The Organ of Meaning

I spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday of last week in the Durham, NC area at the Advance09 conference. It was a conference about the resurgance of the local church. I’m not talking about a political power and I’m not talking about something that involves violent war metaphors, protests and bait-and-switch events. In the past decades the Church has failed to take it’s role and responsibility seriously and has largely lost its direction.

The conference included some of the most powerful and cogent pastors and teachers who are bringing the message of Jesus into some significant and historically dificult places. Some of this difficulty comes both apathetic arrogance and from innoculated ignorance, both of which are our own fault. In the north and the west we’ve failed to engage the cultural conversation with anything significant to say and in the south we’ve assumed that everyone should know better and have engaged using blunt arguments that don’t address people’s hearts or minds.

I’ve been thinking and dwelling on some of the messages that I heard and I’m hoping to post a series of reactions to the conference and its implications.

Just before Christmas I read an article that was recommended by a friend that works in the American University’s chaplain’s office. It was written by an author that works at Penn State as a history prof who focuses on the history of Christianity and particularly focuses on non-Western Christianity.

The article referred to a book that he had written that had been recently released, called The Lost History of Christianity that focused on what happened to the “Jesus movement” in Asia and Africa after Acts ended. Let me just say that this book is fascinating and eye-opening. It outlines a lot of things that we are happily ignorant to in our own histories and which is absent in most of our minds as we think about how the message of Christ has spread to the parts of the earth that are not European in historical and cultural origin.

I read some of the reviews on Amazon – yes, some of the churches that he outlines are ones that have been historically designated as heretical, but there is still value to understanding reality in relation to where the Gospel has gone before and how & why the rest of the world sees and interprets its history. The chapter that I have just finished even talks about the fact that Arab Christians were major players in the Palestinian Movements of the early 20th Century and much of the pro-Arab Identity movements that continue today. It will shed some light on how fellow followers/worshippers of Christ still influence into the wars that we’re fighting now… both on “our” side and on the side of our opponents (either explicitly or implicitly). And, it shows how complicit our own nation and government is in the martyrdom of thousands of Christians in the past 50-ish years alone.

Again, I recommend the book as a history book (as opposed to a “Christian book”) that I think that every Western person who calls themself by the name of Christ (”Christian”) should read this book – especially those who have dreams or callings towards the Middle East or Asia.

Okay. I need to post in response to the responses on my post (they’re mostly on Facebook).

I should have made it clear that my beef was mostly with people who are Christians undercutting and slandering someone else who is also. The whole socialism is a peve of mine, but not that big of a deal. I apologise if anyone feels offended by how I presented the comments about socialism, but I will not be apologising about the ones about slandering a brother in Christ. Take it as rebuke or whatever you want to call it.

To summarize: dis your brother and I’ll get pissed, but dis politics all you want I’ll just debate it with you.

I’m glad.

I have a few complaints though. I am disappointed in a whole lot of my friends.

Honestly, I don’t care at all who you voted for. I actually do completely understand why you voted for McCain, and I would not have been enormously disappointed if he would have won. I lean left and I do so because of things in my faith in Jesus Christ and many of the teachings of Scripture that move me that direction, but I absolutely understand and agree with the teachings that also agree with the McCain-Palin platform. The importance of one issue over another is something that we have to decide for ourselves and with the help of God who guides us. Yes the president-elect that I backed up with my vote has some views, and political leanings that I do not agree with, but there are also important ones that I do agree with and as I prayed and read and listened and learned I came to a place where I was absolutely certain that I was supposed to vote for Barack Obama.

Let me say these few things though:

• The AntiChrist will probably not be an American president, especially one who is a Christian and says things like “I am a Christian… I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life.”
• For those of you who claim to be a Christian, Barack Obama is a brother in Christ to tear him down publicly and to purposefully undermine defame him in the hearing of other people is, without a slight doubt, sin.
• Democracy is not something that is ordained as a political system that is more or less ordained than any other system… including socialism. It is not something that is we can claim that God inherently supports. (And, I’d like to point out that Marxism and Leninism may be founded in many of the same principals as socialism it is not the same. We have never had an actual socialist state in history.)
• The same (if not the inverse) is true about capitalism.

All of my posts on my blog also go to Facebook and I am tempted to tag people on this, but in light of what I am saying to some of my friends (and I do consider them to be friends and family in Christ) I will not, because I do believe that it would (in effect) be mocking them in public as well. I love you all, for real and my concern is not in your politics, but in your reaction to dissapointment. You (plural) are great and I think better of you than this, because you are.