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 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?

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.

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.

An amusing little story about a half-black candidate who acts white trying to act black while preaching to a mixed audience of happy black people and weird, awkward white people clapping their hands out-of-rhythm trying to feel more “spiritual” by trying to be black people. We certainly live in a mixed up country! The candidate, culturally a white Midwestern liberal, is doing his best to identify with the southern black people who dominate Democratic primaries, and no doubt an image consultant of some sort filled him in on the practice of calling down Holy Wealth Redistribution common among the lower classes of Pentecostals, white and black, in the South. Distribute your tithes to the preacher, who God hath given an Escalade, and it shall be returned to you ten times over. And then there’s the liberal social gospel variant- give your votes to the Democrat, and it shall be returned to you in welfare benefits one hundred times the cost of the effort of getting to the polls. Not to mention the free chicken dinner for turnout!

One of the most interesting angles was Obama’s endorsement of Rick Warren as his kind of evangelical:

Obama noted that he was pleased leaders in the evangelical community like T.D. Jakes and Rick Warren were beginning to discuss social justice issues like AIDS and poverty in ways evangelicals were not doing before.

“I think that’s a healthy thing, that we’re not putting people in boxes, that everybody is out there trying to figure out how do we live right and how do we create a stronger America,” Obama said.

Translation: so what if I want to murder babies, that’s putting me in a “box” and besides, it’s much more important to Jesus that we stick our hands into middle class wallets to subsidize illegitimate babies and keep AIDS patients alive with $500-a-month drug cocktails courtesy of the taxpayer. “Social justice” means “Socialism = Justice”.

The church where Obama visited calls itself the “Redemption World Outreach Center”. Sounds important- I bet they have a semi-circle display of flags of different countries in their parking lot to demonstrate how much more they care about missions than anyone else. In fact, this church is so important that they don’t even have a pastor. No, they have a real live APOSTLE. Check it out:

Together, Apostles Ron and Hope founded Redemption World Outreach Center in 1991 with three members and an undying heart for outreach.

If you thought T.D. Jakes was important because he gave himself the title of bishop, then you better watch out for the husband-and-wife tag team of apostles. I find it so amazing that there would be even two real live apostles left, and then that they would go to the same little Pentecostal Christian college, and then get married! Amazing evidence of God’s presence in their lives, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, other than that, the only possibility would be that they are taking advantage of poor and/or dumb people by promising them material benefits in this life based on dubious interpretations of Scripture and magical, primitive reasoning:

LORD, we thank you that Redemption World Outreach Center operates in the multiplication anointing. We multiply in every area of ministry. We thank you that we are financially multiplying. Money is coming from unknown sources. We thank you that your Word declares that the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous.

Redemption World Outreach Center will experience the miracle of debt cancellation! Every member and every partner in the name of Jesus! Every service will be filled with people regardless of how many services. I command thousands and thousands to come now from the north, from the south, from the east, and from the west! Angels go! Bring them now! Prompt diligent, dedicated, committed, sold out, tithing, on fire, anointed, Bible carrying, devil stomping believers now in the name of Jesus. Bring the hurt, bring the sick, bring the poor, bring the depressed, and they shall be healed in Jesus name!

I wonder if Fred Thompson ever sees fellow members Rick Warren or Southern Baptist bureaucrat Richard Land at Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) meetings; I wonder if they chat about their kids between sessions while they plot a North American Union and conspire to overthrow our country’s sovereignty.  Just a thought on the banality of treason… 

Anyway, it’s good to see somebody make Fred Thompson uncomfortable about his dubious associations while he tries to pretend to be a conservative in Houston, Texas today.

I generally try to avoid the petty controversies of religious circles, unless I see a huge consequence for our civilization, generally through leaders abusing their positions to push socially liberal agendas. With the low-testosterone tendencies of much of the ministry, it’s something laymen have to look out for or else the sheep will be led away from the true gospel and into the fever swamps of the social gospel.

But lately I have noticed a potentially serious problem in conservative Christian circles. Instead of rejecting the relativism of their liberal brethren, they have embraced a mirror image of the same relativism to justify their countercultural instincts, some of which may be out of sync with reality.

Thus, we see Creationists who talk endlessly of “presuppositions”, as if the truth of the origins of life were not worthy of serious scientific study, and the only use of any given piece of evidence is to either confirm or deny one’s presupposed conclusions. There is a grain of truth to this, but this attitude leads to needless division, as one can presuppose one’s way to any conclusion. Whereas thoughtful Christians were once all united in combating the atheistic worldview, we now have self-appointed mullahs out to purge anyone who deviates from a 6000-year-old young earth view as “unbiblical”.

Similarly, we have folks taking medical advice from non-professionals because of the person’s particular bizarre interpretation of Scripture. Or worse, because “God has given me a peace” about some particular irrational course of action. Mothers refuse vaccines for their children, not based on any sort of rational analysis of the risks, but because they “feel”, presumably based on some sort of private divine revelation, refusing the vaccines is the right thing for their child. I’m not saying every decision has to be rational, but we ought to at least admit when a decision is primarily emotional instead of claiming some sort of superior Godliness for our gut-level choice.

I just bought a new truck. I don’t need it, and God didn’t tell me to buy it; its purchase was a purely irrational emotional decision on my part. I don’t think God really cares what I drive, as long as it doesn’t impact my ability to provide for my family and doesn’t cause me to fall into a general pattern of materialism relative to my income and capital. And I’m proud to support the local energy-based economy here in Texas with a 381-horsepower gas guzzler

Yet I hear Christians all the time quoting God’s guidance on such inconsequential decisions. With the frequency with which some people get specific extra-Biblical messages from God, you’d think they had his cell phone number.

I suppose some of this is inevitable. Post-modernism (of which Christian relativism is a symptom) is a reaction both to the overwhelming amount of available information and the perfection of the arts of propaganda. There is literally too much information for most people to interpret and the information they do get is often slanted for someone’s agenda. It’s much easier to trust the voice in one’s head and call it God.

While I see this as somewhat inevitable on the macro level, I do worry about some of my friends on the micro level- and specifically, how I am going to find a Christian man for my daughters who is not ate up with this relativistic navel-gazing as justification for irrational choices. Generations of work to build wealth and security for a family, or even their physical health, can be destroyed by one idiot who thinks God is telling him to invest in a pyramid scheme or that there’s a medical conspiracy to hide “natural cures” to his child’s ailments. It’s enough to make one embrace some sort of merit-based primogeniture for descendants.

What is the alternative? In my view, nothing but hard work and hard thinking. There are no shortcuts to research, analysis and foresight- and a recognition of the reality of risk and uncertainty. A Christian friend of mine who studied engineering probability and statistics at the Ph.D. level once informed me that man is most irrational when estimating and dealing with risk; man always underestimates risk and pays the penalty.

To the extent that Christian relativism creates a lower perceived risk for individuals who believe in some sort of private revelation (”God spoke a peace to my heart about this investment”, “God has just given me a peace about taking her out of chemotherapy and using pseudoscientific homeopathic treatments instead”, etc), this can lead to exceptionally destructive choices.

My view, in summary:

1. God’s sovereignty is undeniable, and a comfort in the long term. But in the short-term, it is of little practical benefit for making decisions. God allows horrible things to happen to people. Many of these horrible outcomes are consequences of irrational decision-making.

2. The notion that “God will not give you more than you can handle” is false. God certainly gave Judas and Pharoah way more than they could handle, and I’d certainly like to avoid what happened to Job, even with the net gain at the end. God has given us a brain to use, and our choice to not use it could be the means by which we are revealed to be a vessel of wrath rather than a vessel of grace. After all, we can’t know in advance which saints will persevere, and thus are true saints and partakers of grace.

3. We often want to make irrational choices and adopt irrational opinions for short-term comfort (e.g. it’s easier to blame a vaccine for autism than random bad luck; having a child in a hospital is a generally unpleasant experience, but is necessary for the 1/1000 chance of a serious problem at birth that requires immediate medical intervention).

4. There is no private, reliable and practical revelation of God’s will, especially in circumstances where short-term comfort conflicts with low-probability high-risk scenarios (i.e. where man is most irrational). Man, even Christian man (and esp. Christian man when much of the church is teaching this sort of direct-from-God relativistic private divination of God’s will), is utterly vain. We are completely incapable of distinguishing between our own subconscious irrational desires and our perception of God’s Will. Our error rate is so high as to make this sort of attempt at discernment pointless. A friend of mine calls it the “quiver in the liver”, as the means by which most Christians attempt to “feel” God’s will. We’re too vain and fallen to know the difference.

5. In the end, we have the Bible and our brains. Subjects that do not fall into the authoritative, non-negotiable scope of the former must be addressed by the latter. God will not insure against loss because we refuse to use our brains and project our irrational preferences onto Him.

And finally, please understand this is not written as a criticism of any one person or any particular decision, just a general rant against patterns of behavior, prevalent in most people to some degree, that concern me.

Here, as promised in my first post about the War Between the States and its implications, is presented a PDF of Robert L. Dabney’s A Defense of Virginia and the South. Both as a debater and a Christian, I hesitate to even attempt any sort of defense of the Confederacy, when Dabney has done such a wonderful job. He rejects superfluous arguments of both sides, and reduces claims to their moral and Scriptural essentials. Most startling is his claim that a verse in one of the epistles to Timothy makes no sense unless we see it as a Providential warning against the coming of the Abolitionists and other Equalitarian zealots. You’ll have to read to find out more.

When we see the reign of death that the false god of Equality has brought to our world, whether through Communism or feminism (i.e. abortion), Dabney’s prophecy is even more startling, given that he saw it in only its embryonic form.

Click Here to Download Dabney’s A Defense of Virginia and the South

For those of you who homeschool, this would make a great supplement for high school history.  Biographical information about Dabney, a theologian and soldier born in Virginia who died a Texan, can be found here.

Now, many of you may be wondering why this is important.

There seem to be two responses when dealing with the War Between the States and the ethical implications of the eventual casus belli for Northern repudiation of constitutional limits of federal power and aggression towards the self-determining efforts of the Southern states.

Response one, most common, is wholesale condemnation of the South as a sort of proto-Nazi society, with some exceptional individuals and interesting history surrounding the war, but ultimately no moral justification for its existence due to the horrible injustices perpetrated by its societal structure. Conservative historians have branded this the “Nazification of the Confederacy”.

This seems to be the default explanation both secular and Christian. Of course, from the Christian side, it is explained that the South, though more Christian than the North, suffered God’s wrath for punishment of the sin of slavery.

Response two, less common but still represented, is to entirely ignore the slavery issue and pretend the war was entirely about state’s rights (which it was, partially). Many “neo-Confederates” do this well, making ridiculous arguments to walk around the slavery issue, and pretending that a surviving or revived Confederacy would somehow miraculously solve all of our country’s racial problems because it would avoid the “divisive” interference of the federal government. This is wishful thinking at best (though based on some truth, as the feds do exacerbate baseline racial tension with their policies), and disrespectful to the past at worst. Slavery was a major issue of the war, and to let the Nazification charges go unanswered, or to make ridiculous arguments about the Confederacy being some sort of lost multicultural paradise, gives credence to the very serious moral charges leveled at our ancestors and their society.

It’s important to understand that these charges do not exist in a vacuum. The Globalist Elites are attempting to impose a new religion onto our society, and that religion is Equality. In the name of the false god Equality, all national borders can be erased (thus easing the way for cheap labor and universal consumer markets) and the relatively small minority of people in this world who cause trouble for the elites (a large number of whom are Scots-Irish in the South) can be marginalized.

That’s the purpose of the attacks- to make us feel guilty for who we are so we stop resisting attempts to remake our nation in the image of Babel. And like all good cults, Equality merely twists the truth instead of telling outright falsehoods.

One of these twisting is the elevation of the issue of slavery out of proportion to its actual importance- and since Southerners have always been at the forefront of resisting the Cult of Equality, one convenient use of this twisting is to marginalize the moral authority of those who question the Cult’s edicts.

With Dabney’s help, and not just for Southerners but for all Americans (as the elites, having marginalized the South morally, are attempting to do the same to the heritage of the entire nation), we can regain our sense of moral authority and have renewed confidence in the righteousness of our resistance to the Globalist agenda.

Recently a minister named Mark Driscoll, of an interesting “emerging” church with uncharacteristically conservative theology, put together a video about church planting making analogies from Scripture about the task and being a soldier. I don’t know much else about him, but he makes good points about the feminization of the church. The video was very man-focused, “edgy” and was shot in a veterans’ cemetary. I find it interesting, and unlike the “masculine Christianity” movement of Eldredge (which has a great premise of men wanting to fight for something instead of being feminized Christian “nice guys” singing love songs to Jesus- but with little practical advice for what or who to fight- honestly the book Wild at Heart seemed rather anticlimactic, with all of its Braveheart rhetoric ending up as advice- as far as I could tell- to spend more time outdoors with other men- I’m sorry, but I don’t think real William Wallace masculinity is satisfied with a fishing trip), Driscoll makes some comments that take guts.

Driscoll prepared the video for a church planting conference attended by Bill Clinton’s spiritual adviser, Bill Hybels. And we know how much both Bills care about women- Clinton for the usual reasons and Hybels’ for his pet “relevant” theology of ordaining women pastors and deacons in direct contradiction of Scriptural instruction on the subject.

After this video was presented at a conference, Bill Hybels, the next speaker, immediately criticizes the video for failing to include or affirm the role of women in church planting. What kind of screwed-up, politically-correct, bizarro-world freak sees that video (whatever else one may think of it) and comes away with some kind of beef against it because it’s unfair to women?!! I stand by my assertion that Hybels is a fruitcake with no business in any church, much less promoted as a leader to be emulated. Link to the controversy and video here.

I dismissed this as possibly an overreaching conspiracy theory when I first heard it, but Daniel Sheehy has put together a good piece at VDARE discussing the facts behind a possible North American Union supported by Bush, Rice, Guitterez and other globalist members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Interestingly, both Rick Warren and Richard Land are members of the CFR, which explicitly supports the political extinction of the United States.  We know about Warren, but Land is lesser known, and works for some sort of lobbying bureaucracy funded with Southern Baptist tithe money called the Ethics and Religous Liberties Commission.  Land has explicitly endorsed a guest worker program as an imperative for Christians, playing religion for politics.

So if you’re a Southern Baptist, how do you feel about your tithe money and offerings being used to lobby in support of Ted Kennedy’s immigration bill?  From now on, I’ll be earmarking all of my offerings for specific purposes, not simply into the general pot for abuse by these liberal bureaucrats.

The Left, of course, is ecstatic over his betrayal:

Kudos to Dick Land. First he teams up with Kennedy, the “liberal” National Council of Churches, and the same-sex endorsing Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism. Now, just a few weeks later Land is getting his picture taken with Ted Kennedy AGAIN!

Merely a decade or two ago, Roger Moran and other Southern Baptist fundamentalists were giving moderate ethics and religious liberty leaders hell for participating in coalitions with groups such as Americans United and People for the American Way. Let’s not forget that these same leaders regularly were involved in coalitions with VERY conservative organizations as well.

Heck, just a few months ago 2nd Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention, Wiley Drake, was moaning and groaning because Rick Warren invited Barack Obama to speak at his AIDS Conference. I believe good ole Wiley dubbed Obama, “THE ENEMY.”

I’m curious - are the Roger Morans of the Southern Baptist Convention slightly bothered that Richard Land is regularly partnering with that Massachusetts liberal Ted Kennedy?

This Southern Baptist is very bothered by it.