The experience issue

I intentionally avoid blogging about politics for all kinds of reasons, but Less than the Least has some very interesting comments up about the value and types of experience held by the major presidential and VP candidates.

The comparison is between three kinds of experience: time served in the federal government, time served in an executive position, and results produced. Definitely worth a read.

Galatians Link

Thanks to TC for the blog love on this fall's Bible study series on Galatians.

Don't forget, btw, to change your subscriptions to his new address.

Anthony Famiglietti

If you're a runner, you're going to love this interview with Anthony Famiglietti, or "Fam." His description of his job as an Olympic runner: "My job is to push myself to complete physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion everyday." Man, I love this guy!

He didn't achieve his goal of winning a Bronze medal in Beijing, but true to himself, he left it all on the track.

Confiscated Bibles

I don't know anything about the group "Vision Beyond Borders," but apparently they were carrying over 300 Bibles into China which were confiscated by Chinese authorities. This action isn't the worst act of persecution of Christians by any stretch of the imagination, but this sort of thing is always disturbing.

Radical Grace

In yesterday's post, I commented on some thoughts from a conference I'm attending right now, and today's post is more of the same.

The driving question for today's session asked whether Lutheran theology had any particular contributions to make to the mission of the Christian church. People floated a lot of ideas, everything from a decentralized power structure to a communal, non-individualist gospel (are either of these things particularly Lutheran?), but I continue to think that the most important contribution of Lutheran theology is the insistence on the radical and consistent priority of grace. Or, as Lutherans like to say, we try to get Law and Gospel and right. We want to tell people the good news of God's grace in Christ (gospel) and talk about "law" only insofar as it serves that purpose.

But I do wonder whether our churches are ready for the consequences of doing this. What if we really welcomed everyone with no preconditions? Would we be willing to build a community that considered Jesus to be the only non-negotiable. I wonder.

Something to offer?

"I don't think the church believes that it has anything to offer that the unchurched world really needs."

Ouch. I participated tonight in the opening sessions of "Missional Education: Savvy with Substance," and I was profoundly grateful for the excellent breakout group of which I was assigned to be a part. But then a soft spoken and thoughtful member of our group hit us with the line that I quoted to open this post.

How you evaluate the truth of that statement will depend in large part on what you think "the church" means. Is it true of an individual congregation? Of our denomination? Of the broadly defined Christian church on earth?

Frightening thought.

Meals Create Communities

First Lutheran hosted the last of the summer picnics that we scheduled off-site at Stellmacher park today, and it was awesome!

It's good for our church community to eat together and play together and be a family, but we could do that at our place. We held these picnics "off campus" so that we could share the love with our neighbors and make them feel like a welcome part of the family.

At each of these three summer community picnics, but especially today, I've been so delighted to see this dream coming true. Members of First Lutheran were mingling with new found friends at every picnic table in the park and showing simple, genuine Christian care for our neighbors.

This is only the beginning, but it has been a wonderful beginning. We know that Jesus loves our entire community, and we are committed to following Him as he leads us more and more to love our (literal) neighbors.

Depth

We are deep into the "listening group" process at First Lutheran right now, and I'm loving every minute of it! It's so great sitting down with other folks in the FLC community and hearing what's on your hearts and minds. Because we're still in process on this, I don't want to prejudice the future groups or short circuit the conversations at all, but I do want to celebrate one thing that I keep hearing.

We have a deep well from which to draw water.

It might be easy for us or other churches to get obsessed with how we should market, package, or present ourselves to our community and call that outreach or mission or evangelism. (And I do know how important marketing is.) But then there's always the danger of becoming a beautifully wrapped empty box. Or a dry well with a big, useless pump.

First Lutheran isn't perfect, and there's a lot of mistakes we can and do make. But we have a long history and a deeply formed culture of spiritual growth and maturity. We have great resources for hearing and answering God's call. And, perhaps most importantly, we have a deep, unbreakable connection to a Living Well, from which to draw and share the water of life.

Global Hoops

I don't think I'll ever stop loving the game of basketball, even if the safety of my oft-injured ankles prevents me from playing much anymore. Two interesting roundball stories are current today: first a link describing the U.S. Men's Olympic team's dismantling of Lithuania and then some interesting speculation about the possibility (is that even too strong a word?) of LeBron James playing in Europe after next season.

The Olympic team holds special interest for me because they are being lead by Coach K of my beloved Duke Blue Devils, and because I'm one of the many American basketball fans ashamed of what (UNC product!) Larry Brown did to our team in 2004.

The second story about LeBron intrigues me for a number of reasons. At one level, it's just another example of the globalization of everything. And, far fetched as it may seem, it makes just enough sense to plausible. Not only could the owners of one or more Euro teams throw incomprehensible amounts of money at LeBron, but this could also be a positive step for LeBron toward achieving his self-identified goal of becoming a "global icon."

(For a bunch of other USA basketball links, click here.)