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Posts from the ‘Hope’ Category

Sep 26

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Life and Death

This past weekend was one of almost unbearably stark contrasts.

Friday and Saturday were spent with a few of our church’s young people at a high-octane youth conference put on by one of the larger churches in our area. Climbing walls, go-kart tracks, paintball, ear splitting rock concerts, dodge-ball, team games, sleepovers on a church floor, etc, all in the company of hundreds of screaming teenagers—this is how I spent a good deal of Friday and Saturday. Not the most natural of contexts for me, I suppose, but it was great to have some fun with the kids and get to know them better.

And then, as we were finishing up our breakfast on Saturday morning and getting ready to head back to the conference for round two, a phone call came. Read more

Sep 23

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The Scandal of the Cross—Take Two

God’s self-giving goodness and his determined commitment to rescue and redeem his creation were demonstrated two thousand years ago on a Roman cross. This is the guiding conviction that animates Mark Baker and Joel Green’s exploration of the meaning and scope of the atonement in the second edition of Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts. Read more

Sep 14

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The Nature of Greatness

I was at a meeting with some pastors and other leaders in our community today, and one of the things that was on the agenda before lunch was “worship.” And so, as we waited for our lunch to appear, a guitar was pulled out, and a few songs were sung around a board room table with great enthusiasm. One of the songs we sang was one that I gather is a fairly popular one in evangelical churches these days—Chris Tomlin’s “Our God.” Read more

Aug 31

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We are Always Talking About Jesus

A fairly healthy number of my academic pursuits over the years have been devoted to some form or another of apologetics—a rational “defense” of the faith, whatever that might mean. Indeed, a quick glance at my blog archives yields a similar conclusion. So many words spent clarifying, unpacking, rephrasing, rehabilitating, or somehow defending God or belief in God or Christian practice in a post-Christian context. So many hours devoted to abstract ideas, theological constructs, “metanarratives,” worldviews, and “plausibility structures” within which to locate or give expression to Christian belief. So many pages about what I see to be the inadequacies of modern atheism. My attitude toward the general project of apologetics has undoubtedly changed and (hopefully) deepened over time, but I have always been inclined toward logic and reason and arguments and making some kind of rational sense of faith. Read more

Aug 23

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A God Who Plays Dead

Now that I have started to jog periodically, I have done what all good joggers do: I have created a playlist on my iPod full of  bone-rattling, heart-pounding, anthemic rock songs to provide the requisite boost of adrenaline and inspiration once the legs start to feel like jelly, the breathing gets laboured, and the going starts to get pretty rough. For me, this takes place after about half a kilometre or so.

One of the tracks on my  playlist is a song called “Nietzsche” by The Dandy Warhols, which contains the following lyric:

I want a god who stays dead
not plays dead.

It’s a fascinating line—one that could allude to any number of points and experiences on the psychological/spiritual/philosophical landscape in postmodernity. God is dead, but God won’t away. We want nothing to do with God, but we can’t live without meaning and the hope of redemption. We cannot escape the shadow God casts. Read more

Aug 21

Back in Time

Part of yesterday was spent at a local agricultural/historical museum put together by the The Prairie Tractor & Engine Museum Society.  While I wouldn’t say that antique tractors and machinery, farming demonstrations, and “parades of power” are exactly my cup of tea, it was neat to see the way they had put together a kind of old prairie town circa the early 1900s. Read more

Aug 11

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Peace at the Gate

It’s late afternoon, and I’m looking and listening out my new office window at a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms are common on the prairies, of course, and can be truly breathtaking. They are wild and unpredictable—they can last for hours, or be gone only minutes after they arrive. The rains come fast and hard, the sky booms, crackles, and sparks—lit up with the pyrotechnics of heaven. Read more

Aug 2

2 Comments

Good News… Please

The church of Christ is in the business of proclaiming good news, in word and deed. This is our reason for being. Somehow, we believe that the good news concerning Jesus of Nazareth has changed, continues to change, and will one day finally change things in our lives and in our world. Good news changes things.

This is what we say.

And yet there are moments when it all seems so unbelievable. Read more

Jul 24

11 Comments

Death Intrudes

My first “official” responsibility in my new position took place a week or so earlier than schedule, as I officiated at a memorial service on a sunny, breezy, southern Alberta Saturday.  It was a somewhat strange thing to be leading a service like this before even attending a Sunday morning service! Read more

Jul 21

11 Comments

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Well, the lazy days of summer just roll on... After a great few days camping in BC with my brother and his family, yesterday afternoon was spent participating in a local golf tournament/fundraiser for the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. My father is one of the coordinators for the local growing project here, and when he asked my brother and I if we wanted to go golfing to support a good cause, we could hardly say no (despite the fact that we are both truly abysmal golfers!).

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Jul 4

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Dislocation, Relocation

Things have been pretty quiet around here for a while, so perhaps something of an update post is in order. The past two weeks or so have been spent saying difficult goodbyes to our friends in Nanaimo and packing up and moving back east to our roots in southern Alberta.

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May 11

33 Comments

Everything Seems to Be Broken

It is an odd thing, I have discovered during my nearly three years as a pastor, to be entrusted with people’s pain. 

It’s not an everyday occurrence, but today pain came calling.  Two conversations with two people, both carrying crippling burdens of hurt and despair, sorrow and longing, both dealing with the complex cocktails of physical, spiritual, mental, and relational pain that characterize so many lives, both searching desperately for a word of hope, comfort, or encouragement. Read more

May 7

2 Comments

For You

Each year, one of the most significant parts of the Regent Pastors Conference for me is when we take the Lord’s Supper together as our last act before going our separate ways. Given some of the themes that I reflected upon in my previous post, this year was no exception. Read more

Apr 27

34 Comments

God, Risk, and Evil

Last night, we had a drama group performing at our church (unenviably, on the same night as game seven of the Canucks/Blackhawks series!). Through a series of sketches, the group skillfully and humorously walked us through the basic contours of the biblical narrative—creation, fall, redemption—climaxing, of course, with the resurrection and the hope of new creation. One of the ideas that stood out to me during the dialogue in an early scene which depicted God deliberating with one of his angels about what and how to create, was that in creating human beings, God took a risk. Read more

Apr 22

8 Comments

How God Gets What God Wants

An interesting quote for Good Friday, from William Willimon’s Why Jesus?:

[T]he cross is not what God demands of Jesus for our sin but rather what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us.  This is all validated by God raising this crucified victim from the dead, not by dramatically rescuing Jesus’ failed messianic project, nor certifying that Jesus had, at last, paid the divine price for our sin.  Rather, it showed the world who God really is and how God gets what God wants.

Apr 19

39 Comments

Right and Wrong

This morning I came across an interesting lecture over at TED Talks by journalist, author, and “wrongologist” (apparently there is such a thing!) Kathryn Schulz called “On Being Wrong.” If you’ve got 18 minutes to spare, it’s well worth checking out. Read more

Apr 7

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(How) Is God in Control?

One of the benefits of having a blog is that, aside from feeding your ego through the ordinary rhythm of writing about whatever you want whenever you want and plastering it all over the internet, you can use it to draw attention to yourself at any and every other convenient opportunity as well :). Like, say, when an article of yours is published. Read more

Mar 28

48 Comments

Good Question

Well, I finished Rob Bell’s Love Wins on an airplane this weekend. First reaction? It’s not bad. My suspicions that the storm this book has generated has a lot more to do with how it was marketed and the frantic and reactionary nature of the world of social media than with the content of the book itself were certainly justified. I may write more about Love Wins in the next little while. Or I may not. We’ll see. My sense is that the internet is getting tired of this whole thing. Read more

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