing real-world face to face ministry. Facebook builds social connections and in some ways enhances them; but it can just as easily diminish them as it replaces offline life with online. There is always the temptation to take the easy route (Post “Happy Birthday” on someone’s wall instead of calling him; Send an email instead of meeting him for lunch). Be sure that you are not allowing Facebook to be an easy way of getting around difficult ministry. And make sure you are not using it to disincarnate yourself, to remove your physical presence from people’s lives.

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The Center for Gospel Culture exists to establish the centrality of the gospel as the basis for developing a gospel culture worldview in renewing every dimension of an individual's life, so that individuals would be able to think, act, and live in line with the truth of the gospel.


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