"Just by his being a Christian, it is a fantastic way to broadcast the ways of Christ"

The NYT reports that Jeremy Lin's success in the NBA is having an impact on Christians (and Christian witness) in China:

Lin’s combination of success in the N.B.A. and strong Christian faith — he has spoken in the past of becoming a pastor someday — has fired the imagination of many Asian-American Christians. There are some early signs that he may also be catching the attention of Christians in China, who continue to face varying levels of persecution.

Only 1,500 of the initial 1.4 million microblogging messages on mainland Chinese Web sites that mentioned Lin also mentioned Christianity.

But those messages tended to be fervently enthusiastic.

“Your physical agility has shown me the glory and omnipotence of God,” one Internet user wrote.

“How should young Christians live the life of the Lord?” another blogger wrote. “We have a good example in Lin Shuhao’s miraculous performance and we should cheer him on.”

At the Zhejiang Theological Seminary here in Hangzhou, Professor Yan Ronghui said she was planning to use Lin’s religious faith and basketball successes as a model for students in her course in “theological English” this semester.

Hu Shubang, a 25-year-old student at the seminary, said Lin would become a natural symbol for Christians in China to use in seeking converts.

“Just by his being a Christian, it is a fantastic way to broadcast the ways of Christ,” he said.

Read the rest.

LeaderLines: A Visit with David Smith, Director, Austin Baptist Association

I want to periodically use LeaderLines to introduce you to some community leaders and opinion makers in our area.  I welcome your suggestions of community leaders and opinion makers you'd like me to interview. 

Our first interview was with Donna Houser, principal of Anderson High School.  Our second interview was with Eileen Flynn, faith columnist for the Austin American-Statesman.

Today we’ll visit with David Smith, director of our Austin Baptist Association.

--Tom

David, tell us about yourself and your family.

I was born in Kokomo, Indiana (45 miles North of Indianapolis). I’ve lived in Missouri and then Colorado, where I graduated from high school. I attended Wheaton College but I ran out of money, so I went home to work and attended the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. There I worked with the youth at my home church and worked construction. I really felt called to ministry during this time. I got an offer to go to Liberty University on scholarship. Tough semester. I decided to pursue a degree in psychology and transferred to Baylor where I graduated.

While I went to Southwestern Seminary I worked as Minister of Education and then Youth for Oak Knoll Baptist. I met Julie, the woman who would become my wife, at Baylor but we never dated there. We reconnected at Disciple Now at her church, FBC Euless. We got married in '89 and moved to Eastman, GA. I served as Minister of Youth, Education and Activites until June of '94.

It was then I came to FBC Dripping Springs and stayed until March of 2000 when I was asked to come on board as director for the Austin Baptist Association.

We have a daughter, Bethany, who is a freshman in high school, and a son, Thompson, who is a senior. They both attend Hyde Park Baptist School. Thompson will be attending Dallas Baptist in the Fall.

What is the mission of the ABA and how do you hope it helps make Austin a better place?

To strengthen existing churches, plant new churches and partner with the Church in Austin to see Austin transformed. If we are successful in all 3 areas we will be in the best position to see the Kingdom advanced in Austin. If the Church in Austin will work together, we will see great things take place that can only attributed to the work of the Father.

What are your responsibilities as director of the ABA?

I would describe my responsibilities as vision caster, resource, counselor and mediator. Whatever the churches need we will work to find a solution/answer. The roles listed above can take place with whole churches, pastors, church leaders and even individuals. If the church has a need and we can help we want to serve.

From your vantage point as ABA director, what are the greatest needs of the Austin Metro area that our churches need to be aware of?

The churches need to remember that there are many in our city who need to know the Lord. It is easy to focus on preference issues and miss the fact that we need to develop relationships with our lost neighbors, co-workers and friends. AND seek ways to live the presence of Christ in our everyday lives.

From your vantage point as ABA director, what do you think Austin Baptist churches are doing well? In addition, what areas do you observe need improvement in our area churches to better reach Austin?

Over the past 12 years, I have seen the Church have a renewed desire to engage and serve the people that live in their area of the city. The churches are looking for ways to make disciples that live transformational lives. Lives that are on mission.

You've been doing some work across denominational lines, especially with ABBA. Tell us what excites you about getting better cooperation between Baptists and other denominations.

Working together with other denominations provides a great picture to Austin of unity. I believe there is more that unites us than divides us. As friendships grow and as the Church in Austin becomes more connected great things happen. I am so excited about the April 12th Cymbala Prayer event. How powerful to see churches and members coming together to seek the Father in Prayer!

How can we pray for you and the ABA staff?

For discernment and sensitivity as we serve the Churches. For an inextinguishable passion to see the City reached with the Gospel. For wisdom in how to utilize the resources that we have. For favor in networking the Body of Christ.

____________________________

Each Thursday I post my article from "LeaderLines," an e-newsletter for church leaders read by more than 350 subscribers. If you want to subscribe to "LeaderLines," sign up here.

Winning Ways: When People Let You Down

People sometimes disappoint us. And when we’ve been hurt by people we’re tempted to withdraw into a shell. We isolate ourselves from everyone, going no deeper in a relationship that a routine greeting and safe conversations about sports and weather.

Maybe you’re a single adult who has been let down by the opposite sex once or once to often, and now you refuse to risk your heart like that again.

Maybe you were offended by someone at a church in the past and so you refuse to get close, to get involved, or even to get into anther church home.

Some close themselves off from a marriage partner when it is discovered that he or she is not 100% reliable 100% of the time.

Some refuse to go into positions of advancement at work because it would mean trusting others—safer to stay unnoticed, doing your own work, trusting your own heart.

Listen: It is impossible to live life the way God wants it lived if you remain uninvolved with other people. That means stepping out on the limb, trusting someone else’s reliability.

But you must not step out on that limb alone. No, trusting others must be done only when you’ve put your ultimate trust in the one who will never let you down.

That’s the message of Psalm 62. David cries out:

How long will you assault a man?

Would all of you throw him down—

this leaning wall, this tottering fence?

And yet he reminds himself:

Find rest, O my soul, in God alone;

my hope comes from him.

He alone is my rock and my salvation;

he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.

This Sunday, we’ll draw strength from Psalm 62 to deal with the times that people let us down. Disappointment with people tempts us to withdraw defensively from life. Trust in the God who will never let us down enables us to get back out there again.

It’s part of our sermon series called “Growing Pains of the Soul.” Join us @ 10 a.m. this Sunday to find out more.

_____________________________

Each Wednesday I post my article from "Winning Ways," an e-newsletter that goes out to 1200 subscribers. If you want to subscribe to "Winning Ways," sign up here.

"They oppose the government's attempt to coerce them into facilitating the practices they preach against"

 If you haven't been keeping up with President Obama's efforts to require religious organizations who oppose contraceptives and abortifacients to distribute them, you need to. You don't have to be Catholic--or even religious--to be alarmed by this, as James Taranto explains:

 After President Obama made a symbolic concession to religious liberty last week, the Times once again employed scare quotes to sneer at the entire idea. This time it was in the very first phrase of its Saturday editorial:

In response to a phony crisis over "religious liberty" engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his ground on an essential principle--free access to birth control for any woman. . . .

Nonetheless, it was dismaying to see the president lend any credence to the misbegotten notion that providing access to contraceptives violated the freedom of any religious institution. Churches are given complete freedom by the Constitution to preach that birth control is immoral, but they have not been given the right to laws that would deprive their followers or employees of the right to disagree with that teaching.

In truth, no one denies that individuals have "the right to disagree with that teaching," and the religious institutions that object to the mandate do not claim the authority to police their employees' private lives or opinions. Rather, they oppose the government's attempt to coerce them into facilitating the practices they preach against.

...

This columnist likes birth control a lot. To our mind, it is one of the greatest conveniences of modern life. As we are not Catholic, we don't share the church's moral objections to abortifacient drugs or sterilization procedures. But as we are American, we care a lot about religious liberty, and about liberty more generally. Thus we view the birth-control mandate as a particular outrage and ObamaCare more generally as a monstrosity.

...

Religious liberty--no scare quotes for us--is one of America's basic principles, the first freedom in the Bill of Rights. The separation of church and state protects religious minorities, and nonreligious ones, from the coercive imposition of religious law. It is also a bulwark against a secular government's impositions on private conscience.

Taranto quotes from Albert Mohler's excellent piece about this issue, then adds:

Albert Mohler is a Baptist. This columnist is an agnostic. But we're with Mike Huckabee, another Baptist, who said last week: "We're all Catholics now."

During Obama's candidacy in 2008, I wrote a post called "Three Things that Prolife Obama Supporters Must Do." Here was the third:

Should Obama become President, monitor his actions on this issue and base your re-election decision on what you see. Certainly, you should keep an eye on his Supreme Court nominations, but he will also have a chance to select federal judges. These positions last long after a President leaves office, and they have a huge impact on what kind of “culture of life” we see in our country. What kind of life-ethic legislation from Congress will he sign or veto? Also, watch for his selection of Attorney General, whose Department of Justice impacts how laws are enforced that advance abortion or limit it. Watch for his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, who oversees all kinds of programs that could either encourage or discourage the frequency and availability of abortion. Keep up with his foreign policy. President Reagan established the Mexico City Policy which bans the flow of aid to agencies that provide or promote abortion. President Clinton refused to follow this policy, so watch what President Obama will do with that. In short, a United States President has a major influence on whether our country makes advances or setbacks on creating a culture of life--much more than you may have realized. So, if you help put Obama in the White House and he proceeds to ignore your pro-life convictions until he needs your vote in the next election, refuse to give it to him.

Well?

Links to Your World, Tuesday February 14

From Victoria's Secret Model to Proverbs 31 Wife

I love reading stories like this--and in the NYT, no less. Asian-American Christians are taking justifiable pride in Jeremy Lin's noteriety.  

Did you read about the 3-year-old who climbed inside a coin-operated claw game at a family restaurant and proceeded to hand out the game’s candies and toys? He probably decided to engage in a little distributive justice...

 

The physiology behind tear-jerkers like Adele's "Someone Like You."

 

NASA scientists announced today they had received a radio transmission confirming the existence of intelligent, extremely condescending life in a galaxy nearly 13.8 billion light-years away. (The Onion)

 

"Only 54.3% of young adults aged 18 to 24 have a job. It’s the lowest rate since the government started keeping records in 1948." Yikes.

 

Promises for those struggling with unemployment.

 

"The brain is "neuroplastic" from cradle to grave. Neuroplasticity is the property of the brain that allows it to change its structure and function through mental experience....The question thus inevitably arises: What ambitious kinds of learning might we, as adults, undertake?" Norman Doidge reviews "Guitar Zero," a book that asks the question, is 39 years of age too late to learn guitar?

When Numbers Don't Count--And When They Do

 Tim Challis suggests some better questions to the "How big is your church" question--and he suggests some better ways to answer the "How big is your church" question:

Instead of going to the easy question of, “How many people go to your church?” why don’t we ask things like this:

• How have you seen the Lord working in the lives of the people in your church?
• What evidences of the Lord’s grace has your church experienced in the last few months?
• What are you excited about in your church right now?
• Who are you excited about in your church right now?
• What has the Lord been teaching you?
• Who have you been discipling recently? Tell me about some of the future leaders at your church.

When asked, “How many people go to your church?” why don’t we consider answering something like this:

• As many as the Lord has determined we can care for at this time.
• Enough that we are actively working toward planting a church.
• I don’t know, but let me tell you about a few of them…
• You know, I have chosen not to answer that question, but let me tell you how the Lord is blessing us these days.

I think these are good alternate questions but the alternate answers come across as defensive. I'm not sure we need to be so evasive in answering the question. The Bible writers seemed to find it important to tell us how many were saved on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2) or how few were responsive to Jesus in his own hometown (Mark 6:5).

Of course, I think the number in attendance always requires some context before it can be useful to evaluate the church. If you're seeing, say, 120, does that tell the whole story? Are you in Pensacola or Portland...or Paris? Are you 6 months into a church start, and if so, was the start with a core group from another church or from the ground up? Or is the 120 what you have left from an average of 320 2 years ago? If that, was the decline a result of a bad leadership decision or a righteous stand or just because the nearby military base closed? 

Now, this reinforces how unhelpful the "how big" question is, and I'd say that there are many contexts in which idly asking the "how big" question would better be replaced with Challis' alternatives. If you don't have the time or the relationship with another pastor to interact at this depth (say, while making small talk during a conference break), the Challis questions are far better. But if we want to be faithful pastors, and if we want accountability among pastors, we can't just ignore the "how big" question. As we earn the right to interact more deeply with each other, the "how big" question can help us know how to celebrate God's favor with some pastors--and how to pray with others.

"The drums of war are sounding again, and Calvinists are the newest bogeymen"

 Ed Stetzer writes:

I’ve always been fascinated by the Baptist bogeyman.  Bogeymen are not real dangers, but ones we use to scare one another, often distracting us from real danger. There are real challenges in our churches and the convention—theological and otherwise—but bogeymen distract us from the real issues.

In the recent past, he says, the bogeyman has been Purpose-Driven churches, and then "emerging" churches. Now it's Calvinism. 

The Southern Baptist Convention can and must include Purpose Driven pastors, pastors who used to call themselves emerging, and Calvinist pastors, when they choose to affirm our BFM confession and engage in mission cooperation. But the drums of war are sounding again, and Calvinists are the newest bogeymen....Preaching against bogeymen gets the big amen at some meetings and in some publications, but we should take notice– those meetings are getting older and smaller every year.

Hear, hear. Read the whole thing.

Winning Ways: Our Extraordinary God

 Several years ago in Britain researchers went door to door asking people about their belief in God. They would ask, "Do you believe in a God who intervenes in human history, who changes the course of affairs, and who performs miracles?" 

The title of their published study came from the response of one man whose reply was typical of many answers they received: "No, I don't believe in that God, I just believe in the ordinary God."

When we believe only in an ordinary God, oh, what peace we often forfeit, and oh, what needless pain we bear.

In Psalm 40, the sacred poet celebrates an extraordinary God--a God who can deliver us from impossible situations. This God, wrote David, "lifted me out of the slimy pit" and "gave me a firm place to stand" and "put a new song in my mouth."

How do you come to believe in a God like that? 

Here's what you need to do.  I learned this from someone who is in a 12-step recovery group where they remind each other, "We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."

In those words--"We came to believe"--you'll find everything you need to know about starting a relationship with the extraordinary God.

First, "We came." Show up. Attend a church service, read a book about faith that a friend loans you. Join a Bible study. It's helpful to see how faith in God is lived out by people you know. So, come.

Second, "we came to"--that is, we woke up to spiritual reality. Most of us would describe our conversion like that: As if coming out of a daze we woke up to the fact that life didn't have to be lived the way we were living it. 

And then, third, "we came to believe"--that is, you decide that this God-talk makes sense and you accept it.

This Sunday, we'll look closely at Psalm 40 and come--or come again--to believe in the extraordinary God who can deliver us out of impossible situations.

It's part of our new sermon series in February and March called "Growing Pains of the Soul." Join us @ 10 a.m. for an hour of worship and study! 

 

 

Links to Your World, Tuesday February 7

Federal employees owe $3.4 billion in back taxes...and the U.S. Office of Government Ethics had one of the highest percentages of delinquency, with 6.49% of its 77 employees behind in what they owed. (HT: Andrew Kang)

 

"A study conducted by the financial service company Investopedia found that the sum value of different homemaking duties annually amounts to almost six figures. If a homemaker's job were salaried, it would draw, on average, $96,291 per year. Tasks accounted for in the study included private chef, house cleaner, child care provider, driver, and laundry service provider." (Joe Carter)

 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Newsweek: "A fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop." She outlines the hotspots and recommends responses.

 

Top five regrets of the dying

"According to Charles Murray in 'Coming Apart'..., a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s....He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four 'founding virtues'—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic." (Read the rest of the WSJ review)

David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going to Church, wrote 2 articles for Boundless, a webzine for young singles: The first is how churches have tended to "screen out" young men in later elementary years and (especially) in youth groups . And, two, tips on how churches can win their young men back – and the role single women can play in that revival.

TLC plans to do a show called "Preacher's Wives," along the lines of the "Real Housewives" series. Ah, me.

"A worldwide study of charitable giving...ranked Americans first in giving personal money, and time, to organizations and strangers....Of the top 20 nations in giving, only five are in the top 20 of economic wealth" (Time).

Jeremy Pierre: '"I love you, but you need to obey.' Every English-speaking parent has said that phrase at some point or another. It's our attempt as parents to express commitment to our children even as we require them to obey: 'I love you despite anything you do, but you also need to obey what I tell you.' I'd like to take issue, however, with using the conjunction butbetween these phrases. Using but may be communicating something we don't want to say---namely, that there is some kind of conceptual opposition between 'I love you' and 'You need to obey.'" Read the rest.

"A new study suggests that the ability of exercise to speed the removal of garbage from inside our body’s cells may be one of its most valuable, if least visible, effects." Read the article.

I loathe endnotes and just can't see how they improve over footnotes. This guy feels the same way.