SpiritFarmer

I just got off the phone with my dad. He got back to San Diego yesterday afternoon, after being just outside of New Orleans for the past two weeks. He was with a Baptist relief team, running a kitchen that fed up to 10,000 people per day. During some of the rare down time, he and a couple other workers drove a Red Cross van into the city – around the Superdome vicinity, and then into another neighborhood. He said that all of the pictures we’ve seen in the media do very little to show the extent of damage there. They went to a church, which had a big circus tent in their parking lot, set up as a food distribution center. The water had washed all kinds of debris in. The ground was covered with mud and littered with dead fish that had come in with the water, but got caught when it went away. Eerie stuff.

Busy week. I know that for that for the majority of the nation this seems really late, but school finally starts this week at UW. So finally, after a couple months worth of build-up, we’re kicking off our ministry stuff. That’s exciting. I’ve been really looking forward to hanging with the students and getting to know them. I think I’ve had my fill of the strictly administrative aspects of the job, and I’m eager to gain some balance through relationship building.

I’ve been reading less than I’d like lately, but enough to keep me thinking. I’d like to crash through about three books by the end of next week. We’ll see how that goes.

Random thought – now that podcasting has become so widespread, I might actually be interested in getting an mp3 player. Though I’ve been a music geek for a long long time, the attraction to being able to walk around with 246,000 songs on an iPod has been lost on me. But the ability to put U2, Foo Fighters, NT Wright, Green Day, NPR, and Switchfoot in shuffle mode actually does appeal to me.

Someone found a way of combining Google Maps technology with weather tracking technology, and produced this Hurricane Rita tracking tool. Interesting stuff.

I found this link via BoingBoing

I’m thinking of adding a subtitle to the blog . . . “Spirit Farmer: Morally rebellious since 1996.” And lest I get lonely in my moral rebellion, at least I know I’ve got a life partner to join me. That’s right Michelle, you too are living in sin . . . with your husband.

More proof that I’m not a good Southern Baptist:

The church must help this society regain its sanity on the gift of children. Willful barrenness and chosen childlessness must be named as moral rebellion.

This is from an article by the president of one of my denomination’s seminaries, who is also a blogger.

In the category of not having anything nice to say, and therefore not saying anything at all, I’ll refrain.

O.k., no I won’t. That quote – which, by the way, is very representative of the full article from which it was lifted – is an example of the modern Pharisaism that boils my blood. Maybe I’m just feeling the conviction of moral rebellion, but childlessness is now on the list of societal evils? Look, Michelle and I have been married (need I state that we are a male and female, and both committed to our monogomous heterosexuality and staying married as long as we both shall live?) for nearly nine years now, and the issue of whether or not to have children has always been there for us. We do not hate children. We just haven’t had any for ourselves. We do not reject scriptural references that call children a blessing. We just haven’t had any. In my premarital counseling I do not encourage couples to not have children. I just don’t have children myself.

And for the record, my availability to doing Christian vocational ministry has been directly related to not having children. Michelle and I have always been of the opinion that if children enter our life, it would be a very high priority to have her be a full time mom. Michelle has almost always outearned me – partly because I’ve taken ministry positions at pretty low wages (especially considering my education, etc.). We would survive on my paycheck alone . . . but just barely.

My availability to minister – especially to other people’s children – is due in large part to the fact that I don’t have children. I haven’t had to neglect my own children to stay out late at night at meetings, youth group lock-ins, 70 hour work weeks, etc. And now that I mention it, I know plenty of full time pastors who are apparently more morally sound than I (based on the number of children they have), and who have completely ripped their own children off for the sake of their ministries. I kind of always assumed that having children was only one part of the equation, and that actually spending time with them as parents was also important.

I’m way out of time to be writing this, but seeing this article got under my skin in a big way. I haven’t even gotten to the list of supposedly godly people in the Bible who did not have children. Maybe I’ll work on that for later. For now, I have to go to work (ministry stuff) and attempt to earn back God’s favor.

So I attended my first ever blogger meetup yesterday. Now, I’ve been to a ton of events at which bloggers were present, but yesterday’s common thread among us was blogging. Rudy Carasco is in the neighborhood for some meetings, and he initiated it. Also there were local bloggers, Justin Baeder and Aaron Ogle (his wife joined us too), who blog over at Radical Congruency, and Ambra Nykol. It was the closest thing to internet dating I’ve experienced. Good stuff, though.

Charlie Wear of Next-Wave has posted this article from Jim Henderson, the director of Off The Map. It mentions our good friend, Jason, and what he’s doing to respond to the ugliness that Hurricane Katrina has exposed in our nation.

Jim’s article is harsh. I read it, and I squirmed. I wanted to say out loud, “No, no, no, this isn’t true.” Sadly, I know that the truth of it is screaming at a deafening level right now.

What an interesting week it’s been for President Bush. As we began this week, Mike Brown resigned his post at FEMA – not likely a post he should have ever had in the first place. Egg on the face of Bush. But then there’s his nominee to the Supreme Court, John Roberts. I’ve heard part of his confirmation hearings over the past few days, and whether you like his positions on the law or not, it’s clear that he is very well qualified for the job.

How can Bush have been responsible for both of these appointments – one so incompetent, and one so stellar?

This here is one good post, from one of my all-time favorite bloggers, Andrew Jones. References to Roland Allen and the genius books he wrote that are still kickin’ butt almost a hundred years later.

I helped lead a student leadership retreat over the weekend. It was a small, pretty quiet group. It was a good experience in some ways, and a bit concerning in others. I’ve been assuming for a while that the mainstream evangelical church of North America would soon experience a kind of death, and become an insignificant part of culture. This is neither all bad or all good. Now I’m thinking I’m all wrong. There are still a lot of young people who are still very much tracking with the mainstream evangelical church, and the ones who are either self-identifying, or being identified by others as future leaders have some pretty conservative, very conventional ways of thinking.

For example, I sat and watched these 19-25 year olds have a conversation about which Bible translations were the best/their favorites (for the sake of clarity, this was not a dogmatic, fist-pounding debate for KJV only, or anything close to it). And while it’s fine by me for people to have their preferences for different translations, I was a little unnerved about the strength of opinion I heard being offered – as though this was an issue of critical importance to them. Later, as I was engaging them with questions about culture and Kingdom, and a few times I got the sense that they wanted to ask me, “Soooo, what’s the point?”

Interestingly, one of the biblical passages I talked about has Jesus sending his disciples out and telling them to “go to the lost sheep of Israel” first when they do their Kingdom thing (Matthew 10). I was trying to ask them who they thought the equivalent of “the lost sheep of Israel” would be in our culture. Now that I’m reflecting on it, I’m wondering if I wasn’t talking to the lost sheep right then and there.

The Jesus Dojo, brought to you by the good folks at ReIMAGINE . . . cool. Scandrette rocks. Michelle and I got to hang out with Mark and Lisa, and even stay in their very cool San Francisco home a couple years ago. Good times.