Being a Disciple of Jesus and your Money

Had the opportunity to teach again at HTC. This time from the text assigned to me for our stewardship series: Matthew 6:19-34.
Audio here.
Video here (be warned: it comes in five parts; better for the attention"ly" challenged=+)

Urban Farming

Read this great article in Fortune on urban farming possibilities. Time/Inc. magazines have taken as its project over the last several months and into an indefinite future to chronicle the story of Detroit and her future. They demonstrated their drive for this story by buying a house in Detroit--- yeah, some editors bought a house!




Some highlights from the article:

• John Hantz is one of the drivers behind this phenomenon; a white guy who is rich and still has a Detroit address (and isn't about to leave).
• Hantz: "We can't create opportunities, but we can create scarcity."
• Detroit has 40 sq. miles of abandoned land and is bigger in land mass than Frisco, Boston and Manhattan combined!
• "Where will new ideas for the 21st century emerge? From older, decaying cities, Krieger believes, such as New Orleans, St. Louis, Cleveland, Neward and especially Detroit-- cities that have become, at least in part, 'kind of empty containers.'"
• Center city sports attractions such as Ford Field and Comerica Park "have restored, on some nights, a little spark to downtown Detroit but have inspired little in the way of peripheral development."
• "Abandonment is an infrastructure problem."
• Make pods.
• Dave Bing seems positive.
• Not trying to reproduce IA. In fact, if anything, this idea realized to an urban phenomenon may unseat "the nation's dependence on Big Ag."
• Hantz: "Some things you've got to see in order to believe," he says, waving his cigar. "This is a thing you've got to believe in order to see."
• Hantz might win the day with his ideas: "That's the beauty of [Detroit] being down and out.... You can actually open your mind to ideas that you would never otherwise embrace." At this point, Detroit doesn't have much left to lose.

I used to live right outside of the Motown in Allen Park and Lincoln Park. These years in metro Detroit were quite formative in many ways. In a sense, part of my heart is still in this suffering city. I hope that this idea of urban farming will stage Detroit as a 21st century leader in urban renewal (geographically speaking). Religiously speaking, I see great opportunity for the gospel in this blighted community. There are some even tricky ethnic and racial hurdles that Caucasian Christians need to face head-on with some serious thought. I'm thankful for this group of believers (website needs a new design, I know; it hasn't changed in over ca. 5 years) that is attempting to reach Detroit with the good news of Jesus. May their tribe increase even among their own.

Goose Island Recycling Center

It's super helpful to know a place where I can drop off some hazardous stuff and other electronic/household stuff.
The City of Chicago has a recycling outpost right at the infamous Goose Island Brewery. I wish someone would have told me earlier that such a place existed.

One of my favorite writers...

Carl Trueman, a VP and Historical Theology prof at Westminster Seminary in Philly, has got to be one of my favorite living thinkers. He borders on cynicism (and maybe that's why I'm attracted to him) as he turns words in to punching cultural critique. Dr. Trueman just came out with this post on his reflections on a visit to Rome. Being a former Catholic (who is being wooed "home" by his grandmother and the media), I appreciate his perspective on the general state of Evangelical Protestantism and yet the woeful gaps in Catholic tradition, i.e., mind and tongue.

He concludes 3 things:

• First, my trip to Rome reminded me once again of how inadequate evangelical Protestant literature on contemporary Catholicism is.
• Second, I was challenged by a Catholic friend, when I raised the issues of Padre Pio and St Anthony's tongue, to consider whether my own reaction was conditioned in part by my being more a son of David Hume and the Enlightenment than I care to admit.
  
• Finally, it seems that it is very easy for American Catholic intellectuals, and those evangelicals who are attracted by Rome, to ignore the tongues, the jaws, the bits of the real cross, the stigmatics, the folk religion. But American pick-n-mix consumerism applied to Catholicism is just one more manifestation of, dare I say it?, the modern Western aesthetic of choice; it is emphatically not the same as Catholicism as it works itself out in the very backyard of the Roman See; and it will not do simply to say that the practices of such are not significant; they are significant, at least for anyone who takes seriously their Catholicism.
  

America's Favorite Unopened Text

I came across this stimulating article on Christian illiteracy among youths. Author, David Nienhuis, argues cogently for the need to get past mere "sword drill" or trivial type of Bible knowledge and encounter the Scriptures in a more holistic, multi-perspectival fashion.
He particularly draws upon his context-- the Christian college.
"It is not enough for a Christian university to function as an outpost of the academy; it must also take up the task of serving the church by becoming an abbey for spiritual growth and an apostolate for cultural change."

While my experience in university lectureship was short, I think I would have a class which had a semester project that would be pass/fail. The students would have to write about one ideology, philosophy or theology that they would die for.

The Burj Birdmen

Most of you know that the tallest building in the world no longer is the Sears (not Willis) Tower. I guess it hasn't been for a few years now b/c of Malaysia and Taiwan . Leave it to sheiks, shahs, oil, drive and innovation and you've got the Burj Khalifa; better known as the Burj Dubai.
For the Chicagoans out there (or those who know the Chitown landscape), the Burj is taller than the Sears Tower and John Hancock buildings stacked on top of each other.

Well, this well-made little documentary of two really daring birdmen (is that redundant?) is a favorite on Vimeo. Watch it, and you'll know why... Crazy.

The Burj Birdmen from Jan-Paul Bednarz on Vimeo.

Praying through Scripture: An Idea...

I'd like to share an idea with you. It regards my inability and sometimes my sinful propensity to not prioritize my time to spend with Jesus in his Word and in prayer. Sometimes, lack of time to commune w/ our Savior isn't about inability or sinfulness. Maybe it's just providential circumstances that purposefully have squeezed out your regularly scheduled time. This, too, we must accept from the Lord with willing hearts not being super-pious thinking we have somehow let God down or those who "expect" us to be with Jesus regularly.

Today, I basically had about 5 minutes of undistracted time before I woke my son up to go to school. In that time, I read four verses from Colossians on my knees (again, not that it indicates anything of my personal piety). Then, I prayed through each phrase of this portion. That's it.

I might add that the "daily" things I pray for, I was able to pray through the grid of those four verses. This is just creative ideation and not at all meant to propose one method toward holiness. If anything, it's more like another way toward fighting for joy in Christ.

Suggested Reading about praying Scripture: A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers (by D.A. Carson)