|
bigtook
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: bigtook
Gender: Male
Interests: Click here for the Family Photo Site (BUT YOU WILL NEED "FRIEND" or "FAMILY" STATUS FIRST. Email me for permission, and I'll gladly grant it. Just want to keep absolute strangers out.)
Occupation: net surfer addict
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
12/10/2004
|
|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| So this will be my last entry here.
We're moving to another site in an effort to better solidify relationships, resources and prayer support:
www.mikeandleslie.org
Thanks for following here.
Mike
| | |
| I have always loved John Cu$ack. If I could hang out with any actor in Hollywood, I would want to be with him hands down. Low key, yet has a gravitas about him though at the same time. Accessible. Cynical-yet-remaining-idealistic. Extremely likable without being greasy or oily.
Anyhow, here's an excerpt from an interview of him in V@nity Fair that a friend of mine on facebook tipped me off on. It's actually a hilarious interview. But, men, be careful, b/c there are some images... well, let me remind you that it's V@nity Fair magazine.
Here it is:
===========
Who are your heroes in real life?
Let’s go with Jesus. Not the gay-hating, war-making political tool of the right, but the outcast, subversive, supreme adept who preferred the freaks and lepers and despised and doomed to the rich and powerful. The man Garry Wills describes “with the future in his eyes … paradoxically calming and provoking,” and whom Flannery O’Connor saw as “the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of [one’s] mind.”
===========
There's a lot of depth in that answer that I would love to talk to him about. | | |
| So I was reading Christianity Today and came across something that I've never heard before despite taking an entire class on St. Augustine: in the Confessions and the City of God he refers to lust [and sin] as "disordered love."
Interesting and fascinating idea. Why is it disordered? Isn't love the virtue of all virtues? How can it be disordered?
There is an idea of a natural created [metaphysical] order. Things have their proper place and value in the metaphysical order. Ordered love is virtue; disordered love is vice. For Auggie, love that seeks its ultimate happiness on something lower in the order -- like any finite, created thing is automatically disordered. And out of this disorder comes a wealth of human pathologies.
On the highest end of the order scale is what he called the "Summum Bonnum," Latin for the "highest good." And it is out of that backdrop that Auggie says "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you."
I like this. The language of disorder and restlessness. Isn't that so true? The idea of a natural design to things -- that God has set as Creator. Of linking human happiness -- not to three-legged chairs but, instead, to something it was always meant for. Even created for. The Highest Good. What would it look like for the world to really see God as the Highest Good? Of course, he's more than just that, but what a fantastic descriptor of Scriptural realities like Rom.8:28.
Now for the tough part.
Application question --> can my love for my wife be disordered love? How about for my children? For ministry? For an experience of God? None of these things -- good as they are -- are metaphysically capable of providing lasting joy. And it is a fair warning to us that our attempts to do so will lead to a restlessness that can take us to dark sides of human existence.
I think the bible calls this idolatry -- setting something finite in the place of the infinite. (This takes us to Tim Keller's idea of sin). Auggie is saying all this pre-Jon Edwards, pre-C.S. Lewis, pre-John Piper.
God, bring us back to you as the Highest Good in the world and the Highest Good FOR US. You are love; bring your bride back to an ordered love, and the satisfaction that comes through obedience to your order.
| | |
| From the same site. He made a great point. "Missional" does not mean we have planted a few churches or have a few missions or service projects. It means that the whole church views itself as a missionary. I like that. Very similar to Mike Frost's missional is when mission is the organizing principle of the church -- not worship, not community.
Missional is so in vogue now that it practically means little. How many of MDivers are now getting DMins in missional leadership? Thankfully, many pastors are reading stuff like Frost and Hirsch. I'm glad for it. But at the end of the day, it is not a change of degree; it is a change of kind. The former is executed from the top-down. The latter from the bottom-up.
- He also had great points about the every day disciple being everything -- not the leadership team (which is what the books all say and the practices for the last 50 years). At the end of the day, gospel transmission stands and falls on the quality of disciple who is incarnating (or not) the gospel of Jesus. Roberts believes the technology is there for the Great Commission to be fulfilled in 10 years time (wow) -- that is in terms of accessibility. But that doesn't mean that people will see and hear. Why? B/c of the lack of quality of disciples. This just underscores the need for everyday people to be disciples worth reproducing. THAT is infinitely more important than quality of program.
- ohhh, another nice nugget: many guys say, we're going to do this, this way, and that way, and be this kind of church. Great but that's just a model. To be a movement, it must be relational and organic. Otherwise you reproduce a model. Well said, Bob.
Bob is a good guy who sees the right things. And he's doing it from a big Southern church, Northwood.
Kudos to you, Bob.
Glocal.net is where you can find more info on stuff he's written. I recommend. | | |
| Listen to it here: shapevine video
He talks about his new book Organic Leadership.
Any thoughts? | | |
|
