Psalms, psalms, so many psalms...

I have to pick two psalms to preach on in the upcoming school holidays. There are a number of ways to go about this task and the most obvious route is to pick the psalms most obviously about Jesus. Or at least psalms that are quoted in the New Testament (which often happen to be the same as those most obviously about Jesus).

The downside of this is that we know some 'important' psalms well, but we miss the breadth of the emotions expressed elsewhere. There are two ways to remedy this. The first is to arrange a series emotionally, which is kind of like that guy in that movie (John someone in High Fidelity??) who arranges his music albums autobiographically. But again, the temptation here is to encourage a superficial reading of Psalms which merely lumps them into categories without seeing the unique portrayals. The other course of action is instead to work your way through numerically.

In not wanting to cover recent ground I decided to go through the previous preaching programs to see what had been studied in the sporadic (did somebody say "filler"?) series on Psalms over the past decade. Over ten years, we have covered around 30 psalms (some weren't enumerated) with only 5 being repeated. Historically my church have done a bit of all three approaches. We've covered many of the biggies, looked at 5 emotions, but also for a time just started at Psalm 40 and worked through to the mid 50s.

In the end, seeing they hadn't been covered for about 8 years I decided to preach Psalm 1 and 2. Yeah. yeah, I know you're thinking 'Well that's original'. But why not? I haven't done them before, and they are both important in terms of biblical theology as well as in framing our understanding for all of Psalms.

The plan is that next year I'll do Psalm 3 and 4. If I average two psalms a year and Jesus doesn't come back I'll finish in 75 years. It will be 2087 and I'll be 102 years old. At least the psalms are all relatively short towards the end as I imagine standing for long periods of time may be a problem by then.

Is Uni Ministry Quantifiably Better than Church Ministry?

No.

My comment in response to this post by Mikey on the relationship between church and uni ministry was too long to be published. So I decided to post it here instead.

Mikey wrote a list. Lists always create comments longer than the original post.

p.s. My baby girl is in sleep school at the moment. If she decides to graduate then I may even start blogging again soon.

Thanks Mikey, a thought-provoking list.

You may go on to balance these comments in the next post, but some reflections on point 5 (that's code for "I don't actually have a point, but want to rant for a minute on my personal experience").

Lazy and bloating programming needs to be rectified. Though even if a heavy commitment remains, in terms of the guilt-line "campus ministry is such a great opportunity" I think it is true and should not be downplayed but emphasised, though in a context of serving the wider church.

I always put to potential student leaders that serving on campus would have a significant impact on the time they had available to serve in church. You only have so much time (though always more than the students think they have), and I was asking for a commitment of a big chunk of it.

I always encouraged them to make the decision in conjunction with their minister, and as you suggest that they would need to continue serving in that church. However, my goal was to train them primarily in evangelism to a variety of people that would be unlikely to walk through the doors of their church with any regularity. I was committed to meeting up with them 1-1 each uni week for as long as they were student leaders. Furthermore, I wanted to invest in them for a short period of time to train them to be even more effective leaders within their church. We existed to serve the church.

A lot of the guys I asked ended up continuing in most ministries within the Sunday gatherings as well as attending a church bible study, but they would generally step down from youth ministry in their congregations, as this was another night out and required more additional preparation. The positive of this is that with the quick turnover in youth ministry, churches are theoretically always producing new youth leaders.

Uni ministry was a chance to serve amongst their peers in a bible-teaching and evangelistic capacity that I remain convinced is more effective in training than most church ministry can be, purely for time available face to face with people, talking about Jesus. And at least where I worked, after decades of faithfully training and sending students, churches with our grads would encourage future students to serve with us.

However, having a campus-only model (not an all-encompassing uni-church) probably enabled this pitch to be given with a clear conscience.

Maybe I do have a point to campus ministries:

Know what you are and what you aren't. You are a place where there are lots of people with varying amounts of time with a willingness to hear about Jesus. Realise you have the blessing and curse of 2-3 years with most students. How can you best serve the wider church as their members study in this place? It's certainly not by alienating them from their local congregation with bloated programming. But the best thing might be to take some of their time already serving in that church instead into the campus, for their greater good. And as long as you don't have a uni-church which is virtually synonymous with the campus group, that greater good is unlikely to be building your own little kingdom.

End rant.

It's like a Picasso

Edmund Capon, the curator of the Art Gallery of NSW on 702 ABC Sydney, speaking about the artwork of Pablo Picasso:

His artwork always says far more about Picasso than it does about the subject.

Like a lot of the Bible, I reckon. It says more about the author, than it does the subject.

A one-sided conversation

One of the problems in reading a lot of the New Testament letters, and particularly 1 Corinthians, is we're only getting one side of the discussion. It's like overhearing someone on a phone call, and you need to supply as best guess the other side of the conversation. Trying to work out the other half of the conversation works best when the side you are hearing is arguing for something (e.g. against circumcision), rather than general statements (give thanks).

This entire process is fraught with difficulties.

As our New Testament lecturer Brian Rosner noted in class,

"It's all kind of speculative. If you don't like it, you call it speculation. If you do, it's called historical reconstruction."

This American Life Live

Do you listen to the weekly podcast This American Life?

If you don't, you should. It is the best story-telling in the world. If you are a preacher, it will help you to understand the craft of language, and how to structure intrigue. If you are a person with the love of a good story, you will appreciate the well-told yarns.

Anyways, I'm wondering if anyone wants to come along with me to see 'Reinventing Radio: An Evening with Ira Glass' (the host of TAL) at Sydney Town Hall on January 11. Sarah has given her blessing for me to go out without her, so I'm after some company.

First show sold out in two days, and tickets on sale tomorrow for the second show (8:30-11:00pm).

And whilst I'm at it, I need to say again that I have no idea why ABC local radio hasn't started a local version of the program. With the long distances Australians travel, I am certain this would soon become the most popular podcast in the country. Someone needs to make this happen. The Conversation Hour with Richard Fidler is a start, but this is the next step between the story-telling of Conversations and the production value of PM with Mark Colvin.

What books do I need to have?

Okay, so "need" is probably the wrong word. But I'm in Moore Books with money to spend and I'm lacking inspiration. Suggestions?

National Church Life Survey

Did you fill out a National Church Life Survey survey on Sunday? It's a good idea, I think.

But obviously the NCLS people are not overly optimistic about the life of the church, considering the main sponsor on the front page.

A photo a day

Image credit: oelal.wordpress.com

For the last few days, my wife Sarah has been taking a single photo each day on her daily walk as she passes the time until the birth of our baby.

I am writing about this for three reasons:
1. I'm not sure I have mentioned here previously that Sarah and I are expecting. The pregnancy has been going really well and this little one who we hope to meet in the next few weeks is a fantastic answer to prayer.

2. There are surprises around every corner in the Inner West of Sydney, and Sarah has a keen eye for a good photo. The one above is my fave thus far, and it reminds me of this song.

3. I have blog envy. Her new design is so beautifully minimal, and she caught me ogling at it the other day. How embarassment.

A new game - Scientheology

I've invented a new game inspired by the quote I posted yesterday. I call it Scientheology.

For those who missed it, this was the quote from an article on overpopulation:

I love the old biblical statement from Isiah [sic] - 'all flesh is grass'. That's actually a brilliant statement because it summarises the basic truth that we are only here on Earth because we can trap the energy in sunlight and turn it into something of use to us. And the best way of trapping the energy of sunlight, virtually the only way we've got, is to use chlorophyll - the green stuff in plants - to turn the solar energy into a plant which we can eat or harvest and do what we like with. So ultimately our future depends on the ability of the Earth to trap that solar energy, and for a plant to grow, it needs water.

- Professor Roger Short, University of Melbourne

Scientheology involves taking a verse or section of Scripture and applying it through an exlusively scientific lense.

Today's challenge is Revelation 3:16 'So, because you are lukewarm–nethier hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth.'

Will you take up the Scientheology challenge? Can you explain how the thermal qualities of food apply to the Christian life. Perhaps you have knowledge of the mechanisms by which humans expel substances from their mouth.

Paul Williamson on the Problem of the Documentary Hypothesis Theory

I don't think the word 'Theory' should be in that heading.

Anyways, the Documentary Hypothesis hypothesises that the Old Testament (especially the Torah) is basically a collection of potentially related but essentially independent stories which have been brought together by editors (redactors). The different sources who have been brought together have been identified as 'J' (Jahwist) 'E' (Elohist) 'D' (Deuteronomist) and 'P' (Priestly). As a side note, this led to the Jed P. joke in the OT part of my Moore Revue video which I assumed went over most people's heads.

This is what Paul Wiliamson has to say on the theory in our Old Testament 2 lecture notes regarding the promise of land to Israel being both unconditional and provisional in nature.

Those looking at the text through a diachronic lens see the explanation of such a paradox in the editorial layers allegedly underlying the final form of the text.16 All such theories, however, ultimately come up against the insuperable problem of why redactors would wish to combine two antithetic traditions, or qualify the tradition of an unconditional promise on such a selective basis themselves.

In other words, as I've said many times, this theory works on the assumption that the editor was an idiot.

The whole hypothesis arises from the fact that you can see the 'seams' of the editing process. And yet others argue we should worry where we can't see the seams, because it has been edited too well. But you can't have it both ways. If both evidence of multple sources and lack of evidence of multiple sources indicate multiple authorship, what evidence would you need to prove the writing is something close to a single author?

End rant.