I know this topic is somewhat taboo (what can of worms am I opening?!), but I think that it is incredibly relevant (see the recent revokation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and what it has conveyed to the LGBT community). Today, LGBTs are lobbying for more ‘rights,’ acceptance, and recognition. And the ‘freedom’ that America is touting is stuck in a strange tension in resolving this. In light of this, the sexual brokenness ensued by homosexuality (but also sexual brokenness in heterosexuality, which I will not explicitly touch here) must be addressed by Christians, lest our views fall to the cultural norm.

And please note that I want to disclaim any authority on the matter–only (mere) reflection–and am, therefore, petitioning your opinion and discussion. And really, I’m just asking questions to get your thoughts as I have some tentative.

EDIT: many of these considerations use the word ‘homosexual’ and its derivatives applied to implied meanings of the practice of homosexual acts as well as same-sex attraction.

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First of all, I am not entirely confident in Christianity’s response to homosexuality–I wonder, does it even exist? How have Christians responded to the cultural approval of homosexuality?

Before you answer those questions, I want to ask this: how many people in your church do you know deal with homosexuality?

I know only of one. But wait–isn’t the church a gathering of sinners? Isn’t it a body of those who acknowledge their sins in repentance and hope in Christ’s completed work on the Cross? If so, why aren’t there more people in the church who struggle with homosexuality?

I have a couple of (not exhaustive) proposals for the answer to that last question.

1) People who struggle with homosexuality are universally withdrawn from the church.
2) There exist people who struggle with homosexuality within the church, but are not entirely open with their burdens.

I tend toward the idea of the second–I think that there are Christians who are struggling with homosexuality. Let me pause for clarification here: I think that there are Christians, who acknowledge that they are broken and sinful, burdened with the temptation of homosexuality, but have faith in Christ’s justifying work on the Cross, and are now living in repentance and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. But where are they as we sit in pews among liars, thieves, gossips, and adulterers? Have we really welcomed those who struggle with homosexuality into our church? Or have we scared them into thinking that they are somehow worse than the rest? Have we scared them into thinking that they cannot live in the love of Christ because of their sexual brokenness?

I know not how to phrase it any differently, but I think we have scared those who struggle with homosexuality by not really loving them. And if we’re scaring struggling Christians, how can we reach the entire nation of those struggling with homosexuality outside the church?

Respond as you will, but if I can conclude with my questions in a somewhat ordered matter, you may like following that:

1) How has Christianity responded to homosexuality?
2) How many people in your church do you know struggle with homosexuality?
3) Where are the ‘homosexuals’ in the church?
4) Has Christianity’s response to homosexuality been one of love?
5) How do we respond?

Or even more summarily:

1) How should Christians approach homosexuality?

For the longest time Derek Webb had confused me. I started really listening to music long after Caedmon’s Call had come onto the music scene, and even after Webb had released his first couple solo albums, but somehow I got exposed to Webb in more-or-less chronological order. First I heard those classic Caedmon’s songs–Thankful, Thy Mercy, Table for Two, Forty Acres, Lead of Love, Shifting Sand, etc–that in my estimation earned the band the title of Most Calvinist Band Ever. And then I heard that classic, unmatched Webb album She Must and Shall Go Free, which to this day I declare the best album on the Church in the history of the Christian music industry. After that I stumbled into some later Webb–The Ringing Bell, parts of Mockingbird–the albums which saw Webb shift the attentions of his songwriting genius to more didactic, more politically minded music. Then at this point, I think I went out of order and discovered The House Show, which still makes me rather mad that I never got to see the old Webb in concert. I’ve never heard a musician preach the Gospel like that at a concert. Anyways, at this point I was sold on Webb, and a full-out part of the niche market (of YRR’s) that he had carved out for himself, and so I awaited the release of the “controversial” Stockholm Syndrome with eager anticipation, a little annoyed at how ridiculous he was being but nonetheless expecting great things from it, due to all the hype. And then when I finally got the album, and listened to it five, maybe ten, times through, and started to try to interpret/understand it, and then talked to other people who had listened to it about what they made of the album, I started to get confused. And the reason why is that I really didn’t see the Gospel anywhere. I mean, if I looked really hard and read way in between the lines and drew meaning out of obscure places, I could see it. But in general, as a whole, the main gist of the album was not a bold declaration of the Gospel, even though “the truth is never sexy”–no, instead all I could really see what bitterness, and outrage, and angst (and ironically, he was bitter/angry at fundies/conservatives for being hateful/hypocritical). And I had to ask myself: “How could Webb have forgotten the Gospel? He appeared to have understood it so well, and articulated it better than anyone else in the Christian music industry, but where is it now in his music? I can’t even find it–and what I do find instead looks an awfully lot like the worst kind of liberal Christianity: evangelical-hating social gospel.”

But recently, a thought hit me, and I think it works if you trace it through the history of Webb’s career. Is it possible that Webb was never really as obsessed with reformed theology, and the local church, and Gospel-centered living as he made it out to be, but that in reality he just likes being edgy? That deep down, what drives him is simply a desire to be critical, to be on the outskirts, to be contrary to what’s popular? For the record, I hope not. But let me try to walk through his career, in just a sentence, to try to show how I think it works. Webb was a calvinist before it was cool; Webb preached the importance of community when mega-churches were booming; Webb sang against trusting in government right as (Christian) conservatives were celebrating victory; Webb lashed out at right wing fundies about their treatment of homosexuals while evangelical leaders stressed the importance of preserving the sanctity of marriage and not defiling the pulpit. And now Webb has released an album challenging the “conventional” concept of what “worship music” is. Sounds kinda like being edgy for edginess sake to me.

What do you think?

That gets me all in a tizzy.

(By the way, if you don’t want to read all of my babbling, then just read the last three paragraphs, I make the most sense there and spent the most time writing those. Plus, that’s basically where my thesis is.)

I often consider if other people view art the same way that I do, and I must say that it doesn’t seem like that’s the case. For example, I don’t understand how there were such defined periods in art history. I don’t understand how each art movement had such specific styles of art churned out during it. Is it art if it is not made to express something inside the creator? (For that matter is Graphic Design art if I’m just making pretty things to suit the desires of others? But that’s another subject entirely.)

I mean, I can see how people can express themselves in a specific medium when there isn’t much else available, but what about now? Now, when there is everything available? (Generally speaking, of course.) Is someone an artist when they don’t utilize the best material for what they are trying to say in a specific instance?

I guess what I am trying to say is this: I think a true artist has to consider not only what they want to say, but what rules of art they are following only because those are the generally understood guidelines. As in, am I painting this piece in an impressionist style because paint is the best way to express this idea, or just because everyone is painting like this lately? Am I writing this in free verse because free verse best captures the feeling of looseness (or, in Trey’s case with his recently posted poem, the feeling of not having even the will to make rhymes or a specific meter), or because I just kind of always write in free verse? Am I writing this music using a piano and guitar only because these are the generally used instruments of the time, or because the capture the essence of the feeling of this song better than, say, strings or random claps and a kalimba.

Of course, all of this is pretty relative. It’s just something I consider a lot.

Why does a basic band consist of a guitar, drums, vocals, bass, and some sort of piano?
Why are art and science the opposites of religion? (They used to be thought of together!)
Why do I only paint/draw nature lately?
Why are today’s trends pleasing now and not in 10 years?

I hope any of this makes sense.

In my Conceptual Art class, the professor says that true art is the expression of an idea, no matter what it actually looks like or how it happens, and references artists who have people cut pieces of their clothing off as performance art and draw/paint/photograph disgusting things that I do not want to see and praise the “shock factor” as being something that is jarring us as humans from our complacency.

Well, I am not okay with that. I feel like artists should be open to using the best medium necessary to carry out their idea, yes, and I think that art should evoke change in a human’s life, yes, but I think that the great goal of art is not to just jar humans out of some abstract complacency, but to change people for the better, to glorify God, and to remind people that there is something else besides themselves.

And just to clarify, I don’t think glorifying God with art necessarily looks like a cross or Bible verses with filigree all over the place. I think art can be glorifying to God without have Christian icons in it. After all, God’s creation tells of His glory.

Okay, you’ll really have to forgive me for that terrible pun, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.

Where do you stand on the subject of churches being “seeker-sensitive’? Obviously there is a place where the Church could go too far, but what’s the opposite end of that spectrum? Does God want us to hide the message of the gospel behind oozy layers of smoke, lights, and ambiguous CCM music, or does he want us to yell the gospel at anyone who comes within yelling distance of us?

I feel like lately, I, as well as many friends of mine, have been unfairly bashing the seeker-sensitive movement, saying that it obscures the gospel and the message of the Church (and, as an aside, I feel it necessary to point out the irony that I am currently working on another post about how American Christianity and American Patriotism are far too closely bound up in one another.) Anyway, I think it necessary to point out that the whole movement wouldn’t have started if there weren’t need for it. Have some pushed it too far into the gospel-obscuring range? I think so, but, have others brought it too far back in the other direction? Maybe.

What do you think?

[This, of course, is my response to the question raised by Eric in the directly preceding post. Please feel more than welcome to join our conversation. But in the comments, of course. Please don't try to hack our blog and create an account for yourself. Unless you're Andrew, in which case you should feel free to do so. Anyways, back to the article.]

In the previous post, Eric asked “What is the purpose of Social Media?”* And just to clarify, I think that his question was not meant literally, but was rather asking, “In light of the chief end of man (to glorify God and enjoy Him forever), to what extent ought the Christian participate in social media? Can it be edifying and beneficial, or is it inherently pointless?”** So that’s the question I’m going to attempt to answer.

In my response to Eric’s original post (see the first comment), I established that I don’t believe any of the social media to be inherently wrong, or even inherently frivolous. However, I believe that Christians who choose to engage in social media on the interweb*** need to be careful to not fall into several of the traps that Eric listed–namely, the addictive, self-promoting, and time-wasting nature of many forms of social media. We must make sure that in all our actions, including what we do on the internet, we are living out our purpose (soli deo gloria), and not just doing stuff because we want to. Jonathan Edwards wrote when he was still young, “Resolved, Never, henceforward, till I die, to act as if I were any way my own, but entirely and altogether God’s”–we have been bought with a price. I don’t think we fully realize the seriousness and totality of this call, but if we have resolved that we don’t want to waste our lives–that we want to give God glory with our lives–then we must lay hold of that principle. Edwards’ Resolutions can once again be helpful to us here: he also wrote, “Resolved, Never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can”. If we take serious the call of Christ to take up our cross, deny ourselves, and follow Him, we must adopt a similar attitude to what Edwards expressed.

Now, I want to make a slight caveat at this point to keep from erring on the side of radical asceticism. I am not proposing that Christians can never do anything simply “for the fun of it”. I am not suggesting that all forms of entertainment are inherently wrong. I am not even implying that we should always have spiritual thoughts forefront in our minds. I believe there is a place for doing crazy and/or somewhat pointless stuff for the sake of fellowship and building relationships. I believe there is a time to just kick back and watch a movie or read a book because you’re stressed out and need to just wind down. And I certainly believe that it’s possible to honor God in all things without actually consciously thinking the thought “God, I give you glory in this”. But here’s what I am saying: if we really believe that true joy and true satisfaction and ultimate fulfillment are found in Christ alone, then we must determine what it means to abide in and treasure Christ in the midst of ordinary, everyday life that goes beyond just “having a quiet time”. We must be intentional about what we do with our time and energy and resources, asking “how will this enable me to better love God with my heart/soul/mind/strength?”

Okay, so now to get to the question of social media. Here would be my rule of thumb for the use of social media (and time spent on the internet in general for that matter): am I using this _______ as a tool for the development of the kingdom in my life and/or others’ lives, or is it simply something I do for the fun of it? And if the answer is the latter, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should cut it off altogether, because like I said earlier, I believe there is a time for doing stuff for the fun of it. But I would submit that that amount of time should be severely limited. And I mean pretty severely. I remember in perhaps the best Piper sermon I’ve heard****, he says “If you watch TV and don’t read biographies, then you’re…making a mistake” (he wanted to say worse, I think, but managed to restrain himself). So I think that a decent test to see if we are spending too much time in leisure–just doing things for the fun of it–would be to consider what we are or are not doing, like reading, spending time in serious prayer, carving out intentional time to evangelize, etc. And if we aren’t doing those things, but are spending three or four hours a week on social media just for the fun of it, we might be wasting our lives.

Now, if the answer to the question (tool or pleasure) is that we are using the social media as a tool, then I think we are on the right track to being good stewards of the time God gives us. What remains to ask is how effective we are being with our time, how pure our motives are, and how important the “work” we are doing on said social media needs to be in our priorities. I really appreciate Eric bringing this question up, because those of us who blog and tweet and facebook need to stop occasionally–often, actually–and reevaluate what exactly we are doing and why we are doing it, to ensure that we really do love God with all our hearts, and all our minds, and all our strength, and all our time, and all our resources, and all our blogs, and all our words. Let us not waste our lives, but press on toward the goal, which is to know Christ more.

Soli Deo Gloria

*By “social media”, I’m assuming that he is referring to social networking sites (facebook, twitter, myspace, etc) and the blogosphere. Perhaps this is a slightly flawed definition, but it’ll have to do for now.
**I’m assuming that this was really his question. If not, then I guess you’ll get a nice little unasked spiel from me for free. But I guess everything on Mere is both unasked and free, so it wouldn’t really be anything new.
***I’m pretty sure that at some point, this word originated as an inside joke somewhere, but from what I can tell, has passed into common usage to refer to the internet. Also, I’m trying to jack up my footnote count.
****It’s called “How to Fight for Joy”, I believe. In other news, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that I’ve reached the point with asterisks that it’s starting to look like I wanted to cuss but edited myself. Which is awesome. #excessivefootnotesftw

What is the purpose of social media?

Let me begin with my initial ideas:

Social media is addicting. Apparently, activity on your wall or blog causes a reaction similar to feeling affection, which therefore causes addiction (see this). And addiction to anything isn’t terribly good (quite the contrary, I’d argue).

Social media is inherently self-promoting. This is and the previous point are similar. As men, we can easily want to be more in the opinion of others, and social media can so cause self-centeredness, which is absolutely contrary to the way God wants us to live. Trevin wax makes this point here.

Social media is time consuming. To this I’m sure we can all testify first-hand. How long do you spend blogging, tweeting, or Facebooking? And what fruits do we bear? In Trevin’s post above, he writes that he needs to “take a step back and evaluate the spiritual effects (both good and bad)” of social media. Does the time we spend justify our use of it?

I see these three points primarily as results of using social media, and I make them without regard to [social media's] actual purposes. So, what is the purpose of social media? How would you reconcile these three points with social media’s real purposes?

And specifically, how would you reconcile these three points with a blog’s purpose? Facebook’s purpose? Twitter’s purpose?

So Zach’s small suggestion to post your favorite hymn(s) which apparently got noticed started me thinking: why do people like hymns? I mean, I know more or less why I like hymns, but I wonder if everyone else agrees. So let us know what you think (or I guess, more like how you think). What makes you like hymns? And do you like original arrangements, or creative new ways of playing them? Or if you don’t like hymns at all, why not?

We want your thoughts.

I am probably the weirdest person you will ever meet in terms of making up words to put in the place of cussing. I will frequently range from saying something as close to the American culture’s ‘bad’ words as “freaking,” to words that are just basically me pulling letters out of thin air and putting them together after the phrase “what the…” I’ve been known to say frick, flip, frack, gravy, goodness, gracious, nonsense, fark, and many other borderline prafane words to make myself feel better about my exclamatory tendency. Now, (and of course this doesn’t make me any better than anyone I know who openly cusses, it probably actually proves I’m in denial or something) I haven’t really ever been one to outright cuss, I’ve always just used filler words. But the other day at lunch at Willie’s with some of my friends from the Art Institute I got called out.

We were waiting in line to order when something warranted the exclamation from someone else, “What the french toast!?” which reminded me of the sign in Mrs. Prine’s old room at Cy-Creek that said “What the function?” (Math joke! But anyway.)  and so I said it out loud. Now, though this isolated event was not just me making an almost profanity exclamation for no reason (I was outwardly referencing the sign), I do a lot around my Art Institute friends, and this time, one of my two closest friends at Ai, Ashlee, called me out on it. We’ve talked about how I don’t cuss before, and she said, this time, “You know, you don’t really cuss, but you do in your own way.”

She wasn’t trying to be mean or anything, but that comment froze me for a fraction of a second. I was really caught off guard by it. Really. I had to try really hard to not stop and have a mini theological debate in my head right there and stop everything else I was doing. So that’s where this blog comes in:

Where do you stand on the subject of profanity?

Obviously, some of us have had similar conversations a few times before because of everyone’s favorite edgy person, Derek oh-what-a-tangled-Webb-we-weave, and his album that you love-and-feel-uneasy-about-at-the-same-time, Stockholm Syndrome. (Sorry, I think I just broke the legal hyphenated adjective limit.)

But anyway, I’m looking at a slightly different dichotomy I think. I’m looking to examine the difference between flat-out cussing and (let’s call the other one) ‘substitute’ cussing in the context of Christians being saved by faith (Ephesians 2:8) and God looking at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).

I think we can agree that flat-out cussing is generally frowned upon in Biblical teaching, if not because of the whole “Taming the Tongue” part of James 3, then because of the charge Paul gives us to not do anything that might make a brother fall (Romans 14:21). Aka, cuss in front of someone because we think it’s okay. Even if you think you are ‘solid enough in your faith’ to yell expletives, there may be someone around you who is struggling and will be really disappointed that someone they looked up to doesn’t care enough to keep their tongue tamed.

Then there’s also Matthew 5:21-24 :

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.”

I put this whole thing in here because I think it’s the most important part of this subject for me and you to consider. Jesus is effectively saying here that it isn’t a matter of the word itself, it’s a matter of the heart behind the words. (Though I might add that I’m saying this after noting Romans 14:21 earlier, so I’m not advocating that we try to transcend the sin of cussing and be able to do it with a clean heart which I’m pretty sure isn’t even possible.)

I suppose the main point of this post is not specifically that we should not cuss, but that we should be concerned with having pure hearts before God, because God looks at the heart. He does not care, I think, if we accidentally (or purposefully) cuss, or if we sin in any way (though if you’re not at least concerned with not sinning, there is probably something wrong), but I think that God sees us as really are, not as our specific sins. God wants us to yearn for him. If we are truly wanting God as we should, then we do not need to worry.

“Give us clean hands and give us pure hearts,
let us not lift our souls to another.
O God let us be the generation that seeks,
seeks your face, O God of Jacob”

What do you think: about cussing? about little vs. big sins? about God looking at the heart? about anything else?

Donald Miller doesn’t think so.

What do you think?