Best Things - Laminin, First Things, Vroegop

Spirituality Column #81
May 27, 2008
Current! In Carmel
Current! In Westfield

Best Things: Laminin, First Things, Vroegop
By Bob Walters

This is a week when I hope the sum of the parts adds up to a whole column.

Laminin

Am I too late? Have you already seen the “Laminin” YouTube video? Louie Giglio preaches a sermon about how Christ holds us together, and comes up with a molecular protein called “Laminin” to prove his point. Talk about “fearfully and wonderfully made.” This video gave me goose bumps.

Google “Laminin” or “Louie Giglio Laminin” and watch this eight minute video.

First Things

My dear friend Russ Blowers who passed away last November was a long time pastor in Indianapolis to tens of thousands of Christian souls. He was a life-long learner who never tired of reading up-to-the-minute theological scholarship.

His favorite magazine was First Things, a monthly journal founded and edited by Richard John Neuhouse, a Catholic priest who started out as a Lutheran minister.

“Was Shakespeare a Catholic?” “Thinking in Tongues.” What’s the straight scoop on the so-called “Emergent Church”? Politics and culture. Theology and religion. This is all normal grist for the brilliant writers and commentators of this wide-ranging periodical of all things intelligent and Christian.

My favorite half-dozen mementos from Russ are old copies of First Things that he had read. Russ was an underliner, a commenter, and a doodler. Reading a magazine or book after Russ read it was great fun. I received a subscription to First Things for my recent birthday and I just couldn’t be more pleased.

See www.firstthings.com.

Mark Vroegop – Welcome!

College Park Church has welcomed new lead pastor Mark Vroegop. He met the congregation in February – I visited and heard him preach twice – and began duties in late April.

For nearly two years loyal parishioners of the Bible-based congregation on Carmel’s southwest side weathered the storm of the difficult departure of founding pastor Kimber Kauffman.

Carmel is blessed with a thriving faith community with its enormous Catholic parishes, several vibrant Protestant and Evangelical churches, and other places of worship. College Park’s patient, prayerful pursuit and placement of a first rate preacher and pastor is a blessing for the both the church and city. Welcome Mark Vroegop!

College Park’s website is www.yourchurch.com.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) archives these weekly Current! columns at his blog, www.believerbob.blogspot.com.

The Reason for God

Spirituality Column #80
May 20, 2008
Current! in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current! in Westfield (IN) newspaper

The Reason for God
By Bob Walters

This week I am writing to recommend Tim Keller’s excellent new plain-language book on Christian apologetics, The Reason for God.

“Apologetics.” It’s too bad we don’t have a more culturally intuitive word for this honored intellectual exercise. It does not mean, “I am sorry for what I believe.” It means, “This is why I believe it.” It’s from the Greek verb “to defend.”

My guess is that in a very short time The Reason for God will ascend to the top of Christian “must read” lists. I’m reading it now. Let’s pray that more than a few skeptics will read it as well.

Keller is a well-known graduate of the prestigious Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. For nearly 20 years he has been successfully delivering the true message of Christ in perhaps the most unlikely of geographical regions and cultural demographics.

Keller is pastor of the thriving Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, a church Keller started from scratch in 1989. Today five services in five separate locations total 5,000-6,000 worshippers every Sunday in the uptown area near Central Park.

Manhattan is sophisticated and hip; filled with non-religious skeptics, critics and cynics. The middle class family, backbone of the church market, has long ago fled the city’s high cost and crime. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost caught the last train for the coast, so to speak, way back in the 1960s.

What Keller has done for Christ and Christians in New York, hopefully his book will do for other places as well.

Keller presses at the great big, skeptical questions of the Christian faith posed by atheists, doubters, skeptics, seekers and heretics in the great secular maw of relative morality and New Age spiritualism.

The Gospels? They are just legends.

The Church? Full of injustice.

Christianity? A straitjacket.

Jesus? A good man, but, c’mon … resurrected?

God? He hasn’t helped me lately.

A Good God? Can’t be; too much suffering in the world.

Answering the knotty problems of Christianity in smart and accessible language is Keller’s special talent and the great gift of this marvelous book.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recommends you look into the book’s group study guides as well. They look superb.

Dealing with Jesus

Spirituality Column #79
May 13, 2008
Current! in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current! in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Dealing with Jesus
By Bob Walters

Ben Stein’s recent movie Expelled presents Intelligent Design/Creation as a salient life science subverted by 150 years of incomplete yet burgeoning and now pervasive Darwinian/Evolution worldview and education.

The 1996 PBS NOVA episode titled “The Ultimate Journey,” a video on evolution commonly shown in high school biology classes with fascinating microphotography of embryos, confidently asserts itself as “The Odyssey of Life,” a veritable highlight reel of how life works. The video contains this direct quote, “We don’t know how life began.”

How odd. I know how life began; God created life, and us. The Bible lays it out in plain terms in Genesis chapters 1 and 2.

The fact that there is life because God wanted there to be life – and our trying to figure out the how and why of life based on that – is entirely different and I daresay more satisfying than evolutionists stuffily saying “we don’t know how life began” and foregoing any explanation of why life exists.

To an evolutionist, there is no “why.”

Creationism is different. That’s because the Bible is different, and Jesus is different.

Our God-given human creativity and freedom to invent secular views like evolution, humanism, and broad and competing swaths of philosophy – or conversely, to discover God, life, love, purpose, salvation, relationships and truth in the Bible – too often create conflict, not understanding. For the record, I don’t think science is specifically secular or necessarily divisive.

Discussing this with a friend from church, wondering why so many people insist on separating science and scripture, she said, “The problem is that if you deal with Creation, you have to deal with the Bible. And if you deal with the Bible, then you have to deal with Jesus … and a lot of people don’t want to go there.”

So true. The thing is, we should recognize that our individuality, uniqueness and significance all come from Jesus, not Darwin. Evolution defeats all those ideas, and Darwin doesn’t demand that we act right and love each other.

We’d all be better off dealing with Jesus, even in science class. And by all means … go to science class.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) finds dinosaur bones and carbon dating quite fascinating, but not as fascinating as his relationship with God, Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Unconditional Christian Extremists

Spirituality Column #78
May 6, 2008
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper

Unconditional Christian Extremists
By Bob Walters

A non-believer should know that a Christian extremist will:
- Love unconditionally,
- Be compassionate unconditionally,
- Forgive unconditionally,
- Evangelize unapologetically.

I know … it sounds pretty good until you get to that last one about evangelizing. Don’t those Christian extremists know how annoying that can be?

Ah, those extremists. Then there is the F word … fundamentalists. It is important for those of us who identify with the Gospel to get a grip on both the extremes and fundamentals of our faith.

Ajai Lall, a native of India and president of Central India Christian Missions, spoke in Indianapolis recently about extreme Christianity and what it looks like in his native central India. This is an area where Christians endure atrocities at the hands of Hindus and Muslims.

Lall noted that Christians are commanded by the New Testament to exhibit extreme love, compassion, forgiveness and evangelism. Since the time of Christ we haven’t always gotten that right, but the example Jesus set endures.

Love – Jesus loved those who crucified Him.

Compassion – Jesus comforted the thief hanging on the cross next to him.

Forgiveness – Jesus begged his father, God, to forgive his executioners.

Evangelism – Jesus spoke to his followers and to his enemies about His mission to establish God’s new covenant of grace, love, mercy … and faith.

If every Christian were that resolved in these areas, it might be easier to evangelize without non-believers and confused believers thinking you’re a religious nut.

Thing is, if you believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and you trust Him as your Lord and Savior … well, you’re a fundamentalist. No, seriously … you are. And if you love your enemies, have compassion for others before yourself, forgive all wrongs, and tell others of your faith that Christ is the only way to eternal life (John 3:16, John 14:6) you’re a Christian extremist.

A couple of things will then happen. You will be at peace. You will have complete freedom. And the evangelizing part will still be rejected by many.

Just remember, the evangelizing is the easy part. Talk is cheap.

What those Christian extremists do in central India ain’t cheap.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that few people are annoyed by love, compassion or forgiveness. It drives a lot of people nuts to be told Christ is the author of all three.