Tom’s Big Picture

This time it’s Hillary Clinton:

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York) will join Rick Warren at his California church this month for an AIDS conference.

A year ago this was offensive. Now, with the likes of Pat Robertson endorsing the baby-killer Giuliani, I guess we were too hard on Pastor Rick. Abortion is a minor problem compared with ingratiating yourself with politically correct causes (in Warren’s case) or compromising your principles to hold onto power to advance Israel’s foreign policy objectives so the Rapture can come sooner (in Robertson’s case).

We are seeing the hollowness of both the social gospel and extreme dispensational premillenialism, as both compromise God’s Law for supposedly “higher” causes. It matters little whether that cause is Marxist wealth redistribution or War for Israel. Both are examples of “doing evil so good may come of it”, something explicitly prohibited in Scripture.

The Republican National Committee is sending out fundraising letters right now.  Be sure and send back the postage due reply envelope with one of these:

Just print it up, cut it out and put it in the mail.  Render Bush’s legacy back to him.  Better Hillary than a traitor.

No, I’m not talking about the cheesy Civil War miniseries with Patrick Swayze. This is a recent miniseries put out by the BBC based on a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.

A conservative friend of mine recommended it and said: “Don’t rent it, you’re wasting your money. Buy it because your wife is going to love it.” I rented it. We watched it. And I should have bought it since I will be buying it soon.

The movie concerns a minister’s family from South England moving to North England sometime in the mid-1800’s. The minister, a dissenting non-conformist (presumably a closet Presbyterian), refuses to sign a statement swearing ideological allegiance to the Church of England, and thus sacrifices a comfortable living as a parson out of principle. He moves his entire family north to Milton, an industrial mill town full of lowlanders genetically identical to and not unlike America’s own Scots-Irish.

There, his family and his daughter Margaret, the protagonist, must adjust to the very serious and business-like atmosphere of the North, quite unlike the gaiety and frivolity of the South. Romance and drama of course ensue, and I will say no more since the plot is quite intricate. (As an aside, it’s amazing to me how easily my wife keeps up with the twenty-odd characters in the series, their relationships, etc. It’s more than the male mind can handle, so I’m always asking her who this person is again, etc…)

There are so many nice touches in the movie, such as how it deals thoughtfully with the conflicts between the mill-owners and the workers (coming to the realistic conclusion that there is good, evil and plain incompetence among both groups). Or the moment when the main character revisits her old hometown, discussing theology with the new minister who took her father’s place, and finds herself disgusted with the anti-intellectual attitude (in terms of a disdain of serious Bible study) of the then-embryonic liberalism within the Anglican Church.

And apparently many women in Britain went crazy over the male lead character, Thornton, many thinking him superior to even Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. It is very similar in plot to Pride and Prejudice, and healthy for it. Both plots are realist romantic, almost anti-romantic in their centering around the serious-minded conservative people who are always cleaning up the messes of the ne’er-do-well “free spirits” around them, always denying themselves for someone else’s sake. The real romance of these plots is their forcing these personalities out of their self-denial for others for a moment and causing them to fall in love despite themselves with someone just like them.

Buy this for your wife for Christmas. It’ll be a hit:

www.amazon.com/North-South-Daniela-Denby-Ashe/dp/B000AYEL6U

The most powerful expression of our heritage is the Christmas season, and it is for this reason it is continually attacked and undermined by our society’s elites, who desire a homogenous generic multi-culti “holiday” soup that profanes Christ’s name while securing additional rents for themselves by stimulating retail avarice.

To counter this, I believe it is of utmost importance to transmit the real heritage of Christmas, the most powerful cultural meme of our Christian and European heritage. I’ve always found it interesting that Christmas carols are all, almost to the song, written in minor keys. There’s a bleak beauty in the music, transporting one instantly to cold winter nights circa 1600 somewhere in Scotland.

Anyway, I found the two following resources to be very helpful. The first is a pdf of many Christmas carol lyrics, which can be easily printed at home for singing with the family:

images.meredith.com/bhg/pdf/ChristmasCarols.pdf

The second is a site with a cornucopia of Christmas carol-related information, including pdf’s of sheet music now in the public domain:

www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/HTML/table_of_contents.htm

Am I alone in starting to listen to Christmas music on November 1, and continuing all the way to Epiphany on January 6th?

In politics, it’s really easy to get carried away in the midst of a campaign. In many ways, it’s more intoxicating than sports. The Sport of Kings is what Huey Long called it.

So I try to be always on guard for fantastical notions of how well my preferred candidate is doing, lest I cloud my model of reality and make poor judgment. Knowing my own vanity, I play an advocate against good news, making my best case. If I can’t make the case, I allow myself to agree with my predispositions and accept the good news as true.

I’m getting to the point where the case against Ron Paul, i.e. the case that he can’t win, is getting increasingly hard to make. I’m starting to not only hope, but to believe. So let me raise my hands and testify, brothers and sisters.

At this point in the campaign we get signals that are representative of real support. Sometimes these are good signals, sometimes they are bad. But Ron Paul’s record-setting $4.2 million dollar day is awfully hard to ignore.

What we’re learning now is how much support the other candidates have as they try and copycat Paul’s strategy. So this week, Barack Hussein Obama’s (that’s his real middle name, I’m not kidding) supporters decided to do a money bomb of their own today:

my.barackobama.com/page/group/BaracksFridayNovthe16th

Go check it out. As of 11 pm Central, they’ve raised $4600 from 69 people. Paul raised $4.2 million from 30,000 donors. What the heck is going on out there?

Many will argue that Paul’s supporters are inherently more computer-oriented Internet types. This might be true if we were comparing Paul to Hillary Clinton (who attracts a lower-class demographic). But Obama is the toast of silly upper middle class liberals from New England to California (try this Google search): a silly, but also wealthy and internet-savvy population.

Make all the adjustments and tweaks you want to normalize the stats, but these numbers scream.

Fred Thompson’s supporters are trying the same thing:

www.fredsgivingday.com/

They have 60 people signed up. Meanwhile, Tea Party ‘07 has over 15,000 people signed up to moneybomb the Paul campaign all over again on December 16th, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

Statistically, donors are a subset of voters, and unless we are prepared to believe that Ron Paul’s support is entirely anomalous (i.e. not subject to the 80/20 principle universal in human behavior that the donors represent many more supporters and voters), we must admit that it is real, and it is big. It’s getting harder to believe he can’t win than he can. Even his poll numbers are starting to pick up, at 5% nationwide and 7-8% in the early primaries.

John Kerry was at 4% at this time in 2003.

It could happen, it really could.

The second greatest commandment meets Castle Doctrine in Houston:

In a case legal experts say may “stretch the limits” of the state’s self-defense laws, a Pasadena man shot and killed two suspected burglars during a confrontation as they attempted to flee his neighbor’s property Wednesday afternoon.

In the minutes before the fatal shootings, Pasadena police said the man called 911 and reported that he had heard glass breaking next door and saw two men entering the home through a window. Still on the phone with police, the man, believed to be in his 70s, saw the suspects leaving from the back of the home.

“I’m getting my gun and going to stop them,” the neighbor told the dispatcher during the 2 p.m. call, according to Vance Mitchell, a spokesman for Pasadena police. “The dispatcher said, ‘No, stay inside the house; officers are on the way.’

“Then you hear him rack the shotgun. The next sound the dispatcher heard was a boom. Then there was silence for a couple of seconds and then another boom.”

After the shotgun blasts, the telephone line went dead. But the neighbor called police again and told a dispatcher what he had done.

My favorite part: the 911 dispatcher tells the man that “property isn’t worth killing anybody over” and “if you go out there, you’re gonna get shot”. To which the man says “the hell I will.”

These were the wrong things to say to a Texan with a gun. The Scots-Irish moved to the state to get rich, even though doing so put their lives at risk with some of the nastiest most aggressive Indian tribes of the frontier. And to tell a Texan that if he engages in a gunfight, he’s going to get shot…well, even if he were inclined to not fight, by saying that you force him to prove you wrong.

What’s the old saying? You can tell a Texan, but you can’t tell him much?

This brave man loved his neighbor as he loves himself. Go and do likewise.

Baptist Press reports that Willow Creek Association’s own study shows their methodology is a failure:

Willow Creek has released the results of a multi-year study on the effectiveness of their programs and philosophy of ministry. The study’s findings are in a new book titled “Reveal: Where Are You?,” co-authored by Cally Parkinson and Greg Hawkins, executive pastor of Willow Creek Community Church. Hybels himself called the findings “ground breaking,” “earth shaking” and “mind blowing.” And no wonder: It seems that the “experts” were wrong.

The report reveals that most of what they have been doing for these many years and what they have taught millions of others to do is not producing solid disciples of Jesus Christ. Numbers yes, but not disciples.

I’ve often thought that the real problem with the “Church Growth” movement is not so much its insistence on metrics and research but rather its tendency to measure and optimize for precisely the wrong things. When we have a faith based on the “narrow way” it would make sense to measure something other than church budgets and total attendance. There are two reasons I think things went badly:

1. As covered in the recent pop-economy book The Tipping Point, studies have shown that groups can only grow to about 150 or so before new sub-groups form with stronger internal loyalty than the larger group. Thus, unity is easier to achieve below the level of about 150 individuals. Once you significantly exceed that, bureaucracy and factionalism take over, creating their own institutional imperatives. A church with a huge staff, payroll and building debt simply cannot optimize for anything but offerings and numbers.

2. Deeper measures of spiritual growth are harder to do. Thus, what’s easier to measure (numbers in attendance, offering income) becomes a proxy for what’s hard to measure. Unfortunately for the church in the last 30 years, that assumption was incorrect.

Proper measurement variables are essential for any business, and even more essential for the church. Businesses that optimize for market share, total sales, growth, or even profitability are destined to fail: total long-term risk-adjusted net-present-value profit is the only measure worth optimizing for. Just as sales growth is not the same as profit growth (and in fact can be detrimental), growth in attendance and fundraising does not mean spiritual growth.

Here’s an idea: maybe the whole idea of running a church like a business is fundamentally flawed.

Businesses can be run on scientific metrics and experimentation because, frankly, it’s just money and the negative consequences are pretty tolerable if you get it wrong: you make less money than you otherwise would. I conduct scientific experiments daily in my business in the quest to optimize for total risk-adjusted profit.

I don’t do the same at home, i.e. I don’t perform experiments on my kids in real-time while raising them. Why? Because my kids are infinitely more valuable than mere profits or a business. For my children, I use the most conservative methodology possible, relying on traditional child-rearing methods developed over hundreds of years that slowly change.

As the Baptist Press article discusses using this very same analogy, parents who relied on so-called “scientific” child-centered methods for raising their children (as popularized by Dr. Spock in the 1950’s) had poor results. Those sticking to traditional methods had the better outcome.

Now we’re seeing the same result in the church: seeker-sensitive churches monkeyed with the proven traditions of the church and screwed up an entire generation of believers, just like trendy parents screwed up their kids with child-centered pop psychology.

Just like our kids, the church is too important for experimentation: much better to take the conservative strategy of tradition and incremental change over long periods of time.

But from what I can tell, the Willow Creek people still haven’t learned anything:

Perhaps the most shocking thing of all in this revelation coming out of Willow Creek is in a summary statement by Greg Hawkins:

“Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights. Insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture. Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how he’s asking us to transform this planet.”

The bureaucracy is too deeply entrenched to just pull down the tent and go home. If Hybels were truly sorry for the mess he’s made, he’d quit ministry and go sell cars or something. He’ll have a new book and a new forty-day study in a year or so, explaining what was missing in his former approach and the sure-fire way to fix it. And you can bet it won’t involve going back to what works and dismantling the resource-hungry bureaucracy of the megachurch movement he’s spawned.

My alma mater’s administration tries so hard to move away from its roots and be like that Other University. But Aggies keep messing the P.R. job up by being good at Aggie stuff, like beef jerky:

Recently, however, beef jerky has earned a shred of respectability. In Texas, where all things beef find their meaning, researchers have been applying actual science to make better jerky at the E. M. “Manny” Rosenthal Meat Science and Technology Center, at Texas A & M University. The resulting Aggie jerky is apparently a breakthrough. As the Web site thrillist.com put it, it’s “a Unified Theory of Meat available by the ½-pound bag.”

The Aggie-culture-hating administration must cringe: a research program at A&M makes the New York Times for beef jerky. But I think most Aggies would agree: turning beef jerky into an engineering optimization problem is pretty cool.

And yes, there’s a website: beefjerky.tamu.edu. Lest anyone laugh, this is actually pretty complicated. I had a Food Engineering class where we were actually using little pistons hooked to computers to measure the “crunch curve” (newtons plotted over time) of a tortilla chip. The folks at Frito-Lay have a much tougher engineering job that just about anyone.

This probably won’t help the Newsweek rankings (which is mostly weighted towards what snotty college administrators think about other colleges), but that’s ok. Too much attention could ruin the environment over at what the liberals (affectionaly I’m sure) call Crackerland.

Today Pat Robertson endorsed Giuliani for President. Chris Ortiz over at the Chalcedon blog summarizes this event succinctly:

Quoting Robertson: “It is my hope and prayer that he will lead the Republican Party to victory in November of 2008.”

Here’s a man with a university supposedly dedicated to training Christians in cultural leadership and Robertson tramples over God’s law and the U.S. Constitution by endorsing the cross-dressing, pro-choice, three-time divorcee with mob ties. He did this when the most ardent constitutional defender and dedicated Christian, Ron Paul, is laboring to restore the American Republic. This is the clearest indication that Robertson is as much a part of the Establishment as any other Blue Blood. It’s time to turn off the 700 Club.

Another news story summed it up as follows:

But Giuliani’s support for abortion rights is apparently not as important to Robertson as Giuliani’s stance against Islamic terrorism and the argument that he’s the most electable candidate in his party.

Let’s do some math: 3,000 Americans on 9/11 vs. 30 million aborted babies. That makes abortion like ten thousand times worse than terrorism, especially the marginal difference in terrorism between Giuliani and the alternatives. The only possible way this makes sense is in Robertson’s extreme dispensationalist bizarro world where the physical sons of Jacob are more equal than others (Giuliani is by far the preferred candidate of neoconservative war hawks). Thus, it’s okay to compromise on killing babies if that advances Israel’s foreign policy interests. It’s okay to endorse a cross-dressing pro-gay-rights sociopath if it gets us closer to the Rapture.

Some extreme Israelophiles, like John Hagee, have even outright denied the Gospel in their efforts to pander to neoconservative preferences, embracing “dual covenant” theology that says Christ is only “the way and the light” for Gentiles, while Jews can still be saved by following rabbis and their Pharisaical interpretations of Old Testament law. Never mind that whole “brood of vipers” speech I guess.

Of course, if left alone by the chickenhawks in Washington and New York, Israel could solve its own problems. They have nukes, high IQ’s (and are surrounded by low IQ Arabs) and a world class military.

A rather eccentric friend of mine once made the argument that much of Christianity today is not Christian in any historical sense, but rather has degenerated into an apocalyptic cult worshipping all persons and things Jewish. At the time I thought that an unfair exaggeration, as to me all of the prophecy-Israel-rapture stuff seemed like a sideshow. For Pat Robertson and those who follow him after these strange political gods, my friend’s description seems accurate.

My instinct and hope, though, is that the average Christian out there, dispensationalist or not, isn’t ready for this sort of compromise. 2008 is going to be interesting.

Why it’s important to allow open debate.