Recommendations, Christian Living, Culture, Heaven
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Four good questions to ask your tech: Tim Challies says, “We are in constant communication with our devices and through our devices. And since we are already in the habit of asking them our deep and personal questions, perhaps it would do us good to ask them some good and honest questions about themselves. Here are four questions I propose we ask of any technology that has become (or has the potential to become) deeply embedded in our lives.”

  2. Embracing the silence: Christopher Cook says, “We’re spiritually exhausted, disoriented, and desperate to hear from God. And in our desperation, we turn up the volume, hoping that more input will lead to more clarity. But the Lord doesn’t compete with the chaos. His voice doesn’t cut through the noise. It waits for stillness.”

This Week's Recommendations
Death, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
The Ruin of Me

Today I have the pleasure of sharing a poem by my daughter, Camille (age 21). It is from the perspective of King Ahaz (see 2 Chronicles 28).

The Ruin of Me
Christian Living, Evangelism
John Beeson
Open Dumpster Living

Along the route from my house to the church is an undeveloped intersection on three of its four corners. Two medium-trafficked two-lane roads converge at a stop sign. A while ago, inexplicably, two massive forty-yard dumpsters showed up on one of the undeveloped corners. They sat empty for a few days, and then some observant neighbors, likely determining that the dumpster didn’t have another purpose, dumped a ragged armchair in the dumpster.

The proverbial floodgates opened. Old TV sets, broken dressers, bikes, and couches filled the two dumpsters to overflowing. Over the next two months, the dumpsters were emptied multiple times and then quickly filled.

Open Dumpster Living
Recommendations, Church, Counseling, Culture
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Understanding therapy culture from different generations: This article from Sheryl Jacob resonates with my experience in the counseling room with different generations. “Millennials (born 1981-1996) grew up with therapy as mainstream - encouraged to talk about trauma, set boundaries, process their inner child, and name anxiety. While this openness is good, this generation also normalised many struggles the Church should have addressed long ago.”

  2. Be drunk with love: J.A. Medders encourages, “We get filled with the Spirit—when bottles (barrels) of the vintage gospel hit our bloodstream, our Blood Gospel Content rises above the legalistic limit.”

This Week's Recommendations
Suffering
John Beeson
Ducking Suffering

"Forgive me for all the times I needed to suffer and I ran from it, I numbed it.” The prayer caught me off guard. I looked up. Aspens bent in the wind outside the window. A small group of pastors gathered in the small community center in the tiny town of Summerhaven, located near the summit of Mount Lemmon, 5,000 feet above Tucson.

Who hasn’t avoided suffering? I’ve avoided suffering in countless ways: I’ve dodged difficult conversations, evaded serving, neglected the spiritual disciplines of fasting and silence, overspent our budget, and skipped leg day. But how often have I prayed for forgiveness for shirking suffering?

Ducking Suffering

Christian Living

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       A Visual Journey of How Amazon Became the World's Biggest Retailer: This is an interesting as it is visually compelling.

2.       My Son's Down Syndrome Showed Me the Real Imago Dei: This is a well written and important article. Corey Latta reflects, "The longer I looked along the beam of my experience with Down syndrome, the more I realized that my propensity for sin was enhanced by an intellect, cunning, and premeditation wonderfully absent in my brothers and sisters who have it. People with Down syndrome neither understand nor practice malice, greed, jealousy, or deception the way others do. They speak out of an unmasked honesty. They love without the pretentious and self-protective impairments that taint our relationships."

3.       Why God Still Works Through Fools Like Sampson: Fred Smith minces no words on what he thinks of Sampson and what that tells us about God, "The writer of Judges doesn’t hide any of that or even attempt to justify or condemn his behavior. It is not a tale with a moral. It is not a warning. It is simply a puzzling illustration of how God’s ways are not ours. But if there is hope for Samson, there is hope for us when we have misused our strengths, wasted our gifts, not lived up to God’s calling, and even harmed our friends and family. God can redeem and he does."

4.       Evangelism is Changing: Reflecting on Sam Chan's new book, Jeremy Bouma shares 12 ways that evangelism is changing today. He shares this about the news of salvation, "Various evangelism methods have emphasized differing benefits from salvation: deliverance from hell, forgiveness of sins, the gift of heaven. 'But Graham Cole,' Chan observes, 'believes that the umbrella metaphor for all of these salvation metaphors is peace or shalom' (84). Peace, connecting with the ultimate existential cry of every heart."

5.       The Bizarre Physics of Fire Ants: How is it possible that ants can act like liquid? Unreal. 

Nonviolence and the Christian: Self-Defense

Nonviolence and the Christian: Self-Defense

While ideas can be clean, life is messy. We have begun wrestling with what the Bible says about violence. I have made the case that God calls us to nonviolence. While we can all agree on that admonition to nonviolence in most circumstances, what do we do in the midst of all sorts of situations that it appears that violence is necessary?

Arguing along with Preston Sprinkle and his book, Fight, I believe that while there are circumstances that physical restraint is appropriate, even physical restraint that might injure someone, we are never given biblical permission to use violent force that ends in death.

That is a position I come to tentatively and is an issue of conscience, not law. It is, in fact, a topic that Pastor Greg and I have respectful disagreement on.

I recognize from the outset that the positions I will be setting forth here are not only unpopular positions, they are minority positions. I respect those who come to different conclusions. I only recently changed my mind on what I believe is biblical. I hope you read charitably and with an understanding that I have no desire to stoke the flames of discord here, but rather to earnestly seek what God calls us to. If you haven’t read my first two posts that builds the case for nonviolence from the Old Testament and Jesus’ life, I would encourage you to do so.

So, let’s deal with the more difficult situations: self-defense or defense of someone else, or the use of violence while serving in the military. We will deal with the first question in this post and the question of the use of violence in the context of military service next week.

Let me begin with the fact that I believe that it is acceptable to use non-lethal force to neutralize aggression. So, I am not encouraging that a Christian be completely passive, but rather that there are restraints on what we can do.

An armed man enters your home. You wake up and hear footsteps in the living room. What is appropriate action? Everyone can agree the best first step is to call 911. But what if the situation escalates before the police arrive? Let’s raise it to the highest stakes: the gunman enters your room and, at gunpoint, threatens violence against your family.

There are two questions to ask: first, what is the ethical response for a Christian? And, second, what response will prove most successful?

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       What Do Americans Really Think About God? Pew's recent polling is revealing. Christianity Today reports, "Even in an era where more of the nation doesn’t ascribe to a higher power at all (10%) or believes in some sort of higher power or spiritual force (33%), a slim majority of Americans (56%) still believe in God “as described in the Bible,” according to the Pew report."

2.       Just How Christian Are the Wealthiest Zip Codes in the US? Not very, it appears. "Both communities also have fewer evangelical Protestants than the national average, data from TheARDA.com shows. Evangelicals account for less than 11 percent of the population in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and a scant 3.4 percent in San Mateo County, California—well below the national average of 16.2 percent."

3.       Children's Crusades: Alan Jacobs takes a cultural phenomenon head-on, "One clever little speciality of adult humans works like this: You very carefully (and, if you’re smart, very subtly) instruct children in the moral stances you’d like them to hold. Then, when they start to repeat what you’ve taught them, you cry “Out of the mouths of babes! And a little child shall lead them!” And you very delicately maneuver the children to the front of your procession, so that they appear to be leading it — but of course you make sure all along that you’re steering them in the way that they should go."

4.       Can a True Christian Have Depression? Jeremy Pierre's answer is excellent. He concludes, "The promise 'the Lord is my light' is most precious from a place of darkness."

5.       Beauty from Above: Incredible shots of America's beautiful landscape.

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Nonviolence and the Christian: Jesus' Ministry

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Nonviolence and the Christian: Jesus' Ministry

Violence was contrary to everything Jesus stood for. In fact, Jesus absorbed the violence of human beings to bring about peace.

The conclusion was from our first post was surprising: that God in the Old Testament was not a God who endorsed violence.  The conclusion of this post is equally unsurprising: Jesus strongly opposed violence. But what may be surprising is how that very position by Jesus was a stumbling block for his contemporaries to see him as Messiah.

Jesus wasn’t the only one who claimed to be Messiah who walked ancient Palestinian soil. Two of those who arrived on the scene after Herod the Great died were Simon and Anthronges. Both led independent revolts against the Roman Empire, with the “principle purpose… to kill Romans” and reclaim the throne by force. The Roman Empire crushed both revolts and executed both men who claimed to be Messiah. The Zealots waited with bated breath for a Messiah who would overthrow Roman rule by force and reclaim the Promised Land with the new Davidic king on the throne.

And then on the scene arrived a Jewish peasant, who talked about the arrival of a kingdom, but a kingdom that “is not of this world.” In fact, Jesus explains to Pontius Pilate, that “if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting… But my kingdom is not from the world.”[i]

In other words, Jesus’ pacifism was not just a quirk of his ministry, it flipped the very expectations of who the Messiah was supposed to be.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       Why Men and Women Can (and Must) Work Together: Faith Whatley with an important article on how to strike a healthy balance in workplace relationships, "It’s important—especially as seemingly more and more Christian leaders are caught in a scandal—to make sure the right boundaries are in place to protect your marriage, your ministry, and your soul. But in doing so, it’s easy to put up so many boundaries you alienate yourself or stifle the giftedness and friendship of the opposite gender."

2.       Why and How to Take the Risk of Opposite Gender Relationships: Tish Harrison Warren pushes back on those who, in light of recent misconduct, have responded to cutting off opposite gender relationships with this thoughtful piece, "Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary president Danny Akin tweeted, “A valuable lesson we all can learn from this tragic situation: follow the @BillyGraham rule. If you are married, never be alone with someone of the opposite sex who is not your spouse. Never!” This rule, in its most pristine form, renders male-female friendships impossible. However unintentionally, it communicates to women that they are fundamentally dangerous. And it bars men from meaningful mentorship or pastoral care of women and vice-versa. I, for one, give thanks for the many men I knowwho broke the Billy Graham Rule."

3.       6 Relevant Things the Apostle Paul Never Said: Nicholas Davis unmasks the deception of our culture with this tongue in cheek article. His final is, "'Let your guard down and just relax a bit. Everything I’ve said is more like a guideline; just be young again and live a little. Let all that you do be done for you. You deserve it!' What Paul actually said: 1 Corinthians 16:13-14: 'Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.'

4.       Baby Boomers Turn to Faith As They Age: A new study finds that, "Most boomers (56 percent) said their religiosity stayed the same over the past 10 years, while 21 percent said they became more religious and 11 percent said they became less religious. Twelve percent said they were never religious."

5.       17 Ways Christians Say No: John Crist on our special Christian superpowers of saying no; "I don't think it's God's will; I just don't feel peace about it right now."

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Nonviolence and the Christian: the Old Testament

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Nonviolence and the Christian: the Old Testament

I remember the first time I had a conversation with a dyed-in-the-wool Christian pacifist. I was on an immersive backpacking trip with classmates the month before I entered my freshman year at Gordon College. Our guide, a student at Gordon, and one of the freshmen on the trip were both Mennonite and were staunchly pacifist. I had never really heard a strong argument for pacifism and was intrigued by their position.

My dad came of age during the Vietnam War and shared stories with me as a kid of his opposition to the war, an opposition that he came to see as well-intentioned, but naïve. My natural response to war was similar: war is bad, but inevitable, and if our country can intervene for the betterment of those involved, we ought to do so.

My freshman ears were intrigued by the argument, but ultimately unmoved. I would encounter Just War Theory in a philosophy class and that would become my anchor point for processing the use of violence.

When a friend urged me to pick up Preston Sprinkle’s Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence, my interest was piqued but I didn’t expect much to come of reading Sprinkle’s book. But, in a way that rarely happens at this stage of my life, I’ve found my perspective on nonviolence has changed pretty significantly over the past months as I’ve read and processed the book.

Over the course of these posts, we are going to examine a biblical perspective on violence.

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Chocolate Chip Cookies for Appetizers

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Chocolate Chip Cookies for Appetizers

Ben works at a local sandwich shop called Baggins near our church. Every time I set foot in his Baggins I know I will leave happier than when I walked in. Baggins gives away a free freshly baked chocolate chip cookie with every purchase. Brian takes that a step further.

After you order, it probably takes five minutes for your food to come out. I’ve never been to Ben's Baggins and not been offered a warm chocolate chip cookie by a smiling Ben before my meal is up. Chocolate chip cookies as appetizers. Yes, please.

There are several other Baggins locations across town. But there’s only one Ben. Offering cookies to customers while they’re waiting for their order is his idea. Brian moves through the tables with a smile and a tray and asks how your day is going. He asks customers if he can refill their drinks. This isn’t a sit down restaurant. Ben doesn’t get tipped. He’s tipping the customer.

Do you know what restaurant I frequent disproportionately? Baggins. I’ve joked with our Exec Team that we need to have Ben come in and train our Welcome Team. I’m only half-joking. There is something powerful in his combination of kindness and hustle. Something inspiring about his level of ownership. In fact, it was only recently that I realized Ben wasn't a manager. I just assumed he had to be.

When people interact with me, do they leave feeling as special as Ben makes me feel?

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Fishbowl Living

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Fishbowl Living

Recently, Southern Baptist Convention President Paige Patterson was ousted from his post at Southwestern Seminary.[i] The firing began not with a dramatic revelation, but with concern over Patterson’s public statement some 18 years ago when he said that he had never counseled couples to separate or divorce.[ii] The trickle turned into a stream and then a torrent as other statements and counsel surfaced (including discouraging a female student from reporting a sexual assault on his campus). The external pressure from the mounting claims made Patterson’s firing all but inevitable.

I believe the outcome was just. But ten years ago Paige Patterson would have never lost his post. It is only in a day and age where every statement is public and permanent that these moments could be brought to the fore in such a short time period. And it is only in a day and age of democratized communication that the voices of those injured by Patterson and those who were upset with the trustees at Southwestern Seminary would have been heard so quickly and had such an impact.[iii]

Every word is public.

Every word is permanent.

I grew up in a mega-church. From time to time our pastor would reflect on the difficulty of his family living “in a fishbowl” where everything they did was monitored. In 2018 we all live in that fishbowl.

There are obvious dangers of this reality in the world we live. But there are also wonderful opportunities.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.      What's the Most Costly City in the World to Live in? An international report says that five of the top ten cities are in Europe. There are no US cities in the top ten, but two in the top twenty. What's the most expensive city you've ever lived in? For us, it was Princeton, NJ.

2.      When Obsessing About Theology Prevents Obedience: Andree Seu Peterson reflects, "Carolyn did Greek boot camp with me at seminary. She was a Carolinian, a people person, and outspoken in her love for Jesus, everything that I was not. I chalked it up to Southern culture. I explained that I was reserved by natural endowment, and more prone to wait for the right moment. She wasn’t impressed: 'I’ve got plenty of faults, but shutting up ain’t one of them.' I did not like Carolyn. Forty years later I’m still waiting for the right moment, and Carolyn’s probably blabbed the gospel all over Dixie. She has offended many people, I’m sure, and won a few to faith. After all, the law of averages."

3.      Two-Thirds of Americans Believe They're Sinful: LifeWay Research reports that while 2/3rds of Americans agree that they're sinful, only 33% of women and 22% of men depend on Jesus to overcome sin. And 52% of Americans believe that you can help earn your way into heaven with good deeds. 

4.      7 Ways Grief Becomes Sinful: The Bible does not tell us to stifle or suppress our grief, but there are ways that grief can become sinful. Paul Tautges draws wisdom from John Owen: "It moves us to take strange pleasure in sadness. 'Strange it is that we should find some kind of pleasure in rousing our sorrows.'"

5.      Online Traps: How so called 'dark patterns' online trick you.

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Our Story: Restoration

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Our Story: Restoration

The week following Angel’s (her words will be italicized) confession of adultery I was in a state of shock. I was still trying to navigate the situation with my identity as a pastor intact. Even when we came to our Senior Pastor, I said that I could still preach Sunday (just a few days away) as I was scheduled. Fortunately, wisdom prevailed.

I was asked to take a leave of absence, which was difficult for me to accept. The next six months would be the most difficult months of my life. Angel’s confession of her affair would be peeled back. Her confession of one affair became confession of a series of affairs and I would have to come face to face with the ugliness of my own heart. From the time I was ten, my understanding of my identity was inextricable from my calling as a pastor. I was about to not be a pastor any longer.

Days after we met with our Senior Pastor, we met with the Ministry Director at the ministry where Angel was working. They graciously allowed her to shift her job and stay on as their book store manager.

Our church’s leadership was not only generous enough to support us with counseling, but they also brought in a conciliation ministry called Live at Peace. The partnership would initially be difficult for me, in particular, as our conciliators recommended that my leave of absence become semi-permanent, with a two-year reconciliation period. “How is that fair?” I questioned. “Why am I being punished for what my wife did against me?”

Counseling was really rocky as well. I thought we would be working to repair our relationship and work through the damage, but what our counselors quickly became aware of is that Angel had compartmentalized a significant amount of the previous two and a half years. Every session peeled back more hurtful layers.

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