Archive for the ‘Mars Hill Church’ Category:
Substitutionary Atonement
In the past week, our COAS has seen a lot of discussion on the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. To fill out explanations of this, I’d like to direct you all to 2 different locations
First of all, check out our Confessional Statement (#’s 7 and 8). This is a concise and clear explanation of the doctrine.
For a very detailed and thorough explanation, I will direct you to Mars Hill Church in Seattle, for Pastor Mark Driscoll’s sermon on Good Friday, the Day of Atonement. I will warn you, as it is a dark and heavy theme. He goes into a lot of detail about the crucifixion that will make most of us uncomfortable. I recommend it because it definitely does not pull any punches, and is one of the best explanations of the Old Testament sacrificial system and allusions to the Messiah that I have ever seen. It is an excellent sermon overall.
Enjoy!
Dead Man Walking
For Holy Week, my church put on four worship services to illustrate the story of Jesus’ last week on earth. The Wednesday night service was organized by the pastor and church plant leadership team we are preparing for in St. Louis city (Mike and I are on that team). The pastor and the worship leader are incredibly artistic men, and instead of the usual worship-preaching-worship model of service, they crafted several short videos that were interspersed with music played by the “Soul Expedition Band.”
The evening’s theme was “The Sweat of a Son,” telling the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying before he underwent torture and crucifixion. To communicate the stark intensity of this struggle, the video showed some blunt video imagery. Clips from the movie “Dead Man Walking (the scene where Sean Penn’s character is executed by lethal injection) were inserted to help contextualize Jesus’ impending execution. The following short video utilized clips from “The Passion,” with frequent flashes of the previous video, to connect and contextualize Jesus’ prayer in the garden with the struggle of knowing he would be executed.
Now, I explained all this because we’ve received some interesting responses after this worship service. One response in particular was noteworthy. Read more »
The Value of Risk in a Risk-Averse Culture
When I was in high school, my Dad encouraged me to pursue a career in financial planning. I really did like the idea of helping people get out of debt, invest wisely, and build wealth. But the career I really wanted was in law enforcement. While my Dad wanted me safely behind a desk from 8-5, I wanted the freedom of keeping the peace in a roaming patrol car at all hours of the night.
I’ve learned over the last several years that I’m a bit of a closet adrenaline junky, and thrive in stressful or risk-inherent environments. But I’ve also learned that this is not necessarily the norm for our culture.
Read more »
Jesus Christ and… Jack Bauer?
This post makes me smile. Mark Driscoll, a Seattle Pastor often criticized for being “overly macho” and dudely (to which he will gladly admit to the latter and deny the former as even being possible) wrote an article last year that I keep coming back to for some valuable perspective and laughs.
While I am not nearly as outgoing in my “dudeliness,” or advocation thereof, I certainly appreciate the perspective and agree that a responsible, biblical, and moral masculinity is sorely lacking in our culture. Neither he nor I are advocating misogyny, subjugation of women, or anything else that would disagree with the heart and spirit of equality between the sexes. Rather, we both see a need to redeem men in our culture to values like responsibility, fatherhood, loyalty, faithfulness, sacrifice and selflessness service. Driscoll’s article uses humor to connect biblical masculinity as lived out by Jesus to similar parallels in culture. In this instance, we have the pleasure of giving you Jack Bauer.
Enjoy!
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emergent laughs
I’ve heard that one of the ways one can gauge the strength of Christianity is how well Christians are able to poke good fun at themselves. So it is with great joy that I present to you this gem of a find.
I submit this satirical article here, from Lark News. It’s hilarious, and awfully indicative of some of what I hear in seminary. Let’s face it, the Christian sub-culture can be pretty silly sometimes, but it’s pleasing that we can afford to laugh about it in good fun.
Enjoy!
