Nick Bogardus

Consuming News, Consuming God

Nick Bogardus — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:26:54 -0700

This article originally appeared on the Mars Hill Church Creative blog.

USA Today announced recently they're significantly restructuring of their newsroom, starting with a big layoff. Underlying the physical effects are real changes in their business of journalism. As newspapers and magazines continue their sprint away from physical towards digitally distributed content, we gain some helpful visibility into how Americans consume news and, far more importantly, how and what news is reported on. Fundamental shifts in how Americans produce and consume news are happening quickly, and, rather subtly. We'll take a look at why this matters to you, but first, some brief background.

"That's the way it was."

It's no surprise that news outlets are tied to advertising. A recent article in the Atlantic explained that, in a typical newspaper's business model, 80% of their revenue came from ads and 20% from subscriptions. As people started getting their news online, the number of subscriptions, viewers, and therefore advertising dollars tanked. Outlets had to become more targeted to sell more advertising and they essentially became advertising-delivery vehicles. T. David Gordon has helpfully shown that as that happened, important shifts happened in how the news is being reported:

Popularity became more important than consequence, and readers' tastes (invariably sensational) began to dictate media coverage, rather than editors' perspicacity.
Speed became more important than accuracy, which is how debacles like the Shirley Sherrod case happen.
People began to look to news organizations, not for objective information, but for argument and opinion as to how to interpret the news, hence Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck, or even Jon Stewart. This recent PEW report helpfully illustrates this.

The most convicting and revealing finding though, is that people have started going to news outlets to reinforce their view of reality and their preconceived opinions, not for information or education.

Why do you watch or read the news you do?

Let's look at USA Today's recent announcement in light of those trends:

What are they doing?

De-emphasizing their print edition and ramping up efforts to reach more readers and advertisers on mobile devices
Laying off 130 people, or 9% of their workforce
They will no longer have separate managing editors overseeing its News, Sports, Money and Life sections
Instead, the newsroom will be broken up into "content rings"
The "content rings" will be "Your Life," "Travel," "Breaking News," "Investigative," "National," "Washington/Economy," "World," Environment/Science," "Aviation," "Personal Finance," "Autos," "Entertainment" and "Tech."
The executive editor of content will have a "collaborative relationship" with the vice president of business development
USA Today is looking at how to "usher in a new way of doing business that aligns sales efforts with the content we produce."

It appears that the "content rings" will act to narrow the editorial focus in those areas to aid in attracting advertisers to more targeted segments.

Why are they doing it?

Less advertisers are buying ads (580 advertising pages sold in its most recent quarter ending in June, a 50% drop from the 1,098 pages sold at the same time in 2006)
Shrinking print circulation (1.83 million, down from 2.3 million)
Parent company's stock price down 78% in four years.
"We have to go where the audience is," Hillkirk said. "If people are hitting the iPad like crazy, or the iPhone or other mobile devices, we've got to be there with the content they want, when they want it." [Emphasis mine.]

News & God Consumption

Why is this important on a church blog? Because it is partially illustrative of how Christians approach reading their Bibles or listening to sermons, not to mention really formulating right thinking about God, Christianity, or the Christian life. When 23% of Christians believe that there is spiritual energy in trees and in reincarnation, when 15% of Evangelicals and 30% of mainline Christians ages 18-29 don't believe in hell, and when 52% of Evangelicals believe that there is more than one way to heaven - each related to tenets of the Christian faith - American Christians are consuming God, the Bible, and orthodox Christianity the same way they consume the news: to take only the bits they want to reinforce what they already believe, but not to challenge or inform those views.

See the Trends, Preach the Gospel

Enough ink and pixels have cataloged the ways the American Church has fed itself on convenience, comfort, and distraction to produce numbers like that so I'd rather give examples of how we've tried to not to fall into the same diet at Mars Hill Church. I don't advocate following USA Today's example but I do suggest we watch and listen to the results as they unfurl their new organization. I am challenging churches to see the cultural trends, but not to bow to them, and to communicate the glorious, transcendent, eternal message of the Gospel in its fullness, and with clarity and power, no matter the medium.

Consequence over popularity. It is all about Jesus. We believe Jesus is the most consequential person who exists. We believe that the good news of His story, as revealed in the Bible, is the most significant truth anyone can know and be a part of. This is why our pastors preach through books of the Bible and for over an hour on Sundays. This is why we try to make even small differentiations, such as between testimonies and biographies. This is why we just did two series on the Mars Hill blog about Biblical manhood and Biblical womanhood. Jesus, the good news of the reconciliation offered through His death on the cross for our sins, and God's revelation in the Bible may not always be the most popular but they are always consequential.
Accuracy over speed. Most practically, we try to make sure every blog, video, printed resource, or piece of media points to Jesus and is theologically accurate. The majority of our content is written by our pastors, and the pieces that aren't are checked for the same theological accuracy and applicability as a sermon. It is easy to fall into the trap of having to feed the Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Blog/YouTube/Vimeo machine and to compromise the content because it needs to get out instead of checking it with a shepherd-like intentionality.
Information over argument and opinion. Most practically, this comes back to our view of the primacy of Jesus, the gospel, and the Bible. If we put out a piece of content, we don't want it to be our words or our opinions. It should seem obvious but we believe that ultimately people long for, and are truly changed by, Jesus and His word. Practically, on the Mars Hill blog, we try to take a journalistic tone; we try to source theological statements and let people tell their stories rather than running with journal-like, first person tomes.

The good news of reconciliation, salvation, adoption, and redemption offered to sinners through Jesus' death on the cross is the most consequential truth that anyone can hear. It is something that everyone needs and never grows beyond. As a church it is our only message and mission, and it should be conveyed in its totality, centrality, and accurately and not traded for popularity, recognition, or personal opinion.

Nick Bogardus is the Director of PR/Media Relations at Mars Hill Church. You can follow him on Twitter and read more of his work at his website.

What I Didn't Learn About Manhood From Esquire

Nick Bogardus — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:08:20 -0700

[This originally appeared on the Mars Hill Church blog]

I was originally assigned the task of looking at advice on how to be a man from a men’s magazine. Problem is, there wasn't any.

Esquire's June/July 2010 issue was called How to Be a Man. Appropriate. With a title that declarative and a tagline of “Man at His Best,” I was anxious to comb through it to see what they had to say about manhood. With a base circulation of 700,000 and competition like GQ, Maxim, and Details, Esquire is arguably one of the largest and most influential men’s magazines in the world. They've got to know what they're talking about, right? Esquire’s website describes their audience as "the affluent and successful man." Should be exactly what I'm shooting for here.

With Irony As Our Guide

Here’s the twist – and I’m putting it up front because that’s where I found it in the magazine – according to Esquire, you can’t define manhood or what it means to be a man. Here’s what the Editor-In-Chief wrote in his introduction to the issue:

There are no guides to manhood. Not really. We try on selves – constantly. We see traits exhibited by other men and we emulate them. We learn by example and trial. We keep trying. Those of us who’ve had fathers who were engaged in our lives always measure ourselves by them…Those of us – like our cover subject – whose fathers were absent develop in reaction to that absence and either triumph or collapse, or both. [Manhood is] a huge topic, impossible to be definitive about, and not all our advice will work. But look, we men are always gonna do stupid stuff. It’s who we are, and how we learn.

So, 20 pages in, and we're already told that the thing this issue sets out to be, a guide for manhood, cannot exist. The trouble is, if you don't define something, you certainly can’t issue a guide of how to do it, and so we’re left with the orphans running the orphanage. More precisely, the magazine is left with manhood being defined by what you individually consume, from clothes to technology to women.

The Blind Leading the Blind

Nonetheless, they proceed (boldly or foolishly, I don't know) to fill the pages of the guide-that-isn't-a-guide on manhood with the following:

Pg. 50: An essay about making more money instead of saving it, based on this explanation: “When I’m on my deathbed, I want to look back on a life of struggle and jihad. And I want my kids to know what work is.”
Pg. 52: Threesome etiquette.
Pg. 54: An answer to the question, “I heard a rumor long ago that if you simultaneously flushed all the toilets in a large public building, like a school, the plumbing would fail or burst under the pressure. True?”
Pp. 57-72: "The qualities we appreciate most in the places where we drink.” Basically, a 15-page bar guide.
Pp. 77-78: The essential $2,000 blazer and suits.
Pp. 87-88: An essay about our culture’s current infatuation with the ’80s in entertainment that ends with a call for responsibility to ensure that the next decade doesn’t end up with the same greed and phoniness.
Pp. 90-92: Car of the Year nominees.
Pp. 94-102: A story about ex-Congressman Eric Massa, who, according to the story, was brought down by clumsily trying to manipulate the media for his own gain. He comes across as bumbling and shameless. (How does this fit into the original "How to be a Man" theme? Maybe "How Not to be a Man"?)
Pg. 107: Two good questions – greatest example of someone stepping up as a man and what you’d wish you’d known at 18 – followed by three mediocre, 100-word answers.
Pp. 109-115: The cover story on Tom Cruise. According to the story, Tom was raised by a single mother and the main lesson he learned from his father was formulated in a question Tom asked himself when his father was on his deathbed, How can I not be that guy? Most of the lessons Cruise shares come from that lesson/question and are generally nice, but nothing pointed.
Pp. 116-125: "The Vital Organs: A guide to keeping your brain, heart, and balls healthy."
Pp. 127-129: "How to Raise Men." I had some hope for this article but, again, it contains more reflections on raising sons, where the writer explains why certain male traits are either overrated or underrated: tribalism and insolence (underrated), drive and optimism (overrated), etc. Ultimately it’s an entertaining article and you can tell the writer loves his sons and wants to do his best, but it's hard to see how someone can leave the article and understand how to raise men better.
Pg. 130: An installment of Esquire's trademark series, "What I’ve Learned," this time, with Jon Favreau. Most of it was banal life lessons like “It's the struggle that makes you who you are” and “You have to create the quiet to be able to listen to the very faint voice of your intuition,” or random observations like “Kids don’t want to be guitar players anymore. They want to be DJs,” and “You tend to gravitate to the things you grew up with.”
Pp. 133-137: A story about Shaq. Shaq talks about himself in the third person and says this about his ex-wife producing a show for VH1 called Basketball Wives, “It's all marketing. All marketing for me. It keeps my name out there. I like it.”
Pp. 150-153: "How a Man Ages…Or Should." Again, hoping I’ll get some tips on being man, I’m left with information about what I should be consuming during different decades of my life: men should graduate from Grand Theft Auto to Call of Duty at 24, from ordering what everyone else is having to a gin martini at 26, from renting to owning a tux at 27, and from ogling much younger women to ogling slightly older but still incredibly hot women at 53.
Pg. 170: "15 Things Not To Do Before You Die." #3. Bunt in softball. #4. Start a fan club for yourself on Facebook. Noted.

One hundred and seventy pages later, I don’t know how to be a man. I learned some general life lessons and heard some nice stories about Tom Cruise and A.J. Jacobs' kids, but I haven’t left the How to be a Man issue with any tangible instruction as to how to be a better man, let alone a better husband or father.

Misguided Guys

The truth is, as Granger pointed out at the beginning the issue, culture has ceased being able to define manhood, which makes creating a guide for it, well, misguided.

But the thing is, the fact that they would nevertheless promote the issue as a guide is revealing. Beneath culture’s ambiguity, men’s questions still lie tangled in video game controllers, bar tabs, and browser tabs of porn. As Esquire knows, men are built to learn and share knowledge. The problem is - as this issue illustrates clearly - if men go to the culture for the answer to the question of manhood, the answer is geared around consumption. Moreover, if there is no instruction, and young men aren't learning from older men, there is no accumulated knowledge or collective wisdom, and each man is left to fend for himself, making the avoidable mistakes thousands of men have made before him, as he tries to define a hyper-relative sense of masculinity. The How to Be a Man issue is a harrowing example of that.

The rise of the Omega Male is the culmination of years, maybe decades, of unanswered questions. It only makes sense that if a question goes unanswered for long enough, people will stop asking or caring.

Go Boldly – with Wisdom – to Jesus

Mark Driscoll put it well when he said that men need to know who they’re to protect, who they’re to defend, what truth is, what righteousness is, and what justice is. These are questions that resonate with every man and that God answers from the beginning of the Bible to the end, from the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the wedding feast in Revelation.

It takes a certain boldness to want to ask and answer those questions because their answers are costly, and it's not just a desire for sentences in the imperative. A man isn't going to be able to base his life on what he can buy with a credit card. For those of you brave enough to be asking the question of what it means to be a man, and selfless enough to commit to pursuing that, let’s look at what one passage says about Jesus.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5-8

Jesus was in authority as part of the Trinitarian God but submitted to the authority of the Father and was obedient in coming to earth to take responsibility for the sin of His bride, the Church. Those four verses are but a glimpse of what truth, righteousness, justice, defending, and protecting look like. While our culture remains largely silent on the topic, we need more men to look to Jesus (cf: 1:25) and the Bible for answers to the question of what it means to be a man. For more on masculinity, as based on identity in Christ and not Call of Duty, check out these sermon series from the Mars Hill media library:

What Urban Outfitters Reveals About Their Customers

Nick Bogardus — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:08:12 -0700

In the same way you can learn about what someone values by what they buy, you can learn about a group by looking at what a store sells them.

URBN

Urban Outfitters has 130 stores in the US, Canada, and Europe. On January 31st, Urban Outfitters Inc. reported $1.94 Billion in annual revenue (nearly doubled in the last 4 years). Their website claims that their "established ability to understand our customers and connect with them on an emotional level is the reason for our success." They also claim to offer a "lifestyle-specific shopping experience for the educated, urban-minded individual in the 18 to 30 year-old range".

Whenever Kim and I are down in the University District I like to stop by Urban Outfitters and look at their displays. The most basic thing I noticed a few months ago were that their non-clothing items can be broken into a few categories: books, photography, music, toys, household, and drinking.

Toys, Bowl Movements, & Me

Yesterday, after a trip to the dentist we did a quick run-through and here's the glimpse of what connecting with the educated, urban-minded individual on an emotional level looks like.

Toys

Pee, Poo, & Bongs

Which is probably why I'm curious about what my poo is telling me.

A theologian and media-ecologist I read recently made the point that in a society immersed in the trivial and inconsequential, the only responses most of our culture are left with are irony and cynicism. When nothing matters, when everything feels fleeting and insignificant, how can people not be sarcastic and disenchanted? Similarly, in a recent article, the Atlantic described Omega Males like this: "He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man."

Maybe that's where this section comes in...

Labeled pint glasses and flasks.

The glasses aren't just labeled, they're labeled with titles like slut, pimp, ho, bitch, and hot mess, and slogans like "My Life Sucks". Someone could say that they're supposed to be ironic but that's my point. If nothing matters, if everything is trivial and transitional, why not label oneself a slut, study my poop, and play with nostalgic toys from our childhood. Maybe you don't own any of the above products but think about how those attitudes might pervade your friends or those around you.

When Urban Outfitters began, they were criticized for selling thrift store clothes back to hipsters for exorbitant prices. Somehow we missed that they've morphed into a corporation that sells our own cheap irony, cynicism, self-absorption, triviality, and nostalgia back to us at a far greater cost.

The Omega Male

Nick Bogardus — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:11:10 -0700

[This article orginally appeared on The Resurgence]

He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. - Hanna Rosin

There has been significant attention in the media recently about changing roles between men and women; most notably in The Atlantic, Slate, and The New York Times (Interestingly each written by women). One of the major themes in this trend is the rise of two things: The Omega Male and women who don't need them.

The entire article in The Atlantic is worth a read, but a few paragraphs are especially insightful:

"As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”

"American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man [Emphasis mine]. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”

"At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.”

Here's the thing; you might be this guy. You might know one, or ten, of these guys. The Omega Male is not a phenomenon; which is why we need to familiar with it and them.

The Complications of Roles

This is clearly a loaded subject; packed with a slew of issues like the following:

Sociological: the well-documented prolonging of adolescence into emerging adulthood.
Philosophical: according to the New York Times article, questions of self-understanding.
Pop-Cultural: as the references in each article to movie and TV characters illustrate, the media that helped to create this phenomenon is selling it back to us and perpetuating it. I could've sworn there was a line in Fight Club about this.
Economic: are cultures without America's vast economic luxury facing the same cultural issues? Are Belize, Rwanda, or Ecuador struggling with the same confusions?

The end result of all of it is wide-spread confusion over the roles of men and women, love and sex, relationship and friendship.

The Omega Male and the Church

What none of these articles have touched on is how this has invaded and effected the church. Like any other social entity, the church tends to overemphasize certain things to the detriment of others. Beneath the din of culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage, we have to ask if the church has been faithful in teaching young people about proper roles for men and women. In the large segments of the church that clumsily "embraced the arts" in the last 7 years, did they spend as much time teaching those same artists what the Bible teaches about what a man is, what a woman is, and how they should interact in friendships and relationships?

The Omega Male and the gender role confusion associated with them are only recently being popularly analyzed and diagnosed, but by the time issues reach a popular level they are already ubiquitous. This would make it a good time for the church to ask how it can teach Omega Males to be men; to contend for the faith (Jude 3), to treat girls as sisters (1 Tim. 5:2), and to work hard like a farmer, sharing in suffering, competing by the rules like an athlete (2 Tim. 2:1-6)—all activities that Omegas aren't prone to do but about which the Bible is clear.

For further thought-provoking commentary on men, women, & relationships, I strongly suggest this video.

The Church Cannot Die: Poetic Figures, Misunderstanding, and Reality

Nick Bogardus — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:43:34 -0700

This is taken from A.W. Tozer's book Man - The Dwelling Place of God.

Poetic Figures vs. Reality

The language of devotion has helped to create the impression that the church is supposed to be a band of warriors driving the enemy before them in plain sight and with plenty of color and drama to give a pleasing flourish to the whole thing. In our hymns and pulpit oratory we have commonly pictured the church as marching along to the sound of martial music and the plaudits of the multitude.

Of course this is but a poetic figure. The individual Christian may be likened to a soldier, but the picture of the church on earth as a conquering army is not realistic. Her true situation is more accurately portrayed as a flock of sheep in the midst of wolves, or as a company of despised pilgrims plodding toward home, or as a peculiar nation protected by the Passover blood waiting for the sound of the trumpet, or as a bride looking for the coming of her bridegroom.

Misunderstanding The Church's Role: Wincing & Sanctioning

The world is constantly lashing the church because she has no solution for the problems of society, and the religious leaders who do not know the score wince under the lash. Every once in a while some churchman in an acute attack of conscience does penance in public for Christianity's failure to furnish bold leadership for the world in this time of crisis. "We have sinned," cries the frustrated prophet. "The world looked to us for help and we have failed it."

Well, I am all for repentance if it is genuine, and I think the church has failed, not by neglecting to provide leadership but by living too much like the world. That, however, is not what the muddled churchman means when he bares his soul in public. Rather, he erroneously assumes that the church of God has been left on earth to minister good hope and cheer to the world in such quantities that it can ignore God, reject Christ, glorify fallen human flesh and pursue its selfish ends in peace. The world wants the church to add a dainty spiritual touch to its carnal schemes, and to be there to help it to its feet and put it to bed when it comes home drunk with fleshly pleasures.

Speaking In It's True Prophetic Voice

In the first place the church has received no such commission from her Lord, and in the second place the world has never shown much disposition to listen to the church when she speaks in her true prophetic voice. The attitude of the world toward the true child of God is precisely the same as that of the citizens of Vanity Fair toward Christian and his companion. "Therefore they took them and beat them, and besmeared them with dirt, and put them into the cage, that they might be made a spectacle to all men." Christian's duty was not to "provide leadership" for Vanity Fair but to keep clean from its pollution and get out of it as fast as possible. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

The Church Cannot Die

We are in real need of a reformation that will lead to revival among the churches, but the church is not dead, neither is it dying. The church cannot die.

A local church can die. This happens when all the old saints in a given place fall asleep and no young saints arise to take their place. Sometimes under these circumstances the congregation ceases to be a church, or there is no congregation left and the doors of the chapel are nailed shut. But such a condition, however deplorable, should not discourage us. The true church is the repository of the life of God among men, and if in one place the frail vessels fail, that life will break out somewhere else. Of this we may be sure.

Missional: Is it a good word?

Nick Bogardus — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:21:35 -0700

Reflection & Influence

Christians love catch-phrases and keywords. Making fun of or lamenting "Christianese" or the Christian subculture is a relatively easy and lazy thing to do. The more fruitful approach - the one that would hopefully build up the church rather than armchair quarterback it - is to lovingly critique it.

How we use language is something that really interests me. It's something that's important to see and think about because, while I'm not a linguist, I can see that language carries with it two big factors. First, language is a reflection of what we think, believe, and value. Secondly, language influences what we think, believe, and value.

Blurred Definitions

Which brings me to the word I want to bring up in this blog article: missional. "Being missional" or "to be missional" has been a descriptive or imperative catch phrase for about the last five years, particularly among younger Emerging churches. It's a word that I've always felt a little uncomfortable with because of it's ambiguity (but that's another article).

A recent Q&A video from John Piper helped me see more clearly the restlessness I felt about the word. In this clip he makes a very good distinction between "evangelism" and "missions".

Cause & Effect?

I'm left with a couple questions:

1) Do churches and Christians use the word "missional" because they are afraid of the word "evangelism"?

2) Though it claims to do otherwise, will this North American emphasis on being "missional" negatively effect global missions and the global Church by affirming (instead of challenging) our culture's narcissism and producing culturally insular Christians?

Our Relentless Month

Nick Bogardus — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:08:24 -0700

The last month or so has felt relentless, volatile, exciting, and hopeful. To give you an idea of what our lives have been like I'll paint you a picture with a list of what we've been up to since coming moving back to the States from Mongolia.

(Keep in mind that from the day we found out we were pregnant, Peace Corps had us packed up and moving back to America in about a week and a half.)

The first week we spent going from Mongolia to Los Angeles to Seattle and back to Los Angeles. We landed in LA on a Monday and were in Seattle on a Thursday. During the four days we were in Seattle I had my last job interview and we found a house to live in.

The second week was sad because unfortunately we spent it dealing with the loss of the pregnancy.

The third week we spent mostly packing, moving things out of storage, and shipping everything up to Seattle.

The fourth week we went up to Seattle to unpack and move into the house. We also had to deal with my car being totaled while it was being shipped.

The fifth week we were in Seattle and I started work at Mars Hill while Kim tackled the difficult task of sorting through all of our junk and making a home.

The sixth week we unpacked our last box at 1:30am the night before flying back to Orange County for the Mongolian photo exhibit.

Now, I'm back up in Seattle and working while Kim is in California enjoying time with her family. Needless to say, we're tired but thankful for all of the ways God, family, and friends have carried us through this time. My parents gave us a home-in-between-homes; a quiet place where we could decompress. The people at Mars Hill in Seattle have been so generous and welcoming; going so far as to let us borrow a car when ours was wrecked and making numerous airport runs to shuttle us back and forth. Our friends made great efforts to stop by and say hi and to come to the opening of the exhibit.

Despite all of this stuff we're really grateful and extremely excited about this chapter about to start up here. Personally I'm fired up for my job; to be working at such a great place with great guys. Kim and I are anxious to love this city, this church, and being here together.

We'll make a video of our house this weekend. It won't feel as distant and foreign as our Mongolian apartment video but hopefully it'll give you a glimpse into our life here.

I'll return to a regular schedule of posting content here when my life gets back to its regular schedule of content. :) Very soon....

In the mean time, you can find me on Facebook and Twitter.

Confessing The Sins of The Church and Why Church Is Boring

Nick Bogardus — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:07:25 -0700

Two more great quotes from Why We Love The Church. I wish I could post every line I've highlighted so far in this book but I think I'd probably drive you all crazy. Just do us both a favor and read this book. This first excerpt is from co-author Kevin DeYoung.

[In speaking of the current trend among many younger Christians of confessing the past sins of the church.]

""When a man over forty tries to repent of the sins of England and to love her enemies, " writes [C.S.] Lewis, "he is attempting something costly; for he was brought up to certain patriotic sentiments which cannot be moritified without a struggle. But an educated man who is now in his twenties usually has no such sentiment to mortify. In art, in literature, in politics, he has been, ever since he can remember, one of an angry and restless minority; he has drunk in almost with with his mother's milk a distrust of English statesmen and a contempt for the manners, pleasures, and enthusiasm of his less-educated fellow countrymen."

Younger generations today face these same dengers with regard to the church. In confessing all the sins of the church, we have everything to gainand nothing to mortify. This isn't to suggest that the church hasn't gotten things dreadfully wrong, but it is to suggest that slavery and the Crusades are no the things thirtysomething Americans are likely to get wrong today. We would do well to listen to Lewis from seven decades ago: "The communal sins which they should be told to repent are those of their own age and class - its contempt for the uneducated, its readiness to suspect evil, its self-righteous provocations of public obloquy, its breaches of the Fifth Commandment. Of these sins I have heard nothing among them. Till I do, I must think their candour towards the national enemy a rather inexpensive virtue.""

----

This excerpt is curteousy of co-author Ted Kluck.

'Church isn't boring because we're not showing enough film clips, or because we play an organ instead of guitar. It's boring because we neuter it of its importance. Too often we treat our spiritual lives like the round of golf used to open George Barna's Revolution. At the end of my life, I want my friends and family to remember me as someone who battled for the Gospel, who tried to mortify sin in my life, who found hard for life, and who contended earnestly for the faith. Not just a nice guy who occasionally noticed the splendor of the mountains God created, while otherwise just trying to enjoy myself, manage my schedule, and work on my short game."

HT: Team Pyro

Our Silly Tools

Nick Bogardus — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:48:11 -0700

If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it.
Exodus 20:25

“God’s altar was to be built of unhewn stones, that no trace of human skill or labor might be seen on it. Human wisdom delights to trim and arrange the doctrines of the cross into a system more artificial and more congenial with the depraved tastes of fallen nature; however, instead of improving the gospel carnal wisdom pollutes it, until it becomes another gospel, and not the truth of God at all. All alterations and amendments of the Lord’s own Word are defilements and pollutions.

The proud heart of man is very anxious to have a hand in the justification of the soul before God; preparations for Christ are dreamed of, humblings and repentings are trusted in, good works are cried up, natural ability is much vaunted, and by all means the attempt is made to lift up human tools upon the divine altar. It were well if sinners would remember that so far from perfecting the Saviour’s work, their carnal confidences only pollute and dishonor it. The Lord alone must be exalted in the work of atonement, and not a single mark of man’s chisel or hammer will be endured.

There is an inherent blasphemy in seeking to add to what Christ Jesus in His dying moments declared to be finished, or to improve that in which the Lord Jehovah finds perfect satisfaction. Trembling sinner, away with your tools. Fall on your knees in humble supplication. Accept the Lord Jesus to be the altar of your atonement, and rest in Him alone.”

- Charles Spurgeon, Morning by Morning (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2001), 204.

HT: Of First Importance

More Reasons Why People Are Leaving The Church

Nick Bogardus — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:42:51 -0700

Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck could be my favorite new writers. I loved Why We're Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be, I really enjoy everything DeYoung writes on his blog, and when they write paragraphs like this I can't help but cheer out loud like a fruitcake.

"Perhaps Christians are leaving the church because it isn't tolerant and open-minded. But perhaps the church-leavers have their own intolerance too--intolerant of tradition, intolerant of authority, intolerant of imperfection except their own. Are you open-minded enough to give the church a chance--a chance for the church to be the church, not a coffee shop, not a mall, not a variety show, not Chuck E. Cheese, not a U2 concert, not a nature walk, but a wonderfully ordinary, blood-bought, Spirit-driven church with pastors, sermons, budgets, hymns, bad carpet and worse coffee?"

It's from a column they recently did for The Washington Post. Check out their upcoming book, Why We Love The Church: In Praise Of Institutions And Organized Religion.