TheDeSocios.com

Ed Stetzer recently posted a little twitter proverb which says: “If you can learn to order at Starbucks, then you can learn theological language at church.”

At first I thought it was insightful and funny but the more I think about it the more I think it reveals some of the problems with Christianity today.

Here are a few of my thoughts:

• I enjoy Starbucks, but I never say grande, I say medium. I think Starbucks can get away with charging you twice as much because you believe that they are intellectually superior when it comes to coffee. I’d hate for people that visit my church to think that we are superior because we use big words.
• I appreciate what I think Dr. Stetzer is getting at, the fact that when people want to learn something they will. Think about all the information that we use, just when it comes to technology in our daily life. My 50 year old mother knows how to post photographs to facebook, but do most of us know anything about where the Apostle’s creed comes from. I appreciate him bringing this up.
• Words are important, but its not ok for pastors or church members to develop or use jargon for the sake of jargon. In fact we should be seeking to remove all the unneeded church-slang that we can, so that people don’t feel as if they need an advance degree to participate in our churches.
• Id rather go to a Dunkin Donuts than a Starbucks. You can get the same quality coffee at Dunkin Donuts, but with out the meaningless jargon and the self-inflated pretense that is apparent at most Starbucks.

As I’ve been thinking about it a bit more, I realized that some of the specifics of my post on the purpose of the church might have been a bit nebulous.

I want to explain my thinking on mission, by comparing the church to driving a car. As we drive a car we check the gauges, and make sure that we are going the proper speed. We speed up and slow down, we look in our mirrors, and shift gears (if we are driving a manual). We might even pick up some friend along the way. All of this is part of driving the car, but at the same time, when I was a kid sitting in my dad’s driveway doing most of these things I wasn’t driving. So whats the difference between driving and sitting in the driveway? Well, its the journey. All of those things are part of driving but alone they are out of place.

In a spiritual sense, driving is the mission. We worship, we pray, we fellowship, we confess, we share our faith, we do all of these things, and many more. But all of these things should be done while on mission, all are things the church should do, but without the great commission we are still sitting in the driveway.
To take this idea one step further, as we drive the car we have a destination in mind, for the drive: to glorify God, but we have to remember that the destination isn’t the drive.

I hope this explains a bit more about my thinking on the issue.

I have been spending alot of time thinking about the church recently, and more specifically the purpose of the church.

At RPTS I was told that the purpose of the New Testament Church, was to worship. Even in seminary, I saw some flaws in this understanding. Over the last year I have become more convince that worship is not the purpose of the church. Here is why I do not see the worship as the purpose of the church, it presupposes that the culmination of Chris’t kingdom has already happened. While, I do think it is appropriate to say that we were created with the purpose of worshipping God, making this the purpose of the church does not take into account the impact of sin, and the plan of redemption. Please don’t think that I trying to remove the importance of worship in the life of the church. Read More

I want to discuss what things would be helpful in seeing more churches planted in Pittsburgh. Remember that I am speaking from my context within the PCA, but I don’t think that any of my points are necessarily limited to only the PCA. I admit that I am not an expert in the topic of church planting, but at the very least I think I could be called an avid supporter or a student of church planting. Most of the suggestions that I am going to make are coming from listening to other wiser church planters, men like Roland Allen, Harvie Conn, Bill Krispin, Tim Keller, Dick Kauffman, Bruce Finn, Ed Stetzer, and Mark Driscoll.
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I’ve compiled a map with all the geographic boundaries of the different presbyteries of the PCA. While I have seen, and heard of maps of the presbyteries, I do not know of any map that existed online. So I decided to create one, based off the information available on the PCA Administrative Committee’s website. At the bottom you will find the links to all the source files. Some of you might have a few questions?

Why do this?
I began this project by simply putting up the information for my presbytery, but I soon began filling out the northeast, and once i can to a certain point, I thought that I should just make one for the whole denomination.

How much time did this take you?
My wife might just reply by saying “too much time!”. It took me probably around 15 hours to complete, most of that was spent while my wife was sleeping.

What can this be used for?

• I hope Churches and Presbyteries will use these maps to for the purpose of planning church plants, and other cooperative projects. (This is the primary reason I started this project.)
• Ministers and Members could use it to learn more about the PCA.

Since most of the boundaries are marked at county lines, its very difficult to understand the size and shape of a presbytery without knowing alot more local geography than most people. Even in my state (Pennsylvania) I did not understand how all the presbyteries connected. I hope this project allows people in the PCA to learn a bit more about the shape and movement of the PCA.
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