Introverts in the Church – Quote – Pg. 53

The shyness cycle. Introversion and shynessare not synonymous. Introversion is a natural personality trait where we go inside ourselves to process our experiences. Shyness, on the other hand, is a condition marked by fear or extreme anxiety in social situations. It is common for introverts to struggle with shyness, because if social skills and confidence are earned through experience, then it’s logical that introverts who run low on social energy and, consequently, have less experience would struggle with uncertainty and tentativeness. Our fears are compounded when we take a risk and are misunderstood or rejected, leading us into greater self-doubt and social anxiety. Our painful emotions lead us further into ourselves, and we often resist sharing our feelings with others. This ciompletes the shyness cycle, as we hide from social situations, even becoming cuynical of social interaction, and seal ourselves off in our internal worlds.

Pg. 53 of “Introverts in the Church” by Adam S. McHugh

I’ve been reading through this book and find it quite refreshing and helpful as an introvert. If you’re an introvert I’d encourage you to give it a browse at some point.

How does ‘Christian’ fit with Church?

Could we but climb where Moses stood,

And view the landscape o’er,

Not Jordan’s stream, nor death’s cold flood,

Should fright us from the shore.

I wrote in a prior post a critical breakdown of the methods our congregations utilize on typical Sunday mornings (link).  Any criticism, without follow-up, will be one sided.  It is possible that the effectiveness and implementation of our church service exemplifies the best case in our worst case world.  I don’t think it is however, and I wish to continue discussion on the topic.

If we are criticizing how churches operate, it means there is some base assumption that we believe is not being met.  For me, it is the idea presented in the comment that stated, “the time in the NT when Believers [sic] were most hyped about living in community, singing praises to God, and worshiping, was early in the book of Acts… those people were 100% authentic and into their formal worship, but they were not engaged in mission”.  Certainly, there is a directive given to be mentors across the world (Mt. 28:19-20), leading others in holiness and Christ-centered living.  To do this requires a severe focus on our own holiness first.  Not only is there hypocrisy if you attempt to lead others in holiness when you are not holy yourself, but there is an issue of priority.  About priority, the leaders in our churches are not required to score 10 conversions per year, nor required to condense the gospel into 1 minute, 5 minute, or 15 minute retellings.  Instead of unleashed torrents of words; leaders are called to integrity, holiness, moral living, and effective representation as images of God.  This is why Jesus demands us to make “disciples” of all nations and not speak the gospel to all nations.

If then our own lives center around retooling our minds into Christ-thought, then our encouragement and support from fellow believers should also be to that end.  Hebrews 11-12 dictates men known for faith in God (not morals!) and then calls the reader to endure and continuously press forward “looking to Jesus”.  Acts, describing the new dispensational growth of God’s program, were indeed “100% authentic”.  Could you imagine today an Annias or Sapphira situation where a speck of deception is met with death?  Our congregations would expire in a matter of days!

Today we sit in a nation saturated with information.  Christian dialogue is plentiful, and excellent sermons and lessons exist with free and easy access.  As we think about church criticism, we must take into account our saturated environment, and our priority towards holiness.  I fear the order of service we mentioned before even if it has a similar goal, has rested in traditional patterns when a need to rethink itself is prevalent.

My next post will offer suggestions for rethinking church paradigms, but until then how do you see our goals as Christians relating to the goal of the Church?  Are they the same goal?  Do you think that there are various goals represented by different churches?

QuotedPost: What to do when you cannot die for Christ?

I am quoting the following in full from Michael Patton linked here: http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2009/11/what-to-do-when-you-cannot-die-for-christ/

The blog is an extension of “Reclaiming the Mind Ministries” who put out some good resources for studying and learning the bible.  Check them out: http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/. I wanted to quote the blog entry in full because I really resonate with what he is saying and think it is very important to keep in mind for all Christians.

You know what it feels like: you are on fire; you are ready, willing and able; you don’t need any more sermons on Rom 12:1. You are a living sacrifice; you listened to Piper’s “Doing missions when dying is gain”; you are ready to die. You are ready to die for Christ, the Gospel and whatever other mission God puts you on.

Here I am Lord; I am ready.

Problem: there is no altar. Well, not like you thought. If it exists, it does not exist in the glory of your perceptions. You pray continually for God to show you his direction.There has to be a place for me in his army.

Here’s what you do:

You decide to become a missionary. You talk to your wife and your family about quitting your job and becoming a full time missionary in Africa. Why Africa? Just because. You wife thinks you are nuts and your children don’t understand. All attempts to infect her with the desire to die have the opposite effect. But you are not about to question yourcalling. In your spiritual high, you place some distance between you and your family, believing that it is the Lord’s will. Discouragement has yet to set in.

Or maybe . . .

You decide to start a church. Your passions will be realized as you minister in your local community, transforming all those around you with the preaching—expository preaching—of the word of God. You are sick of the churches that would not know the Gospel if it hit them in the knee cap. You are going to be the lighthouse on a hill. You don’t really know what to do so you get on Microsoft Word and make a flier. You put a nice Bible graphic that you found from Google image search on the flier, along with the announcement of the new Bible study that is going to be held at your friend’s coffee shop.

The day comes. Hundreds of fliers have been handed out. Two people show. One is your wife. The other is a nice young girl who just broke up with her boyfriend and had nothing else to do that night. It’s past time for the Bible study to start and you look outside in hopes that someone else will show. Someone pulls up and leaves upon the realization that they might be the only ones there. You attempt to teach the Bible study, but the disappointment of teaching two people when you hoped for 30 to 40 takes the wind out of your sails. All you want to do is go home and cry.

Or maybe . . .

You decide to go to seminary, but don’t get accepted.

Or maybe . . .

You start with a small missions endeavor, but you don’t get the funds.

Or maybe . . .

You start with a bang, but then it fizzles and no one is as anxious and excited as you are.

What do you do when you try . . . I mean really try to die for Christ, but he won’t let you. What do you do when you are on the altar and you don’t die, but your are getting really sunburned?

This is to those of you who feel called to do something big for the Lord, but it never happens.

Don’t give up your zeal. This is the hardest thing to do. The first two illustrations given above are reenactments of my life. God is not setting you on a 100 meter dash, but on a long distance run. I love new Christians who are set on giving their lives up for the Lord. But I am so saddened when I see those who had such a zeal reenter their old life with great discouragement, wondering why the Lord did not use them. God will use you. God is using you. But he does not move as quickly as we like. Keep the zeal and passion, but let the Lord set the pace.

Ministry is not the de facto solution to satisfy your intense craving to die for the Lord. Remember, you are a living sacrifice. Living sacrifice. Don’t be surprised if you live. Don’t be surprised if you live a life that is rather ordinary, not making a significant impact every direction you turn. Don’t impose such a goal upon the Lord.

Be quiet and tranquil. The Lord will show the path in your tranquility. Paul tells the Thessalonians to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands” (1Th 4:11). Ouch. But impacts are never “quiet.” I want to make an impact. I want to stir things up. I want to drop a bomb on the world leaving behind the sign of the Trinity! The problem is that your bomb could be the very antinomy of God’s plan. Your bomb could be you getting off the altar. God will direct you.

I have just watched a very dear friend who had so much zeal for the Lord, so much passion to follow him, so much desire to die that he now sits, divorced, estranged from his wife and family, with his head in his hands wondering why the Lord gave him a spiritual cement job.

Your passions may open the doors you expect and they may not. But you are to sit on the altar, no matter where you are or how God leads, and be a living sacrifice. Chuck Swindoll once said that the problem with living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off the altar. Get back on the altar.

What do you do when you cannot die for Christ? Live for him.

Why do you go to Church?

Flooded church on Lake Mavrovo

I wonder if our church gatherings will be praised or condemned on the last day.

Consider the typical church service* that begins with a word of prayer to prepare people and dedicate their time before God.  Proceeding the prayer a set of songs are sung intending to give outlet to praise and bind the community together in unity.  A short lecture is given highlighting principles from Scripture that help us draw closer to God through His character or by seeing His unfolding plan.  Sprinkled between these stages may involve announcements, other prayers, or vision statement.  Stretching may also be inserted to keep individuals attentive and awake.

What do you think?  Is this the Christian gathering Paul would approve of; that Jesus would design?  Is this a group the apostle John, full of unity and veracity for truth would affirm?  What would Jeremiah, suffering with flames in his bones, think of how we conduct ourselves?  Or Daniel, John the Baptist, James, Ezekiel in exile?

I have some concerns with how we do conduct ourselves.  I suppose my concerns fall back not to the purpose of gathering, but potential (and real!) abuses that are not only tolerated, but encouraged and perhaps forgotten to even be abuses.

If Israel was repeatedly blasted for empty worship and empty hearts, what of our own?  Is a minute opening prayer enough to take our tired minds and bring us into the presence of a transcendent God who has dipped His toes into reality for us to enjoy Him?  Are praise songs intended to bring us into the presence of God, or to be an overflow of a mind united to His divine character?  Furthermore are praise songs in anyway a form of ‘worship’ if they do not flow from depths of our souls and desires of our hearts?

I wonder what type of gathering Paul would organize.  Would the goal be reviving tired and struggling exiles with faith in a world of unfaith?  Would the structure be dynamic to account for the dangers of tradition and repetition?  How can we make a vibrant and passionate community?

Perhaps I am the only Christian who attends that does not mean the songs I sing and wonders what goal our leaders (and ourselves) are aiming for.  If I am the only one, then I must think, perhaps “justice is a lost cause. Evil is epidemic. (Amos 5:13)”  Where is our justice-oceans of it?  Where is our fairness-rivers of it?
*with some variation of course

Obama Announces Smart Grid Plan (from Stimulus $$)

Yesterday around lunch time (EDT) Obama announced stimulus funding for the US energy grid at the largest photovoltaic power installation in the US.  Arstechnica has a full story on the event here.  The breakdown of where the current $3.4 billion commitment will go can be found here.  After scanning through it, I found my own local power company was going to be receiving some cash:

 

PECO Energy Company
Funding Awarded: $200,000,000
Total Cost: $422,570,000
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Description: Deploy smart meters to all 600,000 customers, upgrade communication infrastructure to support a smart meter network, install 7 “intelligent” substations, and accelerate deployment of more reliable and secure smart grid technologies that will reduce peak energy load and increase cost savings.

 

I’m not sure how granular or helpful these “smart meters” will be.  It will be cool though if they allow me to check at any point how much power draw is coming from my house, and possibly from what appliance as well.  Part of the reasoning for dumping cash into the energy grid is for future sustainability.  Our current grid has limited ability to shuffle power across the continental US.  Renewal energy plants typically are geographically bound (solar potency, geothermal options, water dams) and if we have more green plants in the future we will need a more efficient and effective system.

An interesting point the Arstechnica article also makes is that Arnold Schwarzenegger just approved a smart grid measure to bring a smart energy grid to California.  Because of the size of California this will may match the impact of the Government program.

Fitness CAN be Fun

Taken from Dr. Claude Mariottini’s blog.  Perhaps fitness CAN be fun:

Microsoft XBOX 360 getting Blu-Ray Player (Updated: Apparently not…)

theRegister is reporting the following for today,

During a recent interview on the future of Project Natal, the motion-control system for Xbox. Ballmer was asked if Microsoft plans to put Blu-ray into the games console.

Although he told website Gizmodo that he doesn’t know if Blu-ray needs to be integrated into the console, Ballmer added that “you’ll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories”.

During the format wars between HDDVD and Blu-Ray Ballmer made comments that explicitly stated Microsoft would never back the Blu-Ray format.  This announcement is great news to the plethora of 360 owners out there who would like to watch some amazing Blu-Ray DVDs (Netflix anyone?) such as Planet Earth.

Update:
Apparently there has been further clarification from Microsoft about Ballmers quote and Microsoft has no immediate or near future plans to release a Blu-ray accessory.  Phoey.

Why Does Everyone Want Annoyance

There’s a “feature” introduced on the latest iPod nano, touch, and phone that allows it to turn your image sideways when the phone is sideways.  Mozilla also is apparently attempting to introduce this “feature” for future versions of Firefox.  The latest generation Kindle from Amazon also has the ability.

I hate this feature.

Why would I hate it?  Isn’t it so helpful to be able to turn your mobile device/laptop sideways to fit your aspect ratio better?  In theory yes.

What happens though when you are playing games or watching videos while lying on your side in bed?  Or perhaps you’re on a car ride and laying down.  Or maybe you want to look at a photo from a different angle.  Or perhaps you are just moving around and the device is flat with slight rolling to either side.  Take an object and lay it flat, then tilt it slightly left or right – which way should the screen orient?  Maybe you didn’t mean to tilt it at all.

There are ways to work around the most obvious abuses: Perhaps making devices resistant to easy screen change (for instance when rolling to the side you need to hit 70° rotation but then you need to go at least 50° in the other direction before it would switch back again.  This allows a 50° buffer between rotates to minimalize accidental movement.  There would also need to be a timed delay based on acceleration speed and how long it has been rotated).  Perhaps also having the granularity to tell your device what software is allowed access to acceleration data.  It may be really irritating to have a video game flipping 90°, but what about CD covers?  Problem: probably not.  Perhaps also having the ability to easily disable completely the accelerometer.  Now you can lay on your side and enjoy the device without it rotating incorrectly, ever.

So why do I hate the feature if there are so many ways to work around it?

1) Using someone elses device could be extremely frustrating.

2) Just because workarounds exist does not mean common sense will be incorporated.

3) It has been hyped multiple times in the past few years as a ridiculously awesome feature and it is not.  It is a nice feature, but it is a minor one with great potential for annoyance.

Quote from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle on Feminism and Working/Cooking

I think “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is the best book I have read this year.  It really is too much for me to digest if I try to read more than one chapter at a time.  Here is an excerpt from the chapter I read today:

I understand that most U.S. Citizens don’t have room in their lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomoically entangled in the answer. I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won’t have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our fulltime job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of our shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.

It’s a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture.  When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. “Hey, ladies,” it said to us, “go ahead, get liberated. We’ll take care of dinner.” They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way, baby, into bad eatting habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories.  Pg 126

This passage brings up all kinds of questions to me.  There are the validity questions such as, “Are wild range chicken labels really significantly different from CAFO chicken?”  And then also questions such as, “Is this a valid explanation of the results of feminism?”  ”How can we provide healthy living (family and food) in our both-parents-working culture?” “How true are these generalizations?”

A Review: Losing God: Clinging to Faith through Doubt and Depression by Matt Rogers

Losing God by Matt Rogers

Losing God: Clinging to Faith through Doubt and Depression. by Matt Rogers
InterVarsity Press, 2008, Downers Grove, Illinois

Losing God is a book about mental and spiritual suffering.  Matt Rogers, now a copastor of New Life Christian Fellowship church, takes the reader on a journey through his darkest years of depression.  Lacing his journey with with journal entries, Matt starts at the onset of his deepest struggles and unfolds his battles and reflection.  The issues Matt struggles with may not be the issues you are struggling with.  His struggles focused on an all powerful God allowing evil, and loving that God.  He wants to love God, but can’t find a way to do so.  I found the book mirroring my own depressive years.

Saturday, November 28, 1998

It’s getting harder and harder to love even the thought of God. I don’t know who he is anymore. I feel like he hates me. … I just can’t fake being okay anymore. (p. 42)

Thursday, November 27, 1997

It’s been so long since I’ve felt close to God, and the horror is that I have no idea what to do. I am so ashamed of me. Everyday I long for a savior to change my heart, and all the while I know there is no other savior than the one my heart doesn’t love.

I want to know what people mean when they say, “I love Jesus.” I want to love him too. I wonder if I ever will. (p. 30)

Matt breaks down his story into 10 chapters.  The first 7 detail his struggle and efforts at healing.  Chapter 8 marks glimmers of hope in his life, and chapter 9 and 10 expand on that hope and the process of appropriating it.  Hope waits for chapter 8 to represent his own experience and constant despair up to that point.  Depression he explains, “does not come with encouragement.  It is a void, a vacuum, a terrible blackness.”  As someone who also suffered from depression, I admire greatly his endurance.

The weight of the despair bent me to the floor, and there, in a near fetal position, I lay sobbing the whole afternoon. (p. 42)

Depression is, in its more severe manifestations, an all-consuming illness. It saps its victim of all but essential life energy. The thought of making my bed or brushing my teeth was exhausting; even more so were the tasks themselves. It seemed as though my body had spent all its abillities on just keeping my mind running in tormented circles. (p. 49)

Eventually as Matt writes through chapters 8, 9 and 10 he finds a path that leads to recovery.  Not a recovery that clouds over or ignores his struggles, but instead a recovery that allows balanced understanding of life; he writes, “If I hid my face from what hurt and if I made God into whatever image I wanted, my solace would be an illusion. (p. 114)”  I don’t want to say too much about how the book resolves issues because there really are no simple answers given.  What this book allows is for people to understand they are not alone in their struggles, and to give them some hope of future resolution.

A simple conversation, pleasurable to a healthy mind, is utterly exhausting to one that is ill. Afflicted souls, therefore, retreat from what could be (and what was for me) a wonderful source of hope: the community of saints. (p. 122)

This was strong medicine for my battle-scarred mind: If God would use me for good in the lives of others, might he not also desire blessing for me? (p. 123)

Matt struggled through not only finding joy in life, but also seeing life as it is.  He observes that “darkened hearts wonder why no one can see the world ‘as it really is.’ (p. 76)”  He acknowledges the self-inflicted tortures that say “if I weren’t so weak, I could handle life better. If I were a stronger Christian, I wouldn’t need drugs. (p.80)”  Matt doesn’t hedge any part of his struggle and he doesn’t end up on any theological extremes.  I would recommend this book heartily for a healthy person to understand depression more fully, and for a depressed person to realize they are not alone and hope does lie ahead.

It is a sobering truth that many who experience depression once will face it a second time later in life. But if God, in his wisdom, decides that darkness is again the path for me, then I will talk it as best I can. For now, I am simply happy to be alive, grateful that I can smile and that I can once more sing with the saints,

He loves me

He loves me

I can really say I know

And I love him

I love him.

p.147

Another review can be found here by Trevin Wax author of Holy Subversion.

Or here by the famous iMonk.