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When I got Burned at the Stake

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Burned at the Stake

I didn’t really get burned at the stake for being a heretic. But I did get “fired” for my theological beliefs.

Kind of.

The story would be amusing, if it weren’t so sad. And if it still didn’t hurt so much.

My Personal Experience

I was working as an editor and conference coordinator at a Christian non-profit organization. After three years there, I wrote a post on this blog about some doctrines and theological ideas I was reading about and investigating.

The simple fact that I was studying these ideas made the founder of the organization nervous. Though my job performance was faultless, and not a single one of the doctrines I was studying had anything to do with the doctrinal statement of the organization, the founder thought that if donors heard that I was studying these doctrines, support for the organization would decrease. So, he, with the backing of the board, terminated my employment.

One of the board members even said that I should be “thrown under the bus” in order to protect the ministry. Yes, he literally said that. It felt like I was stabbed in the back or burned at the stake.

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Discard Your Doctrinal Statements

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Doctrinal Statements

Chapter 9 in my book, Close Your Church for Good, is called “Discard your Doctrinal Statements.” In it, I explore the idea that doctrinal statements, while helpful in many ways, have harmed the Gospel, and hindered the spread of the Kingdom of God. To live and practice the way of love as modelled by Jesus, one step we can take is to get rid of our doctrinal statements, which divide and condemn, rather than invite and forgive.

Please note that due to some of the feedback I receive on these posts, this chapter might be radically revised for the final edition of the book. These changes will only be available in the print or eBook version when it comes out.

Here are the blog posts that come from this chapter:

To read the content of any other chapters, check out the post which contains the Table of Contents to Close Your Church for Good.

War of the Words

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In a previous series on preaching, we have seen one way that Christianity has become a religion of words.

Christianity should, however, be a life of loving action and service of others. As followers of Jesus, we are to live like Jesus and love others like Jesus, but far too often, Christianity degenerates into arguing about words related to Jesus, rather than living like Jesus.

Saddest of all is when as a result of our war of words, Christians not only fail to love others, but actually go and kill others instead. Even as early as the 4th century AD, continuing all the way through the Middle Ages and the Reformation up until even modern days, it is not uncommon to hear about one group of Christians seeking to slander, destroy, imprison, and even kill other Christians with whom they disagree theologically.

Killing Tyndale for his faith

Murder in Church

Though for the first 350 years of church history, Christians were persecuted by others, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and gained all the power inherent within that position, the persecuted quickly became the persecutors, hunting down and killing not only those who refused to convert to Christianity, but also those Christians who held to different theological beliefs than those of the church leaders in power.

For example, one of the major theological debates in the Fourth and Fifth century AD concerned the nature of Jesus Christ. Was He fully God? Was He fully man? If He was God and man, did He have one nature, or two? Was He one person, or two? And in regard to both, how did His divinity and humanity interact? Though the theological scuffle waged for many years, the church eventually decided in 451 AD that Jesus had two natures in one person.

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Doctrinal Statements Win!

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Thanks to all who voted in the recent poll about which blog series I should continue next.

53% of you voted for an explanation of why churches should do away with Doctrinal Statements.

Doctrinal Statements

So, we start that tomorrow morning with a post called “War of the Words.”

If you know anybody on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter who might want to weigh in on this, invite them them to join in by using the share buttons on the left!

What I Learned from Wandering

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My wife’s name is “Wendy” which means “wanderer.”

So I blame her…

In our thirteen years of marriage, we have moved 12 times. Or is it 13 now? Who can keep count?

And no, we are not a military family. And no, we didn’t use a moving company. We did all the packing and unpacking ourselves, which is no small feat, especially since my books and her teaching materials fill over half a Ryder moving van all by themselves.

In all of those moves, we have learned a few things.Cardboard Moving day

  1. Don’t be a book lover or marry someone who loves books. It just makes moving more difficult. The number of books a person owns is a deal-breaker in love and marriage.
  2. When nearing a move, stockpile cardboard boxes. They are worth their weight in gold. To help with this, become best friends with the Grocery Store manager, as he can help you score lots of big banana boxes.
  3. Make friends with lots of weight-lifters. In a few of my moves, my only friends were weakling seminarians like me. Most of us have bad backs and cannot help you move.
  4. Remember that just as there is a sock heaven, there is a movers heaven also. When you move, things that you had in your previous will somehow magically disappear during the move. You will empty every box in the new place, and the item will not be in any of them. Where did it go? Movers heaven.
  5. Your new home will have “quirks.” In one place we moved into, the bathtub was filled with black sludge. In another, two hours after we got there and started unpacking, the city inspector showed up and condemned the house, so we had to pack everything back up and go get a hotel while we figured out what to do next. When these things happen, just laugh and enjoy the ride.

Those are some of the lighthearted things we have learned in our moves. Below are some of the more serious ones.
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5 Writing Tips from C. S. Lewis

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I am reading through every book by C. S. Lewis that I can find, and recently finished C. S. Lewis’ Letters to Children, edited by Lyle Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead. I wrote a brief review about this book here.

writing tips from CS Lewis

Writing Tips from C. S. Lewis

In one letter, C. S. Lewis offered the following five writing tips to a young aspiring writer. If you want to write like C. S. Lewis, here are some writing tips from a master author:

  1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
  2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
  3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
  4. In writing, don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do my job for me?”
  5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

So there you go!

Now get writing! (Also check out the writing routine of C. S. Lewis.)

25 Reasons to Subscribe to this Blog

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Here are 25 reasons to subscribe to this blog: 

$25 Amazon Gift Card

If you subscribe to this blog to receive the posts by email during the month of October, you will be entered in a drawing to win a $25 Amazon.com Gift Card.

Subscribe by email using the Form at the bottom of this post.

Also, if you Tweet this post and add the #tillhecomes hashtag, you get an additional entry.

UPDATE ON NOVEMBER 1: A winner was selected using Random.org. Congratulations to “D. Eutychus” for winning the $25 Amazon Gift Card.

God is Uncategorized Bible & Theology Topics:

Doing Sermon Application Right

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Sermon Application

For many sermons across the United States and around the world, the application section of a sermon consists of something close to the following words, “May the Lord apply to your lives what we have learned today. Let’s pray.”

Such “Application” is completely inadequate.

I understand that application is difficult to come up with, but if it is difficult for the pastor, it is doubly difficult for the person who has not been preparing the sermon all week. In a monologue message, the pastor must diligently strive to provide concrete and clear examples of how a message can be applied to the people who listen.

Thankfully, more and more pastors understand this, so that it has almost gotten to the point that some sermons are nearly 100% specific and concrete application. I am not sure this is any better, since application without specific truth from Scripture, is like skin on a body without bones. Application needs Scriptural truth for structure, balance, and validity.
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How to Make Sermons more Interactive

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Interactive Sermons

I do not care if you are more of a topical teacher, or a book-by-book teacher, I believe that we must move away from the monologue model, and allow interaction from those we are teaching. Here are a few ideas for helping your church move in this direction.

Small Groups as Primary

This may involve a complete reversal of the popular mindset in today’s churches that the Sunday morning service is the most important church event of the week, and the midweek gatherings of smaller community groups are secondary.

Near the end of my years as a pastor, as I was beginning to change some of my views and ideas about church and pastoral ministry, I started to try to impress upon the people of the church that if they could only attend one gathering of the church per week, I would prefer they go to a small group gathering, rather than to the Sunday morning service.

While I personally liked to see full pews on Sunday, it was at the small group gathering that they could get better community, encouragement, accountability, and service opportunities than they ever could in a church service on Sunday morning.

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Prophecy and the Book of Revelation

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Blogging Book Club

Want to learn more about the Book of Revelation? In a few weeks, several of us around the blogosphere are going to read and blog about a book which is creating an earthquake in the way people read and understand the Book of Revelation.

You are invited to obtain the book, and read it along with us, and if you have a blog, write about it on your own blog as well. We will all be linking to each other in our posts, so this will also create some good backlinks to your blog.

We will be reading The Theology of the Book of Revelation by Richard Bauckham.

Here is a brief introduction to what the book is about:

Understanding Revelation

The book of Revelation has always fascinated and frustrated students of Scripture. It appears to contain extensive predictions about the future through the use of images. But what do these images mean?

What message is John trying to convey?

What message, if any, does the book of Revelation have for us today?

Is the end of the world upon us?

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