Ever since I listened to a great lecture and follow-up Q & A on evangelism by a church planter from New Mexico (who encouraged pastors to do more work outside the office), I’ve been challenged to follow his lead. So I did a few hours of work in a coffeehouse on Friday. It cost me. Unfortunately the 2 allotted hours in its present spot was taken quite literal. I showed up about 2 hours and ten minutes later to find an ugly stinkin’ ticket on my windshield.

Everybody hates, or at least gets quite angry with the ‘parking ticket cops.’ One of our golf cart parking ticket ladies at Furman was actually attacked by a local, high on drugs. And no one felt bad. I wasn’t an eyewitness and was unavailable for comment. I still am.

Around any downtown area, these ticket cops hover over cars like vultures, waiting for their time to expire. And to make matters worse, they seem to take great delight in ruining people’s days.

Then something hit me as I drove passed the ticket cop with some anger in my heart. I preached the other day on the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. This Sunday, I’ll be preaching on The Parable of the Hidden Treasure (just a shameless plug). I think the parking ticket cop would have made for a much better illustration. I used people least likely to be seen in church: strip club owners or gay folk.

But as community, who likes these ticket cops? Strippers, gay folk, democrats haven’t personally ‘wronged me’ (I know 10 minutes over is still 10 minutes). That only scratches the surface of what tax collectors would do back in the day. They would actually keep the money for themselves. If this ticket lady were keeping the money for herself and charging arbitrary (not 25 dollars if paid on time) fines, then we’d have a pretty close parallel.

And it just reminds me how shocking Jesus really was. And he still is now. How offensive would this parable have been to its original religious audience? Amazingly offensive. When Jesus stops offending us today (remember his greatest offenses were to the religious crowd), we need to stop following a religiously comfortable, fabricated Jesus; and follow the real, offensive one.

This will be my final post on our coffeehouse. We had a decent turnout this year. Quality music by folks who were outside THE Church, outside OUR Church, and inside OUR church. The art was quality as well, in my humble non-artistic opinion. All in all, we left the evening encouraged and probably will do it again next year.

One affect of the coffeehouse/art show that we had hoped for was for more Christians to enter into this creative world. None of us expected we should see such fruit almost immediately.

After the coffeehouse on Friday, several folks hung out for several hours and began to write a song. I wasn’t there but I’m told that four of them contributed to either the music and/or lyrics.

There are some extremely well written hymns (with some being better/worse than others) and it is a mistake to throw them out. However, it is also a mistake to ignore any new hymns/praise songs (I know that many are shallow, but not all, for instance “In Christ Alone”). And it is still a bigger mistake to not continue writing new hymns/praise songs. Has God stopped working in the hearts of believers or our world? Then we ought to write and sing about it.

Here is an excerpt from a song called Sacred Seduction which several of our young adults composed on Friday evening (or I guess early Sat morning) and sang for our offertory Sunday morning.

All that I can see, Is you drawing me into your arms
Wiping clean my tears of fear and alarm
Who can resist, your sacred seduction
Slowly breaking down my defenses

Miriam sang after crossing the sea, Deborah after victory over Jabin, David after one of his many deliverances in Psalm 40, Paul quotes a hymn celebrating Christ’s victory in Phil 2. So why should we stop singing or composing new songs?

I’m now a man with no more baby classes. I probably even look different. We only have to go to Lakewood Ranch once a week (instead of 2-3 nights) for doctors visits. Soon “Little T” will become Connar or Anna Kate. Soon.

Anyhow, I just wanted to follow up on the last post about our coffeehouse, and why we are doing it. Some folks would wonder why we care at all about cultural transformation, restoring neighborhoods, bringing community where there is none, etc…Many Christians have put for the question: why should you care anything about the world around you, or enter into the world and culture since it is all going to be destroyed? They have compared such efforts to polishing the deck of the Titanic (BTW-last week two separate people used this analogy as a way not to think of culture so I find it apropos to use it now). Why do anything when the ship is going down anyway?

Such thought arises from the Anabaptist tradition. During the period of the Protestant Reformation, two streams of thought developed. The Anabaptists sought to flee from cultural involvement, politics, military, etc…They divided the world into spiritual and secular. The spiritual component was sacred and eternal, while the secular world of politics, military, the arts, were left to others. Now there were some amazing Anabaptists who endured fierce persecution from not only the Catholics, but other Protestants (to our shame), so I commend them on such amazing perseverance. Yet I think their cultural legacy leaves something out.

The Reformed view of the world leaves no distinction between sacred and secular. According to this world-view, there should be no major section of the world and culture in which Christians shouldn’t be present. Again, as mentioned in the last post, they don’t have to be witnessing to others in order to fulfill their calling in work. As Christians go forth, they ought to embrace and express truth, beauty, love, goodness about God and His world. Painting a picture of a beautiful sunset or radiant full moon displays something about our creator in the same way that the moon, stars, sky display something of God (Psalm 19:1-2). It doesn’t have to have a bible verse (though I’m not knocking art that does) to honor God.

One day we will have a whole new world, as heaven comes down to Earth. And on that world we will have culture which perfectly and fully emphasizes truth, beauty, and goodness. There is a picture in Revelation of the different kings of the earth bringing their glory to the New Jerusalem (Rev 21:33). We bring the best of our culture into the new world we are promised. It’s more that we are getting a head start in this magnificent endeavor than we are polishing the deck of a sinking ship.

Yesterday was a day of highs and lows, and I’m not talking about the tides. However they, by the way, have been awful lately, and what I’m blaming for my lack of fish in the boat (or rather kayak). Anyhow, I was down because the promised article from the Herald was no longer a possibility due to the proximity of our coffeehouse/art show (in two days). Then all of a sudden, a woman called and interviewed me. And 30 minutes after that, someone came by to take pictures. My office has never looked so good. Seriously. All the art crammed in the tight space covered over some of the other clutter.

To read the article, click here. I think they did a good job.

One of the reasons we do this coffehouse/art show each year is to give the community, our church, the Church in general a chance to more greatly appreciate the arts. Art, music, writing, story-telling don’t have to be explicity Christian to be good. God is a creative, story-telling God whom we honor by reflecting back that creativity through pursuing art, music, story-telling, and/or simply by appreciating the aforementioned through the arts.

My Reformed background has always expressed a high regard for arts, music, and cultural engagement. The Reformed view of the arts is to appreciate beauty and the creative processes God has given to men and women because they are in fact made in the image of God. Animals can’t do this, nor can their descendants. Christians ought to celebrate this unique God given creativity through the arts.

In addition to simply reflecting a creative God, art, music, story-telling point us to a greater story behind our story. To depict God’s world, even in its brokenness, points us to some aspect of God’s Ultimate story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. It needn’t be explicitly Christian, nor done by Christians for it to be of great benefit to us.