Now that TRON has won over one, will HARRY POTTER be coming to a church near you?

One of the most frequent criticisms of the church has been that it has demonstrated itself to be so much behind the times. The church needs to get over it, get with it, get on with it.

A sure example of the modern church being so stuck in the past is when a church decorates its lobby with light cycles featured in the movie TRON: LEGACY. If a church wants to have an "At the Movies" sermon series, then can't it please get something much more current? Do you realize that the movie TRON: LEGACY was released at the end of 2010? We are talking over six months ago! How behind the times can we be when we have a movie that has been released on DVD for over three months now? Not even Redbox has it on its current releases list.

It is really embarrassing how much the church is lagging behind again, especially when the world has moved on to other things. How many movie releases have there been since the end of 2010, and all we can come up with is a fantasy world thriller that is so 2010ish?

The ideal solution is this--have a church advertise all over the place that Harry Potter is coming to their church. Talk about being current, talk about being on the cutting edge, and talk about mega box office hit with the finale, DEATHLY HALLOWS 2, and talk about bringing in the teens and the twenties to church. Picture this for example: young people lining up outside a church building in the late hours of a Saturday night waiting for the church doors to open on Sunday morning. The TV cameras would catch the spectacular. Most of these young people would be dressed in the familiar Harry Potter garb, complete with Potter's glasses and wizardry attire.

The church could have giveaways which would entice an even bigger crowd to show up--like a complete DVD series of all the Harry Potter movies, once the finale makes it to DVD. Once inside the church, the young people would be met with people from the church dressed just like themselves and the town of Hogwarts would be recreated in the lobby and on the auditorium stage. Background music from the movie would be playing all the time leading up to the start of the worship service (excuse me, here I am showing myself stuck in the past!), I mean, entertainment hour, experience hour, reconnection hour, or whatever we want to call it.

The preacher, excuse me again, the speaker could come out on stage dressed like Potter himself or maybe Lord Voldemort. We must identify with the world if we are going to reach them. The ideas behind all this are LIMITLESS and quite magical.

For a Scripture-based sermon, there are much more possibilities with a Harry Potter than a TRON. I looked in my big Young's Bible Concordance, and I didn't see one verse anywhere with TRON in it. But the word "potter" is a different story. In Jeremiah 18, God told the prophet to go to the potter's house. There you have the obvious connection. What more does a speaker need?

But then again, maybe that will not work. After all, Jeremiah is a book in the OLD Testament, and OLD does not compute with what is new, current, up-to-date, trendy. So maybe we better scratch the idea from Jeremiah 18. Of course, we can hide the fact from where we are reading, and most people would not know the difference, but it is still too risky. We need to be new and fresh and safe.

So I kept looking, and behold in Romans 9, this is the NEW Testament, it talks about God being like a potter who has absolute power over everyone of us, represented by clay, and it is His prerogative to make some of us vessels of wrath for destruction and some of us vessels of mercy. That He shows mercy on whom He will have mercy, and He has compassion on whom He desires to have compassion. And none of us can talk back to God about this, because it is His sovereign right to do all the above, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, and. . .

On second thought, we might need to scratch the Romans 9 word connection with young Potter. It might be new, but it definitely is not safe these days.

So, back to the drawing board, and I stumbled upon a verse in Isaiah 29:16. (I know it is the OLD Testament, but we will just not mention the scriptural reference. The Potter fans would not be carrying their Bibles to church anyway.) There we read people who were getting things backward. They were saying that they were the potter and God was the clay.

Now that will go over big time! We control God, God answers to us, we do something, and God must respond, that He is a responder and not an initiator, we push the right buttons and God does His thing, we hold the keys to determine our fate, etc. So we have found our angle from Scripture. Plus, it has the added advantage of fitting right into the world of Harry Potter.

What church out there will be the trendsetter and get us out of the six-month, behind-the-times, rut we are in? Who out there will be the first one to invite Harry Potter to their church?

(After we are through with Harry, the next coming attraction could be HORRIBLE BOSSES. I know it is very racy and rough in parts, but once you cross one line, it is so much easier to cross the next line. And besides, do you know how many people out there work for horrible bosses? Disgruntled employees would be flooding through the church doors.)

One final word. . .I read this summary movie review of TRON: LEGACY. "The result is a cheerful, colorful and solidly PG popcorn piece that won't leave you deep in thought."

Maybe I was too harsh on the use of TRON at first. I get it now. The connection is so obvious, how could I have missed it? It makes perfect sense now. I have seen the light, just like the light in that church's newly decorated lobby.

After all, we certainly don't want the Sunday crowd at church ever to be deep in thought about anything. O foolish me, what was I thinking?

Sarcastically yours,

Chris

A Fomenting Family Fetish

The human heart is a nonstop idol factory, and often times the hardest idols to detect are those things which are good that compete with that which are best or most necessary.

The fifth commandment has to do with the family; the first four though has to do with God and the exclusive worship, honor and obedience which He deserves. Really the fifth commandment is directed not just toward fourth-graders in the honor they should give to their parents, but it is geared toward 40 year-olds in the honor they should give their aging parents. Adults comprised the original audience of Moses' congregation at the base of Mt. Sinai.

Today I fear that in an over-reactionary way, to correct society's views toward the traditional family, that there is a large segment of the Christian community who are unknowingly elevating the family to a place that belongs only to God. I see this danger especially in the patriarchal and family-integrated church movement, a prominent fad that will fade away over time just like Gothard's Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts and Promise Keepers.

There are many points of appreciation (and I want to give credit where credit is due, and that is from a positional paper from a Grace Bible Church, somewhere in the USA) which I have toward those individuals and organizations who have sounded the alarm bell about the devaluation of the family. For one thing, they address the many problems in the modern day church related to youth, where often times children and youth are segregated at every turn from adults, and are babysat and entertained. The traditional youth ministry has proven to be a disaster in so many ways.

Also, they boldly call parents, especially fathers, to take up the call to lead, shepherd, disciple and train their own children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. How many dads, even Christian dads, have gone AWOL from their responsibilities at home? When parents turn over their responsibilities to day care or schools or churches or other organizations to train their children primarily, then repentance is in order.

Our society looks upon children as a curse or a nuisance, inside the womb and outside the womb. Those who champion the family have rightly said that the Scriptures teach that children are a blessing.

So I stand shoulder to shoulder with those who have spoken up rightly so about all the above matters. We are losing our church youth today even after spending so much time and church budget in youth activities, and the numerous Christian spokesmen on this issue have put their finger on what is the problem and what are some practical solutions.

In some quarters, though, I am hearing and seeing hard-fast rules to counteract all the above that do not have the support of Scripture behind them. We are being told that only parents should be teaching their children, that age-segregated instruction such as Sunday School, VBS, church camps, AWANA programs, or whatever is "of the devil" or "from the pit of hell" (the exact words from some within the patriarchal and family-integrated church movement), wives should only be taught by their husbands and not from a ladies' Bible study group, that the family must do practically everything together in a church setting, that the father/husband has almost supreme authority in all matters of instruction.

Yes, the parent(s) should be the primary teacher or instructor of children, but nowhere in Scripture does it say that parents should be the SOLE teacher of their children. Deuteronomy 6:3-9 is a favorite among the patriarchal movement, but nowhere in that passage does it say that ONLY parents should be teaching their children. Priests were given by the Lord to instruct people in the law. Prophets were called out by God to admonish the people to follow the Lord and His covenant. Synagogues were developed during the Exile, and rabbis came on the scene to teach the people God's laws. Paul was trained by rabbi Gamaliel. Even boy Jesus was bar-Mitzvah-ed; he was conversing with the religious authorities in the Temple at the age of twelve.

There can be a benefit to children hearing "other voices" in support of their parents' instruction. What if the parents' instruction is off the mark scripturally? Would it not be a blessing if that child hears godly, doctrinally solid instruction from some other source over time? Sunday School or other times of instruction do not have to be a substitute or in competition with the parents' instruction at home, but it can be a nice supplement on a level where the children can learn with their peers. After all, we are talking about only an hour each week. If a parent is really concerned about the detrimental effect an hour's instruction will have on their children on a Sunday morning at a church they like and leaders they trust, then what does that say about the value and worth of their own instruction at home during the week? If one hour can possibly "undo" all they do during the week, then I guess what they are doing during the week must not be that hot.

There can be a sense of hypocrisy within the family-integrated church movement. Are not their children learning from a pastor/elder who is teaching and preaching each week? Unless that pastor is his or her own parent, then that child's instruction is coming from someone other than his or her own dad. Within the home school community, where this family-integrated church movement has really taken off, how many of those home school kids are instructed ONLY by their parents? Dance lessons? Piano lessons? Sports teams? Home school co-ops?

I am a family guy, but I want to be known more as the Lord's guy. It has been rightly said that God made Adam before he made Eve. He could have made Eve before Adam; He could have made Adam and Eve at the exact same time. He also could have made the entire family at the same exact time--Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel. But He did not do any of those things. He made an individual first. Marriage and family are high up on God's list, but it is the individual that must give an account of himself before God. It is the individual who has sinned and come short of the glory of God. It is the individual sinner that is need of salvation. Ezekiel 18 plainly says that the son will not bear the sins of the father and the father will not bear the sins of the son. It is the individual soul that sins that shall die.

The church is not made up of a "family of families", as one family-integrated prominent advocate has stated. Nowhere do we find that definition of the church in the New Testament. I know of some churches who have "Family" in their name to advertise they are a family-integrated church. I guess that would leave a single man like the apostle Paul feel unwelcomed. In a family-integrated church, are singles made to feel like second-class citizens? Are widows disenfranchised? What do you do with a woman is a new Christian and whose husband is an unbeliever? Send her somewhere else? What do you do if you have an unbelieving family with unruly children? It seems that our Lord Jesus had an easier time interacting with people like that than those refined, cultured religious folks in His day. The woman at the well in Samaria certainly might stick out like a sore thumb, maybe an unwanted sore thumb, at a family-integrated church.

Yes, families are important to God. Marriage and family are God's ideas after all. But a good family life is not a guarantee of anything, nor is a bad family life a guarantee of anything, unless we believe in Christian determinism, an oxymoron if there ever was one. Josiah had a rotten father and grandfather, but he was a righteous person and a great King. Yet, in spite of being raised in a good home environment, Josiah's three sons were evil in the Lord's sight. We should do everything we can in a Christian home to provide the best type of learning environment for our children, but in the final analysis, that child will have to answer for himself before his Creator. (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

When a church defines itself in any other way than CHRIST, it limits its ministry to a people who are just like them. Maybe that church should put CLIQUE after its name. Legalism takes many forms, and there is a tendency in this patriarchal movement toward outward conformity to certain unspoken and spoken expectations, so much so that these families actually look alike. Contrary to what some might think, there is not an eleventh commandment that says, "thou shalt not send thou children to public schools", there is not a twelfth commandment that says, "thou shalt not send thou children to any church age-segregated events", and there is not a thirteenth commandment that says, "thou shalt not dress thou girls in anything but long denim skirts or dresses".

One fault behind the Promise Keepers movement was that it tended to berate dads into believing their wives are nearly always right, and we should bow to their wishes. Wives are sinners and can be wrong at times. The patriarchal movement tends on the other hand to elevate man to a status where he has no accountability. What if that man is abusive with his authority at home? Does the family have a right to seek corrective church discipline, or must they take it on the chin, because the father is untouchable and all-powerful?

I sincerely applaud all that those in this movement have done to highlight some needed changes that need to be made in our homes and churches. We must be careful, though, that we don't impose our individual or family preferences as a law over others. We have a great amount of Christian liberty (Romans 14) in areas where there may be a diverse set of convictions.

A good course for a church to follow is this--allow families to make up their own minds if they want to send their children to age-segregated activities at church or not. Provide options for all. The church surely is not a showcase for self-defined saints; rather, it is a hospital for self-denying sinners. The church is not a place for law to abound; it is a place where grace should abound. The church of Jesus Christ is made of up of redeemed individuals. That is the family of God that will live on throughout eternity.

Praising God for His being such a wonderful Father, I am yours in Christ,

Chris

Some Surprising Observations from Attending a "Moderate" Southern Baptist Church

I hardly ever get to attend a church as a visitor. But over Memorial Day weekend, I did just that in Ft. Worth, Texas. While my wife and two of my daughters were two hours west of Ft. Worth, I was alone, and I needed to decide which church to attend. I chose a Southern Baptist church close to where I was staying, and a church I was somewhat familiar with in my seminary days back in the late 1970s.

As I entered the worship center, I flipped through the church program that was handed to me, and I noticed immediately that the church had a different name than what it had back in my seminary days. I had no problem with that, but as I read through the program before worship began, I did see something much bigger than a name change that raised all sorts of red flags. I discovered that I was sitting in a "moderate/liberal" Southern Baptist church. (In case someone thinks I might be jumping to conclusions with my labeling of this church, the pastor in his sermon even brought out that their church was a moderate Southern Baptist church.) Texas has two state Southern Baptist conventions, due to a split several years back between the conservatives and the moderates.

I did give it some thought about quietly making my move out of the church building and finding another place to worship. But I stayed put, because I thought this might be a good learning experience. I am glad I stayed put.

What I witnessed was something that blew my religious socks off. We sang some hymns, some of which were totally new to me, but every one was very deep theologically and biblically. We did a responsive reading from two Psalms, after which the choir sang a beautiful song from one of the Psalms in response.

Later the deacon of the week got behind a microphone on the floor and read to us Romans 13:1-7. The pastor then preached out of Matthew 22:15-22, the last in his sermon series on historic Baptist principles. (Of course, his take on all that constitutes historic Baptist principles would be somewhat different than mine.) While the sermon was entitled "The VBS Flag Incident", it was basically a sermon on Baptists and Religious Liberty.

While I disagreed on some points he made in his sermon, at least he preached verse-by-verse, and as I looked around the congregation, everyone had his or her own Bible opened and was following along as the pastor preached. It was not a three-point, twenty-minute sermonette with jokes interspersed, worn-out illustrations, or a poem at the end. It was a very well developed biblical exposition of the text.

Contrast to what I witnessed that Sunday to what I have seen at some contemporary "conservative" evangelical/Southern Baptist worship services, and the differences are startling. In the modern conservative stream, I have seen many people not even carry a Bible to church. To reduce the number even further, I have seen many of those who have a Bible never make an attempt to open it during the sermon.

One of the saddest commentaries on the state of the church today is the number of people who do not carry God's Word with them to church and/or those who never open their Bibles at all while they are at church. Why go to all the trouble when it is shown on an overhead screen? But the saddest commentary is not all of that. . .there is one that is sadder and more tragic, and that is not giving the people a reason to bring and use their Bibles in the first place.

When sermons are fluffy topical motivational speeches with very little exposition of Scripture, then why bring a Bible, when the man behind the pulpit, or on a bar stool, or on a sofa hardly uses the Bible himself? When we do not give an ample reason for people to bring and use their Bibles at church, then that has to be the sadder commentary on the state of the modern church.

So what I learned on Memorial Day weekend this year is that I attended a non-conservative church in order to hear more Bible than I possibly would have had I attended a flashy, trendy, "conservative" church.

Beam me up, Scotty.

Is Barack Obama the Antichrist? (or if he is not, does he come in as a close runner-up?)

I turned 18 in September 1972, just two months before the first presidential election in which 18 year-olds were allowed to vote. In the early spring of my eleventh grade, months prior to my birthday, my economics teacher talked me into attending the local Democrat precinct meeting at someone's house. That is the last thing I wanted to do and the last place I wanted to be on a school night. But to please my teacher, and to earn some possible brownie points in class, I reluctantly went. That was my first taste of local politics, a far cry from my taste for sports.

The biggest surprise came when they began to nominate delegates from the precinct to attend the Eastern Oklahoma County Democrat district meeting (or whatever it was called). My teacher nominated me to be a delegate. I sat there in shocked silence. What did I do to her to get this type of treatment? If this school night in a stranger's house with a bunch of adults was a barrel of fun, I just couldn't imagine what excitement would be brewing in a Friday evening and all-day Saturday event at a high school auditorium! My brownie points better be piling up in a big way.

After attending that two-day mini-political convention, I decided quickly that it was going to be my alpha and omega as a political delegate.

That election year would eventually have George McGovern as the Democrat nominee, President Richard Nixon as the Republican nominee, and George Wallace as the Independent candidate. I stood in a long line to vote for the first time in November that year. It was a privilege I took seriously.

Many that year thought McGovern was probably the Antichrist or close to it. After Watergate became full-blown, there may have been many who once thought McGovern was the Antichrist changed their minds to Nixon's being the most likely candidate for the biblical position.

While in college, several of us drove over to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to hear some Georgia peanut farmer speak. I shook hands with the former Georgia governor who would eventually become the next President of the United States.

I held out great hopes for the unashamedly "born-again Christian" who now occupied the White House, but my hopes faded over time. I still remember such things as those long gas lines and our hostages in Iran. Jimmy Carter was a good, decent man, I thought back then, but I became to believe he was just too incompetent for the job. He may have meant well in all that he did, but he was just in over his head. I have done household plumbing before, and I know what it is like to be in over my head, figuratively and almost literally.

David was a righteous man, but he was also very skilled in what he did. (Psalm 78:72) Character and competency together residing in a leader is a powerful force for good in any society.

Presidents have come and gone, and our own evaluations and opinions may vary on how each one did. The awful truth is that we probably have had more mediocre or bad Presidents than we have had great ones. This only shows the genius of our founding fathers, who did not want a monarchical executive. Our country, so blessed by God in the wisdom imparted to our nation's founders, is very resilient because not all power rests in one man.

Two of our most unheralded past Presidents whom I would put in the "great" category are Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, and Calvin (good first name!) Coolidge, a Republican. When Cal Coolidge left the presidency in March 1929, he said, "Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business." If government would mind its own business, and quit trying to mind everyone else's, it certainly would be a marked improvement, in my books.

Certain past Presidents have gained the inevitable distinction of being nominated as the Antichrist. That would be a special category of a "bad" President.

Without giving away everything in a future article, I can with 100% certainty say that Barack Obama is NOT the Antichrist. Some would be quick to add, though, that he deserves to come in as a close second.

I realize the Bible says that we are to pray for all those in authority, and if first century Christians can pray for Nero, then we can pray for President Obama. I also realize that God raises up leaders as He sees fit, as He did toward Pharaoh and Cyrus, and as Nebuchadnezzar learned the hard way after seven years of insanity. I also know that the Bible teaches that the king's heart is in the hands of the King, and He can turn it whatever direction He chooses.

The other thing we learn in Scriptures from the history of Israel and Judah is that God often gives the leaders they deserve. The more appropriate question to ask then is not if Barack Obama is the dreaded contrived "Antichrist" or not, but is Barack Obama God's judgment upon our country? Are we getting what we deserve?

That may sound like a harsh statement, and I do not delve into politics in these articles and I certainly refrain from doing so when I teach God's Word on Sundays, but it is hard to ignore the obvious these days. Charles Spurgeon in his sermons frequently referred to relevant current events in his day.

I have read much on Barack Obama's upbringing (no, I am not talking about his birth certificate!), and that alone scared me. While I disagree with about everyone of Obama's liberal policies, and while I think he has proven to be much more incompetent or inexperienced than any previous President in my lifetime, those two factors alone by themselves do not raise my concerns to the level that it exists today.

While I have disagreed with all past Presidents over certain issues, I figured that for the most part they thought that what they were doing was what was best for their country. Some may have come from different worldviews or held different presuppositions than I did, but still I tried to give the benefit of the doubt to all of them in that they were doing what they thought would help our nation improve or get better.

But. . .

I do not know if I have that same sentiment toward the current occupant of the White House. This is the first time I have ever felt this way toward the President of the United States, and it is not a feeling I relish or enjoy having. It is hard for me to imagine that we would ever have a President that would purposefully do things to harm our country. What we are witnessing today has to be more than just incompetence at work. It has to be something else. No one can just be this arrogantly wrong or misinformed.

I hope I am proven wrong, but if it is true that the current policies of this administration are aimed at bringing our country down at home and abroad, then we are on uncharted waters as a nation. Incompetence is one thing, but intentional design is something far worse.

Like every parent, I want my children to have things better than I did. I want to leave them a country flourishing in liberty. I want them to grow up with opportunities to use their God-given abilities in a free society. I want them to be grateful they are Americans. I want them to bask in the rich heritage of our country.

My concern is that we have a President who does not share in these same desires and goals, and who is determined to undo everything our country has stood for. Whatever his motivations, my prayer for this President is that he will be a one-term President. 2012 can't come soon enough for me. After all, that passage in 1 Timothy 2 says we are to pray for those in authority so that we can lead a quiet and peaceable life.

Calvin Coolidge hit the nail on the head.

After saying all that, though, I must repeat what I read this week as I was studying for my sermon series through Ezekiel: "If there is any lesson to be learned from this sorry history (of Israel) it is this: Trust God, not national power. American Christians are too often overly concerned with saving America. Perhaps God does not intend to save America. But God will save His people. He always has, and He always will."

That is a bigger nail.

Yours in Christ,

Chris