TMNT
3.30.07
Archive for July, 2006
Megachurch pastor aims to separate church from politics
The top emailed article on the New York Times right now is about Gregory A. Boyd, a pastor of a large church in the St. Paul area and author of the popular book, Letters from a Skeptic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/30pastor.html
According to the article, Boyd got so fed up with people making requests to use his church for promoting certain political ends that he decided to take action from the pulpit and make it clear that “the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.”
I wholeheartedly agree with him. That might be surprising to you that I would say that, since many of you probably consider me part of the “Christian right”. However, it’s completely in line with my previously stated belief that the institution of the Church should stay out of politics and focus on preaching the Gospel.
My concern with people’s response to Boyd’s teaching is that they’ll think he’s promoting what Jim Wallis talks about in his book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. That is not the case; I get the sense that Wallis still believes that churches should be politically active but it should just be open to embracing elements of liberal and conservative political philosophy. Boyd seems to be saying churches should not be involved with politics at all. I would agree with Boyd.
This is not to say I don’t believe Christians should not be involved in politics. Now this goes back to something else I posted about in the past, which is that we need to distinguish the function of the church (as an institution) and the Church (the worldwide Body of Christ). The responsibility of the institution of the church should be VERY small and limited. The responsibility of the Church (the collective efforts of individual Christians) is MUCH greater.
I believe the overarching problem behind all of this is we intimately tie the concept of “ministry” to the institution of the church. Should Christians be involved with politics? Yes, but the problem is that because almost everyone ties the idea of faith-action to the local church, they therefore conclude that the local church should be involved in politics. “Ministry” happens completely independently of the institution of the church. I’m not saying the local church doesn’t/shouldn’t do ministry; but it is not the only means by which ministry happens. Ministry happens through the institution of the church, through individuals, through small groups of friends, etc.
Let’s take patriotism, pro-capitalism, etc. out of the church, but let’s also take “social justice”, environmentalism, etc. out of the church. The institution of the church works best when teaching the Bible; let individuals figure out the best means of implementing economic, social and environmental policy.
Good architecture
I might be biased but I’m sure many experts would also agree–Chicago is the most architecturally interesting city in America.
That being said, I love the John Hancock Tower in Boston. It’s the only building in Boston that I can say that I love. I think it’s beautiful. So even though everyone and their mom has taken a picture of its breathtaking majesty, I did too.
Work and Faith
In case you haven’t been following my blog the past year, the big theme of my life during this period has been an exploration of the role of work in our lives as followers of Christ.
The latest issue of Christianity Today contains an advertisement from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary which profiles a young Hispanic American woman’s journey from investment banking to theological studies. The tagline at the top of the ad says “I wanted to become a CEO, but then God called me to something greater.” (emphasis retained from the ad)
This actually made me feel angry. Why would someone’s decision to follow God by entering seminary instead of staying in the corporate world get me upset? If it was a pure news story featuring this woman’s life journey, it would not have generated such a response from me. However, this is an advertisement for which the sole purpose is to draw as much interest to the seminary as possible. I see the seminary’s choice of this woman’s story and the quote used as a tagline as a blatant means of preying on young professionals trying to find meaning in their work. I expect more from an institution like Gordon-Conwell, rather than these sort of emotionally predatory tactics.
First, I believe her quote is generally false. She may believe that, for her, entering seminary is “greater” than being on track to be a CEO, which is fine. But I believe on the whole, Christians can have a much more positive impact on society if more were to become CEO’s rather than pastors. Imagine if the CEOs of some major drug companies were Christians and found a way to make life-saving drugs available to dying people in third world countries. Imagine if we had some Christian CEOs at major corporations that wanted to invest in poor communities by opening stores or factories to provide jobs to people living there. I can come up with countless more scenarios of how we can reduce global suffering with more compassionate Christian corporate leadership.
Second, although I understand seminaries must act in their own self-interest, they could do so in a manner that is respectable and less predatory. I believe our generation is more interested in helping others and making the world a better place than previous generations. Instead of trying to capitalize on that for themselves, seminaries should encourage young people to understand how to integrate faith and work rather than simply discredit work as being “secular” and/or not “significant”.
I believe God is going to change the world through His people, but I don’t think He’s going to do it through pastors and traditional missionaries. I believe God is going to do His greatest work in our generation and the next through people who fully embrace their God-given talents and use them in the context of the secular world. We are entering a post-Christian era where we are not going to be able to convince people to come to church. If the Church wants to remain relevant to this world, Christians will have to go out where the people are. Instead of leaving corporations and academia, Christian will need to engage those environments with even more passion.
I think many people in the Church have given up on work too quickly. Just because you don’t see the purpose in your work doesn’t mean all work is meaningless. Maybe you’re just not in the right career or the right company. Instead of exiting the workplace, we need to discover what we love doing, then do it more passionately. That is not being a workaholic; that is passionately engaging in what God has made us to do.
Gordon-Conwell, I used to think about going to a seminary such as yours, but then God called me to something greater.
One good thing about Boston
One of the best parts about living in Boston (at least for those inclined towards working in technology) is that there’s a lot of really interesting cutting-edge work being done here. The only place in America that matches the quality and quantity of job opportunities in the technology sector is San Francisco.
The thought of going to New York and having to write mundane code for some major financial services company or going to DC and having to do government work is not very appealing. I’m sure there are interesting work opportunities in those cities but they’re just more difficult to find.
Why the programming posts?
I’ve started posting little blurbs about computer programming because it’s a good way for me to take notes for myself. Also, programmers often use Google to search for programming solutions and maybe my posts will be helpful to someone. For example, my post about setting no-cache for Struts gets a lot of hits.
I know most of you don’t care, but you’ll just have to deal. :p
flatten=”true” in Apache Ant
When building a war file using an Ant build script, you need to set flatten="true" when copying the required libraries into WEB-INF/lib, otherwise the servlet engine will not be able to find the .jar files.
Example:
<copy todir="${project.war.home}/WEB-INF/lib" flatten="true" includeEmptyDirs="false">
<fileset dir="${project.lib.home}"/>
</copy>
Let the summer begin
The wife and I haven’t had much of a summer because of the bar exam. But it’s finally over!
I’m going back to Albany this weekend to pick her up from her parents’ place. I’m hoping to go on a boat cruise on Lake George. There isn’t much to do around there so this seems like something unique and fun to do.
We’re going back up to our favorite city (Montreal) for Labor Day weekend. That’ll be a nice, relaxing weekend. I’ll be taking the Friday before the weekend off so we can have a good long weekend there; the last time we went, the amount of time we spent there just wasn’t worth the amount of time it took to drive.
Spell checking in Firefox
Firefox 2.0 has a new feature that highlights words that it thinks are misspelled. It’s very useful when writing blog posts and trying not to look stupid.
If you don’t want to or can’t install the bleeding-edge Firefox 2.0, there’s a way to get this functionality into Firefox 1.5.x through an extension:
Internet access has been difficult to come by
Finding a good place to work has been a nightmare these couple of days. Initially, I hoped to work from the hotel we were staying at (La Quinta), but they block VPN access! That’s ridiculous since the main point of offering internet access at hotels should be to entice business people to stay there; they usually need to connect to their company networks via VPN.
My next option was to try working from Panera Bread, since they offer free wi-fi, but the one in Clifton Park doesn’t allow VPN access either. I found a FAQ on the Panera site which claims that all of their hotspots allow VPN access, but people have posted on various message boards saying that’s not true. I ended up going to my brother in law’s place to work yesterday (which wasn’t perfect either; his roommate placed the router underneath the bed which severely limited the wifi connectivity. I had to move it out and it worked fine.).
Today, I decided to place my bets on a different Panera Bread (this one in Crossgates Commons in Albany) but they had the same issue with VPN! GRR! I decided to just go to Starbucks, but the one I went to had problems with their internet; usually, when you open your browser, it should automatically redirect to the T-Mobile hotspot page, but it wasn’t working for some reason. I drove down the street to Borders where I finally found a hotspot that worked! I initially had the same issue as the Starbucks where it wouldn’t redirect, but I went to the T-Mobile site which worked then found my way to the Hotspot login page. So the internet at the Starbucks was probably working but I didn’t think to try to get to the Hotspot login page myself.
Now, I can do work. Bye-bye.
