Coming soon to a living room near you!

This Friday evening I will be presenting about a ten minute preview of the movie 'Luther', at the Mars Hill Community Group in Olympia. Then there will be a discussion time after the movie. If anyone else would like to round up a group of people and do a similar evening, I think you would find it very interesting, encouraging and useful. The preview portion is a narrated PowerPoint collection of photographs, paintings, woodcuts and etchings, arranged to help you figure out who is who in the movie. Let me know if I can bring my projector, movie and discussion to your group.

Category Man: I've been Kellerized

My thanks to Kimball Parker and Mark Driscoll for pointing me to the preaching ministry of Tim Keller. Senior Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, Keller has a gift for synthesizing and categorizing Biblical and cultural concepts in ways that respect complexity and grab you. This guy gets it.
You can download a dozen or so of his sermons for free here.
Question: How transferable are Keller's "city" principles to a less urban setting? (Can you say, "Olympia"?...or even "Shelton"?)

Write on!

I don't know how long it was after J. Gutenburg moved his type and set off a revolution, that someone's private letters were first published for all the world to see. I do know that reading other people's mail--specifically, Theodore Roosevelt, Dorothy Sayers, John Newton (especially Newton!), Samuel Rutherford and Vincent van Gogh--has informed and challenged and inspired my life more than I can say. Someone has probably blogged insightfully on what we are losing with the demise of cursive writing and snail mail; we aren't, are we, likely to be able to buy a hard copy of "The Complete and Unabridged emails of J. I. Packer or David Wells or James Dobson"? Maybe it's just as well--we'll still have Newton.
Whose printed correspondence should I add to my own list?

From my toolbox:

Bible commentaries are expensive. And how to sort through all of the choices? I have a leaning toward older books in general, but it is very encouraging to see tremendously helpful new work being done by Christian scholars. So, I highly recommend D. A. Carson's New Testament Commentary Survey. Get the 6th edition, just published in January. It may be the best ten dollars you have spent in a long time. (Locals: Feel free to just borrow my copy.)
Does anyone know whether a similarly reliable list is available online (like, free)?

Who do you trust? Part two

In a recent sermon, Mark Driscoll (Mars Hill Church, Ballard) stressed the importance of trust between church leaders and the people in the padded, stackable chairs. (He didn't exactly put it that way.) Which raises a few questions:
1. Do you think Christians (by God's design) naturally trust their leaders, unless they are given reasons not to?
2. What factors break down trust in church leaders?
3. Once trust is lost, can it be rebuilt? If so, how?
If you have answers to those questions (other than "Probably"; "Just about anything."; and "Probably not", please leave a comment.

Who do you trust?

One of my sister/friends encouraged me last week to start posting on this weblog again (I had taken some time off.), because with all of the rhetoric and hype and noise in our media-saturated lives, she needs to hear "from someone she can trust."
Because I believe that just about any truly useful thought I might have, has already been said better by someone else, most of my posts are quotes. Here are some people that I, myself, trust. (These are the living ones who are still speaking, writing and blogging; the old dead guys make up a longer list, a subject for another day.):
John Piper; Al Mohler; Donald Carson; Wendell Berry; Marva Dawn; Anthony Esolen.
Who should I add to my list? (People who are saying useful, insightful, Biblically-consistent things)

Steamer..., butter...., or razor....?

"It was said, sneeringly, by someone that if a clam could conceive of God, it would conceive of Him in the shape of a great, big clam. Naturally. And if God has revealed Himself to clams, it could only be under conditions of perfect clamhood, since any other manifestation would be wholly irrelevant to clam nature."
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker. p90

The freedom of obedience

"Obedience is not the enemy of freedom but the exercise of freedom. Contrary to much popular thinking, we are not most free when we are least responsive to the commands, invitations, and directions which beckon us. Liberation is not the absence of duty but deciding which duty is ours. We are liberated by that which we accept as obligation. Again, we are freed when we discover the pleasure of duty rather than the duty of pleasure. There is no more onerous bondage than to be liberated from any obligation that is truly ours. The discovery of our true selves is the emergence of ourselves in free decision and fidelity to the obligations that are ours. The pursuit of holiness is not the pursuit of an abstract perfection--whether that be the perfection of our "authentic selves" or the perfection of moral behavior. The pursuit of holiness is rather a lifetime of responsive listening, of obedience, to our vocation."
Richard John Neuhaus, Freedom for Ministry. p.237

"Conversation is the testing ground of manners."

"This is so because manners are minor morals which facilitate the relations of men, chiefly through words."
Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, p.60. 1959

"Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone." Colossians 4:6

Doing Sabbath the right way

For those of you in the Friday night group at Parkers', here's the info on the book I mentioned: Keeping the Sabbath Wholly by Marva Dawn. Anything she writes is worth reading and serious response; this lady understands "church".