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If you’re not sure which presidential candidate deserves your precious vote, spend 5 minutes on Glassbooth to learn which candidate’s views most closely relate to yours.

McLaren brings his message to Charlotte next weekend for a series of talks — including one in which he’ll engage in a “trialogue” with local Muslims, Jews and Christians. The Observer recently talked with McLaren by phone.

The Observer recently talked with McLaren by phone.

Here’s the full transcript:…. [link]

Sometime today this blog will be moving to a new domain with a new URL. Probably AbductiveColumns.com. Will post with link

Most of you probably have not heard of Jeff Garrett—so a quick intro. Jeff is a pulpit minister, song writer, and musician. I’m proud to say that Jeff has been a friend for close to twenty years.

Currently Jeff has the #1 country song in West Virginia and it is ranked #88 overall (Our Stage). You think I’m biased? Listen up [here]

1. Didn’t bring a lost person to decision
2. He offered forgiveness without confession of sin
3. Failed to ask about the prospect’s (yuck, hate that word) spiritual background
4. Didn’t use healing as a bait for decision
5. Failed to get the prospect (yuck, again) into a Bible (Torah) study
6. Failed to communicate the urgency of the encounter
7. Forgot to assign a spiritual person to do follow-up

adapted from a Doable Evangelism Seminar

Is it possible to subvert consumerism, to inject a virus into it that causes us to slow down, consider the needs of others, while at the same time redefining our place in the world? Fair Trade/ethical buying is a movement that attempts to do just that.

As Brian McLaren says, “Everything must change.” With Trade as One, we harness a very powerful engine of change – commerce, and we subvert a very powerful engine of destruction – consumerism.

In his fine book peppermint-filled piñatas, Eric Bryan says …

Christianity hasn’t fared well when it comes to race relations. Those who claimed to follow Christ have attacked, oppressed, and killed Arabs during the Crusades, Jews during the Spanish Inquisition and Africans during slave trade. Within recent memory, white “Christians” who were part of the Ku Klux Klan actively sought to segregate, intimidate, and even kill blacks, because of their skin color. We may try to navigate the world with political correctness, but what are we doing to show the world that we represent God’s love for all people?

Some of the answers I’ve heard in defense of Scripture’s inspiration have run rough-shod over common sense. And to think that my early polemic-bent life once used such biased arguments (actually, the correct word would be parroted) in Scripture’s defense (as if God’s words need me to defend them) shocks me. I can no longer leap-frog good common sense. If the answers we have parroted in the past were given as answers on a final exam we would find big red Xs all over our paper.

Let me give you just one example and then reflect on it for a few minutes. Don’t hurriedly jump to conclusions. Don’t resort to traditional answers. Instead, think independently…and with good common sense. Let’s attempt to stand outside the bible and then ask ourselves if the pat-answers we have given others through the years, in defense of the Scripture, makes any good sense.

Here we go…

How could Moses have written the Torah when he had been dead for three hundred years before the first verse of the Torah had been written? These five books reflect multiple strands of material that were put together over a period of approximately five hundred years. Deuteronomy even provides us with Moses’ death and burial. It would take a rather remarkable author to record in his writings that particular moment of his life–his death.

Does my thinking somehow destroy the integrity of the Scriptures? I don’t think so. Maybe it has more to do with how one understands inspiration.

Today I’ve been thinking about how we have traditonally done things and why we continue to do them the way we do. Maybe the greater question is why we are so resistant to changing the way we do things when there isn’t any biblical basis for most of what we do (in method, style, or format).

Think about it. “Church” is now defined for people by what we do. And this has become a gigantic barrier for the church in being the church. I am sadden by the “fruit” – shallow, inwardly focused, culture driven, priority given to the service of felt-needs, and consumer oriented. What we have in the majority of our churches are people who “go to church” as opposed to Christians who are the church.