willadair.com: my personal blog

I am only going to write a very brief post on this and get back to work on crunching some numbers for my 9 to 5. I have followed the twitter stream throughout the afternoon and listened to the live feed when I could. I read a few moments ago that the Great Commission Resurgence has passed. Praise God!

Literally take a moment and praise God. If you haven’t read the Great Commission Resurgence document then you really should read it. I signed it when I heard what the first article was. It reads as following. read more…

Originally I was going to just blog on what it means to be a Dad for Christian fathers. Today I learned of two prominent TV personalities that are professing Christians and I thought that I would use them to take my blog in a different direction than what I originally intended to write. Today’s blog post is about the consequences of failing to be a Godly dad. read more…

Quick post, why is that we Christians don’t realize that it is our fallen nature to sin? When we get saved that doesn’t make us perfect. We are counted as perfect in God’s eyes in a judicial sense but we certainly aren’t perfect in how we think, act, or relate to others. When we get saved one of our greatest sins is self righteousness.

Because of our relationship with Christ we begin to think we are “good” people. We are no longer evil like everyone else is how we begin to think. Thus we start to sin in a different way then we did before we met Christ.

We start replacing the grace of God with our own self righteousness. We look at all the good things we do and start to consider our “Christian” works as better than their “sinners” works.

In the OT God described sin in relation to leaven. Leaven (yeast) is necessary for bread to rise. Just a little leaven can effect a whole lump of dough. Leaven is also hard to see. It takes a good pair of eyes. God warned us that having a little leaven in our lives can completely ruin us.

Yet in conservative Christianity to keep the leaven out has become for many Christians there sole duty to God. They create their own little subcultures on what it means to be right with God. They are very defensive. In their effort to keep the leaven actually many of them are does nothing but keeping it because they can’t see it.

I think God wants us to realize that a little leaven is hard to see. To see ourselves right we need to go to the One who sees everything and let him show us who we really are.

Speaking for myself it is not always a easy picture to see.

Love me Lord,
destroy my sin,
let me feel
your true grace
again. may your
graceful truth set
me free, so
that in your
strength i may
be who you
desire me to
be.

What if God had text messaged the 10 Commandments? It might look like this:

no1 b4 me. srsly.
dnt wrshp pix/idols
no omg’s
no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)
pos ok – ur m&d r cool
dnt kill ppl
:-X only w/ m8
dnt steal
dnt lie re: bf
dnt ogle ur bf’s m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl.
ttyl, JHWH.
ps. wwjd?

from being presbyterian

Sometimes, just sometimes, I get those horrible moments where I want to throw a pity party. I’d wear a hat but my wife won’t let me (thank you Liv or I would look even goofier in my state of pity).

Take for example my ministry track record for the past five years (as I see it).

2004 Success: South Mills NC, Ebenezer Baptist Church. God used a punk like me to help a church start to grow. It certainly wasn’t all me. Yet, God did use me to help get a children and youth program started. I consider that a success.

2004 Failure: I left that church way too soon. I should have stuck it out longer there, I did a disservice not giving it more time. I justified leaving after half a year because I was engaged and moving to the other side of the state. I wish I had stuck it out more and invested more time into those kids.

2005-2006 Success: First experience in a new Church plant. It was a community church. In my opinion they used community because they were ashamed of the Baptist brand. In that church I tried everything from College and Career pastor to youth pastor. That church due to its location across the street from the college attracted but didn’t keep any young people. The worship style and age of congregation didn’t help since the average age was middle aged married with kids. It was hard being a youth pastor with only one youth. He was the pastor’s kid and we didn’t mesh. So our youth ministry didn’t last long. When children came I did teach there lessons. That was always fun. We had no resources for a childrens ministry. Honestly that was no problem. Just the joy of telling kids about Jesus was most always enough. Hopefully someone else will be used of the Spirit to “make much of Jesus” from a foundation I helped to lay.

2005-2006 Failure: I felt justified in my indignation to the injustice (merely perceived and otherwise) that was our church and denomination. It wasn’t a healthy church in a lot of ways. We hired a evangelism minster who never led anyone to our church. The rumor was he was on drugs, he may have been all I know is he didn’t do a lot. I thought the pastor was a great soul winner who was going to teach me a lot. That didn’t happen. We were supposed to move to a town down the road from us and it never happened. The church had some successes. In many ways it was a integrated church in a town with a deep history of racial tension. The greatest problem was that I had fundamental disagreements with my lead pastor. He advocated positions I did not feel were essential for the gospel. I also didn’t like that the pastor didn’t refer to the SBC which was our denomination but they supported us and we took their money. I was often arrogant and this probably showed more than I even now realize. I was still working out my theology and wasn’t able to ask for help in that partially because I didn’t feel comfortable doing so and partially because I was afraid to do so. Sure, my former Pastor could have been more fatherly. I needed that father figure in the ministry. Sure, he could have shepherded me more. Yet to quote that sage philosopher Pogo ““I have seen the enemy, and he is us.” It wasn’t ultimately anyone’s issue but my own. I should have and could have done more to reach out to him. It may not have been my responsibility but it was my duty to try. In that I failed miserably.

2006 Success: I left that church and started attending a emergent Baptist church plant called the Living Fish that had relaunched in Wilmington. I loved the pastor there. I still do. He was a really good man and talented minster and I still consider him a good friend. The day we joined the church he quit. Seriously, he quit. How many people can say “We joined the church and the pastor quit!” He was done with the toughness of planting a church. It is tough stuff trying to start a new church with nearly no support. Our denomination supported through money but that was about it. For him it was a toil on his marriage and friendships. I was asked to interim at the church as their temporary pastor until they figured out what they wanted to do. I prayed about it and excepted. There was only a small group of them and they wanted leadership.

2007-2008 Failure: I was arrogant enough to think I had it to offer them. I still don’t know what I was thinking other than “this is cool, I can do this, it’s what I’ve always since learning about church planting wanted to do.” I knew that Jesus is the head of the Church but that didn’t stop me from trying to play that role. That church was called Living Fish, an emergent Baptist church. I convinced the church to ax emergent, since none of them theologically were emergent. I also convinced them to change the name to Living Faith. They called me as there pastor and I accepted. We moved the church from the town of Wilmington where it was relaunched in Hampsted the town north of Wilmington. At first I thought we were doing pretty good. We started meeting in the local community building. We got some shirts made and gave them away. We sent out some information by fliers attached to Frisbees with our name and logo. We got a band together. We even had a youth group come and help us promote our church. I got in good with the local and state denominational heads. We were supported by and were openly affiliating with our denomination. The problem was we weren’t being blessed by God. The community building was problematic. No room for children’s ministry. It was an older building and he we had a tough time getting them to let us put up advertisement. Ironically, another church now uses that building and they put up a semi permanent sign. Just how life works. When we moved to a building big enough to do both adult and children’s ministry that is when things went from bad to worse. Our one deacon’s family left with their kids. Also our band fell apart. One of the guitarist was and still is as far as I know a struggling alcoholic. Our drummer was sporadic in attendance. Another guitarist left as his wife didn’t like traveling a long distance to attend church.

2007-2008 Success: Now God did work in this time. The deacon’s family asked me to help counsel them through a really rough patch that could have easily ended in divorce. One of the guitarist who left ended up going to another church. We picked up one family that has stuck through all the turmoil and is still with us. That family is really awesome. The husband is searching God’s will to go into ministry possibly as a Pastor. He is also a really good friend.

2008-2009: Mixed results is the best way to categorize things. Most importantly for me, God has really been working in my life. My theology is pretty much where I think God wants me to be with it. Room for growth but certainty on some things that up until now were really hard for me to reconcile are now reconciled. We are pretty close to trying to get our current church out of the small group stage into the community stage. We have had a few families join us. We are praying for a few more to maybe get involved but that is God decision not ours. My wife and I had our first baby girl back in February 11, 2008. Learning how to be a dad has been a amazing experience for me as a person and as a pastor. I’ve finally dealt with some personal sin issues that have been dogging me for years. I have and still am learning how to be abandoned in and to the Grace and Truth of Christ. Whom the Son set free is free indeed. I feel free from my failures. It’s a relief actually.

There are moments when I want to have a pity party when I reflect over the nearly five years I have been in the ministry. In all of this I have learned two great truths. God works all things together for good. That includes my failures. Second, my failures have led to my success. It’s kind of hard to have a pity party when God tells you to be thankful that through your failure experiences that He has been practicing discipline on you and that he was working you through them the whole time.

Hebrews 12:7 It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.

My ultimate goal is no longer to plant something that will be a testimony to me. I never realized before but that was part of my goals and desires. In fact when I die I don’t really care if anyone knows my name or remembers me. What I hope is that people really know the name of my Lord and Savior. My failures have and are being used of God to refine me. So I see my failures as part of what I need to succeed in becoming what God will have me to be. In that I don’t mind succeed at failing on occasion.

No running brook, no flood, no sea
can wash away this stain from me …
For only Your blood is enough to cover my sin
Only Your blood is enough to cover me.

music from Advance 09

Let’s sum up today, I rushed into work to set up a projector for an event where I was told several times “YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE THE PROJECTOR SET UP RIGHT?!” I finally got it set up after doing a update on the software on the laptop, rebooting our sever because a user couldn’t access a financial file, and rushing between offices to find paperwork for my wife so she could admit a child this afternoon. My wife calls and tells me she had to come in because a kid was going to have to be hospitalized and she needed to talk with them. Darn, there goes getting much else done in the office.

Anyway I rushed home so my wife could go into work and do therapy with the kid that was being admitted into the hospital. While she was gone I watched our daughter. My daughter, after waking up, wanted to play so I tried chasing her around a bit. She then did her run from one side of couch to the other, which is what she does after she potties. Poopy diaper change two of the day. When we went back into the living room she wanted to read. The problem was none of her books kept her interest. Then she decided she wanted to watch Elmo but he wasn’t on TV and we don’t let her watch it on the computer every time she wants to. Having your child say repeatedly “MELMO” is a wee bit maddening. Honestly the Obama administration would probably classify it as torture.

Finally to distract her I opened the door so she could look outside. She loves hitting the glass screen door and looking at our front yard. After maybe two minutes she started saying dog. So I look up from my computer screen to see a dog standing on the other side of the screen door licking the glass where my daughter was at. I went out to see if I could see a tag on the dog.

The lost dog was Rockie and at 10:50 AM my adventure with Rockie began. I went outside to read his tag and he ran from me. So I went back to the house and then he ran to my door begging to come in. There was no way I was letting a strange dog into my house with my daughter or with our dog Annabelle who is our ever faithful and often spirited (read that as a cross between obnoxious and some positive endearing sounding adjective) house dog who lately presides in the kitchen. Seeing a number on his collar I decided to put him in my backyard till I could contact his owners. After calling the number which was to the dogs vet I got the owners numbers who would not answer her cellphone or home phone. The obnoxious thing was I left her messages and twice got a busy signal. It’s not like I didn’t leave messages. I began wondering was she screening her calls?

My dog Annabelle to prove the adage no good deed goes unpunished decided to go nuts and bark for just about an hour straight once she discovered there was a dog in the backyard. This happened to be during lunch time for my daughter who I had to feed in the living room instead of the kitchen so I keep Anabelle away from the backdoor of the kitchen that separated her from Rockie.

My daughter decided her lunchtime apple sauce would be better eaten with her hands. She by the way repeated that insistence with her yogurt at dinner. For obvious reasons this was not a good idea. It is amazing that a baby can cry loud enough to drown out the whimpering whining dog that though out of sight of Rockie still was fussing over the knowledge of him being in her yard. Rockie come to think of it did look a bit like the squirrel of the same name. Anyway my daughter started off eating lunch by eating cheese– that went well. This was followed by the cucumber that was a bit more irritating to feed her. She ate the first half like a princess. The second half she ate like Roger Clemens attempting to pitch a close-out to the floor. I intercepted most of those gnawed missiles.

After that I went to pick up my father-in-law to carry him to an appointment. Poor guy has a bad strain of his Achilles heel. I cleaned my CRV up so it would be presentable because my wife suggested I do so like three times (she wants me to add that this is a slight exaggeration). I figured what the heck it needed to be straightened up anyway. As I drove my father-in-law to his appointment I get a phone call from work with the following opening line. “THE PROJECTOR ISN’T WORKING, WHY ISN’T IT WORKING?” with what sounded like a tinge of panic and frustration in the voice. The person on the phone then asked, ” you did set this up earlier right?” My answer was yes, what I didn’t know was that after I left, someone “helpfully” decided to undo the laptop from the projector for no apparent reason other than they just didn’t like where it was sitting in the empty conference room. Fill in the appropriate adjective of your choice.

After trying very unsuccessfully of trying to walk them through on how to drag the video over from the laptop to the projector they gave up and said “the video isn’t that important, don’t worry about it.” So I’m driving along irritated that someone couldn’t leave the equipment alone (this was after discovering someone bent one of my personal cords loaned to the agency) when my father-in-law says “you know these vehicles Honda make aren’t very comfortable.” I dropped him off at his appointment and began rushing home. On my way at least five birds decided to play chicken with my car. Swerving to miss birds is not as much fun as you might assume. That went along well with the bird that had decided to paint my CRV on my way to pick up my father in law with an artistic white washing over the lower third of my car window.

When I got home my wife and I decided we should just carry the dog to the dog’s vet. The vet had suggested that we could drop him off there and the owners could pick him up there. We thought that would be a good idea so we could let our dog out of her crate. “We” meant “me” because my wife was working on admissions papers while our daughter took her nap. I got a towel and put it down and Rockie jumped up on it with his dirty paws. As I drove Rockie decided that he wanted to drive and tried to climb over and see me as I drove. I pushed him off of me and of course he moved the towel in his excitement. My nice clean car now has dirt stains from the dog’s paws on the seat. I will be thinking of Rockie for a while now until I can clean the passenger seat.

When I got home my wife went back to the office. I tried to do billing while watching a very active 15 month old. Who surprise, surprise pooped twice more while I was watching her. When my wife got home we let our dog out and she busted out of the double gate that leads to our front yard. My awesome wife was great to go out in the backyard to get the dog because I didn’t have shoes on. Wet-socked feed would not have added positively to my day. The wind had apparently blown the gates so hard that one of the doors had pulled off the post and broke the latch that had held it shut. I backed most of the screws out but had to beat the top one back in because the very big hinges still attached to the post and several boards were still connecting the gate to the post and fence. Beating a screw back in is not fun.

So to sum up my day…. It kinda of stunk but I’m still blessed.

This is also posted at Library Thing.

Thomas Nelson Publishing

First I want to thank Thomas Nelson Publishing for sending me a copy of this work to review. I already had bought a copy from the band of the brother of the guy who started this project endeavor.

I am going to give this Bible paraphrase a rating of a solid two stars. I can’t rate it as a solid four or five but let me be clear I would have loved to have done so if only it had not made one major error in its translation and interpretation philosophy. The issue I have with this work is not a translation issue per se but the underlying interpretation issue on how Jesus is viewed within the text. Before we get to the cons let us tackle the pros.Let’s cover some basics first. I see this as a cross between a paraphrase and a translation/interpretation of the ancient manuscripts.

Pros: This interpretation/translation according to the VOICE website and preface attempts to create a translation that is holistic, beautiful, sensitive, and balanced. On these four goals I will judge this work.

Think of the VOICE as a multi-contributor version of Eugene Peterson’s the MESSAGE. It is elegant in that it reads like a personal letter in most of the books of the NT. It embraces the literary aspect of the NT and attempts to present the ancient scripture in a fresh way for contemporary audiences. It does not say so in either the preface or website much info about the translation/interpretation team assembled for this project. It does seem as if they where trying to communicate to a post modern audience. Very similar to the vein of Eugene Peterson’s The MESSAGE (which I will review at another time), the VOICE offers those who have never read the Bible or have in the past had trouble reading the Bible a new way to read the Bible in a less than formal translation method. This is not an attempt to be a literal or essentially literal translation such as the KJV, NASB, NIV, or the ESV. It’s goal is to present the text in a beautiful way.

Literally it accomplishes the goal of beauty. It really is pleasurable to read. I read through the book of Hebrews and was pleasantly surprised how well the book flows for both private and public reading. Hebrews use of OT themes and theological motifs were briefly explained in the VOICE with its “mini-commentary” which is boxed and flows with the text. The mini commentary explains a very brief background of cultural settings, a theological point, or something specific about the letter in a brief paragraph written in a way in which it could be read with the text to help the reader grasp something they may not have been able to understand without it.

The Cons: As I said earlier as much as I wish I could love this translation when I got to the gospels I really got depressed with how they treated the term Christ. This book was ranking up to a 4.5 or 5 until I realized that they translated (and I use that term in its loosest sense) the title Christ as Liberating King throughout the Gospels and New Testament. In my opinion they chose this term as a interpretative view of who Jesus is not what the Scripture proclaims about him. Nowhere in the footnotes, mini-commentary, or preface does it explain how they came up with using the phrase Liberating King over the term Christ.

Some may not see why this would be such a pivotal issue. The problem is objectively Christ does not mean Liberating King. This is not a simple semantics issue. This is a deep theological issue. It never has and it never will mean Liberating King. Christ is the English version of the Greek word for Messiah (the Jewish term for Jesus). Messiah does not objectively mean Liberating King. It means “the Anointed”. It is a reference to Jesus as the Anointed One of God. Jesus is God’s Anointed One who does several things for his people in that role. Primarily, He is the anointed Lamb of God that was sacrificed for his people. This is why the title Christ explains who Jesus is. The name Jesus explains that he is our King who saves. Yes, he is the liberator of his people but to reduce his title to simply to the liberating King can easily lead to theological misinterpretation of who Jesus is primarily meant to be understood as. He is the sacrificial Son that was foreshadowed to Abraham in the near sacrifice of Isaac. He is the final sacrificial lamb given by God for the sins of Israel as foreshadowed in the Law given to Moses. He is the long awaited great King of his people from the tribe of David. This is the fuller concept of Messiah. The mistranslating of Christ simply to the Liberating King misses the fullness of what the NT authors and I believe the Holy Spirit who inspired them in both the Old and New Testament to call him the Christ. The original audiences would have searched out what Christ meant to the Jews but even the Roman world have known that the term Christ used meant that which “is covered in oil.” To interpret Christ as the Liberating King at best misses the richness of what was originally meant by God.

At worst it opens the door for liberation theology recasting Jesus primarily as the liberator of the oppressed peoples of the Earth. So in this regard the VOICE fails in its attempt to be holistic to the author’s original intent. It is not sensitive to the author’s world view. It fails also to be balanced to the theology presented in the original manuscripts in its re-interpretation of what it means for Jesus to be the Christ.

Summary: As literature it is a excellent read. As it fails on three out of four of its own goals I have to give it only a two. A person can read through this translation and the Spirit of God can speak to them. Yet I believe because it so misses the mark on who Jesus is meant to be understood through the biblical concept of Christ that this translation/interpretation of scripture fails. I suggest using the ESV, NKJV, or NASB as a NT Bible translation. In those translations of the Bible you will get a better view of Jesus as the Christ. If in a future revision they translate Christ as the Anointed One I think they will have made a wonderful new addition to the world of biblical literature. Until this issue of the Liberating King is addressed though I would steer towards another translation.

In my life stream I have whatever is watched on Hulu show up. My wife pointed out the one possible flaw with this. When she shows Eila clips of Sesame Street people may think I am still watching Sesame Street at 29. So to put the issue to rest most of the clips watched on Hulu of Sesame Street are going to be for our 14 month old.

Occasionally I do watch Ernie’s Rubber Ducky song though. It’s still better than 90% of what comes on for tv for “grown-ups.”