Reading “Revival”
You may already know that we’re going through Adam Hamilton’s "Revival: Faith as Wesley Lived It" over the next couple of months on Ministry Matters. Clifton Stringer has written blog posts based on the first couple of chapters here andhere.
I’ve been saying that "Revival" is now my favorite Adam Hamilton book. It has just the right balance of historical and practical information to make it both useful and interesting. And it’s accessible enough that it should have appeal well beyond the world of Wesley geeks like me.
Mark Maxey has written about “Revival” over on his blog, including this post where he talks about the three precursors to revival, and about getting a spiritual director. Ina subsequent post, Mark discusses Wesley’s longing for holiness and the role emotion plays when we encounter the Holy Spirit.
If you’re blogging through Revival, shoot me an email with the link.
Mark Driscoll
A quick thought on the Mark Driscoll scandal that has had some Christian bloggers obsessed over the last several months. I totally understand the need to hold Christian leaders and churches accountable. But what I’m seeing right now in some quarters is what appears to be an attempt to completely destroy the man. One blogger in particular continues to post about Driscoll and Mars Hill whether he has anything constructive to add to the conversation or not. Sadly, this scandal has unfolded TMZ-style in the blogosphere (where an inordinate number of people seem to have a grudge against Driscoll) and on social media. So attendance at Mars Hill has dropped sharply, giving is down, and 30-40 church staff members are losing their jobs. As I said earlier, I’ve never been a Driscoll fan. But is this development viewed by his detractors as acceptable collateral damage as long as they have his head on a platter at the end of the day?
What happened to the news?
Following up on my recent post about American news sources, I turned on cable news earlier this week to see a ridiculous amount of coverage of Ray Rice’s contract being terminated by the Baltimore Ravens. While domestic violence is certainly a serious issue, I felt there were a number of news stories that day that didn’t deserve to be bumped to the last quarter of some of the newscasts I watched. There were several suicide bombings: two by ISIS in an attack on an Iraqi town, and one in Somalia by Al-Shabaab, a militant Islamist group with close ties to al-Qaeda. Not to mention the announcement from the World Health Organization that thousands of new Ebola cases are expected in Liberia over the next three weeks. Thousands. And three Italian nuns were brutally beaten, raped, and murdered inside a convent in Burundi. The alleged killer has since been arrested. If this had happened in the United States, it would have been the lead story on Nancy Grace for the next six months.
Don't forget the conflict in Ukraine
With everything else going on in the world, the conflict in Ukraine is flying under the radar for many of us (I suspect Vladimir Putin is counting on that.) But lest we forget how war affects families, especially kids, here’s a short reminder in this report fromthe BBC.
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