Here is a picture of me and my beautiful fiance.

Been thinking about church the past few days. My good friend Danny Ovalle gave some really good links that I checkout out and are really cool:

www.mdchurch.org Missio Dei
www.a29.org Acts 29 Church Planting Network

Almost every church associated with Acts 29 has an excellent website. Missio Dei is a church in Portland, ME that Danny and I intend on visiting soon. It is exciting to see churches that are stongly Reformed, yet culturally atuned. I think much of Christian “culture” is submersed in termonology and thinking that most people find unattractive prima facie. I don’t particularly care for the Purpose Driven Church model, in that most of their churches lack strong theological foundations; they just want to get people in church. It’s not hard to get people in churches if you offer them free Starbucks and top-notch child care; Microsoft can do that. So many churches skurt around the biggest culture and life questions that people have and tell people to just have faith. When that happens, everybody thinks we are a bunch of idiots, that are intellectually cripple and not caring. Today, my roommate and I were listening to the Radio Factor (Bill O’Reilly), and I don’t know, I heard some Christians call up in response to homosexuality in schools. I was just thinking to myself, people know where most Christians stand on the issue, why do we always have to keep reiterating what we think. “Its wrong and destructive to our society.” OK, I might agree with that, but we would get a better hearing if we actually knew more people that were gay. Granted, we may think that homosexuality is a life-dominating sin, but honestly, they’ve got bigger issues we can address with them; let’s deal with them as people first. We are not even approachable to people, though, when we bark about their sexual preference. We can’t even begin to penetrate people or this society if we don’t put things in a gospel context. Let’s love people, let’s build relationships, let’s get to know people and really care about who they are. Let us exude Godwardness that is beautiful, glorious, and real. Let’s not define ourselves by the fact that we vote for Bush, that our country was built on Christian values, that we don’t swear, that we don’t drink, that we don’t masturbate, that we don’t listen to “secular” music, that we don’t watch TV, that we don’t watch “questionable” movies, that we were homeschooled, that we went to a Christian college, that we have a Christian lawyer, bank, accountant, mechanic, coffehouse, book store, or president. These are all peripheral. We can’t expect to be taken seriously by people if we don’t take them seriously. Just some thoughts.