You know it’s summer when…

• You have had the opportunity to preach the Word 3 out of the last 6 days.
• You have been able to minister to 2 different youth groups and a group of people from all ages at a country church homecoming.
• You were given the opportunity to preach the gospel yesterday morning at 2:45 AM.
• You were up most of the night, yesterday morning, ministering to students at a lock in.
• You are working a ton trying to get camps rolling for the summer at work.
• You are preparing to lead a summer high school small group.
• You are seeking God to open more doors to minister.

All this to say, I love summer and am grateful to God for giving me the privilege to serve Him in ministering to people.  Here are some prayer requests for me as I go through the summer:

Last Sunday, I had the opportunity to preach at Bethesda Methodist Church in a little small town outside of Pulaski, Tennessee.  This was a very interesting and neat experience for me in that this is one of the churches where my quadruple great-grandfather preached and ministered.  He was a Methodist circuit-riding preacher which would be similar to a pastor today traveling and taking care of multiple churches.  It was a very great experience to be the last Birdsong to preach at this church since he did.  

The service last weekend was a homecoming for the church who had not held weekly services, except homecomings, in a little over 50 years.  This homecoming was very encouraging to me and reminded me of what a blessing it is to have a family who has embraced Jesus Christ for generations.  It was neat to stand in the very spot where my many great grandfather stood and to open the same Word of God that he opened to encourage a people seeking to follow after God over a 100 years after His time and ministry on earth had ended.  

This not only brought up gratefulness about having a family seeking after Christ, but also the wonderful truth that the God and Savior whose grace and mercy were proclaimed in that old white church years and years ago is the same God that we worshiped last Sunday morning.  God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  Let us live lives in pursuit of Jesus Christ so generations to come can see and hear stories of how a faithful and gracious God worked in our lives and used us to proclaim His glory!

On May 7th, 2008, a group of influential Christian leaders including Timothy George, OS Guiness, Rich Mouw, and Dallas Willard gathered together to define what it means to be an evangelical Christian.  The document that came out of this meeting is called The Evangelical Manifesto.  This document has had its critics and champions.  Some notable and well respected Christians have decided not to sign this document for various reasons.  Dr. Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, did not sign due to its lack of a strong theology in defining evangelicals and their roles in society.  Dr. Ergun Caner, the President of Liberty University’s Seminary, did not sign the document either due to the minimizing of the influence that evangelicals can have through politics and political endeavors.  Hate it or love it, The Evangelical Manifesto has made some noteworthy points that should be discussed and has made, in my opinion, an overall excellent job at defining evangelicals and the Biblical role that we as evangelical Christians should play in the world around us.  

The first quotes that I want to pass along come from the section of the manifesto focusing on the fact that evangelicals have failed to live out what they have claimed to preach:

“We confess that we evangelicals have betrayed our beliefs by our own behavior.  All to often we have trumpeted the gospel of Jesus, but we have replaced biblical truths with therapeutic techniques, worship with entertainment, discipleship with growth in human potential, church growth with business entrepreneurialism, concern for the church and the local congregation with expressions of the faith that are churchless and little better than vapid spirituality, meeting real needs with pandering to felt needs, and mission principles with marketing precepts.  In the process we have become known for commercial, diluted, and feel-good gospels of health, wealth, human potential, and religious happy talk, each of which is indistinguishable from the passing fashions of the surrounding world.” – p. 11

The manifesto states above that we have taken the message of the gospel, which we have been called to embrace personally first and foremost and then to embody to the world, and have exchanged it for false gospels which come in many forms.  This is so true and convicting at the same time.  The manifesto then goes on to address the spiritual condition that many evangelicals find themselves:

“All to often we have traced our roots to powerful movements of spiritual revival and reformation, but we ourselves are often atheists unawares, secularists in practice who live in a world without windows to the supernatural, and often carry our Christian lives in a manner that has little operational need for God.” – p. 12

Our false gospels that we have created leave no need for the true gospel.  If our whole spiritual lives are based on our own good works and performance or spiritual activities, we have no need for God because we have our acts together.  

The manifesto then goes on to describe what a holistic discipleship of embracing and embodying the gospel would look like in today’s world:

“We call for a more complete understanding of discipleship that applies faith with integrity to every calling and sphere of life, the secular as well as the spiritual, and the physical as well as the religious; and that thinks wider than politics in contributing to the arts, the sciences, the media, and the creation of culture in all its variety.” – p. 14

This is the call made by The Evangelical Manifesto to embrace and embody a holistic gospel that impacts culture through contributing in all spheres of life driven by a Christ-centered worldview. 

I have been out of school for over a week and have had more free time that I could ever imagine.  When you go from school and working part time to only working full time, your schedule opens up in ways you could never imagine.  Not having night classes is also very freeing.  So the question that I have come to face in light of this free time is what would the thing to do with my free time that would help to advance the kingdom of God and glorify Him the most?  This is something that I have been struggling with over the last week.  I think that it is entirely appropriate to have time to rest and relax in your schedule, but the issue is when you waste all of your time being lazy and doing nothing.  I have had the desire to spend a lot of my free time focusing on diving into God’s Word, but I have found myself really struggling with getting distracted with many other things and end up not having any time left to do what I had originally desired to do.  I feel like free time and idleness is a real tool that can be a temptation for believers.  When we waste all of our time watching TV or spending time online, we neglect what God would desire us to do with the short life He has given us.  We dismiss the mission of making disciples of all nations and our own personal spiritual lives in favor of temporary time wasters.  I am not saying that TV and the internet are bad things, but they are intended to be tools and resources for the Christian while seeking to complete the mission not the pursuit that should consume all of our limited resource of time.  I am praying that God would keep me from spiritual ADD and the miss use of my time.

Last night I finally got a chance to go and see Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. This is a documentary that I had been wanting to see ever since I saw the trailer.  For those unfamiliar with the movie, Expelled presents the story of how the scientific world of academia is leading people who have come to this conclusion that biological evolution might not be the only answer to the questions of biology and origins to be expelled from their jobs and places of influence.  This new movement is called intelligent design (ID).  ID is different from creationism in that ID only suggests that there is some form of intelligent force that was involved in the origins of the universe.  A creationist would take the concept of ID one step further in stating that this intelligent force was God.  Due to this focus on the expulsion of individuals who are opposing the status quo of darwinism, Expelled has a very political and sociological message.  It does not deal with the scientific evidence or seek to answer the question of whether darwinism or ID is the true and factually based ideology.  The movie just focuses on the suppression of the freedom of speech that the ID proponents are said to be experiencing.

There were some good points that the movie made, but overall, I was greatly disappointed.  I was excited to see the interviews that had been seen in the previews with radical atheist, Dr. Richard Dawkins, and some prominent Christian apologists including Dr. John Lennox and Alister McGrath. The movie interviews presented the fact very clearly that this is not merely a discussion of scientific theories but that each side represents its own worldview.  This was a good point to make in that all scientists no matter how “objective” and “open minded” they claim to be come to the table with certain biases and preconceived notions from their own personal worldviews. This helps to clear up the perspective that scientists so often seek to present that they are completely unbiased when they came to their own view of evolution while the ID proponents came to their decision in favor of ID only due to their own personal biases against evolution.  This was a very good point made by the film.  

Another interesting item presented in the film came from Ben Stein’s question of: If their is not an intelligent designing force that began the universe, then how do you suppose that the universe came into being?  Two of the scientists responded to this question specifically with an answer besides the common one of having “no idea.”  One of these proposed that life formed from a chemical reaction that took place on the back of a crystal that sparked life as we know it.  The second, Dr. Richard Dawkins, attempted to explain his theory of origins.  In this theory, he proposes that there is a possibility that life was brought to the earth from life that existed on another planet in our solar system.  This is a theory that sounds very much like aliens but is presented in a very scientific sounding fashion that makes this odd theory seem more intellectually feasible.  Ben Stein then presents these theories as absurd in comparison to the theory of ID.  These theories were clearly minimized and not given much credence in the film, but personally, I do not believe that these theories are any more than creative attempts to avoid acknowledging the clear signs of an intelligent designer in the world around us.

The movie, despite these interesting interviews, present something that hurt the position of the movie in an attempt at an easy shot against the evolutionist camp. The perfect atrocity to blame on an opposing ideology is the holocaust.  The horrible slaughter of many lives overseen by Hitler and the Nazi regime is the nail in the coffin to an opposing ideologies camp.  This was the attempt made by Expelled - an attempt to blame Hitler’s motivation for the holocaust on the philosophy of darwinism.  Human directed natural selection could be seen as an extreme result of this philosophy being fully embraced but the fact that this was the driving factor is hard to prove.  It could also be said that Hitler used the religious convictions of the Christians to turn them against the Jews in the holocaust due to the fact that the Jews are the people who murdered Jesus.  This argument was not appropriate due to the fact that the intentions of Hitler in his leadership of the Nazi regime cannot be specifically pinpointed to a specific ideology since many ideologies could be taken to extremes (in the case of darwinism) or out of context (in the case of Christianity) to attempt to justify the holocaust in the minds of the Nazi people.  Expelled did not just present this idea as a possibility but desired to drive it home as fact through some random interviews along with a step-by-step journey down the halls to a gas chamber of a death camp.  This was the primary argument that evolution needs to be stopped.  

This movie that began arguing for a free exchange of ideas in the scientific community ended with a call to stop the spread of the darwinism due to the fact that it was the cause of the holocaust.  I think that this is a step that is to far to take.  This movie began with a worthy premise but ended with a cheap shot in order to take advantage of unthinking minds.  All this to say, I am not a darwinist but rather a proponent of not only ID but of a Creator who spoke the world into existence and formed humans from the dust of the earth and breathed into them the very breath of life.  I do not think that Expelled did an adequate job addressing the topic that it set out to address and ended up taking cheap shots in the process.  

So if you saw the movie, what do you think? 

I spent some time last week in the picture of the early church in the end of Acts 2.  This passage talks about the people of this early church community devoting themselves to four priorities: the apostle’s teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread (communion), and prayer.  One thing that really struck me in my rereading of this passage was that the first priority the apostle’s teaching or the teaching of the Word of God is the priority that is most minimized in the American church.  The priority of the early church that was the driving priority behind the rest has been neglected.  We have minimized the preaching and teaching of the Word of God and have replaced it by a story and humor driven message that seeks to tickle the ears of its hearers but leaves no truth and no long-term impact beyond a tickle down the spine.  The truth has been minimized.  When we have churches and ministries that minimize the truth found in God’s Word, we are building churches on the sand.  These are churches with no foundational truth found in a Christian worldview derived from the study of God’s Word.  We are not just building churches on the sand.  We are building people on a theology that is empty.  When the trials, temptations, and struggles of life come their way, they need the truth of God’s Word to stand on.  They need to have been taught to be able to search the scriptures for themselves to be able to receive comfort from the Author of scripture.  They need a relationship with Jesus Christ that comes through the preaching of God’s Word not a theology that comes with a great big smile and promises your best life now.  When the smiles turn to tears, a sales pitch for a better life will not suffice.  Only Jesus Christ and His Word will sustain us and be the foundation of a ministry.